Blueberry Workers, Legal Change, Resistance, and Accommodation in the Coastal North of Peru

Abstract This article examines the protests of blueberry workers in Peru in 2020 against an agrarian labour regime that legalizes precarious labour conditions, as well as the aftermath of that mobilization. It investigates whether the legal change demanded and achieved can be categorized as resistance, understood as oppositional acts seeking rupture with the system, or as its opposite, accommodation, meaning reformist acts of opposition, acceptance and co-option. The analysis of the workers' mobilization in Peru tells a straightforward story about the function of law in constituting the rules of agrarian capitalism by distributing resources, such as land, into the hands of a few and legitimating unequal bargaining power to the detriment of workers. The findings suggest that the workers' protest constituted an act of accommodation: while it aimed to improve working conditions, it did not seek to overcome the underlying features and dynamics of the agrarian economic model that led to the entrenchment of precarity, unfreedom, and low levels of unionisation. While the mobilization did achieve legal change, its aftermath indicates that workers' actions were accommodating because they reinforced dynamics of co-option that curtail their capacity to organize and engage with projects of rupture.