De-Fetishising Unions in Global Production: Scrutinising Workers’ Power and Labour Weakness in the Automotive Global Value Chain in Morocco and Tunisia.

This paper examines the contradiction between the disruptive power of workers in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and union strategies that often perpetuate their vulnerability. Mainstream industrial relations analyses typically focus on GVC workers’ limited structural power—due to informality, precarity, and gender-based oppression. These conditions, combined with State and managerial despotism, challenge unionization/associational power as well.

Yet, in GVCs, weak labour-market power could be counterbalanced by strong workplace-disruptive power rooted in the synchronization needs of just-in-time production. Historically, the labour movement did not emerge from a scenario of secure jobs and established “social dialogue”; thus, objective conditions cannot be exaggerated as reasons for labour weakness in global production.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork experience and a critical approach to global labour studies (Ness 2015, Atzeni 2021, Nowak 2021), this paper underscores the disconnect between workers’ exploitation within GVCs and the corporatist or social-democratic strategies of unions. This disjunction perpetuates labour vulnerability, complicating efforts to (1) consolidate grassroots organization and (2) effectively leverage workplace power through strike actions.

Morocco and Tunisia as peripheral, yet increasingly important nodes of the global automotive industry, serve as a case study. The weakness of Moroccan labour associations in this industry is aggravated by prioritizing institutional recognition over support to militant actions, despite efforts by grassroots workers to organise and mobilise. In Tunisia, relatively strong unions in the car-component sector have often divided and demobilized workers in critical labour disputes.

I attribute the moderate approach of Morocco and Tunisia's unions to two factors: (1) their fundamental acceptance of a low-wage and "dependent" accumulation model in exchange for institutional and material concessions from the state to their key constituency (public sector workers); (2) the influence of Global North labour bureaucracies, which promote a corporatist agenda under the guise of “social dialogue” through training programs targeting Global South unions.