Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work 1839106573, 9781839106576
This ground-breaking Handbook broadens empirical and theoretical understandings of work, work relations, and workers. It
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Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work
HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORK
Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work Edited by Maurizio Atzeni Researcher, Centro de Investigaciones Laborales, CEIL/CONICET, Argentina and Professor, Facultad de Economia y Negocios, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile Dario Azzellini Professor Doctoral Program in Development Studies, Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico Alessandra Mezzadri Reader in Global Development and Political Economy, SOAS, University of London, UK Phoebe V. Moore Professor of Management and the Futures of Work, University of Essex, UK and Senior Policy Researcher, International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland Ursula Apitzsch Professor of Political Science and Sociology, Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA
© Maurizio Atzeni, Dario Azzellini, Alessandra Mezzadri, Phoebe V. Moore and Ursula Apitzsch 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023943153 This book is available electronically in the Economics subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781839106583
ISBN 978 1 83910 657 6 (cased) ISBN 978 1 83910 658 3 (eBook)
EEP BoX
Contents
List of figuresx List of tablesxi List of contributorsxii Introduction: what is work and what is the political economy of work? Maurizio Atzeni, Dario Azzellini, Alessandra Mezzadri, Ursula Apitzsch and Phoebe V. Moore PART I
1
THEORIES AND CONCEPTS
SECTION A. CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND FORMS OF EXPLOITATION 1
Class, labour and the global working class Ronaldo Munck
34
2
Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik
43
3
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ Henry Bernstein
53
4
Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles for a global political economy of work Alessandra Mezzadri
5
Unfree labour in the 21st century? Siobhán McGrath
74
6
World-system, production, and labour Manuela Boatcă
83
7
The proletariat and the revolution Marcel van der Linden
94
64
SECTION B. SHIFTING REGIMES OF EXPLOITATION: FROM THE WORKPLACE TO THE TERRITORY TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY 8
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work Kendra Briken
v
113
vi Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 9
Exploitation and global value chains Benjamin Selwyn, Liam Campling, Alessandra Mezzadri, Elena Baglioni, Satoshi Miyamura and Jonathan Pattenden
10
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South: reflections on accumulation and social reproduction Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros
126
137
SECTION C. CONTEMPORARY DEBATES 11
Commoning labour power Dario Azzellini
149
12
Social and solidarity economy and self-management Marcelo Vieta and Ana Inés Heras
161
13
Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity Gigi Roggero
172
14
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? Mark Graham and Mohammad Amir Anwar
179
15
Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times Maurizio Atzeni
198
16
Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change Linda Clarke and Melahat Sahin-Dikmen
209
17
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 219 Dario Azzellini, Sebastian Brandl and Ingo Matuschek
SECTION D. INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES 18
Understanding the global political economy of work: insights from labor geography Andrew Herod
232
19
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States: insights from anthropology Sharryn Kasmir
241
20
Global labour history – its promises and hazards Stefano Bellucci
21
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant for understanding the global political economy of work Heather Connolly
252
266
Contents vii PART II
INTERSECTIONS
SECTION A. INTERSECTIONS OF WORK AND MOBILITY 22
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders Claudia Bernardi
280
23
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau
292
24
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside: precarious lives between violence and agency Monica Massari
302
25
Extractive humanitarianism: unpaid labour and participatory detention in refugees’ governmentality Martina Tazzioli
312
SECTION B. INTERSECTIONS OF DIGITAL AND ANALOGUE WORK 26
Problems in protections for working data subjects: becoming strangers to ourselves Phoebe V Moore
27
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence Baruch Gottlieb
340
28
Class composition in the digitalised gig economy Jamie Woodcock
351
29
Resistance and struggle in the gig economy Vincenzo Maccarrone, Lorenzo Cini and Arianna Tassinari
360
30
Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace Saori Shibata
371
31
Exploring the economics of the gig economy: legal arbitrage and employment law Jeremias Adams-Prassl
323
380
SECTION C. INTERSECTIONS OF WORK AND LIFE 32
Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work Ursula Apitzsch
392
33
Global political economy of care and gender – crisis, extractivism and contestation401 Christa Wichterich
viii Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 34
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case Maria Kontos and Minna K. Ruokonen-Engler
412
35
Questioning social reproduction theory: North African working-class migrants in France and their families Catherine Delcroix
422
36
Towards a global political economy of sex/work: evidence of Argentina and Costa Rica Kate Hardy and Megan Rivers-Moore
433
SECTION D. INTERSECTIONS OF STRUGGLES 37
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community: connections and politics Miguel Martínez Lucio
38
Global unions and transnational labor movement Julia Soul and Cecilia Anigstein
458
39
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy Jeemol Unni
471
40
The power and politics of precarious resistance Marcel Paret
485
41
Spatial dimensions of strikes Jörg Nowak
495
42
Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt Verónica Gago and Lucía Cavallero
503
43
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America Tomás Palmisano and Juan Wahren
512
445
SECTION E. INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN WORK IN THE GLOBAL NORTH AND THE SOUTH: EXPLORING THE LINKS IN KEY PRODUCTIVE SECTORS 44
Exhaust and switch: labour and the garment industry in global production networks Nikolaus Hammer
45
Imperialism and labour: palm industry in the territories of Black communities in the border areas of Colombia and Ecuador (Tumaco-San Lorenzo) Edna Yiced Martínez
523
536
Contents ix 46
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question in the era of generalized monopolies Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo Crossa Niell
47
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 559 Jörn Boewe
48
Counter-logistics in Po valley region Niccolò Cuppini
546
570
PART III PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORKING CLASS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH: LOCAL REALITIES AND GLOBAL DYNAMICS SECTION A. ASIA 49
The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics581 Supriya RoyChowdhury
50
Informalization of labor in contemporary China Jenny Chan
591
SECTION B. AFRICA 51
Precariousness and push-back: capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa Bridget Kenny
52
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond Samuel Andreas Admasie
603 614
SECTION C. SOUTH AMERICA 53
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina626 Lucila D’Urso and Clara Marticorena
54
Chile – between Pinochet’s neoliberal counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt Miguel Urrutia and Fernando Durán-Palma
55
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes Ludmila Costhek Abílio
642 660
Index671
Figures
14.1
The availability of online workers
184
14.2
Job advert on an online outsourcing platform, revealing little detail of the task being advertised
186
20.1
Taxonomy of labour relations
255
39.1
Informal employment as per the ILO, 2003 definition (percentages, 2016)
472
46.1
Graphical representation of the Silicon Valley ecosystem
549
46.2
Patent Cooperation Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization
551
46.3
Annual growth rate (percent) of immigrant and native population aged 22 and above in the United States by level of education, 1990–2017
553
46.4
Annual growth rate of the qualified immigrant population in the United States (percent)
554
46.5
Immigrants with postgraduate studies residing in the United States
555
46.6
Percentage of postgraduates in STEM areas residing in the United States. Main countries of origin (2017)
555
53.1
Real wage (Dec. 2015–Dec. 2020). Index 100: Dec. 2015
629
53.2
Registered workers (s.e.) In thousands
630
53.3
Collective bargaining in Argentina (2002–2020)
637
53.4
Collective agreements (2002–2020)
637
55.1
Changes in Brazil’s social stratification according to economic classes662
x
Tables
9.1
Top 2,000 TNCs annual average revenues and profits, 1996–2015 (in trillions of US dollars)
128
9.2
Key concepts and contributions of critical chain analysis
129
14.1
Oversupply of labour on Upwork.com. Data for October 24, 2018
185
26.1
Data subjects: subject to333
26.2
Data subjects: subject within334
26.3
Data subjects: subjects of334
44.1
Main textile and wearing apparel importers to the United States and the European Union (15), 1991–2018
526
44.2
Monthly manufacturing wages compared to living wages
528
46.1
Patents applied for and granted by country, 1996–2018
552
46.2
World-wide migrant population with tertiary education, 1990–2010
552
53.1
Economy and labour force indicators, Argentina (2003–2020)
631
53.2
Strikes in the public sector (2006–2020)
633
53.3
Strikes in the private sector (2006–2020)
633
xi
Contributors
Ludmila Costhek Abílio is a researcher at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of São Paulo. Her main interest lies in the relationship between labor exploitation, development models, and capitalist accumulation. For the past twenty years, she has conducted empirical research on informal and precarious workers. Over the last seven years, she has published national and international articles on the Uberization of work, analyzing new forms of control and management and emerging forms of resistance. In her doctoral research (2011), she investigated the relationship between one million cosmetics resellers and a Brazilian company. Since 2012, she has been following the transformations of delivery work in Brazil and England. Jeremias Adams-Prassl is a Professor of Law at Oxford University, and a Fellow at Magdalen College. He is particularly interested in innovation and the future(s) of work, and currently leads a five-year research project on algorithmic management funded by the ERC and a 2020 Leverhulme Prize. Samuel Andreas Admasie is a researcher at the Labour Movement’s Archives and Library, Stockholm and a regional specialist (Africa) at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. He is an editorial board member of Labor History, and has taught at Addis Ababa University and the University of Hargeisa. His research focuses on class relations and the labour movement in Ethiopia and has been published in journals such as Journal of African History, Northeast African Studies, Journal of Labor and Society and Africa. Cecilia Anigstein is a researcher and Professor in the Sociology area of the University of Genertal Sarmiento and CONICET. She obtained her sociology degree at the University of Buenos Aires and her doctorate in Social Sciences at the University of General Sarmiento. She has extensively researched the labour movement in national and regional scales from a socio-political perspective. She has published chapters and papers in internationally recognised collections and journals. Mohammad Amir Anwar is a Lecturer in International Development and African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His work enquires how digital infrastructures (e.g., AI, data, platforms, the internet, and mobile phones) are shaping development outcomes (e.g., labour market transformation, access to decent work, poverty and inequality reduction in the Global South). He is the co-author of an open access book, The Digital Continent (2022) published by Oxford University Press. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg and Senior Research Fellow (Honorary) at the British Institute of Eastern Africa. Ursula Apitzsch is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main and Director of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies (CGC). She has broadly published in the fields of care and migration as well as on the history of political ideas and is co-editor of the German Critical Edition of Antonio Gramsci’s correspondence from prison (1926–1937) in 4 volumes (Gefängnisbriefe I-IV, Argument & xii
Contributors xiii Cooperative: Verlag 1995ff.). She is a founding member of the Research Network ‘Womens’ and Gender Studies’ of the European Sociological Association (ESA). Maurizio Atzeni is a researcher at the Centre for Labour Relations, Argentinian National Research Council (CEIL/CONICET) based in Buenos Aires and Professor at the Faculty of Business and Economics, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile, having previously held positions at Loughborough and De Montfort Universities in the UK. He has published extensively on labour conflict and precarious workers’ collective organisation in journal articles and chapters. He is the author of Workplace Conflict: Mobilization and Solidarity in Argentina (Palgrave, 2010) and of Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism (Macmillan, 2014), a book translated to Chinese and Spanish. Maurizio is editor in chief of the Global Labour Journal and on the editorial board of Work in The Global Economy and of Work, Employment and Society. He organises the ‘Labour Transfer Summer School’, a research/activism meeting point, held every June in Sardinia. Dario Azzellini is Assistant Professor and researcher of the Doctoral Programme in Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, author and filmmaker. His primary research interests are labour studies, sustainable work, local and workers’ self-management, and social movements and protest, with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. He recently authored Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill, 2017), co-authored Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work (Routledge, 2023), edited If Not Us, Who? Workers against Authoritarianism, Fascism and Dictatorship (VSA 2021) and co-edited The Class Strikes Back. Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century (Brill, 2018). Together with Oliver Ressler he produced Occupy, Resist, Produce, a series of documentaries on recuperated factories under workers’ control in Europe. More information is available on his personal website at: www .azzellini.net. Elena Baglioni is reader in Global Supply Chain Management and Director of the Centre on Labour and Global Production at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK. She has recently co-edited (with Liam Campling, Neil M. Coe and Adrian Smith) the book Labour Regimes and Global Production (Agenda Publishing, 2022). Stefano Bellucci is a Senior Researcher on African Labour History at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He is also a Lecturer in African History and Labour Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Is the co-editor of the ILO’s General Lab our History of Africa: Workers, employers and governments, 20th–21st Centuries and The Internationalisation of the Labour Question: Ideological Antagonism, Workers’ Movements and the ILO since 1919. He has published in journal such as Labor History, Africa, International Review of Social History amongst others. He is currently researching on the trade union movement in Africa. Claudia Bernardi is an Associate Professor in History of the Americas at the University of Perugia, and Principal Investigator of the project The Mobility Regime across Mexico and United States: The Case of Farmworkers from Tabasco and Oaxaca (1930s–1970s) at the University of Padua. She is a board member of the Italian Society for Labour History – SISLav. Her first monograph Una storia di confine. Frontiere e lavoratori migranti tra Messico e Stati Uniti (1836–1964) [A border story. Frontiers and migrant workers across Mexico and USA]
xiv Handbook of research on the global political economy of work won the SISSCO Prize for First Work 2019. Her research is focused on global history and history of the Americas, labour and migration studies. She has recently edited the Special Issue titled Mobility, labour, rights: trajectories and interactions in the Americas and Europe (XVII–XX centuries) for ‘Annals of Luigi Einaudi Foundation. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science’ (2022). Henry Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK, and Associate Professor, College of Humanities and Development Studies, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China. His books include Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change (Pluto and University of Michigan Press, 2010), and ‘The Peasantry’ in Global Capitalism: Who, Where and Why (Merlin Press, 2010). Manuela Boatcă is Professor of Sociology and Head of School of the Global Studies Programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She works on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. She is author of Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism (Routledge, 2016) and co-author (with Anca Parvulescu) of Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania Across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022). Jörn Boewe is a journalist specialising in labour issues and questions of trade union organising. Together with Johannes Schulten he published The Long Struggle of the Amazon Employees. Laboratory of Resistance. Union Organizing in E-Commerce Worldwide (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2019). Both authors together run the Berlin-based journalists office ‘Work in Progress’. Sebastian Brandl is Professor of Sociology, with a focus on the sociology of work and social policy at the University of Applied Sciences of the Federal Employment Agency. Prior to that, he headed the research funding department ‘Gainful Employment in Transition’ at the Hans Böckler Foundation. He was a research associate in the project ‘Work and Ecology’ at the Social Science Research Center Berlin and conducted research on social sustainability and the future of work. Kendra Briken is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Work, Organisation, and Employment, at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Her long-term research interest is on the future of work, the impact of technology, and related work and employment changes. Her writing and teaching on these topics is inspired by critical theory, and the analysis of the wider political economy. Liam Campling is Professor of International Business and Development at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK, where he works collectively at the Centre on Labour and Global Production. He is co-author of Capitalism and the Sea (Verso, 2021) and Free Trade Agreements and Global Labour Governance (Routledge, 2021), and an editor of Labour Regimes and Global Production (Agenda, 2022) and Journal of Agrarian Change. Lucía Cavallero holds a PhD in Social Science and is a researcher at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and member of the feminist collective Ni Una Menos. Her research focuses on social conflict. She teaches in the gender studies master’s programme at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. She is the co-author of Una lectura feminista de la deuda
Contributors xv [A Feminist Reading of Debt] published in Argentina by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (2019), in Brazil by Criação Humana Editora (2019), in Italy by Ombre Corte (forthcoming) and in English by Pluto Press (2021). Jenny Chan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Vice President of the Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44) of the International Sociological Association (2018–2023). She is the co-author, with Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, of Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers (Haymarket Books and Pluto Press, 2020; translated into Korean by Narumbooks, 2021), which was awarded CHOICE’s 2022 Outstanding Academic Title regarding China. Her research focuses on the informalisation of work and employment in a globalising China. Lorenzo Cini is Lecturer in Employment Relations and HRM at Cork University Business School (Cork, Ireland). His research interests include social movements, industrial relations, platform labour, and Marxism. His recent publications have appeared in journals, such as Theory and Society, New Technology, Work and Employment, Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Industrial Relations, and Work, Employment and Society. Linda Clarke is Professor of European Industrial Relations and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) at the University of Westminster. She has extensive experience of comparative research on labour, equality, vocational education and training (VET), employment and wage relations, with particular emphasis on the European construction sector and on climate change. Heather Connolly is Associate Professor of Employment Relations at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM) in France. Heather’s research explores the possibilities for trade union renewal, and how trade unions across Europe shape, and are constrained by, their institutional contexts. Other areas of research include relations between unions and social movements, worker representation and social dialogue in France, union renewal in UK local government and the politics of equality in the UK and Europe. Mateo Crossa Niell is Research Professor at the Mora Institute, Mexico. Holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and in Development Studies from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (UAZ). Research focuses on areas related to political economy and development studies in Latin America, placing special emphasis on global production chains and the world of labour. Author of the book Honduras: maquilando subdesarrollo en la mundialización and various articles on the maquiladora industry in Mexico and Central America. Niccolò Cuppini is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. His research is oriented towards a transdisciplinary approach within the urban studies and the political theory fields. Moreover, he researches on logistics, social movements, sociology of labour and platform economy. He works on many international research projects, is part of the board of the Into the Black Box research group and is editor of the journal Scienza & Politica. Lucila D’Urso is a researcher and Professor at the University of General Sarmiento (UNGS) and at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (UBA). She currently leads the research project ‘The trade union movement against austerity policies
xvi Handbook of research on the global political economy of work in the Southern Cone: a comparative study between national confederations of Argentina and Brazil’ based at UBA. She has published several papers in collective volumes and international journals. Catherine Delcroix is a sociologist at Strasbourg University and is a researcher at the Laboratory Migrations Internationales, Espaces, Sociétés (MIGRINTER) CNRS/Poitiers (UMR 7301). She is Fellow of the Collaborative Institute on Migration. Her approach of the Muslim world and of immigrants coming from the Maghreb in France and in Europe is socio-anthropological. She is using life stories, observation and she builds family cases stories. She has been studying comparatively in Europe the contexts, situations and actions of migrants’ families. Raúl Delgado Wise is a Senior Professor and Emeritus researcher, UNESCO Chair on migration, development and human rights. Author/editor of 31 books and more than 200 book chapters and refereed articles. Guest lecturer in over 40 countries. President and founder of the International Network on Migration and Development, co-director of the Critical Development Studies Network and Professor of the Doctoral Programme in Development Studies at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas. Fernando Durán-Palma is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Organisations, Economy and Society, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE), at the University of Westminster. He is a graduate of the LSE MSc (Econ.) in Industrial Relations, and earned his PhD from Loughborough University with a study of union strategies in Chile’s copper mining sector. His research interests centre on alternative forms of collective action and organisation by workers in the periphery of labour markets. Verónica Gago teaches political science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also an assistant researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón, 2014, Duke University Press, 2017), La potencia feminista (Tinta Limón, 2019 and published in English as Feminist International, Verso Books, 2020) and co-author of A Feminist Reading of Debt (Pluto Press, 2021). She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones and is now a member of Ni Una Menos. Baruch Gottlieb is Prof*Dual cooperation lecturer at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences where he runs the Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics, and writes on data aesthetics, data epistemology and digital materiality, with a focus on transdisciplinarity. Gottlieb’s practice has a strong social component, involving curation, workshops, artistic collaborations and other synthetic forms. He has published extensively on technology, media and computation, his latest book is Digital Materialism (Emerald, 2018). Mark Graham is Professor of Internet Geography at the Oxford Internet Institute; a Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College; a Research Affiliate in the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment; a Research Associate at the Centre for Information Technology and National Development in Africa at the University of Cape Town; and a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre. He is also the Director of the Fairwork project. A full list of his publications is available at www.markgraham.space.
Contributors xvii Nikolaus Hammer is a Professor in Work and Employment at the University of Leicester School of Business, UK, and Co-Director of the Future of Work research cluster. He has published widely on social standards in global value chains. His recent research focused on work and employment in the European fast fashion industry as well as associated dynamics of economic and social downgrading. Kate Hardy is Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, UK, and a feminist activist. Her research interests include paid and unpaid work; gender; agency; materialist and Marxist feminism; collective organising; political economy; the body; disability; sex work and social struggles. The main focus of her work is low paid and marginalised forms of feminised work. Her research has been widely published academically and disseminated through radio and news media. Kate is committed to developing methodologies which work alongside research participants, in order to undertake socially and politically transformative research. Ana Inés Heras is an Argentinean National Researcher at CONICET (National Research Council) and Professor at the Universities of San Martín and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She also coordinates the Instituto para la Inclusión Social y el Desarrollo Humano, Argentina, and is responsible for the Programa de Aprendizaje de y en Autogestión. She is currently a Member of the Board at the Community Economies Institute International. She has published extensively in Spanish and English and her main topics of study and activism are autogestión, workers’ cooperativism and grassroots organising. Andrew Herod is Distinguished Research Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. He writes frequently on matters related to work, workers and the global economy. He is probably best known for his work helping to develop the field of Labour Geography. His books include Labor (Polity Press, 2018), Geographies of Globalization: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (Guilford Press, 2001) and Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism (University of Minnesota Press, 1998). He is presently editing the Handbook of Labour Geography for Edward Elgar. Praveen Jha is Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, and Adjunct Professor, Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. He is editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. His books include Labour Questions in the Global South (with W. Chambati and L. Ossome, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India (with A. Kumar and Y. Mishra, Orient Black Swan, 2020). Sharryn Kasmir is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Hofstra University and researcher with Frontlines: Class, Value, and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism, University of Bergen. She has done pioneering work in the Anthropology of Labour. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in manufacturing settings in the Basque region of Spain and the southeast USA and is currently studying social movements in a rust-belt region of Pennsylvania. Her publications include Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor (Routledge, 2022); Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor (Berghahn, 2014); The ‘Myth’ of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town (SUNY, 1996).
xviii Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Bridget Kenny is a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She works on political subjectivity, gender, class and race in service work and precarious employment to examine how changes to racial capitalism constitute urban political publics. Her books include Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Wal-Mart in the Global South, co-edited with Carolina Bank Muñoz and Antonio Stecher (University of Texas Press, 2018). Maria Kontos, Dr. phil., is a sociologist and senior researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. Her research interests are migration, gender and care, entrepreneurship, social policy, integration discourses, political participation of migrants and biographical methods. Vincenzo Maccarrone is Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy. His research interests include employment relations, transnational governance and sociology of work. Some of his recent research works have been published in the European Journal of Industrial Relations; Work, Employment and Society; and the British Journal of Industrial Relations. Clara Marticorena is a researcher at the Center for Research and Labour Studies, National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CEIL – CONICET) and Assistant Professor at University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Faculty of Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (UBA) and a Master in Sociology of Work (UBA). Her current project deals with the study of the link between workers’ structural power and associational power during the last decades in Argentina. She has published several papers in both national and international journals. Edna Yiced Martínez earned her PhD degree in sociology at the Free University of Berlin. Her doctoral thesis on palm oil and primitive accumulation was graded Magna Cumme Laude and awarded by Peter Lang Publishers. In 2018 she got a postdoctoral position at the FU Berlin with a focus on black women ex-combatants of the FARC-EP. Between 2018 and 2020 she coordinated the research project ‘Development for whom, possible effects of the construction of the port of Tribugá, perspectives from Afro-Colombian women in the region’. In 2022 she got the Emma Goldman Snowball award. Miguel Martínez Lucio is a Professor at the University of Manchester (Alliance Manchester Business School and Work & Equalities Institute). He researches on questions of regulation, the state and labour relations in terms of their changing and contradictory nature. He has a strong interest in questions of trade union identity and politics in relation to organisational change as well issues such as social inclusion and equality. He studied politics at the University of Essex and completed an industrial relations doctorate at the University of Warwick. Monica Massari is Associate Professor at the University of Milan where she teaches Sociology of Memory, Comparative Social Systems and Global Societies and Rights. Since the early 2000s, she has been focusing on Mediterranean migration with a special focus on gender dynamics, the process of social construction of otherness and new forms of racism and discrimination in Europe. Currently her research interests focus on the study of traumatic memories in the public sphere with a growing attention toward the use of biographical methods and narrative approaches.
