INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT AND LABOUR MARKET: social contestation and recent transformations on siderurgical production in eastern Amazon

This paper analyses the socioeconomic effects of a group of governmental politics of infrastructure and financial/tax subsidies (Programa Grande Carajás) that from the late 1970’s had established a siderurgical zone for commodities production (pig iron) designed for exportation at the eastern Amazon area of Maranhão state. These governmental efforts trigged the emergence of a labour market around steel and forest workers, by the consequence of the use of charcoal as a input for siderurgical production. The analytic effort will be based on the theoretic paradigm of Global Production Networks, which stands as a multicentric approach that stresses the action of diversified social world actors to understand the process of configuration of that market, focusing the changes caused by the 2008’s economic crisis, highlighting the role performed by trade unions, corporates and state agents in this process.