Judith Marshall, "Extractive industries in Mozambique: the case of Brazil’s Vale", TUBMAN SEMINAR SERIES

Dr. Judith Marshall is a labour educator and writer who works in the Global Affairs and Local Issues Department of the United Steelworkers. She has been actively involved in building global networks for many years, along with organizing popular education programmes on global issues.

Prior to joining the Steelworkers, Dr. Marshall worked for several years as a cooperant in Mozambique and has extensive experience working with trade unions in Canada, Mozambique and Brazil, giving her a unique insight into the workings of transnational corporations, including Brazil’s Vale, a transnational mining company whose Canadian workforce in Sudbury and Voisey’s Bay were recently on strike for over a year.

Dr. Marshall was also a founding member of TCLSAC (Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa). The TCLSAC archive is now hosted in the Tubman Institute.

The seminar focused on the mining activities of Vale in the north of Mozambique. The following is an abstract of her talk:

Abstract

Tracking the misdeeds of Canadian corporations like Barrick or Goldcorps in the south is an old story, one eminently worth retelling albeit problematic. A rights discourse based on spaces defined by national boundaries seems curiously at variance with today’s powerful corporate and government actors promoting a discourse of global issues and global supply chains.

For unions like the USW, which represents the Canadian workers in the four newly-acquired operations of Brazil’s Vale, tracking the misdeeds of a southern corporation introduces a new story. In learning to tell it, the USW has had much to learn ranging from Vale’s still contested transition from state company to private hands at home in Brazil and Vale’s global reach.

Not least of the lessons is how Vale, like other global mining companies, chooses to wrap itself in the national flags as it courts foreign governments. Social identities shaped through post-colonial discourses clearly came into play.as Lula openly urged the Mozambique government to opt for Vale. While Brazil’s affinity with Africa shaped by diaspora politics may have prompted the Lula government to promise increased development links with Africa, it is not by accident that the much touted project to produce AIDS drugs has been slow to materialize while Vale’s new megaproject in mining has burgeoned forward, with the first coal exports to start by mid-year.

This week’s seminar is co-sponsored by Tubman and CERLAC’s Brazil Studies Seminar. Please note that this week only the seminar took place on a Wednesday rather than the usual Tuesday, to accommodate the Brazil Studies Seminar schedule.

To see our full programme of speakers, check the Tubman Seminar Series page.