Contributors xix Ingo Matuschek is Professor of Sociology with a special focus on Work and Social Structure at the University of Applied Sciences of the Federal Employment Agency. He was a member of the Working Group ‘Sustainable Work’ of the German Committee on Sustainable Research (DKN) and is doing research on labour market, subjectivation and digital work as well as sustainability. Siobhán McGrath is Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Durham University in the UK. She works at the intersection of labour and development geography and has published on forced labour and labour unfreedoms; anti-trafficking and anti-slavery; violations of labour and employment law; and labour within Global Production Networks. Most recently, she co-edited (with Ben Rogaly and Louise Waite) a Special Forum of the journal Globalizations on ‘Unfreedom in Labor Relations: From a politics of rescue to a politics of solidarity?’ Alessandra Mezzadri is a Feminist Political Economist based at SOAS, London, UK, where she is Reader in Global Development and Political Economy. Her research interests focus on global supply chains and labour regimes; the global garment industry, labour standards and unfree labour; feminist social reproduction approaches and India’s political economy. She is the author of The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments ‘Made in India’ (Cambridge University Press, 2017, 2020), editor of Marx in the Field (Anthem, 2021) and has written extensively on issues of social reproduction, value generation and exploitation in supply chains capitalism, including in COVID times. Satoshi Miyamura is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK. He currently works on patterns of industrial restructuring, labour market institutions and labour-management relations in a range of manufacturing sectors, including jute and cotton textile, engineering and pharmaceutical industries in various regions of India, including West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat and the Delhi/National Capital Region. His research interests are in the political economy of development in India and Japan; economics of labour and institutions; economic history and history of economic thought. His work has been published in many international journals, including Third World Quarterly, The Journal of Peasant Studies and New Political Economy. Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau holds a PhD in International Relations and Political Science. He is currently lecturer at the University Institute for Studies on Migration (IUEM) of Comillas University in Madrid, Spain. He is editor of the journal Relaciones Internacionales and the journal Migraciones and since 2020 he has been president of the Research Committee on ‘International Studies, Area Studies and Globalization’ of the Spanish Federation of Sociology. His main lines of research are international migrations, global value chains, capitalist agriculture and the world-ecology perspective. Phoebe V. Moore is Professor of Management and the Futures of Work at the University of Essex Business School (Colchester, UK) and Senior Fellow at the International Labour Organization (ILO, Geneva). Dr Moore is a globally recognised expert in digitalisation and the workplace. Her most recent book The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts (Routledge, 2019) is a ground-breaking piece, analysing the use of wearable tracking technologies in workplaces and the implications for human resources and working conditions. Moore is a policy advisor and commissioned author who works with several institutions in the European Union, UK government and United Nations on the integration of
xx Handbook of research on the global political economy of work old and new technologies at work, as well as reflections on big data and artificial intelligence systems, analysing the risks and benefits these pose for working people. Ronaldo Munck is Director of the Centre for Engaged Research at Dublin City University, Ireland, and Senior Researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. His books include Rethinking Global Labour: After Neoliberalism (Agenda, 2019) and Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives (Palgrave, 2021). He is a shop steward for The Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU) Ireland’s largest union. Jörg Nowak is Visiting Professor at University of Brasília, Brazil. Last book publication: Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India (2019). Research areas: labour conflict; political economy of development; infrastructure and logistics and Althusserian Marxism. Tomás Palmisano holds a PhD in Social Science from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina (UBA). His research interests span both critical agrarian studies and social movements in Argentina and Chile. He is an assistant researcher in the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas of Argentina and he works in the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani (UBA). His research project focuses on agrarian change and alternative agricultures in rural territories subject to the pressure of agribusiness. Marcel Paret is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah, USA, and Senior Research Associate of the Center for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is author of Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022). Prabhat Patnaik is currently Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Value of Money (Colombia University Press, 2009), Re-Envisioning Socialism (Tulika, 2012), and A Theory of Imperialism (co-authored with Utsa Patnaik, Colombia University Press, 2016) and Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present (co-authored with Utsa Patnaik, Monthly Review Press, 2021, awarded the Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award). Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation – A Study in Method (OUP India, 1987), The Long Transition – Essays on Political Economy (Tulika, 1999), The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (Merlin Press, 2007), A Theory of Imperialism (with Prabhat Patnaik, Colombia University Press, 2016) and Capital and Imperialism (with Prabhat Patnaik, Monthly Review Press, 2021, awarded the Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award). Jonathan Pattenden is Associate Professor in the Political Economy and Sociology of Development at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is author of the monograph Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach (Manchester University Press, 2016) and an editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change. His work on agrarian political economy and political sociology has been published in journals such as Development and Change, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Global Labour Journal and the Journal of Agrarian Change.
Contributors xxi Megan Rivers-Moore is a settler on the unceded and unsurrendered territories of the Algonquin-Anishinabeg nation, where she is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Carleton University, Canada. Megan is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is located at the intersection of sociology, gender studies and Latin American and Caribbean studies. Her research focuses on how gender and sexuality operate transnationally, including projects on sex tourism in Costa Rica, sex worker organising across Latin America and clandestine abortion. Her book Gringo Gulch: Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility was published in English by the University of Chicago Press and in Spanish by the University of Costa Rica Press. Gigi Roggero (1973) is a militant researcher, part of the editorial board of Machina and Commonware, and director of DeriveApprodi’s Input series. Among his various books and essays, he is author of The Production of Living Knowledge (Temple University Press, 2011), Futuroanteriore (DeriveApprodi, 2002), Glioperaisti (DeriveApprodi, 2005), Elogiodellamilitanza (DeriveApprodi, 2016), Il trenocontro la Storia (DeriveApprodi, 2017), L’operaismo politico italiano (DeriveApprodi, 2019) and Italian operaismo (MIT Press, 2023). Supriya RoyChowdhury is Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. Her research interests span labour, trade unions, urban poverty and migration. She has published extensively, including in the Journal of Development Studies, Third World Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, Economic and Political Weekly and Socialist Register. Her book, City of Shadows: Slums and Informal Work in Bangalore was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Minna K. Ruokonen-Engler, Dr. phil., a sociologist, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Research at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. Her research interests are gender and transnational migration, education and social inequality, intergenerational social mobility, intersectional discrimination and racism and qualitative methods. Melahat Sahin-Dikmen is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, University of Westminster. Her current research investigates the implications of climate change for built environment occupations, the role of worker agency in climate action and the gender dimension of climate adaptation strategies. Her broader expertise lies in the sociology of work and employment particularly in relation to gender and professional occupations. Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Development and International Relations in the department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His main research interests are in the broad field of global development, with a special focus on questions of global value chains and development, labour and development, food, agriculture and sustainable development, and theories of development. He is the author of over 40 academic articles and book chapters, and three books: Workers, State and Development in Brazil (Manchester University Press, 2012), The Global Development Crisis (Polity, 2014) and The Struggle for Development (Polity, 2017). He is currently working on his next book, provisionally entitled World Development under Value Chain Capitalism. Saori Shibata is a lecturer of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on Japan’s political economy, including the changing nature of work, the digital economy and how Japan’s model of capitalism is transforming. This draws on institutionalist approaches to capitalism and critical political economy. She has published in Review of
xxii Handbook of research on the global political economy of work International Political Economy, New Political Economy, British Journal of Political Science and Cornell University Press. Julia Soul obtained her Doctorate in Humanities – Anthropology at the University of Rosario (Argentina). She is a researcher of the Labor Research Center in the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research. She has focused in Labour Anthropology and has conducted research on industrial communities, labour organising and transnationalisation. She has published ‘SOMISEROS: La constitución y el devenir de un grupo obrero desde una perspectiva socioantropológica’ as well as several chapters and contributions in edited books and international journals. Arianna Tassinari is Assistant Professor in Economic and Labour Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy). Her research investigates patterns of transformation and instability in advanced capitalist economies, with a specific focus on industrial relations, labour politics and the political role of organised producer groups. Her recent research has appeared in, among others, in Industrial Relations, the European Journal of Industrial Relations and Work, Employment and Society. Martina Tazzioli is Reader in Politics and Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the author of The Making of Migration. The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders (Sage, 2020), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) and co-author of Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (Palgrave Pivot, 2016). She is co-editor in chief of the journal Politics and on the editorial board of Radical Philosophy. Her forthcoming book is entitled Border Abolitionism: Migration Containment and the Genealogies of Struggles (Manchester University Press, 2023). Jeemol Unni is Professor of Economics at Ahmedabad University, India. Previously, she was Director, Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). She holds a PhD and M.Phil. in Economics and was a postdoctoral Fellow at Economic Growth Center, Yale University. She is currently a member of the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics constituted by the Government of India. She has published widely on issues of informal labour, women’s work, informal sector organising, returns to education, social protection and women entrepreneurship. Her latest co-authored book is Women Entrepreneurship in the Indian Middle Class (Orient Black Swan, 2021). Miguel Urrutia is Associate Professor at the School of Sociology, University of Chile. He is a graduate of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile with an MA in Sociology, and earned his PhD from the University of Louvain with a study of anti-neoliberal struggles and political immunisation in Chile. His research and teaching interests combine the study of work, social classes and political action. Miguel is co-author and co-editor of Izquierdas y poder popular en Chile, 1970–1973 (Ediciones Escaparate, 2021). Marcel van der Linden is Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Social History and Emeritus Professor of Social Movement History at the University of Amsterdam. He was elected President of the International Social History Association three times, and has (co-) authored and (co-)edited more than fifty books on socialist and labour history.
Contributors xxiii Marcelo Vieta is Associate Professor in the programme in Adult Education and Community Development and Director of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy & Work, both at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Vieta has published and presented widely on labour activism, political economy, economic democracy, cooperativism and the social and solidarity economy and is the author of the book Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Brill/Haymarket, 2020). Juan Wahren, PhD in Social Science (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina). Assistant Researcher at National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET). Director of Rural and Latin American Social Movements Study Group (GER–GEMSAL) at Gino Germani’s Research Institute (UBA). His research areas involve rural sociology, agrarian change, social movements, extractivism, climate change and territoriality. Christa Wichterich holds a PhD in sociology, worked as guest Professor for Gender Politics at Kassel (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Basel University (Switzerland). Her main research areas are globalisation, transnational value chains and gender, feminist political economy and ecology, women’s movements and international women’s policies. She has published widely on these issues and recently about care during the Covid-19 pandemic. Earlier she worked as a university lecturer in India and Iran, as a journalist in Germany and as a foreign correspondent in Kenya. Jamie Woodcock is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and a researcher based in London. He is the author of The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2021), The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019) and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is inspired by workers’ inquiry and focuses on labour, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organising and videogames. He is on the editorial board of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism. Paris Yeros is Professor in the faculties of Economic Sciences, Sciences and Humanities, and World Political Economy at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), São Paulo, Brazil. He is editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy and director of the publishing association Coletivo Novo Bandung. His books include Rethinking Social Sciences with Sam Moyo (with P. Jha and W. Chambati, Talika Books, 2020) and Reclaiming Africa: Scramble and Resistance in the 21st Century (with S. Moyo and P. Jha, Springer, 2019).
Introduction: what is work and what is the political economy of work? Maurizio Atzeni, Dario Azzellini, Alessandra Mezzadri, Ursula Apitzsch and Phoebe V. Moore
The world of work has gone through profound changes in recent decades. Technological advances have sped up production processes and made possible the integration and interconnection of the world economy through extended commodities chains, shaping new geographies of production and questioning states’ sovereignty in the determination of labour policies. The fall of the Soviet world has opened up new labour markets and streams of profitability in non-market economies. The rise of China as the new global economic power has provided new masses of cheap labour to satisfy the growth of demand for cheap consumer products. The accelerated processes of informatisation and automation of production, creating new jobs and making others obsolete, have opened up once again the debate about the effect of digitalisation on the nature of labour and the future of work. Yet despite these changes, the exploitation of work and workers within capitalism continues to be reproduced according to the political economy of capital: profitability. This drive for profitability produces different forms of domination and control within the employment relationship; creates precarious working classes in specific territories; continues to devalue the labours of social reproduction both in the invisibility of the home and in marketised care chains; uses wars and conflicts to exploit migrants; takes advantage of conditions of uneven geographical development to perpetuate imperialism, increasing extractivism and exploitation in the Global South. Given this background of system-generated changes, and their regional continuities and discontinuities, we have planned this book on the Global Political Economy of Work as a handbook that aims to go beyond the traditional disciplinary or sub-disciplinary boundaries. We understand work, work relations and the subjects involved in it in broader terms, both empirically and theoretically. Empirically we see the need to produce an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the relations existing between different forms of work, exploitation, class configuration and workers’ resistance in their articulation with the changing dynamics of the global capitalism political economy and changing geographies of production. These relations, which are continuously updated by technological changes, produce different configurations of work that need to be inserted in a theoretical framework that is based on the Marxist tradition of critique of political economy, but that is at the same time and for its own nature interdisciplinary and in dialogue with other radical traditions. We have thus structured the handbook to include chapters that can give an authoritative account of traditional and current theoretical debates in geographically and historically diverse empirical contexts, using insights from the broad spectrum of the social sciences and, based on editors’ and authors’ expertise, from different regional vantage points. We hope this approach can contribute to create a truly interdisciplinary/interconnected analysis, speaking to the labour debates and material realities relevant to both the Global North and Global South, and attenuating the Eurocentrism which has characterised much of the labour studies literature. Our aspiration is 1
2 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work to build the basis for an anti-colonial and decolonial labour studies agenda, which understands the political economy of work globally and intersectionally, using arguments, concepts and perspectives that are rooted in Marxist and critical theory debates from different parts of the world economy. While we do not claim here to succeed in the complex task of decolonising the political economy of work – also given the social composition of the editorial team – we hope to contribute to setting its foundations as a necessary intellectual and political emancipatory project. With these aims in mind, in the following sections of this introduction we focus firstly on a selection of concepts and theoretical frameworks (value, the labour process, class, social reproduction, commodification of reproduction and technology), set in the Marxist debate’s tradition, appearing across various chapters in the handbook and that we consider central to an interdisciplinary take on labour issues. Secondly, we reflect on how the handbook can contribute to expanding the field of existing disciplinary debates in industrial relations and the sociology of work, social movement studies, in development studies, in global political economy. Finally, we present the structure of the handbook with details of each chapter.
MARXIAN INSIGHTS FOR THE STUDY OF WORK AND LABOUR Value The term ‘value’ is central for any analysis of the global political economy of work. It is also a greatly contested term, with reference to its meaning, and the processes that generate and sustain it. In Marxian political economy, labour is centred as the generator of all value, through the process of exploitation, and the market is the mechanism through which value is appropriated. In his study of the commodity form, Marx distinguished between ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ value and stressed the latter as the ‘real’ value of all things made in capitalism. Value is first generated in production through the process of exploitation – the process through which labour power is consumed in production to make commodities for the market. It is in the market, however, that commodities acquire their ‘real’ – namely exchange – value. In much of classic Marxist political economy, the distinction between use and exchange value has been deployed to draw the perimeter between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities and circuits. It is on this basis, for instance, that some Marxist analysts of the labour process have argued that domestic and care work cannot be considered as value-producing, as ultimately only ‘making’ use-values (e.g. Smith, 1978). According to this logic, only labour involved in the production of commodities for the market can be defined as value-producing. This exclusionary – some have labelled it productivist – take on value has been challenged by both feminist and postcolonial and decolonial analyses, as well as by frameworks centred on racial capitalism and processes of racialisation of work. Leopoldina Fortunati (1981) argued that the distinction between use and exchange value shall be applied to the worker as well, which is at once labour and labour power. Once it does, however, the distinction also loses its contours and meaning as the two value relations in embodied form are inseparable. Fortunati’s concern was the exclusion of reproductive work from value-generation, a practice that Antonella Picchio (1992) criticised as based on a key misconception; that is a conflation of the value of labour with its price (namely, the wage). Notably, also Diane Elson (1979) criticised the reification of the distinction between use and exchange value, arguing that, in Marx, these are simply two aspects
Introduction 3 of the same (labour) relation, rather than the two discrete typologies of value that orthodox Marxist theorisations refer to. Crucially, a more ‘inclusive’ understanding of value not only allows for an incorporation of unpaid domestic and care work in the computation of what is considered as value-generating labour. They also allow a wider historical and contemporary inclusion of wageless relations as central to value-making and exploitation under capitalism, reaching out to analyses of varied forms of exploitation (Banaji, 2010), including slave and indenture labour, work under petty commodity production and varied forms of home-based and unpaid collective work (Naidu and Ossome, 2016; Mezzadri, 2019; 2021; Naidu, 2022). This theorisation also enables us to account for the value captured and extracted from nature, as a key ‘force’ or ‘circuit’ of social reproduction (Barca, 2019; Naidu, 2022). By extending the reach of what is understood as generating value and/or represented as labour, a rising number of struggles can be reconceptualised as labour struggles, in a process that significantly expands the reach of the global political economy of work.
LABOUR PROCESS One of the most important insights deriving from the work of Marx is that the particular nature of the labour process within capitalism, simultaneously a production and valorisation process, puts the basis for the existence of a fundamental contradiction between capital and labour. At workplace level, the need to guarantee the extraction of value from workers, the bearers of the commodity labour power, pushes capitalists to structure and organise the production process in a way functional to the implementations of forms of workers’ control, direction and discipline. This authority and control, that are sustained in normal conditions by some form of basic consensus (Burawoy, 1979), as workers are dependent on wages to survive, becomes, however, increasingly contested and gives way to micro and macro forms of resistance, when competition forces individual capitals to exert further pressure on workers. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function arising from the nature of the social labour process, and peculiar to that process, but is at the same time a function of the exploitation of a social labour process, and is consequently conditioned by the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the raw material of his exploitation (Marx, 1976: 449).
This antagonism, that derives from the contradiction of the labour process, and the solidarity that it produces among workers is important for theorising about workers’ collective action (Atzeni, 2010), particularly at a time in which capitalism is expanding the area of precarious labour, fragmenting working classes and in which previous forms of collective organisation and representation are contested. However, it is increasingly becoming evident that an exclusive focus on the workplace as the site of struggle and organisation, a focus that has always dominated left-wing parties’ politics, is not helping us to understand the broader context in which the capital-labour contradiction is inserted. Issues of gender, social reproduction, race and ethnicity oppression are interlinked with conditions of exploitation at work as various chapters in the handbook emphasise. Moreover, taking on board David Harvey’s insights on the difference between capital and capitalism contradictions (Harvey, 2014), basic needs of working people, such as housing and the environment, are directly impacted by the dispossessing nature of current capitalist patterns of accumulation and generate the need to rethink political action in a broader class dimension.
4 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
CLASS AND CLASS STRUGGLE Over the past four decades the relationship between capital and wage labour has been continually changing. This has led to an increase in structural unemployment and escalating levels of precarisation. The forms and the relations of production have changed drastically, as has the prioritisation of certain sectors in individual regions and on the global level. The demographics that now make up the working class have also undergone massive changes. Especially in the Global North, the extent of industrial labour in the cities has rapidly diminished. Informal labour and precarisation have increased globally, particularly in the expanding service sector. However, that does not mean that the contradiction between capital and labour, which gives rise to the formation of classes, has disappeared. As Leo Panitch put it: ‘In a capitalist society all issues bear on class, even if they are not all about class and even if a great many problems we face are across class boundaries’ (Panitch, 2003). In the Communist Manifesto, the classes are the two ‘great hostile camps’ into which society is divided: bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx, however, left no highly developed concept of the various aspects of class. Even so, the analysis of class on which Capital is built is that of a single class relation: capital and labour. Following Marx, political economy analyses social relations created by humans, which appear to be relations with and between things; classes are not predetermined positions, but are, like capital, a social relation. Marx rejects the idea that classes are constituted by their form of income or by ‘market situation’, as Max Weber argues from a sociological perspective. Marx did not understand classes as places or groups, but rather as social relations.1 According to Marx, only at first glance are classes constituted by conditions of wages, earnings or ground rent – i.e. the exploitation of the workforce, of capital or of land ownership. A dialectical Marxist approach, which understands class and class struggle as social relations, can also reveal how different individuals are differently affected by the capital-labour contradiction. If class is a social relation, then the relation between classes does not derive from the countervailing interests of exploited and exploiter (which would presuppose groups that are almost naturalised); instead, the relation between exploited and exploiter creates antagonistic interests. Classes are the expression of such relations; because of this, the concept of class is constituted theoretically within the concept of class struggle (Dos Santos, 2006: 31). Class therefore is a relation of struggle: class struggle is the fundamental premise of class. That the conflict takes the form of conflict between groups is the result of class struggle. As a consequence, class is not an affirmative concept. As Marx noted: ‘To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (Marx, 1976: 644). The condition for the liberation of the working class is the abolition or overcoming of classes. The struggle, therefore, takes place on two levels: between the constituted classes, and against class and classification (Dos Santos, 2006: 31; Bonefeld, 2008: 117). Therefore, class is absolutely varied and diverse, irreducible to a specific subject with a certain position in the process of production, and struggle does not have to assume pre-established forms. Class struggle is made up of many struggles. Gender, race and ethnicity have to be integrated in the analysis of capitalism and class composition because they are inherent to capitalism and its exploitation hierarchies. A closer look at the working-class composition and workers’ struggles, and a broader view of global value chains, shows that labour is still a central category, and that identity is neither replacing class nor contradicting it, but rather complementing the category and enriching the struggles, as worldwide protests, especially by ‘essential’ workers, during the COVID-19 pandemic
Introduction 5 showed (Azzellini, 2021a). Or as the new class-specific feminism that has emerged in a number of different countries, confirms, or the Black-led multiracial working-class revolt in the US beginning in May 2020, triggered by police murder of unarmed Black men. And since unpaid ‘reproductive’ work (mostly assigned to women), the negation that it produces value, is functional and necessary for capitalism, it is also part of the contradiction between labour and capital. Therefore, the relationship between production and reproduction has to be reconsidered, as should the answer to the question of class struggle and who wages it. The contradiction between labour and capital expresses itself also beyond the workplace. For example, in popular and working-class neighbourhoods, hence, struggles and revolts there are also class struggle. This also applies to a variety of popular revolts that have occurred all over the globe, as, for example, in Bolivia, Chile and Lebanon (Azzellini, 2021b).
SOCIAL REPRODUCTION The term social reproduction was first used by Marx to refer to the process of regeneration of capitalist relations and, with them, of mechanisms of transmissions of inequality under capitalism. Marx mostly referred to societal reproduction, that is the regeneration of the social relations sustaining accumulation (Laslett and Brenner, 1989). In Capital, Volume One, Marx refers to the regeneration of the worker and labour power, but the mechanisms of this process of generation largely remain under-developed. Instead, feminist scholars, including Marxist feminist analyses (Federici, 2019) have centred their enquiry on the process of the production of the worker, and have extended the definition of social reproduction to include both processes of regeneration of life and capitalist relations, and their multiple entanglements (Katz, 2001; Bakker, 2007; Bhattacharya, 2017). Through the Marxist feminist lens, social reproduction includes biological reproduction and its varied configurations; domestic and care work; marketised reproductive sectors; as well as all those realms, spaces, institutions and processes sustaining and regenerating life and work relations. There are different typologies of ‘social reproduction feminism’, and each explore a different yet interrelated set of above-mentioned concerns (Ferguson, 2019). An attention to social reproduction allows an expansion of the social perimeters of definitions of labour and work, and at the same time promotes an understanding of capitalism centred on the ways in which it is experienced and lived through and beyond work. A social reproduction approach contributes to the global political economy of work in at least three ways. First, it stretches the boundaries of the labour process beyond the walls of the space of work and shows its embeddedness in wider life processes (Federici, 2004; Baglioni and Mezzadri, 2020). Secondly, it enables an analysis of reproductive and care labour and sectors centred on their meaning and functional role in global capitalism (Fraser, 2017; Farris, 2020). Thirdly, it allows a novel approach to labour struggles and organising, which also include reproductive demands and centre the community and life-spaces as central to labour politics. These three lines of contribution are particularly relevant to understand labour and/or agrarian relations and regimes in the Global South (e.g. Naidu and Ossome, 2016; Mezzadri, 2019), as well as novel processes of platformisation of work in the Global North. Crucially, a social reproduction analysis of labour and work can also reach out to analyses centred on racial capitalism and stress processes of racialisation of work across varied domains, including during COVID-19 times (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Stevano et al., 2021; Mezzadri, 2022).
