The Horror of the Domestic Industry: Exploitation, Resistance and Social Change in Capitalist Agriculture

Abstract

The Irish Mushroom Industry went through an “economic miracle” in the 1980s, in a context of economic recession and high rates of unemployment in Ireland. Jobs and means of livelihood were created in depressed rural areas. Technological changes, developed by the Irish State, made the small mushroom farm profitable, but in the last instance this model of development was based on the return of the domestic industry with all its nineteenth century connotations. The arrival of non-EU immigrant workers from the end of the 1990s onwards, and the substitution of the local workforce led to higher levels of workers exploitation, based on the intensification of work and the devaluation of labour. A media scandal in the first decade of the new century uncovered “inhuman” working conditions of migrant workers in the economy at large and the Irish Mushroom Industry in particular. How was it possible the return of the “sweatshop” with public funding? What kind of exploitation regiment was and how was it justified or challenged culturally and socially by participants?