50 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
The joint venture relationship has been well-suited to find new areas of market growth and to 'minimise direct conflict between TNCs and Third World labour*. With no foreign 'owners' of the plant, labour discipline is left to nationals.6 The independent LDC production has been considered the best insulated from the risk of political and social upheaval including nationalisation in Third World countries.7
Independent and joint venture subcontracting has been fast developing in the production of finished consumer goods and of small machines, machine tools and other engineering items. In the case of complete production undertaken by LDC firms, the transnational buyers (import-wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers) provide the designs and specify every other requirement including the material to be used, not necessarily directly to the actual producer-subcontractor but through the mushrooming export enterprises and trading companies in LDCs. It has also been observed that managers and sales personnel of these exporting firms travel overseas with samples of items their firms have designed in order to solicit orders from the parent firms in developed countries but 'they seem to enjoy little financial success'.8
There are also instances—a few—of big Brazilian or Korean firms having direct access to the industrial markets not only for standardised products in only a few designs and sizes but also for goods in many designs and sizes.9 But the evidence that has mounted up so far points out clearly that transnationals retain control in nearly all cases over research, design, material supply, transport, processing, storage and marketing.10
CAUSES OF GROWTH
Why the capitalist employers took the decision to internationally subcontract out during the mid-60s or the late '60s needs some elaboration.
Those were the years when the post-war industrial boom met with the crisis of slackening productivity, high wage rates, labour shortages and, more importantly, inflexibility of labour. Labour in industrial countries, especially in the West, turned out to be militant and litigious with a growing tendency to take recourse to direct action. In other words, from the employers' viewpoint, the crisis was one of the futility of Taylorism and especially Fordism; they became unbearably 'expensive and unpalatable' endeavours in the 'Core'. Hence there was the quest for productivity gains and search for 'secondary' or 'green' labour—labour that was cheap, docile and readily exploitable for the success of Taylorism and Fordism in the 'Periphery'.
Further, the costs of industrial sites (especially in Japan) and growing pollution also rose, with the concomitant public outrage and government regulatory "measures. The 'extra costs' stemming from occupational safety regulations and pollution controls became too stringent to bear not only for the American executives but also for the Japanese management. To 'sum up, the basic thrust of the relocation