6 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
COMMODIFICATION OF REPRODUCTION The commodification of human capacities and needs, turning them into goods to be exchanged, is becoming more and more pronounced. Personal services and all forms of societal reproduction and care work, including gestational motherhood, for which the concept of ‘Clinical Labour’ (Cooper and Waldby, 2013) has been deployed, are bought and sold ‘backstage of the global market’ (Hochschild, 2010: 23), largely free from political structures or state regulation. The question arises of what happens to these reproductive forms of social life when they continuously take place under conditions of the capitalist production of goods as ‘reproductive work’ (Federici, 2004). In his famous work The Great Transformation, written in exile and first published in 1944, Karl Polanyi described the brutal disembedding of economics from social processes with disastrous outcomes for society, as happened in 19th-century Britain. Polanyi’s impassioned attack on the idea that human labour could be a commodity made use of Karl Marx’s concept of commodification, but it also contained a critique of Marx. In Polanyi’s view, the idea that human labour could actually be a commodity was wrong. According to him, it was true that human beings were treated like commodities, but they could not be moved like commodities. This led Polanyi to the concept of ‘fictitious commodities’. He made it clear that the efforts needed to distill human labour out of a lifeworld had disastrous effects. It is particularly interesting that Polanyi considers such a destructive intervention in existing lifeworlds in Europe to be possible from the historical moment when the practices of colonialism are reimported into Europe. Human beings could only be treated as a commodity by way of this disastrous connection between previous compulsion and seemingly ‘free’ labour, squeezed out of a destroyed and socially disembedded way of existence (Polanyi, 2001: 172). In her book Fortunes of Feminism, Nancy Fraser goes back to Polanyi’s idea of the fictionality of commodity forms and argues that it is central to feminist critique, precisely because Polanyi’s concept of the embeddedness of living work puts social reproduction at the centre of the argument. Fraser nevertheless criticises Polanyi, because his strong emphasis on the catastrophic social effects of disembedding obscures, or presents in more favourable light, those forms of injustice that are not market-based. These are kinds of injustice that, in Fraser’s view, had their origins in societal forms of social protection based on power (Fraser, 2013: 229f.). Fraser proposes, in opposition to this, the idea of emancipation, which challenges both the categories of the market and societal dominance. For example, she argues, in the process of emancipation access to wages has meant liberation from traditional authorities for thousands of women, peasants and slaves. What happens, however, when the path to emancipation is embroiled in patterns of commodification that can undermine such emancipation? This happens in relation to manifold forms of labour in the realm of social reproduction. Research on commercial surrogate motherhood, for instance, has shown how biological life-making may be increasingly organised as a market-based production process which, on the one side, exploits bodily, emotional, social and cultural resources (Pande, 2010), yet, on the other side, may be structurally and/or financially liberating for the surrogate mothers, who often come from deprived backgrounds and live in highly patriarchal contexts of male domination (Hochschild, 2010: 31). Crucially, this contradiction between emancipation and commodification conceals the main beneficiaries of these market-based processes. These include clinics, governments and other trade intermediaries, which sit at the top of the hegemonial systems of distribution shaping the contempo-
Introduction 7 rary market-based global gender order, systematically connected with migration processes (Apitzsch, 2010) and the ongoing destruction of lifeworlds and citizenship rights.
TECHNOLOGY The use of tools, machines and technologies to improve and to facilitate what we now consider even the most basic functions for our lives, is absolutely not new. The use of tools to aid people in making and building our worlds precedes industrialisation and modernity. Artefacts from a past time presented in museums remind us that our ancestors carved rocks into arrows and built homes with clay, sand and straw. We have developed tools into the shapes they now appear, where machines have become highly sophisticated and better at some activities and tasks than we are. We cannot refer to industrialisation without referring to machines, steam ships and, later, aeroplanes. All of these machines were invented and integrated socially as aids to humans’ lives but were not necessarily seen to directly compete with our humanity and our subjectivity. The shift towards looking at how we have invented machinery seems to reside in terms of what are our expectations of machines, rather than based on their inherent value or the value that is produced and as Karl Marx noted, they can aid in extracting from workers’ surplus labour time. Fredrick W. Taylor is usually cited as the first guru on the flip side of a Marxist coin to make explicit the idea that the ways that we interact with machines has a determination for how well we can produce. Taylor described the seemingly ‘one best way’ for using technologies to improve productivity based on the separation between manual and mental labour (where he compared manual workers to ‘brutes’) and on precision of specific physical human movement in bricklaying, which would be noted based on recordings made from micro chronometers and early cameras. But Taylor did not stop at bricklaying with his propheteering. Taylorist principles were intended for extrapolation to all layers of society across Europe. The idea was for governments to integrate what was termed ‘rationalisation’ into banking, education, city planning and more. Before Taylor’s musings, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were concerned about the implementation of machines into society. In the Grundrisse, Marx had already predicted the evolution of technology within societies, and predicted the way that within capitalism, human intelligence would be appropriated to develop technologies to facilitate capitalism. Marx’s short but incredibly insightful ‘Fragment on Machines’ within the Grundrisse notes that: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry: natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and have been transformed in accordance with it. [4]
Dyer-Witheford’s (1999) explanation of Marx’s points in this relatively short passage in the Grundrisse is that Marx saw two bases for the power of fixed capital to mobilise the general intellect, where an ‘automatic system of machinery’ with various ‘organs’ would relegate humans to taking a role as ‘conscious linkages’. The second emergence would occur, Marx
8 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work pondered, where techno-scientific development would result in the development of a world market. In this light, the ‘general productive forces of the social brain’ would be ‘absorbed into capital’. Based on this, the expansion of technology could lead to the elimination of the need for human intelligence and human workers, Marx reasoned. Marx’s views on this are not concrete, however. Some have interpreted Marx’s points on the general intellect positively and cross-theorised this provocative concept to imply a future world where machines carry out human work, thus allowing us to enter a post-capitalist society. While a post-capitalist future resulting from automation looks highly unlikely, currently, it is an attractive prospect, surely. Today’s revival in the hope that machines can become as capable as humans at a series of activities that will improve our lives has left largely abandoned, however, the commitment to link how management will change as a result of increased technologies in the workplace and what detriment that may have for societies. Within capitalism, technologies, as Marx pointed out, are likely to become influential on human intelligence and within capitalism, the ‘rationalisation’ that Taylor and his colleagues heralded, could lead to the automation of work without a guarantee of anything better.
HANDBOOK’S CONTRIBUTION TO DISCIPLINARY DEBATES Industrial Relations and the Sociology of Work The fields of industrial relations and the sociology of work have historically considered the labour capital contradiction as the core of the disciplinary debates. The extraction of value from labour and the process of commodification of this through the employment relationship continuously produce forms of conflict and resistance, a ‘structured antagonism’ (Edwards, 1986) that transform the employment relationship into a contested terrain in which labour and capital, workers and management struggle for control. Studies in the labour process tradition (see Briken, Chapter 8, in this handbook) have produced detailed analyses of the ways in which this control struggle is carried on and of the forms of resistance, investigating individual micro processes of ‘organisational misbehaviour’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 2022), on the continuum line between this and the creation of solidarity networks (Fantasia, 1989; Atzeni, 2010) and on collective action and organisation. Traditionally, trade unions have represented the organisational form par excellence in studies focusing both on conflict and resistance at the level of the workplace and on the institutional role of trade unions within established systems of industrial relations. One of the most cited and influential works in the field, John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations (Kelly, 1998), drawing from social movements studies, provides an innovative framework to analyse workers’ collective action: the theory of mobilisation. The theory, despite claims to the contrary (Kelly, 2018), remains, however, to a great extent a leader-led, trade unions-centred, collective-action theory that cannot explain forms of collective action/organisation that depart from this model. Kelly’s focus on trade unions, while justified by the context of retreat and the need for revitalisation of the labour movement at the time in which the book was written, is part of a more general tendency of the field of industrial relations and labour studies to underestimate all forms of working-class organisation and struggle that do not fit into the traditional labour union and workers’ party binomial. This tendency, a narrow Eurocentric view confined to the
Introduction 9 institutionalised modes of conflicts between labour and capital is widespread and common to both institutionalised and conflict-based approaches. In other words, a ‘trade union fetishism’ (Atzeni, 2021) obscures the different social processes through which working-class actors and organisations constitute themselves in workplaces and beyond depending on the combination of broader socio-political, cultural and institutional factors. Compared to other social sciences disciplines which have re-framed their field of study in a less eurocentric trade unions/wage labour-centric perspective – as with the case of global labour history (Van der Linden, 2008, and in this handbook) – or discussed trade unions organising practices within broader processes of class formation – as with labour anthropology (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2014) – the field of industrial relations and labour studies have remained fixed to a 1970s framework of analysis which appears totally displaced by the different forms of action and organisation and processes of collective identification used by precarious and informal workers across the world today (see Cini et al., in this handbook). There is a pressing need for researchers to get out of the comfort zone of known actors and institutions and to adopt a new interdisciplinary research agenda in which central traditional concerns of the field, particularly in relation to the role of regulatory institutions and systems of industrial relations in shaping labour capital relations, can reconnect to broader socio-political dimensions and working-class ways of life in defining conditions for workers’ organisation and mobilisation. Many of the chapters in this handbook can help overcome some of the outlined limitations of the field of industrial relations. In the first part of the book, chapters provide a broader and inclusive conceptual view of what we consider as ‘working class’ and of who produces value. This goes well beyond the salaried industrial working class, and includes, for instance, unfree and coerced labour (McGrath, Chapter 5), migrant labour in border regimes (Bernardi, Tazzioli) or informal work, with exploitation always co-constituted across productive and reproductive domains (Mezzadri, Chapter 4), and manifesting in multiple ‘forms’. These ‘forms of exploitation’ (Banaji, 2010) are strictly connected to global processes of capital accumulation (Munck, Chapter 1 and Boatcă, Chapter 6) that can repropose patterns of imperialist domination (Patnaik and Patnaik, 2016, and in this volume), and shape complex and composite labour regimes (Selwyn et al., Chapter 9). In the second part, various chapters of the handbook, engaging with the theoretical debates presented in the first section, explore how locally framed configurations of the social reality influenced by geographical, historical and identity-based factors, intersect with global political economy processes in shaping the forms of work, exploitation and organised resistance. These chapters, by looking at the various ways in which the sphere of work intersects with the sphere of life and the sphere of production with that of reproduction, can profoundly enrich studies in industrial relations by grounding the institutional level of analysis typical of the field into workers and value producers’ real lives and material conditions. Similarly, chapters exploring the connections existing across production in the Global North and Global South can help comparative studies in industrial relations, whose main focus remain at national and sectoral levels in the formal economy, to connect to broader cross-border political economy processes. Social Movement Studies Over the course of the 1980s, the analytical frameworks of class and capitalism became completely marginal or even disappeared from mainstream social sciences and humanities. Many
10 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work critical scholars and most of the left gave up using class as both an analytical category and as a point of political reference – even labour was no longer considered as playing a key role. Social movement studies were no exception, the ‘mainstream of the social movement literature since the 1990s’, as Beverly Silver and Sahan Savas Karatasli write ‘has in large measure dismissed the concept of “capitalism” from its toolkit for understanding social movements, while at the same time placing “labor movements” outside its field of inquiry’ (Silver and Karatasli, 2015: 1). The drastic transformation of the forms and the relations of production and the constant decline of union membership and workers’ bargaining power since the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with the diversification of protest movements, often labelled as ‘new social movements’ led to the abandoning of the idea that workers could play a pivotal role in social transformation. The new social movements were defined in opposition to the ‘old’ labour movement with its goal of structural social transformation or of establishing a socialist society (Rucht, 1994). The new social movements were considered indicators of malfunctioning political systems, or of growing differentiation in modern societies, and were based on constructed identities (Luhmann, 1991; Castells, 1997; Rucht et al., 1998). Along with many others, Manuel Castells declared that the future belongs to identity movements not based on class because the labour movement is no longer able to act as ‘a major source of social cohesion and workers’ representation’ and therefore workers cannot be the emancipatory subjects of the future (Castells, 1997: 354, 360). These approaches have been criticised as centred on the Global North, focused on the urban middle class, and not taking into consideration neither the Global South nor immigrant labour and the increasing precarisation of the working class in the Global North, and the new forms of workers’ organisations and labour struggles outside institutionalised industrial relations. With the increasingly visible multiple crises and the movements and uprisings all over the world following the financial crisis of 2008, class and capitalism resurged as analytical categories across social sciences, although the role of workers and labour movements remained largely neglected or underestimated, even during the COVID-19 pandemic (Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014; Silver and Karatasli, 2015; Azzellini, 2021a). A closer look at the working-class composition and workers’ struggles, and a broader view of global value chains, shows that labour is still a central category, and that identity is neither replacing class nor contradicting it, but rather complementing the category. Moreover, several chapters contribute to extending important contemporary debates to the field of the political economy of work while they also add new aspects to the contemporary debates. This is the case of understanding labour power as ‘commons’ (Azzellini, Chapter 11 in this handbook). In debates on the commons several authors point to commoning as a strategy to undermine or even overcome capitalism (Massimo De Angelis, Silvia Federici, Michael Hardt, David Harvey, Peter Linebaugh, Antonio Negri, Jeremy Rifkin and Hilary Wainwright among others). Harvey (2013), as well as Hardt and Negri (2009), develop a focus on the urban commons and contend that the context for the development of an alternative society based on the commons is the metropolis. Nevertheless, most examples of commoning discussed in the relevant literature are set in rural areas, where access to commoning practices seems to be easier than in urban spaces and traditions are more persistent (Ostrom, 1990; Bennholdt-Thompson and Mies, 2001; Klein, 2001; Federici, 2011; Federici and Caffentzis, 2014; Linebaugh, 2014). Scholarly work on the urban commons usually focuses on public space and the attempts to counteract its increasing commodification. Examples refer to the temporal collective appropriation of
Introduction 11 public space (occupation, protest, etc.), access to commodified public space and its prolonged collective use, most prominently urban gardens, collective housing and the recommunalisation of water (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015). However, inasmuch as individualisation and commodification of labour power is central to the capitalist mode of production and the transformative potential of commoning resides on collective action and efforts at decommodification, the question of how labour can be transformed into a commons is therefore of exceptional interest. Linked to this is the discussion on the social and solidarity economy, self-management and mutualism (Vieta and Heras, Chapter 12 in this handbook). Cooperatives and the social and solidarity economy were depoliticised and pushed out of the context of labour movements, class analysis and the understanding of working-class alternatives to the dominant capitalist system. The cooperative movement has its origins in working-class mutualism and was part of the working-class movement and strategies to build a different society. In his description of the Paris Commune Marx writes the capitalist system can be superseded ‘if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan thus taking it under their own control’, and as Marx sums up, ‘what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, “possible” Communism?’ (Marx, 1975: 335). Today in the Global North, cooperativism is taught in business schools as an alternative business model or romanticised as a genuine niche model with products affordable only to financially stronger social strata – or in the worst cases even used as pro forma business models so not to abide by national labour laws and national union contracts, which are binding for regular business. Meanwhile, much of the cooperative movement ignores labour struggles, unions and class analysis in the same way as most unions do not see cooperatives as part of the working class (if they even still think in those terms) or as connected to the general labour question. Although many of these views also influenced union approaches in the countries of the Global South (with the difference that, cooperatives there are often seen by policy makers, international organisms and NGOs as mechanisms to get low-waged and unskilled workers into economic activities which are often still underpaid and precarious, as cardboard pickers, recycling material collectors, neighbourhood housing cooperatives, etc.). Here one might refer again to the mainstream in the Global North, which means that different approaches in research and in practice exist also there. Once again, the global view beyond the methodological limitations and understanding of the Global North, and especially dominant US academia is useful. In the Global South, and especially in Latin America, scholars and actors are increasingly using the concept of ‘popular economy’, meaning an economy of popular sectors of society built beyond the production and distribution cycles of the formal economy, which encompasses various alternative and self-organised enterprise models, cooperatives, social and solidarity economy, small businesses, mutualism, local self-organisation schemes and also self-organised forms of labour resistance (Santos, 2006; North et al., 2020; Mazzeo and Stratta, 2021). Development Studies Development Studies have dealt with the global political economy of work rather unevenly. For a long time, mainstream studies have failed to centre the study of labour in debates around poverty reduction or inequality. This is because labour always covered a residual role in key economic development theories. In modernisation theory, labour was assumed to be a mere input in production, which should be moved from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ sectors of the economy to kick off the grand process of economic modernisation and development. This is
12 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the premise of Arthur Lewis’ influential ‘dual-sector model’, as well as of Rostow’s ‘stages of economic growth’. Notably, in criticising these theories, also dependency and structuralist theories often treated labour as a passive recipient of economic processes; this time in ways which produced highly undesirable outcomes (Preston, 1996). This residual approach to labour which characterises much of mainstream development analysis had a visible effect on policy priorities and agendas. It is not a case that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the old development targets, which expired in 2015 – only acknowledged the links between labour and poverty in 2008 (Mezzadri, 2017). Admittedly, ‘decent work’, as formulated by the International Labour Organization (ILO), is now expressly mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; SDG 8), which replaced the MDGs to set development targets until 2030. Yet, also in the case of the SDGs, the links between decent work and poverty are not fully developed, particularly in relation to the gendered aspects of work, and the exclusion of reproductive activities from the computation of what is considered ‘work’ (Rai et al., 2019). This ‘residual’ role labour plays in mainstream development analysis is also reproduced in policy studies and reports focusing on global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs), like the World Trade Organization (WTO) 2019 report ‘Technological Innovation, Supply Chain Trade, and Workers in a Globalized World’ and the 2020 World Bank Development Report (WDR) ‘Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains’. These mainstream policy reports betray a linear understanding of development, tautologically conflated with global integration, in a schema where GVCs become both the means and the end of development, despite overwhelming evidence of poor labour standards and the well-documented harshness of workers’ livelihoods in supply chain capitalism (Bair et al., 2021; Mezzadri, 2021; Selwyn and Leyden, 2022). However, within the critical echelons of the discipline, reference to work and labour have featured significantly and with very productive results. First, they have guided debates around the informal economy and informal employment. Debates on the informal economy trace back to the 1970s, when the earlier ‘informal sector debate’ identified underemployment, as opposed to unemployment, as a main issue experienced in metropoles in the Global South (Hart, 1973; Rosaldo, 2021). These observations were crucial for the development of the ‘mode of production debate’ (see Banaji, 2010), and its critique of wage labour as the only form of exploitation under capitalism. In fact, the spread of informal labour relations in the context of global processes of accumulation suggested instead the presence of multiple ‘forms of exploitation’, (Banaji, 2010) with proletarianisation taking place in distinct ways across the world economy and generating different ‘classes of labour’ (Bernstein, 2007). Secondly, critical development scholars analysing global production have highlighted the ways in which labour is cheapened and devalued through the processes of global outsourcing at the basis of the formation of GVCs and GPNs. Rather than uncritically ascribing a positive developmental role to GVCs and GPNs, these authors have stressed their far more problematic role in the regeneration of global poverty and inequality (e.g. Selwyn, 2018). The contributions of this segment of critical development scholarship have been substantial, particularly in challenging the deeply rooted modernising tropes characterising studies of industrial development, as well as revealing the problematic basis of contemporary models of international trade – which still assume trade to be beneficial as potentially rising wages internationally (Mezzadri, 2022). Crucially, along these two lines of contribution focusing on labour, critical development studies is now also finally dwelling more on the linkages between class, gender, race and ethnicity, both in relation to the analyses of informalised labour processes and their representa-
Introduction 13 tion (e.g. Wilson, 2012), as well as with reference to studies of supply chain capitalism (e.g. Werner, 2019; Werner and Bair, 2019). Admittedly, far more is still required in addressing the ‘white gaze’ of the discipline (Pailey, 2019). Hence, ironically, the discipline of development studies has played a key role both in regenerating depoliticised, residual approaches to labour as impacted by stagist and linear processes of economic development, and in expanding the historical and analytical canvas against which labour relations, processes and practices should be located and understood. This is also because the discipline is polarised between studies enforcing development as an ‘intentional project’, and studies exploring development as an ‘immanent process’ of capitalist penetration and expansion (Cowen and Shenton, 1996; Veltmeyer and Bowles, 2022). Given the complex and uneven role development studies has played and continues to play in the generation of such polarising representations and analyses of labour, it provides a key prism to explore the Global Political Economy of Work. Global Political Economy Perhaps the clearest intervention this volume makes is to the discipline with the same name. The nascence of the discipline of Global Political Economy (GPE) is accurately attributed to Susan Strange’s claim that economics and international relations and the surrounding politics cannot be empirically separated (Strange, 1970). Professor Strange argued that theory was not enough to understand the contemporary issues of global crises, power relations and struggles and that there was a distinct need to research the internationalisation of finance; states; markets; foreign direct investment (FDI); development issues; world-systems; inequality and currency fluctuations and most importantly, the direct impacts that this tier of elite activity had on societies, internationally. This was a claim made just as the era of globalisation emerged. It had become clear that specific powerful actors were on the rise, and international politics seemed to be aligned towards heavy decision-making processes carried out by corporate powers and states which functioned to preserve corporate power. However, one thing that was missing from Strange’s analysis and from the history of ideas debated today within GPE is the labour and work dimension associated to political economy. Marxian critique to neoclassical political economy has always insisted on the centrality of the commodification of labour as basis for the circulation of capital and on how workers are exploited by those who own the means of production. By recovering this critique, research on work in the discipline of GPE began in the early 2000s and developed into what is now called critical GPE, a subdiscipline within GPE that emerged from the work of the Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) of the European Sociological Association (ESA). Within this line of research, the focus has been on topics such as social movements, regulation, class, capital and inequality and with emphasis on cross-disciplinary fertilisation, particularly with industrial relations research. More recently, a line of research on digitalisation and work with a labour process approach (Moore, 2017) has further extended the study of work within Global Political Economy. The current handbook, with its interdisciplinary take, helps to expand this critical agenda within the discipline.
