Dismissing class: Media representations of workers’ conditions in the Global South

The shift from Keynesianism to a neoliberal form of global capitalism during the last four decades, driven by transnational corporations (TNCs), has resulted in major changes for workers, workplaces, and labour markets worldwide (Harvey, 2005; Saad-Filho & Johnston, 2005). Neoliberal globalisation has expanded TNCs’ boundaries of operation and sphere of exploitation, particularly in the Global South where much of the production of traditional manufacturing in and for TNCs now occurs, often within a business model relying on global supply chains (Smith, 2016). The basic relation of exploitation between capital and labour (Marx, 1887/1986) has largely become a relation between Northern capital and Southern labour. In this article, using a longitudinal approach, I conduct a detailed critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 2008) of a large Swedish press corpus reporting on the activities of TNCs such as Apple, Nike, and H&M in Global South countries.

Previous research on mainstream news media coverage of workers’ and working-class issues has found that mainstream news media rarely explicitly discuss class or the class conflicts found in society (Mantsios, 1995; Martin, 2004). Consequently, the lives and problems of the working class are largely ignored (Jakobsson & Stiernstedt, 2018; Kendall, 2011; Martin, 2019). Where there is coverage of the working class, workers, and workers’ issues in the news media, scholars have documented patterns of negative attention, misrepresentation, and exclusion of workers’ concerns and perspectives (Beharell & Phillo, 1977; Bekken, 2005; Glasgow University Media Group, 1976, 1982; Parenti, 1993; Puette, 1992). However, much of the research on workers and workers’ issues in the news has centred on industrial disputes and labour conflicts in the Global North, primarily contributing to an understanding of worker- and labour-related issues in these areas. Few studies specifically examine and analyse the mediated representation of workers and working conditions in the Global South (Cotal San Martin & Machin, 2020), and those that do focus primarily on the “sweatshop” framing and not on representing workers and working conditions in the Global South more generally (Greenberg & Knight, 2004; Guo et al., 2012).

This issue of workers’ conditions in the Global South has become of particular concern, since the liberalisation of trade has made it easier for TNCs, which seek to reduce production costs by taking advantage of the wage hierarchy between the Global North and South, to extend their global supply chains to Global South countries (Smith, 2016).

In critical discourse studies, it has been demonstrated that newspapers are fundamental to organising the discourses through which people understand the world (Bell, 1999; Fowler, 1991; Richardson, 2007). Such discourses can be fostered and used for various ideological purposes, such as to legitimise, maintain, or naturalise different forms of social power and inequality (Fairclough, 1992; van Dijk, 1995). While sociologists and media scholars have studied how the ideological content of news may shape the public's idea and understanding of politics, race, and gender in ways that serve those in power, less attention has been paid to how the news may influence how we understand class and class issues in a similar manner (Kendall, 2011).

The departure point of this article is the contention that, while describing and explaining workers’ conditions in the Global South to the public, the news media play a central role in shaping public perceptions of workers and their conditions, and of the political and economic actors playing pivotal roles in the mounting exploitation of labour in the Global South. As “ideology producing institutions” (Gramsci, 1971), the news media are key distributors of a set of ideas and images through which we understand the world. Crucially, these ideas and images often reflect and reproduce dominant ideas and values that serve to legitimise, naturalise, and reinforce class domination (Fuchs, 2011; Harper, 2012). The news media are fundamental to the process of legitimising and reinforcing the existing social order by (re)producing discourses serving dominant social interests (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk, 1995). However, while mainstream news media often help reproduce the capitalist system, the media do not – in any simplistic or deterministic manner – simply reproduce the interests of the powerful, and neither do the powerful speak with one voice (Hall, 1980; Sparks, 2006). It is therefore important to understand and underline how they justify the existing order.

