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Paper short abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with autoworkers at Volkswagen Mexico, this paper focuses on efforts to create solidarity among unevenly located workforces. It traces an emerging moral economy that seeks to cut across union politics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the labor involved in cultivating relationships of solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork along Volkswagen’s supply chain of car production in Mexico, it focuses on a group of autoworkers and their efforts to create solidarity among unevenly located workforces and among workers whose social relations are contentious and antagonistic.

Volkswagen’s autoworkers are directly employed by the car company. In the current labor regime, they benefit from traces of the social contract among union, state, and companies that characterized Fordism. Logistics workers, by contrast, are a younger generation of workers and are among the most precarious workforces employed in Mexico’s export economy. They are situated in a flexible labor regime. Contentious and antagonistic relationships between workers take different forms: from autoworkers blaming logistics workers for delays in production to autoworkers accusing each other and their union of colluding with Volkswagen to increase the speed of the line.

This paper centers on a group of autoworkers who meet outside the workplace, often during their day-off, and their conversations and heated discussions, to explore the forms of labor and time that go into collective efforts require to create solidarities. It examines how their commitment towards overcoming antagonistic relationships is cultivated and maintained in each encounter and put into practice on the assembly lines in the day-to-day of car production. By paying attention to how solidarities are crafted, this paper traces an emerging moral economy that seeks to cut across union politics, while still instilling labor politics.