14 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK We have divided the book into three main parts. In the first (Theories and Concepts), we aim to set the theoretical framework of the book and contemporary interdisciplinary debates. In the second (Intersections), using empirical evidence from ongoing qualitative research and engaging with the theoretical debates presented in the first section, we aim to explore how locally framed configurations of the social reality influenced by geographical, historical, identity and embodied factors, intersect with global political economy processes in shaping the forms of work, exploitation and organised resistance. In the third (Perspectives on the working class from the Global South: local realities and global dynamics), we continue to explore the dynamics existing between the local and the global started in the previous section by giving an overall view of the current reconfigurations of class and work in specific countries and/or regional economic blocs. The first part is divided into four sections. In the first two, Capital accumulation and forms of exploitation and Shifting regimes of exploitation: from the workplace to the territory to the global economy, we focus on general concepts referring to the relation between capital accumulation and exploitation (imperialism, class, informality, social reproduction, unfree labour, revolutions) and how these are differently shaped in the sphere of the labour process and labour and border regimes. In the third, Contemporary debates, we address a number of important and overlapping contemporary themes (commons and labour, workers’ self-management, operaism and the search for the political economy of subjectivity, workers and the gig economy, workers’ power and collective action, labour movements and climate change) in the field of global labour. In the fourth, Interdisciplinary approaches, we consider the insights coming from geography, history, anthropology and industrial relations in expanding our knowledge on global labour. The first section, Capital accumulation and forms of exploitation, is opened by the chapter ‘Class, labour and the global working class’, written by Ronaldo Munck. The development of a global working class represents a major transformation of contemporary capitalism. Driven by workers’ struggles, capitalism has ‘gone global’ since 1990 but in doing so has brought into being a powerful new agent for social change. The chapter examines this revolutionary event in its broad historical context, from the making of the working class, through its various permutations, to the present complex relationships of class, labour and capitalism, pointing to the difficulties faced but also the prospects for this new global working class. In the second chapter of this section, ‘Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization’, Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik reflect on what imperialism means today for workers. In their view, ‘Imperialism’ refers to the arrangement through which capitalism subjugates pre-capitalist settings for obtaining commodities not otherwise available to it. Colonialism was such an arrangement; in today’s world it is replaced by neoliberal globalisation. Globalisation keeps down working people’s real incomes everywhere, in the metropolis through the threat of capital relocation elsewhere, and in the periphery through an agrarian crisis precipitated by neoliberal policies that swells labour reserves. While workers’ incomes stagnate, labour productivity rises everywhere, expanding the share of economic surplus in world output, and creating an ex ante tendency towards over-production. World capitalism, the Patnaiks argue, has entered a prolonged crisis politically reflected in capital alliance with neo-fascism. However, neo-fascism, while aggravating working people’s suffering, is incapable of overcoming the crisis.
Introduction 15 The third chapter of this section, ‘Reserve army, “surplus” population, “classes of labour”’, written by Henry Bernstein, poses the question: “who belongs to the global proletariat?” Very different answers to this question divide Marxists today. The chapter presents an overview of existing debates starting from Marx’s concepts of ‘surplus population’ and ‘reserve army of labour’. The analysis suggests Marx did not formulate a ‘special law of population’ for capitalism and draws instead from Benanav’s observation of an ‘autonomy of demographic processes from economic ones’. The relevance of this approach is explored further in relation to doing materialist ‘theory as history’ (Banaji, 2010); with reverence to processes of proletarianisation and primitive accumulation; and for the theorisation of ‘informal’ labour and petty commodity production in the contemporary capitalist phase. The chapter concludes by proposing the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to overcome essentialist notions of the proletariat. In the fourth chapter of this section, ‘Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles for a global political economy of work’, Alessandra Mezzadri’s central concern is with the exclusion of activities and realms of social reproduction from analyses of labour exploitation and value generation. This exclusion has implied that the contributions and hardship of reproductive workers has gone unrecognised. Marxist feminist analyses, instead, have illustrated how social reproduction generates value and structures exploitation, as it literally produces workers and hence labour power, crucial to ‘make’ everything else. Scaling up this argument and building on Early Social Reproduction Analyses (ESRA), this chapter shows that the recognition of reproductive activities and realms as generators of value is also crucial to understand informalised employment in contemporary capitalism. Today, as processes of labour precarisation and casualisation become increasingly widespread, reproductive activities and realms not only provide unpaid housework to sustain paid work; they also directly expand exploitation rates across the world of work. The recognition of social reproduction as directly linked to exploitation and value generation allows us to establish key links between labour and reproductive struggles and provides a roadmap towards novel forms of labour organising across the productive/reproductive continuum. The fifth chapter of this section, ‘Unfree labour in the 21st century?’, written by Siobhán McGrath, argues for attending to the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in all labour relations – not only those that might be categorised as ‘slavery’, trafficking or forced labour. It offers a critical review of varied approaches to conceptualising unfreedoms vis-à-vis labour: influential definitions of human trafficking, forced labour and contemporary ‘slavery’; Marxian conceptualisations of (and debates around) unfree labour; and recent literature proposing a ‘spectrum’ approach to freedom and unfreedom in labour relations. It then explores how we might conceive of dimensions of freedom and unfreedom in ways that break through binaries of free and unfree labour. To do so requires drawing on a range of scholarship to attend to dynamics of dispossession, social reproduction, migration and carcerality as well as to situate our understandings of freedoms and unfreedoms. It further requires recognition of ‘everyday unfreedoms’. In doing so, we can understand struggles over freedom as struggles over power. The chapter therefore calls for (re-)conceptualising struggles over freedom as struggles over power. The sixth chapter of this section, ‘World-system, production and labour’, written by Manuela Boatcă, addresses the late 20th-century critiques of Marxian political economy directed explicitly at the ‘blind spots’ of its definition of capitalism, particularly with respect to its inattention to enslavement, colonialism and the gender dimension. Starting in the 1970s, several critiques of the concept of primitive accumulation gradually converged into an explic-
16 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work itly Marxist reconceptualisation of gender relations and colonial exploitation under capitalism that actively incorporated developments outside of Europe. Among them, the chapter focuses on the world-systems perspective, which argued that non-wage, colonial modes of labour control were integral to and essential for the logic of capitalism, as well as on the feminist approach of the Bielefeld School of development sociology, which claimed that subsistence labour paralleled wage labour as a core pillar of capital accumulation. Focused on the attempt to decentre the role of the proletariat as the main exploited class, and that of wage labour as the defining moment of the capitalist system, these approaches shift attention to enslaved plantation workers on the one hand and housewives on the other as pillars of capital accumulation at the global level. In the process, they reveal the structural entanglements between metropoles and colonies as main determinants of global inequalities. According to these combined perspectives, the methodological implications of accounting for coloniality as structurally embedded in modernity, instead of as a set of anomalies, therefore include complementing the analysis of processes of proletarianisation in the core with that of bourgeoisification in the entire world-system, of ethnicisation of the labour force in the periphery, and of gendering as their underlying logic. In the seventh chapter of this section, ‘The proletariat and the revolution’, written by Marcel van der Linden, the analysis goes through important workers’ protests and unrests occurring in the course of history from the 15th century onwards to assess whether the Marx, Hess, Engels’ hypothesis, that the rise of capitalism would lead to the continuous expansion of the working class, is accurate. The author notes two complications with the hypothesis: that even in the 20th century there have been revolutions in which workers remained entirely subordinate; that the revolutions of the 20th century all took place in pre-industrial or industrialising countries, and never in fully developed capitalist societies. According to Van der Linden these two complications can be explained because of the increased role of the state in industrialised countries and the capacity this has showed to incorporate the proletariat as a class but within civil society. The second section, Shifting regimes of exploitation: from the workplace to the territory to the global economy, is opened by the chapter ‘Analysing the labour process and the political economy of work’, written by Kendra Briken. The concept and analysis of the labour process lies at the heart of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of the Political Economy. In this perspective, analysing the labour process starts with understanding of both labour and capital as historically specific social relations. The focus is on understanding labour as a commodity that is unlike any other and reflecting a complex social relation. The workers are selling their labour power, but it is during the labour process that this labour power is transformed into labour. In the capitalist mode of production, this transformation is key to creating surplus value. Today, in scholarly and activist engagement, it is largely agreed that control, conflict, but also consent are key dimensions to understand the underpinnings of the social relations of the labour process. Over the past decades, labour process analysis has seen various theoretical offers. In this chapter, three impactful framings reflecting the theory building and knowledge situated in the United States and Western Europe are presented. The second chapter of this section, ‘Exploitation and global value chains’, written by Benjamin Selwyn, Liam Campling, Alessandra Mezzadri, Elena Baglioni, Satoshi Miyamura and Jonathan Pattenden, focuses on exploitation in global supply chains. This issue, which is increasingly central to public and academic agendas, has been investigated over the last 15 years from GVC and GPN perspectives (henceforth ‘chain’ analysis). The majority of chain
Introduction 17 analysis, however, portrays exploitation as something that can be ‘cured’ i.e. extrinsic to the operations of the world of value chains and production networks, as opposed to inherent to it. This chapter shows instead how throughout global production – in Indian garments, African horticulture and oceanic shipping that brings such commodities to their markets – exploitation appears as the central engine of GVCs and GPNs. It is an increasingly complex process, shaped by combinations of social relations, actors and institutions, which extends beyond the production process into spheres of social reproduction, the globalisation of production and chain governance, and the social relations of credit and finance. The third chapter of this section, ‘Rural-urban circuits of labour in Global South: reflections on accumulation and social reproduction’, written by Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros situates the patterns of labour migration across ‘rural-urban’ spaces and indicates important contemporary processes of accumulation and social reproduction in the Global South. Evidence suggests that there has been a massive population shift out of the rural areas towards urban areas in search of better livelihoods, but most of this population ends up scrounging for subsistence in an incomplete process of proletarianisation. This confirms Marx’s theory of a Relative Surplus Population, which today encompasses a circulating population in diverse economic activities, residing in informal urban settlements, while also maintaining multi-locational households, but typically failing to gain social security and proper access to public services. This population serves as a powerful wage depressor for capital, in active collusion with the state, while presenting significant challenges for household dynamics and social reproduction. The third section, Contemporary debates, is opened by, ‘Commoning labour power’, written by Dario Azzellini. Over the past 20 years the commons and practices of commoning have raised a lot of interest among scholars and activists. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to how labour power could be transformed into a common resource. In the context of the debate on commons and how commons can drive social transformation, the chapter argues that labour power can be understood as a commons. Understanding labour power as a commons means shifting perspective from labour power as an object of capital to imagining labour as a resource organised collectively and sustainably for the benefit of society. Given that social change is primarily the result of social struggles, it is imperative to examine the embryonic forms of work as commons in contemporary societies. Here the focus is on companies recuperated by their workers to produce under workers’ control. Even if they operate within the hegemony of the capitalist market, they still do not adopt the comprehensive capitalist rationality and have nevertheless proven to be economically viable. Recuperated workplaces under workers’ control open up a new perspective on labour as a commons. In the second chapter of this section, ‘Social and solidarity economy and self-management’, written by Marcelo Vieta and Ana Inés Heras, the authors first review some of the wide-ranging definitions of what is increasingly termed the social and solidarity economy (SSE) and related concepts, how diverse communities self-manage their working lives in the SSE, and the varieties of contextual and theoretical perspectives on the SSE. Secondly, via the entry point method, the chapter discusses and summarises the SSE’s most salient components, taking up both concepts and practices developed over time and across geographies, including: the central place of work and working people; the characteristics of its organisations; the types of socio-economic activities; and the values and ethical dimensions embraced. In the third chapter of this section, ‘Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity’, written by Gigi Roggero, the author reflects on the political and academic use and relevance of operaismo. Since the 2000s, operaismo has become well known internationally.
18 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work In the global university, it has even been turned into an attractive academic subject, in the form of the so-called ‘Italian thought’ or ‘post-operaismo’. The risk, however, is to reduce a matter of conflict into an academic matter. In this chapter, Roggero argues we go back to the origins. This move is not aimed at imagining a continuity between the historical context in which operaismo was born and the current one. On the contrary, in the deep changes of the context and historical discontinuity, the chapter restarts from the operaista method or style. The concept of class composition, continuously forming in the relationship between technical and political composition, is a fundamental pillar of this style. To fully grasp this concept, it is crucial to understand the centrality of subjectivity. Far from being objectively determined, subjectivity is a battleground between potentially opposing forces, between capitalist formation and possible counter-formation. It is, therefore, the central element and stake of a relation of production, that is, of a relation of forces. In the fourth chapter of this section, ‘The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market?’, Mark Graham and Mohammad Amir Anwar reflect on the consequences of the spread of digitalisation on labour markets. The relative lack of fixed organisational infrastructure needed for the online outsourcing sector means that it can be characterised by a broad geographic spread. Unlike traditional forms of employment, companies that outsource digital work, and platforms that mediate those relationships, tend to avoid any formal employment of workers and don’t need to share proximity to workers. Jobs are instead listed on digital platforms that allow workers to bid for them. These jobs might take anything from minutes (e.g. click work or image tagging) to months (large writing tasks or web design) to complete. Because of the rapid rise of digital work around the world, this chapter asks whether we are seeing the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ in digital work. To answer this question, the chapter outlines the scalar and spatial changes that have been occurring in labour markets, reviews their implications for the balance of power between labour and capital, and advances some possible responses to ensure that we do not get trapped in a global race to the bottom in which there are constant downwards pressures on wages and working conditions. In the fifth chapter of this section, ‘Workers’ organisation, class and collective action in precarious times’, Maurizio Atzeni reflects on the methodological and theoretical challenges that will shape the study of labour conflict and workers’ collective action and organisation in the future. These themes have always been central for the field of industrial relations and labour studies, given their role in shaping the outcomes of capital-labour relationships inside and outside workplaces. However, new empirical evidence and theoretical contributions are broadening a field originally structured around the capital-labour antagonism in the confines of factories and to workers’ representation in the form of trade unions to new forms of conflict and collective organisation that could be better understood in the wider framework of class analysis. In the sixth chapter of this section, ‘Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change’, Linda Clarks and Melahat Sahin-Dikmen investigate the increasingly active role in climate and green transition politics played by labour organisations. The ‘Just Transition’, whose principles are set out by the ILO and the International Trade Union Confederation in terms of environmental sustainability, decent work and union voice agenda, provides unions with a platform to pursue a socially just green transition that counters technological and market-oriented narratives that dominate the inter-governmental climate-change agenda. The chapter identifies the range of union strategies and interventions adopted, their
Introduction 19 sectoral specificity and realisation, and tensions in implementing just transition at global, regional, national and local levels. In the seventh and last chapter of this section, ‘Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe’, Dario Azzellini, Sebastian Brandl and Ingo Matuschek offer a redefinition of the term sustainable work by looking at how work is addressed in nationally specific, official governmental and civil society sustainability discourses and strategies, and which key values can be identified as underlying these discourses, by differentiating between welfare state models existing in nine European countries: the Liberal Anglo Saxon, the Conservative or continental European, the Nordic or social democratic Scandinavian, the Mediterranean welfare states and the Eastern European transition states. The fourth section, Interdisciplinary approaches, looks at what we can learn from overlapping disciplines with a labour focus. The section is opened by the chapter, ‘Understanding the global political economy of work: insights from labour geography’, written by Andrew Herod. Labour geography focuses upon how workers are embedded in landscapes and how this affects how they engage with the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. At its heart, it seeks to treat working people not as mere pawns of capital and/or simply factors of production but, rather, as sentient geographical agents who have vested interests in ensuring that the geography of capitalism is made in some ways and not in others. With this in mind, the chapter first outlines the historical development of the field of labour geography and then explores four aspects of workers’ spatial praxis: (1) how they engage with place; (2) how geography complicates class analysis; (3) how landscapes’ path dependence shapes the possibilities of worker activities; and (4) how workers make new geographical scales of their own political existence and how this can be a central element in their praxis. The second chapter in this section, ‘COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States: insights from anthropology’, written by Sharryn Kasmir, reflects on how the triple crisis – health, economic and racial – triggered by COVID-19, exposed processes of class inequality typically hidden from view. In this process labour was named, categorised, valued and devalued by capital and the state in plain sight. The author draws on her ethnographic fieldwork on left political organising and social change in the mid-sized city of Reading, Pennsylvania to reflect on these developments. In doing this she engages with a growing body of literature in the anthropology of labour that attends to uneven capital accumulation and puts difference, heterogeneity and the totality of social relations at the centre of class analysis. The third chapter in this section, ‘Global labour history – its promises and hazards’, written by Stefano Bellucci, reflects on the changes produced in labour history by the establishment of global ˙labour history a new field of research that departs from three methodological stands: first, the abandonment of the working class as a guiding category of the labour movement; secondly, the construction of labour history as a process that does not have boundaries, especially national borders; thirdly, the continuation with the anti-Eurocentric approach to history. While in many respects global labour history has represented an advancement, especially in going beyond the Western vision of what is the working class and of its components, for Bellucci it also inaugurates a new trend in labour studies that is post-neoliberal in essence, for it acknowledges that there is no alternative to capitalism. The fourth chapter in the subsection, ‘How the field of industrial relations remains relevant for understanding the global political economy of work’, written by Heather Connolly, demonstrates the continued relevance of the industrial relations field for understanding work and employment. Having collective labour organisations, and the nature (and governance) of
20 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the employment relationship – that is multi-level power relations – at the centre of analyses remains pertinent for understanding the political economy of work in both the Global North and South. The field has moved beyond the dominant focus on, not just trade unions, but long-established unions, to include spontaneous issue-based movements and mobilisations as well as the movements that have emerged in the ‘gig economy’. Underlying these turns in the field we find the added value of industrial relations approaches, that research is empirically based and (often) embedded within and politically aligned to the sites of resistance and communities of struggle, which helps us understand and theorise the shifts in relations of power in the political economy of work. The second part of the handbook presents our exploration into what we have termed as Intersections. These are divided into five sections: Intersections of work and mobility, of digital and analogue work, of work and life, of struggles, of work in the Global North and the South. In the first of these sections, we focus on the interrelation between work and migration by looking at the agricultural sector and at valorisation processes in and across borders in particular. The section is opened by ‘Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders’, written by Claudia Bernardi. The chapter presents the main topics and analytical tools needed for an overarching understanding of transborder labour mobility nowadays. It investigates the transformation of space and its ever-expanding range of related concepts, it analyses workers’ mobility and the recent developments in the scholarship, and then it presents a critical perspective that discusses the capture of workers’ movements, the valorisation of their mobility and the coexistence of labour forms in the same mobility regime by considering the pivotal example of guestworkers. The second chapter of the section, ‘Migrations and global capitalist agriculture: peripheral workers’ mobility and exploitation as fundamental pillars of the world-ecology’, written by Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau, demonstrates how food production plays a structural role in capitalist accumulation as its value marks the cost of social reproduction by directly affecting the cost of labour, that is the principal source of surplus value. Producing cheap food at a systemic level has thus been key for every historical accumulation cycle where different strategies to ensure this process have been put in place. In the neoliberal phase, the ‘green revolution’ of biotechnologies aimed at producing tons of cheap food but it failed because it was not applicable worldwide (an industrial agricultural sector was required) and did not eliminate the dependency on workers. While no new commodity frontiers have been appropriated, cheap food production on the global core has relied on the exploitation of migrant workers coming from the periphery. This chapter will show how the international mobility of migrant proletarians and their exploitation are central for the maintaining of global capitalism. The third chapter of the section, ‘Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside: precarious lives between violence and agency’, written by Monica Massari, on a complementary argument with the previous chapter, provides a qualitative overview on the forms of exploitation and resistance experienced by migrant workers – women and men – involved into the global capitalist agriculture market, through the analysis of the Italian case. The profound changes experienced by this market during the past thirty years, together with the effects of the restructuring of agricultural production and food chains, the lack of fair-trade policies, the widespread underpaid employment conditions and the large availability of a migrant workforce have had a strong impact on the market. Moreover, the highly exploitative system is further exacerbated by the role played by the illegal gang-master system known as caporalato, which oversees a widespread use of violence, threat and blackmailing
Introduction 21 practices. As a result, this has led to an increased informalisation of work, ethnicisation of the labour market, clandestinisation and further racialisation of the people involved. Migrants, however, are also increasingly engaged in forms of resistance and activism against these forms of exploitation and violence which actually represents an essential part of the current global capitalist political economy. The fourth chapter of the section, ‘Extractive humanitarianism: unpaid labour and participatory detention in refugees governmentality’, written by Martina Tazzioli, interrogates the political economy of labour and the modes of value extraction which are at play in refugee governmentality. It centres on ‘extractive humanitarianism’, which consists in humanitarian interventions which capitalise upon unpaid refugees’ labour and on the repeated extraction of data from refugees’ mobility and activities. The essay focuses on Cash Assistance Programmes for asylum seekers to data extraction activities in refugee camps and explores the labour economies at stake there. The chapter illustrates how extractive humanitarianism generates value not only through migrant detention and border security industry but also by capitalising on refugees’ activities and mobility. In the second section on Intersections, we focus on a range of dimensions affecting work in the digital space and production. The subsection is opened by the chapter, ‘Problems in protections for working data subjects: becoming strangers to ourselves’, written by Phoebe Moore. In her chapter Moore argues that existing AI and data and privacy regulation does not sufficiently provide protection from harm in the context of data extraction and mining. This is because the approaches taken are individualist in relational positioning and do not take into account differences across data subject types. The argument updates legal philosophical arguments which are mired in propertarian and identitarian assumptions for how harms can be prevented, but what is needed is a discussion of the social relations of data production. The second chapter in this section, ‘Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence’, written by Baruch Gottlieb, focuses on artificial intelligence. The augmentation of automation and the provision of unprecedented levels of productivity are expected to be accompanied by mass unemployment, and the automated world of leisure foreseen by Adam Smith and J.M. Keynes. However, productivity rates are down or stagnant in all G7 countries and unemployment is largely unaffected. What has happened instead, argues Gottlieb, is progressive deskilling and precarisation of the workforce. Rather than invest in the latest information technologies to improve quality and increase productivity, capitalists invest mainly in the kind of Taylorist profit maximisation AI which drives down wages and intensifies labour. Rather than unemployment we see augmemployment (augmented employment), work increasingly entangled with and inextricable from networked computational infrastructure, leading to increased dependencies from small business towards big tech companies, in effect creating vertically integrated monopolies, who determine the parameters of automation and labour relations enclosed thereby. The third chapter in this section, ‘Class composition in the digitalised gig economy’, written by Jamie Woodcock, argues that the introduction of digital technology has not ‘disrupted’ (to use the common parlance of platforms) the relationship between capital and labour. Instead, like previous forms of technology used at work, it is developed, integrated and used within existing social relations. While technology may change the way we work, it does not, of its own volition, change the relationships at work. Instead, technology is influenced by relationships of power: the kind of platforms that emerge under capitalism are shaped by the existing