I utilise a critical discourse analysis approach (Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 2008), in which I relate an entry-level or thematic analysis of key themes and topics in the coverage to an in-depth analysis of arguments and discursive strategies (Krzyżanowski, 2010) deployed in the discursive construction of workers’ conditions in the Global South. In so doing, this article provides critical insights into how these conditions are represented in newspapers in terms of their relevance (to a national readership) as well as agency and responsibility (i.e., those responsible for working conditions) and the possible ideological impact thereof on readers and their knowledge and interpretation of this issue.

I begin by reviewing the literature to provide context for how TNCs operate and for the global regulatory and finance system that allows them to do so. This is important in order to clearly identify how different forces, processes, causalities, and actors are recontextualised (van Leeuwen, 2008) in news texts. Second, I give a brief account of the representation of the Global South in the news media, helping us understand the nature of the reporting I found.

The outsourcing of manufacturing production from the West to low-wage countries in the Global South started in the 1960s and 1970s, but intensified with the implementation of neoliberal economic policies around the world in the 1980s (Smith, 2016). Outsourcing is generally considered a reaction to the crisis of Fordist capitalism in the 1970s, as well as a response to the class conflicts in Europe and the US, where organised labour threatened profits by increasing costs (Munck, 2002; Saad-Filho & Johnston, 2005). In such a context, expanding to areas in the Global South – with low wages and low production costs – became a conscious class strategy among TNCs (Harvey, 2005; Smith, 2016).

Powerful international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, have been crucial in advancing the interests of TNCs by pursuing and enforcing neoliberal policies globally that remove legal and institutional barriers to capital mobility (Peet, 2009). As a result of these neoliberalising policies, TNCs such as Walmart, Nike, Adidas, and H&M can shift suppliers within and between countries, expanding their boundaries of operation and thereby their sphere of exploitation, affecting millions of workers, particularly in the Global South where networks of production in the form of global supply chains have emerged (Smith, 2016).

Global supply chains have been described as buyer driven, with TNCs being the most powerful actors controlling them and dictating the terms of their operation, aiming at lowering labour costs while increasing output (Anner, 2015). TNCs decide from whom they will source, how much they will pay for products, how soon they need them, and what these products should look like. Supplier factories are therefore under strong pressure from TNCs to deliver cheap, high-quality products with shorter and shorter production cycles. The fact that TNCs can shift between suppliers within and between countries creates a situation in which supplier factories compete against one another on prices to remain “competitive” and be attractive to foreign investment, ultimately at the expense of worker safety and wages (Parenti, 2011; Smith, 2016). To earn profits themselves, supplier factories must implement cost-cutting measures (e.g., pay low wages and provide unsafe working conditions) while forcing workers to work long hours to increase productivity to meet rapid production cycles.

For decades, numerous studies, reports, and books have been documenting and exposing how cost-cutting measures result in brutal working conditions in global supply chains and export processing zones (EPZs) in the Global South (see, e.g., Andersson Åkerblom & Kärnstrand, 2016; China Labor Watch, 2011; Hearson, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 2012; Lindström, 2004; SACOM, 2016; Werner & Weiss, 2005). A vast literature deals with different corporations (e.g., Apple, Samsung, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Walmart, Primark, Carrefour, H&M, Levi Strauss & Co., and Zara) and their practices in specific social contexts (e.g., China, Honduras, Guatemala, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Qatar) and production sectors (e.g., garments, construction, electronics, sportswear, shoes, and toys). Taken together, this literature confirms that worker exploitation is not limited to individual corporations, countries, or factories, but rather is related to how capitalism and this particular business model works (Hoskins, 2014; Sandoval, 2015; Smith, 2016). Violations of workers’ rights in the Global South must be seen in a context in which, for example, increasing wages, decreasing working hours, and improving health and safety protection are costs that directly conflict with the aim of profit.

As I analyse the discourses on working conditions in the Global South, such discourses must also be understood in the context of those generally used to represent the Global South in the news media.

There is a long-standing pattern in the coverage produced by (Western) international journalism whereby Global South countries are largely under-represented in the news (Chang, 1998; MacBride, 1980; Roosvall, 2010), appearing mostly if they can be examined from a domestic angle or when Western people are involved (CARMA, 2006). Coverage therefore tends to be “episodic” and highly selective and fragmented, emphasising certain regions, countries, and hot spots (van Ginneken, 1998).

