10. Complex Labor Relations in Latin American Television Industries

Abstract

The transformation of the Latin American television industry clearly exposes the profound impact of neoliberal policies throughout the region, including the multiplication of distribution windows, trends toward media concentration, and changes in the modalities by which global media corporations are rooting in local and national television industries. Miller and Leger argue that runaway productions are the means by which Hollywood outsources production to developing countries to realize cost advantages via flexible labor, low wages, low prices, tax incentives, cheap accommodations, and access to material, cultural, and symbolic infrastructure, all the while maintaining tight central administrative and financial control. 1 This New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL) allows global corporations to expand their transnational presence; however, capital accumulation and profit revenues stay close to the conglomerates' homes. Given this new media industrial order, Hesmondhalgh argues that media conglomerates acting as large bureaucracies increasingly rely on professionals from small production houses to provide creativity and innovation. 2 Given this scenario, labor conventions in Latin American television are changing dramatically. The incursion of global media conglomerates in local markets across the region has caused unanticipated alliances with local independent production houses, or "indies, " which have traditionally been subject to the disproportionate power of the major national television networks in their respective countries. This combination of circumstances has led to disparate outcomes. On the one hand, the presence of global conglomerates has problematically spurred the region's further incorporation into global capitalism, allowing penetration of Western media in countries where they were formerly confronted by institutional, 10

Censorship, clientelism and bureaucracy: Production cultures in Colombian state-owned media system

“…The continual emphasis on the CCI's economic advantages, in contrast to allegations of informal labour patterns and precarity in the sector, has piqued Latam researchers' interest in the issue. Critics have begun to offer a more critical and reflexive account of media/creative workers' experiences and perceptions of the field, paving the way for a new path for the study of creative work in Latin America that includes both a political economy focus and a much-needed detailed study of workers' agency from a cultural studies perspective (Castano-Echeverri, 2017, Castano-Echeverri andCorrea-González, 2021;García-Canclini and Piedras, 2013;Jongbloed and Corredor-Aristizábal, 2020;Piñón, 2016). Nevertheless, there is still a pressing need for more empirical data that delivers evidence about the working conditions across the different fields in the Latam CCI to establish how local specificities add to the existing knowledge on the topic (Alacovska and Gill, 2019).…”