22 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work conditions. As the introduction of platforms changes working conditions, this builds upon existing relationships of power and exploitation. The fourth chapter in this section, ‘Resistance and struggle in the gig economy’, written by Vincenzo Maccarrone, Lorenzo Cini and Arianna Tassinari, on a complementary argument with the previous chapter, explores the diverse array of organisational forms and practices used by platform workers to collectively act. In the chapter, the authors provide a theoretical framework to understand both how collective action emerges within such a precarious world of work and why it takes very different forms of organising across the globe. By reviewing the burgeoning international literature on labour conflict and organisation in the gig and precarious economy, the authors show how various agential and contextual factors, especially those related to the political and social context of mobilisation, combine with precarious labour processes to produce collective organisation and conflict. The fifth chapter in this section, ‘De-skilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace’, written by Saori Shibata, considers concerns regarding the impact of advanced machines and technologies in the digital workplace, highlighting the potential acceleration of the deskilling of workers and the capacity of automation to lock precarious workers into low-waged and low-skilled work for the long term, increasing the potential to further diminish workers’ autonomy in the workplace. The sixth chapter in this section, ‘Economics of the gig economy and legal arbitrage around employment law’, written by Jeremias Adams-Prassl, argues that upon closer inspection, the role of platforms goes far beyond mere match-making. Instead, they offer ‘digital work intermediation’: in order to deliver tightly curated products and services to customers, gig economy operators actively shape the entire transaction through close control over their workers. While elements of work in the on-demand economy might not look like traditional ‘9-to-5’ jobs with a single employer, the reality of work is often a far cry from the freedom and independence of genuine entrepreneurship. As a result, the services offered to consumers are considerably more than a simple one-off match, from quality monitoring to payment facilitation. In the third section on Intersections, we focus on the increasing commodification of body and care work. The section is opened by the chapter, ‘Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work’. Here Ursula Apitzsch focuses on how care work, intended as the production and reproduction of human biological and societal life, is today, globally, becoming increasingly outsourced along the borders of gender and poverty. One of the most extreme – invasive, painful and often dangerous – form of commodified care industry is the production of children by poor women for rich paying couples or individuals with the help of ‘fertility clinics’ in poor countries like India, Cambodia and Nepal and increasingly – after India’s change of legal policies in 2016 – also in Eastern European regions like Ukraine. Women engage in surrogacy ‘in an imagined world of “win-win” market transactions’. This paper gives a short update of the latest developments of global fertility industries and tries to find categories to discuss this complex phenomenon with a focus on the formation of global emancipatory or oppressive gender orders. The second chapter of this section, ‘Global political economy of care and gender – crisis, extractivism and contestation’, written by Christa Wichterich, argues that the COVID-19 crisis has unprecedentedly highlighted care work and the contradiction between its essentiality for each society and economy, and the low social and monetary value attributed to it. Contradicting conventional economic theories which naturalise care work as female embodied work within the gendered division of labour and define it as unproductive work in the context of separated
Introduction 23 and hierarchical spheres of production and reproduction, feminist political economy and social reproduction theory value care work as productive work which generates and sustains life. Using – analogous to resource extractivism – the concept of care extractivism in the crisis of social reproduction, the chapter analyses different forms of care extraction by cost cutting in neoliberal hospital management, modulisation, rationalisation and digital monitoring of services, by underpaying 24/7 care of the elderly in private households and by transnational care chains based on migration which shift care resources from poorer countries in the Global South/East to more wealthy places in the Global North. The third chapter of this section, ‘Aging societies and migrant labour force in the elderly care: the German case’, written by Maria Kontos and Minna K. Ruokonen-Engler, critically explores the working conditions of migrant labour in elderly care in Germany and addresses both home-based and institutionalised care arrangements. It discusses how elderly care work is organised, which problems emerge, and how it is linked with the general questions about social recognition of care work, (un)equal gender relations, globalised labour markets and transnational division of labour. It concludes that the global migration of care workers to Germany and the accommodation of care workers at their workplace is often followed by experiences of non-recognition of formal qualifications, processes of deskilling, asymmetric power relations, hierarchical structures and discrimination. The fourth chapter of this section, ‘Questioning social reproduction theory: North African working-class migrants in France and their families’, written by Catherine Delcroix, focuses on the aspirations and mobilisations of immigrants from Maghreb countries living in France. Nation-wide statistical surveys have shown that, while most of them are employed as workers and their level of education is quite low, their children get better school grades than children of native (French) workers. This finding and the author’s own fieldwork in deprived areas by collecting family case histories questions the validity for immigrant families of Bourdieu and Passeron’s well-established ‘theory of reproduction’ which states that school achievement is strongly dependent on parents’ cultural and economic capital. Immigrants from Maghreb countries, too poor to get good education, nevertheless value it strongly. They compensate their lack of education by other means and mobilisation. The fifth chapter of this section, ‘Towards a global political economy of sex/work: evidence of Argentina and Costa Rica’, written by Kate Hardy and Megan Rivers-Moore, argues that sex work has been an exception to the general rule of maintaining a dichotomy between sexuality and economy in political economic analyses, representing as it does a site for examining where the sexual and the economic interact. This chapter draws on two case studies – Costa Rica and Argentina – to demonstrate the similarities and divergences in the ways in which sex work is imbricated in national economies. Dependence on foreign capital flows via tourism in Costa Rica shapes the inclusion of sex workers’ labour into national balance sheets, while in Argentina, cyclical patterns of crisis and debt restructuring undermine the capacity of sex workers to use the commodification of sexual labour as a safety net for survival. In the fourth section of Intersections, we look at the relation between labour and social movements struggles. The section is opened by, ‘Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community: connections and politics’, written by Miguel Martinez Lucio. The chapter reflects on how the subjects of social movements and community/non-workplace forms of activism have entered the current discussion about work and employment. It is argued that trade unions need to link to, or appear like, social movements while also engaging more clearly in the spaces of local communities if they are to advance and have a positive impact on the
24 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work increasingly fragmenting and changing labour market and spheres of work. In addition, certain forms of worker organisations are judged to be moving towards new identities and activities linked, or similar, to social movements. The problem we face though, argues Martinez Lucio, is how do these different dimensions in terms of the social and the industrial interact, and to what ends? The second chapter of this section, ‘Global unions and transnational labour movement’, written by Julia Soul and Cecilia Anigstein, presents an overview of the current possibilities and challenges to construct a transnational labour movement by a focus on three dimensions: its organisational architecture, the demands it pursues and the political programs it mobilises. It argues for an understanding of these issues in a multi-scalar field of power relationships and in connection with the uneven mutations and transformations of the working classes. The third chapter of this section, ‘Evolving forms of organising workers in the informal economy’, written by Jeemol Unni, introduces the features of informal work; analyses varied examples of organisations of informal workers; and reflects on distinct organising strategies at work in the informal economy. The nature of informal work and the form of organising of informal workers differ substantially, due to invisibility, significant labour fragmentation and (often) lack of a designated space of work. Based on varied definitions of informality and informal employment, the chapter presents some of the theories of organising that may be helpful to understand informal workers’ contemporary organisations and their strategies. The fourth chapter of this section, ‘The power and politics of precarious resistance’, written by Marcel Paret, explores the terrain of precarious resistance, with particular attention to sources of power and political dynamics. The chapter discusses varied forms of informalisation and economic insecurity, including the growing significance of precarious workers and surplus populations. Then it turns to questions of power, highlighting especially the various ways in which economically insecure groups may compensate for their structural weakness through forms of associational power and solidarity networks based on non-work identities, such as race, gender and geography. Drawing upon the theoretical discussion, two cases of collective action by economically insecure groups are compared: struggles for public service delivery by the urban poor in South Africa and struggles for state-implemented welfare boards by informal workers in India. The fifth chapter of this section, ‘Spatial dimensions of strikes’, written by Jörg Nowak, drawing from insights from labour geography, social history, historical sociology and recent research on strikes without central coordination in India and Brazil, considers the relations existing between strike intensity, regional or local identities and political traditions of migrant workers. While regional identities and spatial concentrations indeed do have effects on strike intensity, the global dissemination of strikes in the public sector or among platform workers in many dispersed workplaces again demonstrates that there is no spatial determinism. However, linking the spatial distribution of strikes to global patterns of capital investment in specific sectors, as did Beverly Silver in her acclaimed book Forces of Labour can open, Nowak argues, a line of research which has seen a very scattered debate during the last decades. The sixth chapter of this section, ‘Feminist strike, social reproduction and debt’, written by Verónica Gago and Lucía Cavallero, hypothesises that the international strikes of women, lesbians, trans persons and travestis, since 2017, allows for debating and visibilising a map of the heterogeneity of labour in a feminist register. The feminist strike provides a class content to the demands and the language of the protest even if the vocabulary is not explicit, precisely because it brings us to stop the machinery that makes social reproduction possible, demonstrat-
Introduction 25 ing its strategic character, which is, at the same time, constantly hidden. The feminist strike, unlike the traditional labour strike (that is, of the masculine, waged, unionised worker) is not linked to categorised and recognised ‘trades’, but rather tasks that sometimes even invent their own names to make them palpable. At the same time, it refers to production and its inevitable link with reproduction and makes explicit why certain tasks correspond to a determined sexual division of labour and why capital accumulation is impossible without gender mandates. In this sense, it is simultaneously a labour strike and an existential strike. The seventh chapter of this section, ‘The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America’, written by Tomás Palmisano and Juan Warhen, analyses the interaction between the extension of neoliberal capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century and the renewed impetus to projects based on the intensive exploitation of nature and commons. Focusing on Latin American academic and political debate, the chapter highlights the role of ‘state-of-the-art technologies’ in the territorial expansion of extractivism, the relation between global, national and subnational scales, the hegemony of extractivism in diverse political orientations and the dispute of meanings around nature, among others. In parallel to the description of the political economy of contemporary extractivism, three cases of socio-environmental or territorial conflicts that have arisen from the resistance of various groups against the progress of this model are considered: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Brazil), Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades (Argentina) and Congreso Nacional Indígena (Mexico). In the fifth section on Intersections, we look at key global production sectors in which inherited relation of domination of the Global North shapes the processes of work in the Global South or for a workforce from the Global South. The section is opened by the chapter, ‘Exhaust and switch: labour and the garment industry in global production networks’, written by Nikolaus Hammer. This chapter emphasises how composite production circuits in global apparel production networks (GPNs) are based on various forms of labour and multiple forms of exploitation. At the workplace level, market discontinuities are translated into relations of dependence, debt and neo-bondage while workers’ mental and physical limits are often exhausted by their thirties. Strikingly, these characteristics apply to offshored, backshored and reshored parts of the apparel industry, from South Asia and the Caribbean to Italy, the UK and the US. It remains questionable to what extent the, largely hybrid, ‘markets of standards and regulation’ will moderate the power imbalances within GPNs as well as the workplace. The second chapter of this section, ‘Imperialism and labour: palm industry in the territories of Black communities in the border areas of Colombia and Ecuador’, written by Edna Yiced Martínez, explores the palm oil industry, a complex business that has operated on a global scale for the last two centuries, involving local, national and transnational capital, articulating political elites around the world, and mobilising international nets of scientific investigation and technical knowledge. Since its beginning, this agribusiness has been characterised by the overexploitation of people and the destruction of environment. The article explores how the labour relation inside but also outside the palm plantations operates, and tracks the socio-bio-ecological elements involved in the production of palm oil as a commodity. The author shows that together with direct work accomplished by labour power in plantations, indirect, personal, collective and communitarian work constitutes a whole universe of social production that is further appropriated by the palm oil production cycle and inserted into the capital accumulation process. The third chapter in this section, ‘Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question in the era of generalized monopolies’, written by Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo
26 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Crossa Niell, argues that the predominance of monopoly capital over practically all spheres of the world economy and society has put the basis for the emergence of a new international division of labour on the North-South or centre-periphery horizon: the export of labour power. In this context, skilled migration is gaining increasing importance and dynamism, not only because it is the most buoyant segment of contemporary international migration, but also because it marks the beginning of a new cycle in North-South relations in the 21st century. This phenomenon is closely related to the new dynamics of development of the productive forces and, more specifically, to the way in which innovation systems have been upheaved nowadays, where the skilled labour force from peripheral and emerging countries plays an increasingly significant role. The fourth chapter in this section, ‘Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour’, written by Jörn Boewe, discusses what a meaningful description of the maritime-industrial-logistic complex could be and outlines some of its key structural features and trends. It provides an overview of the major global players among shipping companies, crewing agencies, port operators and shipyards. It takes an integrated, overall view to define the field, including industries like fishery, off-shore-wind-energy or ship-building and ship wrecking, just to mention some. The long-term trends in the global labour market for seafarers, the global downward spiral in wages and working conditions triggered by the system of ‘flags of convenience’ are portrayed, but also the partially successful efforts of the International Transport Workers’ Federation and national trade unions to stop and maybe reverse the ‘race to the bottom’. The fifth chapter in this section, ‘Counter-logistics in the Po Valley region’, written by Niccolò Cuppini, argues that a logistical lexicon and imaginary are shaping the very ways in which we are accustomed to think about contemporary capitalism. Logistics is rapidly emerging as a crucial systemic logic, as a set of necessary infrastructures and assemblages of labour force for capital reproduction, and as a site of contestation and struggles. In the last decade, the Po valley region (Northern Italy) has become an interesting laboratory of logistical forces with relevant characteristics: the racialised labour regimes; the extensive use of the cooperatives as a tool for employing and organising labour; the factors that made possible the cycle of struggles from the point of view of the organisation of the labour force: the positionality and the concentration. These seem to delineate the possibility of counter-logistics, designing the coordinates of new assemblages of territoriality and its social composition. In the final section of the handbook, Perspectives on the working class from the Global South: local realities and global dynamics, we focus on a number of selected countries in different continents to explore how local political economy frameworks, labour markets and institutions differently shape labour and working-class conditions. The first chapter of this section, ‘The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics’, written by Supriya RoyChowdhury, reflects on informal work in India. Here successive agrarian crises and stunted employment in industries have created a crisis of work, while the growth of the services sector has sustained labour informalisation. Informalised work is often seen as the domain of the self-employed, of petty trade and of small enterprises. Yet, many forms of unregulated and precarious wage-work are also at play. In fact, the chapter argues that there is a need to bring back wage labour to the centre of analysis and politics, and craft a new politics of trade unionism able to speak to and for informal work. The second chapter of this section, ‘Informalization of labour in contemporary China’, written by Jenny Chan, considers major transformations of the Chinese economy and its
Introduction 27 impact on the lives of workers through the intertwined realms of production and social reproduction. In an active way, the government excludes student interns from the rank of ‘employees’ under the current internship regulations. In a passive, or possibly unintended way, the rollout of new legal requirements – such as restrictions over firings of long-serving employees and limitations on the overuse of agency workers – has given rise to various types of labour outsourcing and subcontracting. Outside of the formal, state-defined labour relations framework, technological innovators recruit workers through digital platforms to establish a system of on-demand labour services. From the bottom-up, labour informalisation shapes contentious new forces and resistance. In a slowing economy, and particularly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic since 2019, the struggle for redistributing resources and creating greater social protections for all workers assumes yet greater importance. The third chapter of this section, ‘Precariousness and push-back: capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa’, written by Bridget Kenny, moves our analysis from Asia to the African continent. South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The chapter outlines the shape of these structural divergences, with particular attention to the effects on the labour market and working-class movements. It seeks to understand the significance of these changes within the labour market and economy and to working-class life and politics. It focuses on three conjunctures. First, it reviews changes to the economy through the financialisation of capital. Second, it outlines how state policy continues to direct neoliberal solutions despite increased pressure to deliver broad-based economic and ‘developmentalist’ outcomes to South Africa’s majority. Finally, it explores the shifting terrain of working class politics (broadly understood) over the past ten years. A fragmentation within working-class politics maps the contradictions of financialisation, state commitment to neoliberal frameworks and deepening austerity, and global-local articulations of social relations of survival. The fourth chapter of this section, ‘Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond’, written by Samuel Andreas Admasie, argues that harsh exploitation is engendering unsustainable imbalances and repressive practices in Ethiopia. Ethiopian workers are not merely exploited, but often super-exploited: meaning that incomes, and therefore generally consumption, of workers are reduced beyond the limit of what is required for upkeep and reproduction. The mode of insertion of the Ethiopian economy – as a provider of cheap labour – within global value chains is the key factor in explaining this. For wages as low as in Ethiopia to prevail, facilitating processes are required. Two such processes are identified. First, the chapter discusses subsidisation of wage labour in exporting sectors by means of transfers from workers engaged in other sectors and geographical spaces. Second, it discusses the repressive practices that are required to underpin such a labour regime. But repression only constitutes one side of the equation, and the chapter also discusses the manifold examples of the growing resistance that Ethiopian workers engage in. The fifth chapter of this section, ‘Working class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina’, written by Clara Marticorena and Lucila D’Urso, moves the focus to Latin America. The chapter considers how working-class conditions in Argentina have been reconfigured since the end of 2015, when the right-wing neoliberal government of Macri took power, to the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three major trends have characterised this period: wage depreciation, unemployment increase and flexibilisation and precarisation of labour conditions. These trends represent structural characteristics of the last quarter of the 20th century in Argentina, that remained unresolved during the Kirchnerist governments and
28 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work intensified during the Macri administration’s austerity policies. Within this framework, the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the pre-existing economic crisis, impacting even more on precarious working conditions and on the deterioration of working-class living conditions. In this context, the chapter also focuses on the outstanding resistance experiences that arose. In these experiences non-traditional sectors, such as popular economy workers and women’s movement, claimed with formal workers for a more combative strategy on the part of conservative trade unions and union confederations. The sixth chapter of this section, ‘Chile – between Pinochet’s neoliberal counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt’, written by Miguel Urrutia and Fernando Durán-Palma, argues that over the last four decades, Chile has experienced the longest economic expansion in its history but also suffered the persistence of high levels of income inequality, precarity and social dislocation. Narrow interpretations of this apparent good news–bad news paradox, that is, removed from the neoliberal political economy of work which produces it and reproduces it, are not only analytically suspect but also in the service of dominant narratives. As elsewhere, a fundamental goal of Chilean neoliberalism is the thorough domination of capital over labour, clear evidence of which is an industrial relations model purposely designed to facilitate capital accumulation at the expense of labour by undermining labour’s structural and associational power. That workers and their representative organisations have been severely weakened as a result, does not mean that they have become ineffectual social actors. On the contrary, this chapter argues that workers have found ways to create potentially destabilising experiences of organised resistance at the firm and sectoral levels (what it is called in the chapter ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism) and by supporting/triggering ‘non-class-based’ identity movements with national repercussions. The final chapter of this section and of the handbook, ‘Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation, and new informalisation processes’, written by Ludmila Costhek Abílio, discusses changes and continuities in the Brazilian labour market since the 2000s and the consequences for workers. The analysis starts from considering the period 2003–2016 under the Workers’ Party administrations. During this period, the working class gained visibility as a central target for expanding access to credit and consumption, and also for its importance as an electoral base. However, the exploitation of work and the recognition of the elements that organise daily life and forms of resistance by workers remained invisible. Since 2018, with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff that signalled the end of the Workers’ Party developmental model and the later arrival of Bolsonaro to the presidency, new labour regulations and increasing processes of work informalisation associated to uberisation have been demonstrating a clear attack on the social forces of labour. However, these processes and changes have also given new visibility to informality and to its centrality with Brazil’s capitalist development.
NOTE 1
This difference is important because a sociological interpretation does not help us understand class or class struggle. Nevertheless, a classification of groups or strata may be useful in analysing society.
Introduction 29
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32 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Van der Linden, M. (2008), Workers of the World. Leiden: Brill. Veltmeyer, H. and Bowles P. (2022), The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies. New edition. London: Routledge. Werner, M. (2019), ‘Geographies of Production I: Global Production and Uneven Development’. Progress in Human Geography, 43(5): 948–958. Werner, M. and Bair J. (2019), ‘Global Value Chains and uneven Development: A Disarticulations Perspective’, in S. Ponte, G. Gereffi and G. Raj-Reichert (eds.), Handbook on Global Value Chains. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.183–198. Wilson, K. (2012), Race, Racism and Development: Interrogating History, Discourse and Practice. London: Zed Books.
PART I THEORIES AND CONCEPTS
Section A. Capital Accumulation and Forms of Exploitation
1. Class, labour and the global working class Ronaldo Munck
INTRODUCTION The development of a global working class represents a major transformation of contemporary capitalism. Driven by workers’ struggles, capitalism has ‘gone global’ since 1990 but in doing so has brought into being a powerful new agent for social change. We examine this revolutionary event in its broad historical context, from the making of the working class, through its various permutations, to the present complex relationships of class, labour and capitalism. We point to the difficulties faced but also the prospects for this new global working class. In the various analyses of ‘labour and globalization’ since the turn of the century there has been a tendency to first outline the economic transformations that have occurred and only then look at how labour might be responding to these changes. But, as Mario Tronti admitted in the 1960s, “we too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first and workers second. That is a mistake. And we now have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning; and that beginning is the class struggle of the working class” (Tronti, 2019: 65). It is labour that brings the skills and co-operation, even the innovation that capitalism needs to develop. Capital, of course, will seek to objectify the living workers and reduce them to mere labour power. Workers, in resisting this process, compose themselves as a collectivity that capital seeks to break, through a decomposition of the labour movement. This may be followed, however, by a recomposition of the working class opening up a new phase of resistance and counter-capitalist initiatives. The main thing we need to understand as we move into our analysis of the global working class is that capitalist development is constantly and profoundly shaped by workers’ struggles. Thus, Marx showed how the advent of industrial machinery in Britain followed the workers’ demand for a shorter working day. A century later, the expansion of the multinational corporations can be related to the upsurge of workers’ struggles in the United States. The inexorable logic of capital does not unfold according to its own laws but in a dialectical response to the workers who resist incorporation and subordination. Capitalism has always responded to strong labour movements through technological innovation and the shift of production to other locations. It is the capital/wage-labour relation that is the engine of capitalist development. Workers are not a passive result of capitalist development but are part of its very essence, challenging and circumventing the social control it requires over a passive labour force. Thus, when we move in the next section to examine the ‘making’ of the working class, we must bear in mind that this is not a one-off event but, rather, an ongoing interplay between capital’s bid to subject labour power, and the working-class struggle to resist this. While capital seeks the decomposition of labour, workers are continuously seeking the recomposition of the working class. Hence, industrial conflict and class struggle can spur capital into a round of innovation, but that new platform will see labour fighting back again. From this perspective, the working class is defined by its struggles against capital and not by capital. While capital seeks new ways to control and subdue what it sees as labour power, workers always seek to 34
Class, labour and the global working class 35 challenge this control and establish a logic of unity and resistance. In that vein, we do not need to carry out endless taxonomies of urban/rural, productive/unproductive, stable/precarious, etc., workers, and can accept that, in the struggle against capital, a working class defines itself. It is from this perspective that we will propose in the final section, the emergence of a new global working class, despite divisions and even conflicts between these factions.
THE MAKING OF THE WORKING CLASS In any consideration of the making of the working class we are drawn inevitably to E.P. Thompson’s (1970) classic text on the making of the English working class, despite its limitations as a single-country study. For Thompson “class formations arise at the intersection of determination and self-activity: the working class made itself as much as it was made” (Thompson, 1978: 298). We “cannot put ‘class’ here and ‘class consciousness’ there, as two separate entities, the one sequential upon the other, since both must be taken together” (Thompson, 1978: 298). Workers in the early phases of industrialization – and before – had to make sense of fundamental transformations impacting on their lives and their sense of politics and culture. Over and above the diversity of trades – the previous dominant form of identity – they developed a vocabulary and a world view to understand their situation collectively as a class of workers. The making of the working class is thus a process and not an event, it has its own internal logic and dynamic and is not the automatic result of ‘objective’ economic processes. We must always bear in mind that the making of the working class occurred through violence, dispossession and forced labour. The dispossession of the European peasantry, the enslavement of African people and the ongoing violence of capitalist accumulation went hand in hand. This ‘primitive accumulation’ is not confined, however, to this formative period and continues in the globalized era as accumulation through dispossession. Colonialism and imperialism were an integral part of global capitalist development and they were internalized, as it were, in the capital/wage-labour relation. As Marx put it “the veiled slavery of the wage labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal” (Marx, 1976: 833). Much as capitalism emerged as an uneven yet combined development process, so the subjection of labour was also uneven and combined with ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of domination co-existing and feeding off each other. Another feature of the making of the working class that continues today during its global remaking is the central importance of labour mobility. The first wave of migrant labour was composed of those driven off the land into the newly emergent factory system. The second wave comprised European peasants moving to take advantage of opportunities in the ‘New World’, while the third wave was made up of various coerced groups of workers (not just slaves) taken to work the mines and plantations of the colonial lands. From 1800 to the First World War, more than 50 million rural workers were driven out of Europe by a series of agricultural crises. With the abolition of slavery between 1833 and 1866, employers began to import indentured labourers from China (about 2.5 million) and India (1.5 million) taken to the Antilles and South Africa by force (see Gambino and Sacchetto, 2018). Thus, even as it sought to unify the world under the aegis of the capital/wage-labour relation, capitalism also constructed difference, segmentation and conflict within the first making of the working class.