When there is coverage of the Global South, it is dominated by negative and stereotypical stories of wars, coups, tragedies, disasters, diseases, cruelty, poverty, and suffering (Hafez, 2007; Peterson, 1980; Williams, 2011), without any substantial context, making these events appear almost random and without clear causes (Lugo-Ocando, 2015; van Ginneken, 1998). Such negative and stereotypical stories can be partly explained by how colonialism has shaped the structures and processes underpinning international news gathering (Williams, 2011) and by the criteria and factors guiding the selection of foreign “events” that become “news” – criteria such as drama, conflict, and negativity (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2001, 2017). Crucially, stories about the Global South do not touch upon the role of the global economic system, the legacy of colonialism, ongoing Western economic and political interests, the role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and so forth (Abalo, 2015; Macleod, 2018). Importantly, this lack of context serves ideologically to hide the responsibility of “global” economic and political actors and interests, instead holding “local” actors and interests responsible for their own plight, violence, political and economic instability, and corruption (Hafez, 2007; MacBride, 1980; Williams, 2011), reinforcing simplistic explanations and stereotypes. Underlying these stories is a particular stereotypical colonial imagery whereby people in the Global South are often portrayed as irrational, uncivilised, innocent, hostile, corrupt, poorly organised, and in general deviating from the norms of Western rationality (Abalo, 2016; Lugo-Ocando & Malaolu, 2015; MacLeod, 2019).

Importantly, such colonial stereotypes and representations have historically played a fundamental role in producing knowledge serving Western colonial and imperialist interests (Hall, 1992). By constructing the colonised as people “different” from “us” in terms of both their innocence and friendship as well as their hostility, and as inferior, irrational, uncivilised, and so on, colonial powers could develop ideas about their own superiority (Fanon, 2001; Said, 1978).

In this article, I use critical discourse analysis to analyse the material. Influenced by the “sociology of language” (Bernstein, 1971) and the “critical linguistics” of the late 1970s (Fowleret al., 1979), critical discourse analysis shares an interest in the role of language in the functioning of society and politics. Language is seen as an important means by which we communicate and create meaning; as it can be used as an ideological instrument to legitimise, maintain, and naturalise forms of social power and inequality (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak, 2008), it is crucial in constructing and sustaining ideologies. Ideologies can be understood as “mental frameworks” (Hall, 1986) or “particular ways of representing and constructing society which reproduce unequal relations of power, relations of domination and exploitation” (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997: 275) and, in so doing, confer advantages on those with power. Ideology thus concerns the “ways in which meaning is mobilised for the maintenance of relations of domination” (Thompson, 1984: 5).

A key concept here is that of discourse (Foucault, 1979), understood as capturing the kinds of knowledge of the world or the broader ideas communicated by a text. Critical discourse analysis aims to denounce social domination and social inequality by demystifying ideologies and power relations that are more or less buried in discourses (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak, 2013). Such discourses can be thought of as comprising “scripts” (Van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999), which are the doings of discourse and include elements such as participants, actions, processes, and causalities. Importantly, discursive scripts can involve the recontextualisation of social practices (i.e., the actual events and processes), in order to align them with specific ideological interests (van Leeuwen, 2008). In this article, the analysis examines the details of language and grammar choices and how these shape the representation of events, processes, participants, and identities in ways that support the maintenance of dominant interests and existing social relations (e.g., class relations).

This analysis can be described, broadly, as comprising two steps or levels. First, an entry-level or thematic analysis (Krzyżanowski, 2010) of key themes and topics of the coverage in Swedish newspapers maps the content of the analysed texts. Second, an in-depth analysis (Krzyżanowski, 2010) treats pragmatic aspects of discourse, notably including various discursive strategies of self-versus-other representation (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), the representation of social actors and social action (Machin & Mayr, 2012; van Leeuwen, 2008), and various argumentative strategies used to argue for and against different discursive constructions of the status quo (Krzyżanowski, 2010).

