Worker-Driven Co-Research in Global Supply Chains: Three Studies from Latin America

In the increasingly complex dynamics of global production, labor activists face a challenge: How to research corporations and design organizing strategies while also ensuring workers’ engagement and ownership over that strategy? It has long been understood that the most effective strategies combine local worker organizing with strategic corporate research and comprehensive campaigns.¹ What needs to be more deeply explored is how to involve workers, particularly in the Global South, more systematically in research on the global supply chains (GSCs) to which their workplaces are associated. A worker-driven co-research approach not only ensures better-quality research findings, but it also raises awareness among workers about the relationship between local working conditions and global production while contributing to social and political transformations.