36 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Until the very end of the 19th century, we could say that the development of labour occurred in a largely non-national setting. For Britain, in particular, the free movement of people across its empire was the natural counterpart to free trade. The First International, formed in 1864, was based on pre-existing social solidarities and cannot be explained simply in terms of the rise of the factory system. “Workers of the world unite” was not just a slogan but reflected the common reality of workers, at least in Europe. Divisions along the lines of nationality, race or religion weakened the collective identity of the working class and were thus firmly resisted. Mutual help across borders was a natural confirmation of mutual help across trades within a given country. However, this solidarity was limited to Western Europe and the lands it settled in North America and Australia. Beyond that lay the lands colonized by Europe where conditions of primitive accumulation prevailed, and the formation of the working class was to be immediately and permanently bound up with race/racism and the construction of national states a hundred years later.
FROM INCLUSION TO EXCLUSION Towards the end of the 19th century, the working classes in the original industrial countries of Western Europe were gradually integrated into the nation-state (van der Linden, 2003). From the 1870s onwards, this process of inclusion led to the working class becoming ‘nationalized’ as the European nation-states were consolidated. The labour movements began to enter a close relationship with their respective nation-states. The phrase la nation des prolétaires (‘the nation of proletarians’) emerged in this era and reflected the growing symbiosis between the nation-state and the consolidation of the working classes. Labour internationalism – that had come naturally in an earlier formative period – effectively died out in Europe with the First World War as labour and socialist leaders lined up with ‘their’ state as they joined the scramble for colonies in Africa. The overall trend towards social inclusion of the working classes in the originally industrializing countries continued and was deepened in the mid-20th century after the social and political dislocation of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War. The twin pillars of the new post-war regime – at least in the North Atlantic area – were Fordism in the factory and the welfare state in the social domain. This was a social regime of accumulation based on domestic mass consumption and a range of institutions promoting social inclusion and a limited degree of wealth redistribution. This generated strong growth and a significant, albeit partial, incorporation of the working class into the capitalist social order. The state also began to play a role in the protection and promotion of social welfare, as the pre-war self-regulated market model was set aside. There is a considerable degree of mythology around the notion of the trente glorieuses (‘glorious thirty’) years between 1945 and 1975 but for the working class, at least in one part of the world, it represented a period of stability that allowed for strong levels of organization and social cohesion to be built up. In the colonial world, the mid-20th century was marked by decolonization and the emergence of national developmental states and/or continuity through neo-colonialism. This part of the world had not experienced the effects of Fordism and the welfare state, except in small pockets. The colonial and post-colonial economic orders could not deal with the ‘social question’ in this way. Industrialization was weaker and both trade unions and employers lacked the capacity to demand such a settlement. They also achieved independence at around the same
Class, labour and the global working class 37 time the United States was heading towards hegemonic status in the world order. From its perspective the extraction of raw materials and a reservoir of cheap labour was the role of the ‘Third World’. There was, in the 1970s, a move towards the creation of national developmental states that, in a certain way, acted in a similarly inclusive way to the Fordism/welfarism of the North. But by then capitalism was moving towards a new modality, a globalized world in which the market would rule supreme and workers, once again, were destined to become mere labour power. Marx once wrote that “the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome” (Marx, 1973: 408). Earlier modes of production would need to be taken under the aegis of capitalism and no part of the globe would be immune to its influence. This occurred in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union and other state socialist countries came under the sway of the market as did the national developmental states in the global South with the Pinochet coup of 1973 that put an end to a working-class-led popular government in Chile. This new capitalism would be authoritarian and nothing from the political or social domains would be allowed to restrict the operation of the free market. Later, in the 1980s this was to become the ‘global neoliberalism’ of the North Atlantic (Thatcher/Reagan) where the discipline of the market was allied with the repression of the working classes taking part in slowdown strikes then systematically with anti-trade union and austerity policies. It appeared, as Beverly Silver recounts, that ‘globalization’ “had unleashed an intense competition among workers worldwide, and was resulting in a relentless downward spiral in workers’ power and welfare” (Silver, 2003: 47). The commonly heard expression of a ‘race to the bottom’ pointed towards this new globalized capitalism relentlessly driving down the wages and conditions of the working class. The trade unions were decimated and trade union density (the proportion of workers belonging to a union) had dropped to less than 10 per cent by the turn of century (see van der Linden, 2018). It did seem that the working class would once again be reduced to a factor of production and that trade unions would be obliterated as a movement for progressive social change. In the global South, this wave of neoliberal globalization led to a recrudescence of the primitive accumulation associated with the rise of capitalism in the North in the 19th century. The very success of the working class during the post-war period, in terms of gaining a degree of economic security and social wellbeing, meant that a decisive drive by the capitalist class and capitalist state would ensue.
A NEW GLOBAL WORKING CLASS Critical sociologist Manuel Castells was one of the early analysts of a new global working class even if he prematurely closed off any prospects for the labour movement and trade unions in particular. Writing in the early 1990s, Castells captured much of what neoliberal globalization was doing to traditional concepts of work and workers. This new ‘informational system of production’ was one in which “at its core, capital is global. As a rule, labour is local” (Castells, 1996: 471). Labour was becoming disaggregated and fragmented, its collective identity obliterated and its forms of representation inoperative. Castells was thus able to write off the trade unions as a viable social movement, mainly because capital and labour now existed in “different spaces and times” (Castells, 1996: 475). While this was a salutary call to rethink old
38 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work paradigms it exaggerated, in my view, the way capital had become separated from its Other, wage-labour, under the new ‘informational capitalism’ as Castells called it. The quantitative expansion of the global working class in recent decades has been nothing short of remarkable, but so also has its qualitative transformations. The number of workers worldwide more than doubled between 1990 and 2016, from 1.5 billion to 3.2 billion (ILO, 2017). The geographic distribution changed insofar as most of the growth occurred in the so-called ‘developing world’ and a significant share were new female workers. The accumulation of capital on a global scale creates a global working class through an accelerated process of proletarianization. It is understood as a social relation, its dramatic expansion under globalization has created a new, working class, subject everywhere to the rule of capital. We were not witnessing the ‘end of work’ nor were we all becoming high-tech information sector professionals. The working class was not disappearing it was just becoming more complex and the nature of working-class struggles was becoming more diverse. Things did not pan out quite how Castells predicted in the early 1990s. While robots may be replacing humans in some limited sectors, in most we see innovations enhancing human labour productivity through increased control. New technologies, overall, are creating new jobs as they shape the demand for new goods and services. In a similar fashion, massive industrial job creation is at least as much a feature of globalization as increased mobility of capital or finance. In China, for instance, such growth accounts for 40 per cent of GDP. In developing countries, 70 per cent of workers remain in the agricultural sector. For every worker assimilated into the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, many more are being super-exploited in a paddy field or McDonald’s. More than two billion people across the globe work in the precarious informal sector, unprotected by legislation, without access to a social safety net or an education. The new landscape of global labour points to at least two conclusions. First, analysts who insisted on the terminal decline of labour were wrong. In the enthusiasm for the flourishing civil society of the alter-globalization movements, organized labour was often written off as a relic of an industrial past. However, since 2000, transnational labour organizing has been on the rise, spawning new structures and organizing techniques. Second, although a truly global labour market has not yet emerged outside of a few restricted sectors, what we might call a common global working condition has coalesced. Prevailing conditions on the ground support the development of a transnational labour strategy and a credible change agent to contest the new globalized capitalism. Labour faces these and myriad other obstacles in our rapidly changing, interconnected world. However, fixating on obstacles creates a facile pessimism. In fact, globalization may have opened as many doors as it closed. At the most basic level, the globalization of communication has countered one of the most formidable barriers to global action. With email, social media and other online platforms, workers enjoy better tools to organize across countries. Moreover, globalized communication fosters solidarity as workers are able to see, hear and share each other’s stories (see Herberg, 2018). Looking ahead, improvements in translation software could help bridge the language divide, thereby opening new paths to transcultural dialogue. Globalized capitalism may have created the basis for a new global working class, not only in material conditions but also in consciousness. Transnational unionism can take many forms. It can operate among union executives or at a grassroots level, while organizing can be workplace-oriented or based on collaboration with NGOs on issue campaigns. Successful transnational unionism has the capacity to navigate complexity and operate on multiple levels using globalization to their benefit by organizing
Class, labour and the global working class 39 transnational labour actions, forming new transnational structures and fostering solidarity with migrant workers at home. The smartest unions are now treating migrant workers not as a threat but as an opportunity. By making common cause with migrant workers, trade unions have deepened their democratic role by integrating migrant workers into unions and combatting divisive and racist political forces. In Singapore and Hong Kong, state-sponsored unions have recruited migrant workers, to mutual benefit. In Malaysia, the Building and Woodworkers’ International recruits temporary migrant workers to work alongside “regular” members of the union (Ford, 2019). Through such positive, proactive outreach, unions can counter the divide-and-conquer strategy on which anti-union management thrives.
PRECARITY AND INFORMALITY A major debate around the nature of this new global working class is largely focused on the emergence of what has been dubbed a precariat (precarious proletariat). In the version popularized by Standing (2011) the precariat is seen as a social group defined by what it is not: a mythical, stable working class with full social and political rights. Precarious workers lack work security, work rights and a work-based identity. They are deemed to be alienated from the ‘stable’ working class and their traditional form of organizing through trade unions. There is no doubt that precarious work is becoming more prevalent in the global North – just think of the ‘gig economy’ and its erosion of workers’ rights. However, from a global perspective this is not new insofar as in the global South work has always been precarious. Nor does the emergence of precarious work more centrally as a capitalist tactic mean that this workforce is separate from, let alone opposed to the working class and the trade unions. We would need to go back to debates on ‘informality’ in the early 1970s to make sense of this debate and set it in context. It referred to means and techniques of production that were not capital-intensive, where the means of production were owned by those who operate them and where the division of labour was rudimentary. It took some time for economists to realize that this informal sector was not some unfortunate hangover from a pre-capitalism era but an integral element in the development of capitalism in the post-colonial world. Brazilian political economist Francisco de Oliveira in his influential ‘Critique of dualist reason’ showed how activities and work in this sector was profitable for the overall system (Oliveira, 1972). Small-scale commerce, for example, could facilitate the distribution of industrial goods and the self-constructed dwelling of the informal settlements could have been building workers’ homes. The dialectic of capital accumulation required, inescapably, the input of labour from the ‘informal’ sector as it does today from so-called precarious workers (Munck, 2020). My own analysis is that precarity and informality are two sides of the same coin, despite emerging in different world zones and from within different disciplines. It is in the nature of the new global capitalism to seek the production of a disposable labour force unencumbered by labour rights. The trade unions, and also various social movement organizations, have sought to organize the expansion of informal/precarious sections of the working class. They are seeking to resist the broad process of dispossession under way since the 1990s with the objective of creating new ‘surplus populations’. They are not, however, working in a different ‘informal’ economy with its own laws of motion. As Sandro Mezzadra writes, the new global capitalism is infused by heterogeneity: “by the contemporaneous and structurally related exist-
40 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ence of the ‘new economy’ and sweatshops, corporatisation of capitalism and accumulation in ‘primitive’ forms, processes of financialisation and forced labour” (Mezzadra, 2012: 166). It is important for our analysis of the new global working class to go beyond the dualism implicit in much of the precarity/informality debate. The formal/informal division, like the more recent precarious/stable work divide can be seen as classic logocentric terms where each is defined in opposition to the other. They are seen as mutually exclusive terms rather than social phenomena that are dialectically linked. There are deep and complex relations between the two domains that cannot be comprehended by a dualist reasoning. A perspective based on the notion of uneven and combined development would direct us instead to the complementarity of the two economies and work relations. Formal enterprise deploys informal work relations and in the seemingly stable workforce, precarious work practices are co-present. From a working-class perspective, it would be debilitating to construct a schema that divides workers along dualist lines, least of all positing a ‘precariat’ that is in opposition to the broad labour movement (see Munck, 2013). We also need to deploy a feminist perspective that can renew the social reproduction debate to illuminate the rise and spread of value-producing informal and informalized labour (see Mezzadri, 2019).
RESULTS AND PROSPECTS What can we say in conclusion about class, labour and the global working class today? We could start by recalling what Mario Tronti wrote when a previous ‘new era’ in the class struggle was beginning: Capital’s power appears to be stable and solid … the balance of forces appears to be weighed against the workers … and yet precisely at the points where capital appears most dominant we see how deeply it is penetrated by … the threat of the working class (Tronti, 2019: 219).
The organized strength of the working class is once again being set by capital. If, from 1975 to 1995 the working class was almost everywhere in retreat, after a decade of recovery we can say that, since 2005, and especially since 2010, the working classes have been back on the offensive. So, far from it being the beginning of the end for labour as Castells foresaw, it is now very much the end of the beginning of labour’s resurgence. This will, of course, depend on the agency of workers and the political will of its organizations. The persistence of this upsurge in transnational organizing is not inevitable; maintaining growth and success requires a deep rethinking of the role of trade unions. The popular image of trade unions being ‘pale, male and stale’ has an element of truth in it. Membership is down: less than 10 per cent of the world’s labour force belongs to a union, with many of the most unionized sectors of the economy in decline. Many trade unions still take a narrow approach to defending the interests of their existing members, rather than organizing the unorganized, not least those in the informal or precarious sector. And when international trade unions try to create a countervailing force to transnational capital, they often do so in an outdated manner, such as the bid to institutionalize at a global level the post-war European system of tripartite social partnership among workers, employers and the state. However, no iron law governs how trade unions respond to crises. New visions may emerge, new alliances may form and new forward-thinking leaders may arise. If we understand labour as a social movement, then we will be able to perceive its constant regeneration
Class, labour and the global working class 41 and recomposition (see Frege and Kelly, 2014). While still weakened by the ravages of the ‘long neoliberal night’, the international labour movement has, since the mid-1990s, been regrouping and recomposing. Struggles have matured from desperate rear-guard actions into concerted, proactive organizing campaigns. The International Trade Union Confederation now organizes 207 million workers in 163 countries. The sectoral Global Union Federations for their part have approximately 200 million members across such key sectors of the global economy as mining, metalwork, transport, steel, building, food and public services. Together, these global unions show that labour has not disappeared as some had hoped for and others had feared. Yet, structures do not in themselves make a social movement, especially when they remain chronically under-resourced. The international trade union movement is both a transnational social movement in the making and a representative organization of workers on the ground. Its democratic structures, a clear focus on the world of work, and membership-based nature distinguish it from NGOs campaigning on issues of gender equity, human rights or environmental protection. While many advocacy groups are ephemeral, the labour movement will almost certainly be around for a long time, since the collective representation of workers is essential even as its organizational form evolves. That said, the labour movement has learned a lot from social movements and kindred NGOs, and to an increasing degree has been joining the broad alter-globalization movement. The international trade union movement certainly has the motivation to ‘go global’ (even if it is just to survive), and it has the capacity to do so. It can and will play a central and increasing role in achieving a degree of social regulation over the worldwide expansion of capitalism in the decades to come. In the formative stages of the labour movement, unions engaged actively with the broader political issues of the day and, in particular, the call for universal suffrage. There is no reason why such larger concerns cannot again move to the centre of labour’s agenda, and a very good reason – the interpenetration of a host of economic, social and environmental reasons – why they should form its backbone. In contrast to the later tradition of craft unionism, the early labour organizers did not recognize divisions based on skill or race. This tradition of labour organizing known variously as “community unionism”, “deep organizing” or “social movement unionism” has been making a comeback (see McAlevey, 2020). Its expansion could open a new chapter in labour’s ongoing struggle against capitalism that renews the traditions and lessons of its formative phase.
REFERENCES Castells, Manuel (1996), The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Ford, Michelle (2019), ‘Precarious workers need Asia’s unions’. Open Democracy. https:// www .opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/informal-workers-an-untapped-asset-for-asias -unions/ Frege, Carola and John Kelly (eds) (2004), Varieties of Unionism. Strategies for Union Revitalization in a Globalizing Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gambino, Ferruccio and Devi Sacchetto (2018), ‘The shifting maelstrom: from plantations to assembly lines’, in Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (eds), Beyond Marx. Theorising the Global Relations of the Twenty First Century. Chicago: Haymarket Books, pp. 89–119. Herberg, Mirko (ed.) (2018), Trade Unions in Transformation: Success Stories from Around the World. Bonn: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
42 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ILO (2017), World Employment and Social Outlook. Geneva: ILO. Marx, Karl (1973), Grundrisse. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1976), Capital, vol. 1. London: Penguin. McAlevey, Jane (2020), A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy. New York: HarperCollins. Mezzadra, Sandro (2012), ‘How many histories of labour? Towards a theory of postcolonial capitalism’. Transversal 1. Mezzadri, Alessandra (2019), ‘On the value of social reproduction. Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics’. Radical Philosophy, (Spring), 33–41. Munck, Ronaldo (2013), ‘The precariat: a view from the South’. Third World Quarterly, 34(5), 747–62. Munck, Ronaldo (2020), ‘Work and capitalist globalisation: beyond dualist reason’. Review of Radical Political Economics, 52(3), 371–86. Oliveira, Francisco (1972), ‘A economia Brasileira: crítica a razáo dualista’. CEBRAP Estudos, 2, 4–70. Silver, Beverly (2003), Forces of Labour. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standing, Guy (2011), The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Thompson, E.P. (1970), The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thompson, E.P. (1978), The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin Press. Tronti, Mario (2019), Workers and Capital. London: Verso. Van der Linden, Marcel (2003), Transnational Labour History. Explorations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Van der Linden, Marcel (2018), ‘The Crisis of World Labour’. Solidarity. https://solidarity-us.org/atc/ 176/p4424/
FURTHER READING Atzeni, Maurizio (2013), Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism. Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues. London: Macmillan. A useful collection covering a wide range of topics related to workers’ resistance under contemporary globalized capitalism. Munck, Ronaldo (2018), Rethinking Global Labour. After Neoliberalism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing. A wide-ranging historical review of the making of the contemporary global working class and its current dilemmas. Van der Linden, Marcel (2008), Workers of the World, Essays Towards a Global Labour History. Leiden: Brill. A historical treatise on the early formation of the labour movements and forms of labour exploitation.
2. Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization Prabhat Patnaik and Utsa Patnaik
INTRODUCTION In this chapter we argue that the current phase of imperialism entails a synchronous worsening of the conditions for working people everywhere in the world. “Imperialism” refers to the network of relations through which capitalism subjugates its pre-capitalist setting for its own purposes. These purposes have changed through time, but one common theme has been to use the tropical and semi-tropical land-mass to obtain goods needed by the capitalist North but not producible there. Since the size of this land-mass is given and more or less used up, these goods can be obtained by compressing local demand. Imperialism in all its phases has exercised such compression through various instruments. The current phase, that of neo-liberal globalization, is characterized by relatively free movement of goods and services, and capital, including finance, across national boundaries. Globalization of finance forces nation-States of the global South to obey the dictates of finance and withdraw support from petty production, especially peasant agriculture. This undermines the latter’s viability, causing peasant suicides, a swelling of the ranks of agricultural labourers and an exodus to towns. Simultaneously all restraints on the pace of technological-cum-structural change are removed, raising the rate of growth of labour productivity and hence reducing the rate of growth of employment even in countries experiencing increased output growth rates. There is thus a rise in labour reserves relative to the work force which reduces the bargaining strength even of organized workers, pushing all workers, peasants and other petty producers towards absolute immizeration. Workers in advanced countries experience a similar fate. The global mobility of capital, allowing relocation of activities to the global South, makes them compete against Southern workers; they too now get exposed to the baneful effects of the massive labour reserves of the periphery. This synchronous worsening of the conditions of labour in the North and the South, is accompanied by a rise in labour productivity everywhere, which raises the share of surplus in world output, and hence growing income inequality and a tendency towards global over-production. Such over-production cannot be kept in check through State intervention, as globalized finance, always opposed to direct State intervention, now enjoys dominance. Asset price bubbles can prevent it for a while; but with no comparable bubble replacing the American housing bubble that collapsed in 2008, the world economy is caught in a prolonged structural crisis that further worsens the conditions of labour.
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44 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
MODUS OPERANDI OF IMPERIALISM There is a wide range of commodities that capitalism cannot do without, but cannot produce at all, or not in the requisite quantities within its metropolitan base. Minerals, above all oil, are obvious members of this group; but so are tropical crops essential for metropolitan capitalism. These include natural fibres, oilseeds, beverages, several food grains, spices, fruits and vegetables, which can either not be grown at all, or grown only for a limited period, in the temperate lands where metropolitan capitalism is based. Supplies have to be obtained from the tropical and semi-tropical regions where they are produced by numerous peasants. But the land mass in the tropical and semi-tropical regions is given and more or less used up; its “effective” quantity can be increased no doubt through land-augmenting technological changes, but these typically require State expenditure and are beyond the capacity of individual peasants: State investment in irrigation is required to raise yields and make multiple cropping possible; State spending on research and development is required to improve agricultural practices for raising yields; State effort by way of extension services is required to provide the fruits of such research to numerous peasants; and State support against price fluctuations is required to reduce peasants’ risks so that they can adopt new practices (U. Patnaik and P. Patnaik 2016). Metropolitan capital however is always opposed to any State intervention that does not directly serve its own material interests or is not mediated through itself. In particular it is opposed to any State intervention to increase peasant output and incomes in the global South. As the demand for tropical and semi-tropical products increases with capital accumulation in the metropolis, the escalating requirement for supplies is achieved by a method that is the direct opposite of this, namely by compressing the local absorption of these goods via a real income decline imposed on the population. Instead of an output and real income increase of the peasantry, metropolitan capitalism seeks to impose a real income compression on the local population including the peasantry. Such compression may not release the specific goods it requires; but land hitherto directed to cultivating those goods whose local absorption goes down because of real income compression can now be released for cultivating what is needed by the metropolis. Metropolitan capitalism therefore seeks to divert tropical land use away from meeting local needs to meeting metropolitan needs. Imperialism uses a set of instruments through which this compression of real income and demand is imposed on the population of the periphery. This argument may appear an exaggeration as the value of tropical and semi-tropical goods entering directly, or indirectly, into production and consumption in the metropolis is relatively small. But values are not germane here. Apart from reflecting the unequal power relationship between the two regions, they obscure the need of the metropolis for tropical and semi-tropical goods as things, or as use-values.1 One may pay nothing for the bread one obtains, but that does not mean one can do without it. This real income compression can be effected either through a rise in prices while money incomes remain unchanged (termed by Keynes a “profit inflation”), or through a fall in money incomes at given prices. (These alternatives can also be expressed more appropriately in terms of rates of growth.) The former method entails the risk of destabilizing the value of money, if not in the metropolis then at least in the periphery. While its use is not shunned altogether it cannot constitute the core of any durable arrangement. It is the latter, namely a restraint on money incomes of the local population, that constitutes the modus operandi of imperialism.
Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization 45 This does not exhaust the full content of imperialism. Finding a market for metropolitan goods at the expense of local producers was, for a long time, an essential feature of imperialism. But control over land use in the periphery through imposing an income compression on the local working people is an abiding feature of imperialism in all its phases. Under colonialism, this happened in two main ways: “deindustrialization” which meant a displacement of local craft production through imports of machine-made goods from the metropolis to which these regions were forcibly opened up and which made large numbers of producers unemployed and underemployed; and a “drain” of surplus, mainly through appropriating a part of the tax proceeds that was siphoned off to the metropolis in the commodity-form of tropical and semi-tropical goods, ensuring for it a free supply of such goods (Baran 1957, Bagchi 1972). Political decolonization marked an end to these main colonial forms of income compression. Metropolitan needs for tropical and semi-tropical products were met for some time after independence through newly introduced measures of land augmentation in the periphery. But the absence of any means of imposing income compression always meant a looming threat of inflation for the metropolis. This threat became a reality in the early 1970s and brought the period of dirigiste development to an end, ushering in a new era of neo-liberalism that once again allowed income compression in the periphery.