The key critical discourse analysis categories examined here – albeit in a differentiated manner – chiefly include three categories: topics of discourse, discursive strategies of representing social actors and actions, and discursive strategies of argumentation.

Topics of discourse, or themes, summarise the text, specifying its most important information (van Dijk, 1991). A thematic analysis has the general aim of mapping the content of the analysed texts and ascribing them to particular discourses to which they may belong (Krzyżanowski, 2010). In this article, when analysing texts, one must therefore identify what sorts of themes or topics (and sub-topics) are featured in news texts and to which particular discourses they may belong; this entails listing “larger” or general topics in the text, and is an analytical process including several thorough readings of the data (Krzyżanowski, 2010). Through this inductive and systematic analytical process, we see whether we can abstract recurring themes concerning what is being said about workers and working conditions.

Discursive strategies of representing social actors and action encompass how social actors and social actions are represented in news texts. The key categories used in the analysis were proposed by van Leeuwen (2008), and later elaborated on by Machin (2013), as follows: inclusion versus exclusion, individualisation versus collectivisation, aggregation, differentiation, and role allocation. These categories let me be more systematic in considering how social actors are classified in news texts as well as how social actions are attributed to different participants (Machin & Mayr, 2012).

Discursive strategies of argumentation, or topoi, are classical discourse categories brought into critical discourse analysis via its discourse historical approach tradition (Krzyżanowski, 2010; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). An argumentation-oriented analysis of topoi is intended to “reveal how different elements of discourse are endowed with pragmatic meaning and thus placed within different arguments according to the more-or-less strategic aims set up by the speakers/authors of texts” (Krzyżanowski, 2010: 83). Topoi are parts of argumentation that connect the argument to the conclusion (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). In that sense, a particular topos summarises as well as justifies a particular line of argument by linking it to the background knowledge of the reader. For example, the topos of local (ir)responsibility in the Global South allows one to argue that violations of working conditions are attributable to Global South local actors’ irresponsibility, an accusation widely used in the Western world as a token of a specific post-colonial “Third World” perception of the Global South.

Furthermore, the analysis also focuses on the lexical aspects of studied media representations by exploring specific words used to support discursive strategies (e.g., as part of naming or labelling individuals and groups, predicating their features, and describing contexts and events) (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001; Richardson, 2007). The analysis also includes “headline analysis” (Bell, 1999; van Dijk, 1988), which often captures thematic frames that determine the contents as well as the wider ideological tone of media representations.

The analysed material derives from six Swedish newspapers: Dagens Nyheter (DN), Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), Aftonbladet (Ab), Expressen (Exp), Göteborgs-Posten (GP), and Sydsvenska Dagbladet (SSD). These sources were chosen because they are Sweden's largest-circulation newspapers (Weibull et al., 2018). The study period is the two years, from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2013. This choice of period was intentional, motivated by a desire to capture tendencies in reporting within a significant time period (here, 24 months).

In total, the corpus comprises 32 news texts: nine from DN, seven from SvD, five from GP, seven from SSD, two from Exp, and two from Ab. This material was collected from Mediearkivet (Retriever), Scandinavia's largest digital archive of media sources. Initially, to search broadly, two keywords were used: “arbetsförhållanden” [working conditions] and “globalisering” [globalisation]. This generated 531 total hits, many or which were irrelevant to the analytical aims. For instance, news texts might contain the keywords arbetsförhållanden and globalisering, but not be about working conditions in the Global South. I therefore proceeded with a strategic selection based on the criterion that the content of the news texts – at the headline and lead or introduction levels – must contain information about workers’ working conditions in the Global South, in relation to TNCs. This procedure eventually reduced the material to 32 texts subsequently subjected to in-depth qualitative analysis in the original language, Swedish. The material was not collected in a genre-specific way, so these texts include news articles, opinion pieces, and short notices. Although different genres have different styles of writing, the present focus is not on these differences per se, but rather on how all these texts collectively represent workers’ working conditions in the Global South – in whatever narrative styles appear.

