Good Mothers and Good Workers: Discipline and Care in Chile's Grape-Packing Plants

Abstract

This article explores the affective dimensions of precarious labor in Chile's grape-export industry in the centrally located Aconcagua Valley. Although the country's billion-dollar fruit industry is marked as an example of successful development, female seasonal workers (called temporeras) navigate hazardous working conditions and noncompliance of labor laws. Contrary to common assumptions of workers' alienation from labor, their personal identities are deeply entangled in their workplace. This article examines how management invokes temporeras' identities as mothers and care providers as a disciplinary mechanism. At the same time, workers articulate motherhood as a form of endurance. Although efforts by the Chilean government attempt to regulate the fruit-export sector, there is a dismal lack of enforcement of recent labor laws. As a result, temporeras bear the burden of safeguarding their physical well-being. I conclude by suggesting that social relations and the moral textures of everyday interactions provide the possibilities through which workers endure precarious labor.