NEO-LIBERALISM AND INCOME COMPRESSION The neo-liberal regime re-establishes the spontaneity of capitalism as opposed to the “controlled capitalism” that post-war dirigiste regimes had sought to introduce, both in the metropolis and in the periphery. Neo-liberal globalization is characterized by unrestricted cross-border movement of capital, including of finance; hence when a country gets caught in it, its nation-State is placed in the midst of globalized finance. In such a situation the writ of finance must run over the nation-State, for otherwise finance will leave the country en masse, precipitating a crisis. As long as governments, no matter of what political hue, remain caught in the web of global financial flows, they, perforce, have to remove controls of various kinds over capital, and reintroduce the spontaneity of the system.2 One consequence is the withdrawal of State support to petty production, including peasant agriculture, that had characterized the dirigiste regimes in the periphery, thus exposing this sector to incursion by the capitalist sector, which is a spontaneous tendency of capital. Under neo-liberalism, input subsidies for agriculture, and cheap credit, are whittled down; public investment in irrigation, crop research and land conservation, is curtailed; government purchase of peasants’ produce at remunerative prices is given up (though it still continues for food grains in some countries, which has been a bone of contention at the Doha round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations); quantitative import restrictions on agricultural products are abolished and tariffs are reduced; and public extension services built under dirigisme are withdrawn. Agriculture therefore ceases to be profitable; and investment for land augmentation that had marked the dirigiste period atrophies, bringing down agricultural growth. Reduced growth by lowering peasant incomes reduces demand too, but the actual compression of demand imposed on the working people is much greater. The petty producers comprising weavers, craftsmen, fishermen and artisans are now exposed to competition from capitalist products as in colonial times, and experience sharp declines in incomes; the removal
46 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of all restrictions on labour-displacing technological change within the capitalist sector itself has the same effect. This real income decline is further accentuated by the privatization of education and health services which make them more expensive for peasants, labourers and petty producers, a fact not captured adequately in the usual price indices. Government expenditure in rural areas, including on rural infrastructure, is curtailed which has its multiplier effects. It is also adjusted to the need of the capitalist sector to exercise demand compression in the periphery: when metropolitan demand for some goods creates shortages within the periphery and starts pushing up prices, anti-inflation measures curtail government expenditure, causing a reduction in local demand for such goods, or for substitute goods from which land can be diverted. An indicator of the impoverishment of the peasantry is the drop in their numbers. In India, for instance, not only have over 320,000 peasants committed suicide in the two and a half decades since the introduction of neo-liberal policies, but the number of “cultivators” has dropped by 15 million between the decennial population censuses of 1991 and 2011. These missing cultivators have either become agricultural labourers or migrated to cities in search of non-existent jobs. Per capita real consumption expenditure in rural India fell in absolute terms by 9 per cent between 2011–12 and 2017–18 according to the National Sample Survey.3 The year 2011–12 itself had seen considerable impoverishment compared to the early 1990s when neo-liberalism was first introduced: the percentage of rural population accessing less than 2200 calories per person per day, the “norm” for defining rural poverty in India, had increased from 58 per cent in 1993–94 to 68 per cent in 2011–12; hence the drastic nature of the real income squeeze on the rural population can be well imagined. Those escaping rural distress by migrating to cities only swell the ranks of the reserve army of labour there. This is because neo-liberal capitalism removes all constraints on technological-cum-structural change in the economy, a removal necessitated by the economy’s being open to international competition. Such change, being generally labour-displacing, causes a rise in labour productivity. Labour productivity rises for two additional reasons: first, any rise in labour productivity in an economy with vast labour reserves that keep wage rates close to a subsistence level, increases the share of economic surplus in total output; and the surplus receivers, constituting the elite have a preference for the less labour-intensive commodities and life-styles prevalent in the metropolis, so that the greater the share of surplus in total output the higher ceteris paribus is the rate of labour productivity growth. Secondly, the periphery does not innovate, but obtains its technology from the metropolis; and as product and process innovations in the metropolis, which are generally labour-displacing, are inducted into the periphery, labour productivity in the latter increases for this reason as well. For all these reasons, even in countries experiencing high rates of growth of gross domestic product (GDP), the labour productivity growth is so high in a neo-liberal regime that the rate of growth of employment, which is the difference between the growth rates of output and labour productivity, is generally too low to absorb even the natural increase in the workforce, let alone the migrants from the rural areas. The growing labour reserves do not take the form of growing open unemployment. Typically employment rationing implies a proliferation of part-time employment, intermittent employment, casual employment and disguised unemployment. This makes the measurement of unemployment difficult. In India a term “usual status” employment is used in official statistics to cover those who report being employed for 183 days or more over the preceding year. Between 2004–05 and 2009–10 when the economy was growing at 8.73 per cent per annum,
Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization 47 the growth of “usual status” employment was only 0.88 per cent,4 which was far below the rate of growth of population (nearly 1.5 per cent) and hence of the natural workforce. Even high rates of GDP growth cannot prevent swelling labour reserves relative to the workforce. Swelling labour reserves relative to the workforce weaken trade unions and exert a downward pressure on the wages even of the small minority of workers who are organized and have full-time employment. We thus have a synchronous movement in a downward direction of the real incomes of the entire workforce, consisting of peasants, other petty producers, agricultural labourers, part-time and casual workers and even unionized workers in a neo-liberal regime; the vector of real incomes of all these groups becomes less than before. This is because the linkage through the product market (a lower price for peasants entailing higher real incomes for urban workers) is more than offset by the linkage through the labour market (a lower price for peasants entailing a swelling labour reserve relative to the workforce and hence lower real incomes for urban workers).
RISE IN THE SHARE OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC SURPLUS Along with this synchronous movement of real income within a country under neo-liberalism, there is also synchronous movement, exactly in the same sense, across countries. This is because for the first time in history the current globalization breaks up the segmentation of the world economy. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labour from the periphery which had been colonized and witnessed the creation of massive labour reserves because of deindustrialization and the drain of surplus mentioned earlier, had been prohibited from migrating freely to the metropolis; in fact, it still is. In the “long nineteenth century” (up to the first world war) there was a managed migration of enslaved workers, followed by Chinese and Indian indentured labour to other tropical and semi-tropical locations to work in mines and plantations; there was an equally large order of permanent emigration of Europeans to temperate regions – Canada, the United States, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand – where the emigrants had appropriated the land resources of local inhabitants and started cultivation and manufacturing. These two streams, each of about 50 million persons were kept strictly separate and their wage rates differed (Kenwood and Lougheed 1971, Lewis 1979). Simultaneously, capital from the global North, even though there was no ban on its moving South, did not actually locate plants there to take advantage of lower wages for meeting global demand. It moved South only to mines and plantations thus refurbishing the colonial pattern of international division of labour, but not to manufacturing that could have broken this division of labour. Capital from the periphery, already hemmed in by free trade at home, faced high tariffs on its manufactured products in the metropolis. The world economy thus got segmented into a developed part and underdeveloped part; wages in the latter remained close to a subsistence level, while wages in the former kept going up as its labour productivity increased (Patnaik 1997). This segmentation has come to an end with the current globalization, since capital from the North has been locating plants in the South to take advantage of lower wages for meeting global demand. True, not all countries, and only some in Asia, have been the favourite destinations for such outsourcing of activities (Nayyar 2019); but this has meant that workers in the North are now weakened in their struggle for higher wages. They are effectively
48 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work exposed to competition from workers in the South, and hence to the baneful consequences of the massive labour reserves of the latter. Joseph Stiglitz (2013) estimates that the average real wage of a male American worker in 2011 was marginally lower than in 1968. Much the same is true for other advanced countries as well. Thus globalization of capital has meant that real wages in the metropolis have become linked to the real wages in the periphery and the two have moved down synchronously under the regime of neo-liberal globalization.5 Therefore, a hallmark of the current globalization is synchronous movement of the incomes of working people all over the world. They move not to the same extent, but roughly in the same direction, which is one of approximate stagnation-cum-downward movement. While this has been the case with regard to wages, labour productivity everywhere has been moving up, which means that the share of surplus in output has increased in every country and in the world as a whole. The findings of Piketty (2013) and others about the increase in income inequality in several countries, though explained by them differently, are because of this phenomenon of a rise in the share of economic surplus in output everywhere. This has an extremely important implication: it produces an ex ante tendency towards over-production in the world economy.
THE OVER-PRODUCTION CRISIS Since the propensity to consume out of working people’s incomes is greater than out of the surplus, a rise in the share of surplus, that is a shift from working people’s income to surplus, lowers consumption demand for any given level of investment, and hence overall aggregate demand in the world economy or in any closed economy. Investment which is given in any period, based on decisions taken in the past, then gets lowered in the next period because of the current period’s reduced aggregate demand, and the economy starts on a path of contraction; or more accurately, the time profiles of consumption, investment, output and employment get pulled down. Even if some economies manage to counteract this contraction through larger exports, others by the same token are particularly hard hit. The general tendency towards stagnation is not negated by it. This however is an ex ante tendency which does not get realized if there are counteracting factors. The most significant of these is State expenditure, the use of which had been advocated by Keynes for keeping an economy close to full employment. But since there is no world State to undertake Keynesian demand management, this task has to be left to individual nation-States. They are hamstrung however by the fact that globalized finance is de facto opposed to any such intervention by them. The reason is as follows. State expenditure can increase aggregate demand only if it is financed either by a fiscal deficit (in which case there is no accompanying reduction in anyone else’s demand) or by a tax on capitalists (who save a considerable part of their income and whose demand reduction therefore cannot equal the full amount of the tax); taxing working people to finance a rise in State spending does not increase aggregate demand, since their demand goes down by more or less the full amount of the tax they pay. Finance capital however is opposed to both a fiscal deficit and to taxing capitalists, which is why the State gets incapacitated for increasing aggregate demand. Finance capital’s opposition to higher taxes on capitalists is not difficult to understand. But its opposition to a fiscal deficit is more intriguing, though quite indubitable, as is evident
Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization 49 from the fact that under neo-liberal globalization almost all countries (excepting the United States) have enacted fiscal responsibility legislation limiting the deficit to around 3 per cent of GDP (which is reminiscent of the gold standard days though it was zero then). This opposition arises from the basic apprehension that any direct intervention by the State to stimulate demand would de-legitimize socially the role of the capitalists, whose “state of confidence” would then cease to matter, encouraging further steps towards undermining their hegemony. This opposition of finance to State intervention in demand management through fiscal means (monetary policy that works through respecting capitalists’ state of confidence and hence their hegemony, is acceptable to finance capital, but ineffective in countering stagnation), becomes decisive when the State is a nation-State and finance is globalized. Neo-liberal globalization therefore produces an ex ante tendency towards over-production, while eliminating simultaneously the main instrument to counter this tendency. If capitalism did not get engulfed in crisis earlier (though growth rates in the world economy had come down markedly compared to the period of post-war dirigisme) the reason was the formation of asset-price bubbles in the United States, which stimulated aggregate demand through a pervasive, though largely spurious, wealth effect. The first was the “dot-com-bubble” in the 1990s and then the housing bubble early this century; but the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 has plunged world capitalism into a prolonged crisis from which there has been no real recovery (Foster and McChesney 2017). This crisis gets camouflaged, especially in the United States, by a decline in labour force participation rate, which is actually a manifestation of the “discouraged worker” effect and understates unemployment. If we take the same participation rate as in early 2008 then the pre-pandemic unemployment rate would be 8 per cent, and not 4 per cent as official data suggest. There has been no comparable bubble since 2008, first, because bubbles are not made to order; they cannot be guaranteed to emerge even if interest rates are pushed down to zero. Besides, the very collapse of the earlier “bubble” makes people reluctant to engage in the kind of speculative spree that could generate another comparable bubble. The world economy consequently remains mired in crisis. A co-ordinated fiscal stimulus by several major States coming together, which could mimic the actions of a World State and could over-ride the opposition of globalized finance in a manner that an individual nation-State cannot do, has not even been mooted in the present context, let alone attempted, as it had been during the Great Depression of the 1930s.6 The United States under these circumstances has resorted to a degree of protectionism to revive its economy, which represents a retreat from globalization (though there has been no withdrawal from a regime of unrestricted financial flows); but other countries cannot mimic its actions without generating financial outflows. And if capital controls are introduced to prevent such outflows, then that would mean the end of neo-liberal globalization. Neo-liberal capitalism therefore has reached a dead-end. Extricating the world economy from its current crisis, which predates the coronavirus-caused crisis that has been superimposed upon it, requires overcoming the hegemony of finance that characterizes neo-liberal capitalism. Within neo-liberal capitalism there is no exit from the current stagnation and crisis. There is not even any discussion on how the crisis may be overcome within the capitalist system, as there had been during the 1930s with the work of Keynes and others.
50 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work For the working people of the world this means the additional imposition, with no end in sight, of accentuated unemployment, on top of a situation where their real incomes were already languishing over a long period of time.
THE GROWTH OF NEO-FASCISM The strengthening of neo-fascist forces all across the world has to be seen in this context. These forces become politically important and move centre stage in periods of crisis in capitalism, as during the 1930s. Middle-class insecurity which gets heightened during such crises provides them with the initial mass support which is further enhanced with support from the lumpenproletariat, the semi-proletariat and even some sections of workers. Above all they get the backing of a big section of monopoly capital, which provides them with financial and media support , as it finds in them an invaluable ally that deflects attention from the failings of the system to some hapless “other” as the cause of people’s distress. Fascism gains ascendancy not when the Left is powerful, but when it is divided, or temporarily paralyzed. The current upsurge of fascism owes much to the fact that the Left at present has an ambivalent attitude towards neo-liberal globalization. While it is opposed to the hegemony of finance over this globalization, the fact that it nonetheless represents a transcendence of the “nationalism” in whose name Europe has fought two world wars, is welcomed by significant sections within it. Hence while the liberal bourgeoisie has no panacea for the crisis, the Left too lacks a clear strategy to go beyond neo-liberal capitalism. This enables the fascist forces to push themselves forward. Where they acquire the minimum strength to attract the notice, and the financial backing, of monopoly capital, they move towards capturing power; and when in power they unleash the usual mephitic mix of State repression and street vigilantism to terrorize intellectuals, attack the rights of workers and peasants, and subvert the institutions of a liberal order. The transition from capturing power to building a fully fledged fascist State, however, is a long journey which has not yet been successfully traversed in any country. There is a fundamental difference between the fascism of the 1930s and contemporary fascism. The finance capital that supported fascism then was nation-based, nation-State-aided, had a national identity such as German or Japanese finance capital and was engaged in intense rivalry with other finance capitals. Contemporary finance capital is globalized; the domestic corporate-financial oligarchy in any particular country that supports fascism is aligned to this globalized capital, and inter-imperialist rivalry among metropolitan powers has become muted. The factors that make Keynesian demand management impossible today, also operate when there is a fascist government. Such a government cannot run large fiscal deficits for fear of offending globalized finance capital, and hence cannot bring about a military-expenditure-stimulated recovery from the crisis.7 Fascism in power in the 1930s had pulled those economies out of recession much earlier than countries with liberal bourgeois governments, by increasing armament expenditure financed by government borrowing. Contemporary fascism cannot bring about such a recovery for exactly the same reason that the liberal bourgeois governments cannot, namely the opposition to fiscal deficit by globalized finance capital whose hegemony is not shaken off by fascist rule but is further strengthened.
Imperialism and labour under neo-liberal globalization 51 Because there are no fully fledged fascist States, while the neo-fascist governments that exist cannot overcome the crisis to boost their popularity, existing fascist governments might well lose power. But because they will not engage in war, they will also not burn themselves out easily. They will remain for a long time as political contenders, stoking hatred against the targeted minority. Likewise they will seek to implement quite systematically the agenda of destroying trade unions and the viability of peasant agriculture through legislation that pleases the corporate oligarchy, that institutes “labour market flexibility” and facilitates corporate take-over of agriculture. Hence the fact that contemporary fascism will be less heinous but more long-lasting cannot provide much consolation. Until the Left eschews its opposition to “delinking” from globalization, and thereby re-acquires the autonomy of the nation-State that is currently under thraldom to globalized finance, we cannot transcend the present conjuncture. But the nation-State that can acquire this autonomy will have to be a State based on the support of workers, peasants, craftsmen, fishermen and agricultural labourers, in short the mass of the working people. Such a State will face immense transitional difficulties, including large capital flights, economic sanctions imposed by advanced countries and even imperialist attempts at political destabilization. It will overcome these difficulties only if the working people are prepared to cope with them.
NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6
7
For the distinction between use-value and exchange value see Marx (1978, 43–53). The removal of such controls and the ensuing vulnerability to financial outflows are discussed in Patnaik (1999), Chang, Palma and Whittaker (2001), O’Connell (2002) and Ghosh and Chandrasekhar (2009). These data were so embarrassing for the government that they were quickly withdrawn from the public domain. This figure is arrived at by comparing data from the 61st and 66th rounds of the National Sample Survey. Even if the fall may have been marginal or nil for advanced country workers and the unionized workers in the periphery, this stagnation does not violate synchronous movement as defined here. The Covid 19 crisis has greatly sharpened the contradiction between finance and the people. Most advanced country governments have provided fiscal transfers to the people that are normally frowned upon by finance; in the global South, however, governments like in India have kow-towed to global finance and provided only meagre relief to people despite draconian lockdowns. After the pandemic subsides, countries providing relief will have to decide whether to carry on with defying finance. For doing so will require political support from workers and hence a change in the economic order, but capitalism is unlikely to tolerate it. Covid, some would argue, will change this. But the real point, once the Covid interregnum is over, is whether the hegemony of finance can be shaken off. This requires a political struggle involving the workers that capitalism will find too risky.
REFERENCES Bagchi, A.K. (1972) “Some International Foundations of Capitalist Growth and Underdevelopment”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 7, Issues 31–3 (Aug. 5). Baran, P.A. (1957) The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press). Chang Ha-Joon, Palma G. and Whittaker, D.H (2001) Financial Liberalization and the Asian Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
52 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Foster, J.B. and McChesney, R.W. (2017) The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, Paperback). Ghosh, J. and Chandrasekhar, C.P. (eds) (2009) After Crisis (Delhi: Tulika Books). Kenwood, A.G. and Lougheed, A.L. (1971) The Growth of the International Economy 1820–1960 (London: Allen and Unwin). Lewis, W.A. (1979) Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Marx, Karl (1978) Capital Volume I (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Nayyar, Deepak (2019) Resurgent Asia: Diversity in Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press). O’Connell, A. (2002) “The Recent Crisis of the Argentine Economy” www.networkideas.org Patnaik, P. (1997) Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Patnaik, P. (1999) “Capitalism in Asia at the End of the Millennium”, Monthly Review, Vol. 51, Issue 3 (July–August). Patnaik, Utsa and Patnaik, Prabhat (2016) A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press and Delhi: Tulika Books). Piketty, Thomas (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Stiglitz, J.E. (2013) “Inequality is Holding Back Recovery”, New York Times, January 13.
FURTHER READING Magdoff, H. (1969) The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press). Smith, John (2016) Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press). Patnaik, Utsa and Patnaik, Prabhat (2021) Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press). Bagchi, A.K. (2006), Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Delhi: Oxford University Press). Sen, S. and Marcuzzo, M.C. (ed.) (2018) The Changing Face of Imperialism (Delhi: Routledge).
3. Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ Henry Bernstein
INTRODUCTION Much debate about capitalism in the current period of neoliberal globalization hinges on notions of the ‘surplus capital’ and ‘surplus population’ it generates, and sometimes how the two are connected. One key to understanding those debates is the difference between explaining the central dynamics of contemporary capitalism in terms of either their functions for capitalism or as effects of its manifold contradictions. This is a pervasive issue for Marxian political economy, also manifested, for example, in debates about the origins and development of capitalism, and Jairus Banaji’s argument for doing ‘theory as history’ (Banaji 2010). The second approach, that of effects, is suggested here with reference to what Marx said about the ‘reserve army of labour’ and how his ideas are used. This requires some attention to demography and is further illustrated by proposing a notion of ‘classes of labour’ to replace ‘stereotypical’ (in Lenin’s term) understandings of proletarianization.
MARX AND THE ‘RESERVE ARMY OF LABOUR’ Here are two sets of observations about labour in today’s global capitalism. One states that there is a ‘massive expansion of the global working class in classic Marxist forms’ (Munck 2013, 754), and that the ‘basic fact is that long-term employment is rising’ (ibid 753). ‘Perhaps the most salient feature in the qualitative composition of the great quantitative leap forward of the global labour force is its concentration in the South’, above all in ‘informal’ employment (ibid 755). Of ‘the classic Marxist forms’ this is held to exemplify, the author points to ‘the shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour’ (ibid 754). The other set of observations states that the outcast proletariat—perhaps 1.5 billion people today, 2.5 billion by 2030—is the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet. By and large, the urban informal working class is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers during booms; to be expelled during busts; then reabsorbed again in the next expansion. On the contrary, this is a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix. (Davis 2004, 11)
These sets of observations diverge not only in their empirical claims but what they propose: on one hand, ‘classic Marxist forms’, on the other hand, ‘not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense’. This prompts revisiting what Marx said, especially in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25 ‘The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation’, which serves as a kind of summary for much of Volume I, and, in particular, the chapter’s sections on ‘The progres53
54 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work sive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army’; ‘Different forms of existence of the relative surplus population. The general law of capitalist accumulation’; and ‘Illustrations of the general law of capitalist accumulation’, mostly from England. Marx stated that it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces … a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population … The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself … in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirement of capital. (Marx 1976, 782, 798)
In turn, the relative surplus population or industrial reserve army of labour is ‘the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work’ in relation to wage levels (Marx 1976, 792). Marx sketched different forms of the relative surplus population that he termed ‘floating’, ‘latent’ and ‘stagnant’. Of these, for example, he remarks that the ‘stagnant’ component is part of the active labour army but ‘with extremely irregular employment’, providing capital with ‘an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power’ with maximum hours and minimum wages, especially in ‘special branches of capitalist exploitation’ like ‘domestic industry’ (Marx 1976, 796). Under the rubric of ‘pauperism’ Marx included the demoralized, the ragged and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. (Marx 1976, 797)
BEYOND MARX Marx’s observations about the conditions and crises of the reproduction of labour, and their connections with the accumulation cycles and strategies of capital, resonate powerfully in the twenty-first-century world of globalizing capitalism. Of course, there are important issues today that Marx did not consider (or not in any systematic fashion), in theoretical terms, not least the place of labour in capitalism, argued notably by Lebowitz (2003), and the gendered nature of the reproduction of labour, and of social reproduction more generally. Nor in empirical terms, which is hardly surprising given the momentous historical distance between what he observed and analysed over three or four decades in nineteenth-century England and the world of global capitalism now. That distance is inscribed in the formation, cycles and mutations of the world economy since his time, and their links with the histories of colonial imperialism and their legacies; with the developmentalism of the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia (and their Latin American counterparts) in the context of the ‘long boom’/‘golden age’ of the world economy in the 1950s and 1960s; and with the subsequent crisis of accumulation that terminated the golden age and catalysed both contemporary globalization and the hegemonic ambitions of the neoliberal project from the 1970s.