The analysis below comprises two parts. The first presents the results of the entry-level or thematic analysis (Krzyżanowski, 2010) that maps the content of the analysed texts to give an overview of the key themes and topics of the coverage of working conditions in the Global South in Swedish newspapers. The second part, building on the previous thematically ordered analysis, presents the results of the in-depth analysis (Krzyżanowski, 2010) of arguments and discursive strategies deployed in discursive constructions of workers’ conditions, by highlighting some of the key, general aspects of the discursive construction of workers’ conditions in the data.

In this article, I aimed to provide critical insights into how working conditions in the Global South are represented in Swedish newspapers in terms of relevance (to a national readership) as well as agency and responsibility (asking who is responsible for the working conditions), and the possible ideological impact thereof on readers and their knowledge and interpretation of this issue. The results indicate that workers’ working conditions in the Global South are presented within a consumer framework. By linking Swedish consumers to the exploitation of workers in the Global South, the coverage gives the topic proximity and relevance. However, while this consumer framework “domesticates” the foreign reality – potentially resulting in engagement in the Global South – it also creates an ideological prism through which the social problem of working conditions in the Global South is seen and explained.

The coverage fails to set the systematic problem of working conditions within the wider context of a global capitalist economy, and it fails to offer a critical interpretation of the business model promoted and used by TNCs and key international organisations. Instead, the exploitation and oppression of workers is recontextualised and strategically presented to be understood as a consequence of the wrongdoings of various social actors, in both the West (in the form of consumers) and the Global South (in the form of local social actors).

One defining feature of the capitalist, neoliberal ideology embraced globally since the 1970s is the displacement of agency from structural causes to individuals (Harvey, 2005). The consumer framework identified here shifts agency and responsibility for working conditions to the individual level. Consumers collectively appear in the coverage as a powerful social actor bearing considerable guilt and responsibility for working conditions abroad – for both demanding and purchasing cheap products – but, importantly, simultaneously envisioned as having agency and power to change those conditions.

Emphasising their consumer role ideologically encourages readers to think of themselves as consumers and redirects their attention towards their individual responsibility, making them complicit in terrible abuses of workers. The focus on particular individual responsibility may also lead to an oversimplification of the problem itself, as it becomes a problem that ought to be understood as caused by individual behaviour that is not systematic and can be corrected by individuals themselves. As such, the consumer framework effectively illustrates how the neoliberal discourse of greater individual responsibility is incorporated into how the topic is represented, simultaneously diverting attention from economic institutions and the very system in which TNCs operate. Such recontextualisation of agency and responsibility towards particular individual social actors in media coverage can also be seen as a strategic element of a neoliberal discourse that denies the conceptualisation of the studied problem from a class perspective.

The focus in the coverage on the responsibility and actions of local social actors in the Global South can also be seen as functioning ideologically, as this also helps shift responsibility from TNCs to local contract manufacturers. The characteristics of these social actors (e.g., irresponsibility, corruption, and irrationality) are strategically – and misleadingly – related to nationality or culture, instead of the economic demands that de facto dictate various patterns of behaviour. This not only (re)produces an existing and well-established colonial imagery of underdeveloped “others”, but also gives the impression that the problem of worker exploitation in the Global South is essentially “their” “cultural problem”, rather than a systematic problem related to endemic global capitalism. As such, these representations “nationalise” oppression and shift the discussion towards national culture or “cultural differences” between “us” and “them” rather than considering actions emanating from deeper economic structures rooted in the socially and economically faulty global business model. In this manner, the news coverage effectively recontextualises – but also normalises – the conflict between capital and labour: it relates this conflict to the sphere of culture, where oppression becomes not so much the result of the class conflicts inherent in capitalism, but the result of wrong “culturally driven” and “culturally conditioned” decisions made by “them” in the Global South. The existence of poor working conditions is framed as having nothing to do with the business model promoted by TNCs and international organisations, but as due to a lack of management skills on the part of suppliers.