Promoting Social Dialogue through CSR: From Compliance to Collaboration in the Costa Rican Pineapple Chain

The role of private governance mechanisms, such as standards and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), is changing in global agricultural value chains. According the potentially transformative narrative (Nelson and Tallontire 2014), more attention is given to local embeddedness, representation and voice of workers, in particular the role of trade unions. These developments coincide with a paradigm shift from compliance to cooperation in the chain characterized by more engagement of unions, capacity trainings for workers with respect to their rights, participatory auditing and continuous monitoring. However, Lund-Thomsen and Lindgreen (2014) argue that the measures of the cooperative paradigm are unlikely to alter power relationships in the global value chains and generate durable improvements in working conditions. Selwyn (2016) goes even a step further in his argumentation and discusses how global value chains contribute to the (re)production of poverty and inequality and therefore renamed it Global Poverty Chains. While previous research on social upgrading in value chains demonstrated some improvements in tangible working conditions (Taglioni and Winkler 2014), trade union rights are often neglected (Rodriguez-Garavito 2005, Barrientos and Smith 2007). This raises questions about how workers and their organizations can be empowered to negotiate over their working conditions and defend their interests. In this article we examine what the (political) implications of CSR are for collective agency in GVCs, in particular for the anti-union environment of the pineapple sector in Costa Rica. We rely on a single case study of a successful social dialogue initiative promoted through a cooperative CSR approach. The drivers for workplace unionism are identified within the local embedded context accounting for the workers’ perception of the potential for CSR to promote their interests and exert organized political pressure. The findings are nuanced by addressing the conflicting interests and obstacles that impede successful leveraging in the chain.