Uneven development and labour super-exploitation in regional automotive formations. Insights from Mexico and Morocco

This article demonstrates that Mexico and Morocco's emergence as automotive hubs within the US and EU-led blocs, respectively, has been shaped by the need of core-based transnational capital to secure dependent and productively subordinate locations, where labour super-exploitation can be leveraged. Drawing from Marxist approaches to dependency and global production, we challenge mainstream frameworks that depict accelerating regionalization of global production as an upgrading opportunity for developing and emerging economies. We also refine critical scholarship that correctly identifies core-periphery relations in automotive regions but neglects the notion of super-exploitation. Hence, we show that Mexico and Morocco's integration into unevenly regionalized car-industries entails: the dominance of the most labour-intensive and low wage foreign investments; the state's role in reproducing a permanent surplus population via land privatization and coercive migration management; and the systematic suppression of independent workers' organization.