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ 55 Nonetheless, Marx’s observations do have an evident ring in today’s circumstances of the conditions and crises of reproduction of ‘classes of labour’ (see further below). In fact, there are few social forms and practices of exploitation and accumulation in the past histories of capitalist development that cannot be found somewhere today. ‘Domestic industry’ may appear ‘archaic’ in its relatively simple technologies and technical divisions of labour, and often brutal oppression of labour. Yet as we know, it is incorporated in some of the cutting-edge, organizational forms of contemporary, large-scale capital (global commodity chains, varieties of outsourcing and so on). At the same time, the ‘law of supply and demand of labour’ (the term used by Marx, above) suggests that: ‘The higher the productivity of labour, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their own existence’ (Marx 1976, 799): ‘machinery produces a surplus working population’ (ibid, 531–2, emphasis added). We can then ask: is the impetus towards ‘surplus population’ an effect of capital’s law of accumulation or a function of it? … if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation … it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production … Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity … the constant reproduction of a relative surplus population of workers is a necessity of capitalist accumulation. (Marx 1976, 784, 786, 787, emphases added)
Do these statements – notably ‘effects become causes’ – point towards a ‘functional’ view of ‘surplus population’, and one with problematic legacies? Marx, no doubt wisely, did not attempt any general elaboration of the extent to which a ‘surplus population’/reserve army of labour arises, of what size and scale, nor when, how and why. At the same time, he notes that ‘like all other laws, it is modified in its working by many circumstances’ (Marx 1976, 798). It is those ‘many circumstances’ (historical specificities), of course, which enter into the illustrations Marx provided in Chapter 25. In the tension between surplus population as effect, albeit systemic effect, and function of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, it is clearly ‘effect’ that informs Davis’s characterization (above) of ‘a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation’. I propose that ‘effect’ is preferable, especially in any investigation of many and diverse concrete circumstances. I do not know of any arguments about the peripheries of the capitalist world economy that centre on the (relentless) development of the productive forces there, whatever other benefits (or ‘functions’) peripheral ‘surplus populations’ are suggested to have for world capitalism, typically framed in terms of the ‘cheapness’ of labour power either or both in terms of its conditions of reproduction and wage levels. This applies whether or not there is a ‘shift from the formal to the real subsumption of labour’ (Munck 2013, 754) which is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the development of the productive forces, and pace Cleaver’s view that Marx’s view of the reserve army was more about the demand for labour than its supply (Cleaver 2019, 455), perhaps signalling a desire to bypass the ‘population question’? On the ‘supply’ side of the ‘law of supply and demand of labour’: Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits’. (Cleaver 2019, 788, emphases added)
56 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Here Marx appears to suggest that capitalism needs to create a reserve army which population growth alone might not supply because of its ‘natural limits’ (in effect, a counter-Malthusian position). While Marx gives specific instances of dispossession (not least of agricultural labour) to illustrate concrete historical circumstances of the supply of (industrial) workers, and observations about their gender and age composition, he provides no theorization of the demographic sources of surplus population. Indeed, apart from the polemic against Malthus (and others), there is no ‘theory of population’ in Marx nor any formulation of a ‘special law of population’ peculiar to the capitalist mode of production.
POPULATION At the heart of this particular problem is that labour power, at the core of Marx’s theory of value, is not produced as a commodity. As Seccombe (1993, 9) put it: ‘Labour-power is consumed in the workplace; at home it is produced apart from capital’: The family-formation strategies of subordinate classes respond to their own subsistence imperatives; they must never be treated as if producers, by balancing the dependency ratios of their households, were striving to reproduce the present mode of production or to satisfy the demands of their masters. (Seccombe 1993, 3, emphases added)
Advances along the lines indicated by Seccombe are registered in his own extraordinary investigations of demographic change in transitions from feudalism to capitalism in northwestern Europe (1992) and in the European industrial revolutions of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries (1993). Also, of course, major advances are registered in materialist feminist work on the gendered domains, relations and dynamics of social reproduction (e.g., Bhattacharya 2017), some of which argues that the domestic labour of reproduction is productive of value. This, however, still falls short of constituting a ‘law of population’ peculiar to capitalism, leaving us with the residual of Marx’s ‘natural’ growth of and limits to population (above). There are probably two major reasons for this lacuna. One is the antipathy, inherited from Marx, towards the Malthusian legacy and the deeply reactionary purposes it continues to serve. The other, much less remarked, is the intellectual problem, perhaps intrinsic to demography, of inferring the reasons for individual ‘choices’ or ‘decisions’ about (and impositions of) fertility practices from aggregated patterns (for Marxists class patterns) of population change, a problem that Seccombe himself may not have completely avoided. What is needed then is a theoretical framework that aims to connect patterns of population growth with dynamics of capital accumulation and the types and extent of employment they generate (or fail to generate). As always, this is easier said than done. One important recent attempt is by Aaron Benanav (2019) which examines aggregated statistical data, much of it generated by demographic studies, to explain ‘the growth of the global informal workforce, 1950–2000’. In doing so he proposes two forms of ‘demographic dispossession’: of peasants and of the children of urban workers. The first operates through pressures on access to sufficient land for self-reproduction, as well as class differentiation of small farmers (and ‘land grabbing’ and the like, one should add), evidence of which is provided by many case studies. Concerning the second
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ 57 When parents no longer provide for their children, they revisit their own dispossession on their sons and daughters … In periods of population growth, this process issues in an expansion of the urban labor supply, dramatically increasing the size of the dispossessed population … [this] was the single largest contributor to proletarianization after 1950, yet it is frequently misconstrued … The key here is that, unlike migration rates … rapid population growth rates generate demographic dispossession largely independently of the prevailing speed of economic growth ... although it unfolded at a decelerating pace [from the 1980s, HB], demographic growth continued to give rise to major increases in the labor supply. In the waning decades of the twentieth century, these unfolding trends interacted with a global economic slowdown, issuing in a dramatic informalization of urban work. (Benanav 2019, 686, 687, 688, 689)
In short, there is an ‘autonomy of demographic processes from economic ones’, with ‘the specific pattern of demographic growth that was behind demographic dispossession’ (ibid 694, emphasis added) explained in terms of difference from the model of ‘demographic transition’ based on Northern experiences and at the core of macro-population studies (see also Seccombe 1993). In the South ‘population growth rates were simultaneously much higher and more urban’ than in the North (ibid 699) as fertility rates did not decline as rapidly as mortality rates, with the latter largely ‘an unintended consequence of a health transition’ (ibid 700, emphasis added). Further, Benanav’s argument of the employment effects of ‘global economic slowdown’ also provides a glimpse of the ‘periodicity’ proposed by Marx (above) concerning the different dynamics of the reserve army in moments of expansion and retraction of capitalist accumulation and employment. Benanav’s argument is informed by materialist concerns, and its dispassionate tone does not exclude recognition of the multiple savage inequalities of global capitalism. I have emphasised his ‘autonomy of demographic processes from economic ones’ and ‘unintended consequence’ in support of the position that ‘surplus population’ is better investigated in the first place as one of many contradictory effects of capitalist development, whether in general or manifested in many different circumstances, rather than as ‘functional’ to it by dint of the interests of capital in general or capitalism on a world scale, let alone any conscious intent on the part of the latter (see further below). To move from a demographic perspective to that of political economy – to investigate whether, how and how much, demographic ‘effects become causes’ – requires a great deal more theoretical and empirical analysis than ‘functionalist’ versions of ‘surplus population’ have provided to date. Next I comment on several other conceptual issues central to the concerns here: how we understand capitalism as a ‘mode of production’; meanings of ‘proletarianization’, ‘semi-proletarianization’ and the like; the places of petty commodity production in the reproduction of labour; and the rationale of the notion of ‘classes of labour’.
CAPITALISM Theory as History On the first, pointing towards an alternative way of using Marx, and doing ‘theory as history’ in all its complexity, is Jairus Banaji’s argument that capitalist relations of production cannot be reduced to any stereotypical ‘freedom’ of wage labour. Nor can they be read from any specific form of the immediate process of production, specific form of exploitation or type of enterprise, but are constituted by the laws of motion of the mode of production as a whole; ‘the
58 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work immediate process of production can be structured in all sorts of ways, even under capitalism’ (Banaji 2010, 4): Relations of production are simply not reducible to forms of exploitation, both because modes of production embrace a wider range of relationships than those in their immediate process of production and because the deployment of labour, the organisation and control of the labour-process, ‘correlates’ with historical relations of production in complex ways. (Banaji 2010, 41)
This is a liberating perspective that opens up new ways of looking at the range of forms of production, and of social relations and practices, within an expansive understanding of capitalism even if inevitably it brings other issues in its train and (so far) leaves largely unanswered difficult questions about periodizing the emergence and development of capitalism’s ‘laws of motion’ on a world scale. So, this is not a blank cheque for Banaji’s brilliant and often idiosyncratic work, despite its enormous stimulation; like any other its method must be put to the test of concrete investigation and analysis which he has undertaken in relation to different historical contexts, before and since the emergence of world capitalism. Nonetheless, ‘theory as history’ provides a point of departure very different from a ‘stereotypical’ view of what capitalism in all its constituent social and spatial sites and dynamics ‘should’ look like. Proletarianization and Primitive Accumulation There are two key moments in processes of proletarianization. The first is that of dispossession of the means of production, hence reproduction, which registers the availability of ‘free’ wage labour in Marx’s ironic formulation, creating a class compelled to work for the possessors of the means of production (capital) under the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1976, 899). The second moment is the entry into wage work to produce surplus value for capital. The impact of the first moment without realization of the second is neatly encapsulated in Basu and Das’s formulation (2009, 158) of ‘dispossession without proletarianization’. Evidently, notions of ‘surplus population’ and the reserve army of labour point towards the variable connections (and spaces) between these two moments. Moreover, the ‘excess’ of those created by the first moment but not absorbed into the second is where disagreements about the scale of ‘surplus population’ and its key characteristics lurk, notably its ‘proletarian’ or ‘semi-proletarian’ nature or otherwise. This suggests the need for further determinations, even at this level of generality, for example, in the context of debates about ‘informality’ and ‘permanent semi-proletarianization’ (Moyo et al. 2012): On a global scale, we may affirm that capitalism has always sought to create the conditions for the perpetuation of non-remunerated labour outside the market and the displacement of the cost of social reproduction onto the labourers themselves … the expulsion of small producers from the countryside without their full absorption into the industrial or service sectors, or their permanent urbanization. This expelled population has a fundamental function in the world economy, not merely as a labour reserve but … which also ‘subsidizes’ the reproduction of capital by its own unremunerated labour. The self-exploitation of the semi-proletariat is a key dimension of super-exploitation, and is itself an extra-economic contribution to capital, in the sense of not being accounted for by the market. (Moyo et al. 2012, 187)
Such formulations are supported by no systematic demographic accounting or theses, especially regarding the ‘supply’ side of ‘the law of supply and demand for labour’; also, Benanav
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ 59 (2019) contests the widespread argument – or assumption? – of the (primarily) rural sources of urban ‘surplus population’ today. Another issue, with crucial analytical implications, is the final statement quoted of the ‘non-market’ qualities of ‘semi-proletarian’ ‘self-’ or ‘super-exploitation’ as an ‘extra-economic contribution to capital’. For Moyo et al. (2012) the ‘underdevelopment’ of the South does not require it being ‘outside’ of capitalism (in Luxemburg’s sense), rather the opposite: it is deemed to manifest ongoing ‘primitive accumulation’ by virtue of its ‘non-remunerated’ labour outside the market, and ‘extra-economic’ mechanisms within world capitalism, through which super-exploitation occurs. It is not clear what ‘outside the market’ signifies theoretically in such statements, as distinct from being ‘outside’ capitalism in the Luxemburgian tradition. Rather, ‘primitive accumulation’ seems to serve as a great residual of anything that was not tabled and ‘resolved’ in Capital, and is thrown up by the histories of capitalism in the 150 years since. There is a profound irony at work here. That is, many uses of continuing ‘primitive accumulation’ (with all it is held to explain) rest on a forced (‘stereotypical’ in Lenin’s term) binary between what is held to be capitalism ‘proper’ and relations, forms and practices within the worlds of capitalism that deviate from it. It follows that the stricter and narrower the conception of the former (capitalism ‘proper’), based in the abstractions of Capital which are applied as empirical descriptions without any mediations, the wider the field for highlighting ongoing primitive accumulation as built into the functioning of capitalism. The irony is compounded by assimilating (‘mainstream’) ‘functionalist’ readings of Capital to explanations of continuing ‘primitive accumulation’ as more or less purposefully designed by the logic, interests or needs of capital in general, a teleology expressed in ‘capitalism has always sought’ (Moyo et al. 2012). A further aspect of the irony suggested is that today relatively few(er) Marxist thinkers and political formations adhere, at least explicitly, to (‘orthodox’) conceptions of capitalist development as ‘progress’. There is no reason why that fundamental aspect of the (necessarily abstract) theory of the capitalist mode of production – the sale of labour power and its reproduction through the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ without the (regular) use of force – should imply that the concrete trajectories of accumulation to the present day are unmarked by coercion and violence or that there is no ‘political’ that permeates the ‘economic’ processes of capitalism, that the theory of the mode of production does not require attention to the capitalist state (or states). Or that histories of accumulation, in all their contradictions – specificities, different patterns, rhythms, fluctuations, violence and outcomes – do not require analysis of the formation, functioning and activities of states, of the uneven course of class and popular struggles. This is a bizarre conclusion to attribute to Marx (and to Marxism), and is the effect, surely, of applying – in ‘stereotypical’ fashion – the abstractions of Capital directly to the terrain of empirical/ concrete analysis without mediation (‘concentration of many determinations’ in Marx’s term). ‘Informal’ Labour and Petty Commodity Production A particular element from intense and far-ranging debates about the ‘informal’ sector/ economy/labour (and even ‘informal proletariat’), that deserves comment concerns petty commodity production, agrarian and non-agrarian, rural and urban. Petty commodity production, in all its intrinsic diversity of forms and locations in social divisions of labour, frequently enters the reproduction/livelihood practices of ‘classes of labour’ in both the North and, especially, the South. The fundamental condition of existence of petty commodity production
60 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work today is the social relation between capital and (wage) labour in generalized commodity production (Bernstein 2010). It is not adequate to dismiss conceptions of ‘informal economy’ and petty commodity production as obscuring an ostensible reality of comprehensive proletarianization understood as (more or less conventional) wage employment as, for example, Saumyajit Bhattacharya (2014) does. While in some instances much of the labour in farming, as well as in urban and rural ‘informal economy’, might be ‘disguised wage labour’, this does not contradict the widespread prevalence – as well as the diversity and complexity – of petty commodity production in contemporary capitalism. Petty commodity production has its own ‘entry costs’ and reproduction costs, and contains both ‘petty accumulation’ and ‘sub-subsistence’ activity (in Davis’s terms) at its poles which manifest its contradictory unity of capital and labour respectively. In short, debates about petty commodity production often illuminate consideration of class dynamics within ‘informal economy’, and of (peripheral) ‘classes of labour’ more generally in contemporary capitalism, rather than obscure them pace S. Bhattacharya. Classes of Labour Finally, to the term ‘classes of labour’ that has been deployed here. It refers to ‘the growing numbers … who now depend – directly and indirectly – on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction’ (Panitch et al. 2001, ix), or that (rising) share of ‘the population that depends on selling its labor – or the simple products of its labor – to survive’ (Benanav 2019, 680). I have added emphases to these quotes to highlight the very fine lines between selling labour power and many forms of apparent petty commodity production, for example, in farming (petty cultivation) and in distribution (petty trade). In my view, ‘classes of labour’ is preferable to the inherited vocabulary of proletarianization/proletariat (and semi-proletarianization/semi-proletariat), as it is less encumbered with problematic assumptions and associations in both political economy, e.g., functional(ist) readings of Marx’s concept of the reserve army of labour, and political theory and ideology, e.g., constructions of an essentialized or idealized (Hegelian) collective class agency. This point has been well made in relation to notions of ‘the proletariat’ by Marcel van der Linden (2008) among others. It can also be approached from the perspective of ‘peasant studies’ to avoid, on the one hand, functionalist explanations of ‘peasant persistence’ as in the interests of capital, and, on the other hand, the elevation of ‘peasants’ to the status of principal ‘historical subject’ of the current era of world capitalism, thereby replacing the proletariat. What all members of ‘classes of labour’ share is their inability to reproduce themselves outside the generalized commodity relations of capitalism other than by exchanging their labour power, including many (the majority?) of those deemed ‘peasants’ and many, if not all, others in some form or other of apparent petty commodity production. At the same time, of course, the designation can only be an initial step, not least as it points towards the immense differentiation, hence heterogeneity, of ‘classes of labour’. Five broad (hypo)theses concerning differentiation/heterogeneity can be suggested, each of which is a basis for multiple further paths of inquiry. First the so-called North-South divide continues to constitute … the main obstacle to the formation of a homogeneous world proletarian condition. In spite of the relocation of industrial activities from North to South typical of the current crisis, conditions of working-class formation remain thoroughly dependent on the huge and still widening gap that separates the wealth, status and power of a rela-
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ 61 tively small number of Western countries from those of the countries that contain the vast majority of the world’s population. (Silver and Arrighi 2001, 54)
Beyond this, there are important variations between different regions and countries of the capitalist world economy, not least in terms of the extent and forms of activity of ‘classes of labour’, as well as of its internal differentiation, including in the informal economy. A second (hypo)thesis then is that the relative size and weight, and importantly the composition, of ‘classes of labour’ vary significantly with the times and places of historically specific patterns of capitalist development. Third, classes of labour in the ‘South’, and increasingly in the ‘North’ (Breman and van der Linden 2014), have to pursue their reproduction through insecure and oppressive – and typically increasingly scarce – wage employment and/or a range of likewise precarious small-scale and insecure ‘informal sector’ (‘survival’) activities, including farming in some instances; in effect, various and complex combinations of employment and self-employment. Additionally, many pursue their means of reproduction across different sites of the social division of labour: urban and rural, agricultural and non-agricultural, as well as wage employment and self-employment, ‘footloose labour’ to use the term of Jan Breman (1996). The social locations and identities that classes of labour inhabit, combine and move between, make for ever more fluid boundaries where the masses of ‘surplus’ labour, the ‘informal working class’ and formal and informal economies intersect. In short, there is no ‘homogeneous proletarian condition’ other than the need to secure reproduction through the (direct and indirect) sale of labour power. The ways in which this is done defy inherited assumptions of fixed (and uniform) notions of ‘worker’, ‘peasant’, ‘trader’, ‘urban’, ‘rural’, ‘employed’ and ‘self-employed’ for the majority of ‘classes of labour’. Fourth, while concepts of ‘self-employment’ are often highly problematic, the prevalence of petty commodity production, in all its extraordinary diversity of activities and forms, makes its own particular contribution to the fragmentation of classes of labour. As petty commodity production is a contradictory combination of the class places of capital and labour (above), it is also the site of exploitation: of ‘self’ and commonly of others too. This is why the informal economy is a domain of ‘relentless micro-capitalism’: ‘Petty exploitation (endlessly franchised) is its essence, and there is growing inequality within the informal sector as well as between it and the formal sector’ (Davis 2006, 181). Finally, the ‘myriad … networks of exploitation’ (Davis 2006, 181) of the informal economy, as of the labour markets and labour regimes of the formal economy, are permeated by ‘social regulation’ (Harriss-White 2003), that is to say, social differences/divisions of a typically hierarchical, oppressive and exclusionary nature, of which gender is the most ubiquitous and which often also include race and ethnicity, religion and caste. Thus the ‘structural’ sources of exploitation and inequality inherent in all capitalist production (grand and petty, formal and informal) combine with other forms of social inequality and oppression to create divisions within classes of labour. Such divisions are often indicators of the boundaries between the active and reserve armies of labour, and of the distribution of social categories of labour between formal and informal employment and between relatively better and worse prospects within each.
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CONCLUSION This essay argues that attributing ‘surplus population’ to its ‘functions’ for an abstract and generalized ‘capital’ is a basic theoretical and methodological error, however this may claim the authority of Marx. This is not to deny that the reserve army (or armies) of labour are functional for capitalism, but that this, in itself, cannot explain the existence of reserve armies of labour, nor their scales, forms and composition across the diverse social landscapes of contemporary capitalism. That requires more rigorous attention to demography, and the determinants and effects of population growth, which always exhibits class patterns that are not, however, reducible to particular dynamics of accumulation. I have also proposed that an intentionally looser notion of ‘classes of labour’ is preferable to commonly stereotypical ideas of ‘proletarianization’. This notion foregrounds the immense variety of forms of labour entailed by the compulsions of reproduction, including in the spheres of ‘informal’ economy, the great range of combinations of wage labour with petty commodity production, the dynamics of contemporary global commodity chains, the depredations of the gig economy, and the like.
REFERENCES Banaji, J., 2010. Theory as History. Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. London: Verso. Basu, D. and D. Das, 2009. ‘Political Economy of Contemporary India: Some Comments’, Economic & Political Weekly, 44(22): 157–9. Benanav, A., 2019. ‘Demography and Dispossession: Explaining the Growth of the Global Informal Workforce, 1950–2000’, Social Science History, 43(4): 679–703. Bernstein, H., 2010. Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change. Halifax NS: Fernwood. Bhattacharya, S., 2014. ‘Is Labour Still a Relevant Category for Praxis? Critical Reflections on Some Contemporary Discourses on Work and Labour in Capitalism’, Development and Change, 45(5): 941–62. Bhattacharya, T. (ed.) 2017. Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Breman, J., 1996. Footloose Labour. Working in India’s Informal Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breman, J. and M. van der Linden, 2014. ‘Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level’, Development and Change, 45(5): 920–40. Cleaver, H., 2019. 33 Lessons on Capital. Reading Marx Politically. London: Pluto Press. Davis, M., 2004. ‘The Urbanization of Empire. Megacities and the Laws of Chaos’, Social Text 81, 22(4): 9–15. Davis, M., 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso. Harriss-White, B., 2003. ‘Inequality at Work in the Informal Economy: Key Issues and Illustrations’, International Labour Review, 142(4): 459–469. Lebowitz, M., 2003. Beyond Capital. Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Marx, K., 1976. Capital, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Moyo, S., P. Yeros and P. Jha, 2012. ‘Imperialism and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on the New Scramble for Africa’, Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1(2): 181–203. Munck, R., 2013. ‘The Precariat: A View from the South’, Third World Quarterly, 34(5): 747–62. Panitch, L., C. Leys, G. Albo and D. Coates, 2001. ‘Preface’, in L. Panitch, C. Leys, G. Albo and D. Coates (eds), The Socialist Register 2001. London: Merlin Press. Seccombe, W., 1992. A Millenium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe. London: Verso Books.
Reserve army, ‘surplus’ population, ‘classes of labour’ 63 Seccombe, W., 1993. Weathering the Storm. Working-class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline. London: Verso Books. Silver, B.J. and G. Arrighi, 2001. ‘Workers North and South’, in L. Panitch, C. Leys, G. Albo and D. Coates (eds), The Socialist Register 2001. London: Merlin Press. van der Linden, M., 2008. Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labour History. Leiden: Brill.
FURTHER READING Atzeni, M. (ed.) 2013. Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism. Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Benanav, A., 2020. Automation and the Future of Work. London: Verso. Hann, C. and J. Parry (eds) 2018. Industrial Labour on the Margins of Capitalism. Precarity, Class and the Neoliberal Subject. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
4. Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles for a global political economy of work Alessandra Mezzadri
INTRODUCTION Activities and realms of social reproduction – all those regenerating or ‘making’ life (Bhattacharya, 2017) under capitalism – are often excluded from analyses of labour exploitation and value generation. This exclusion has implied that the contributions and hardship of reproductive workers – houseworkers, care workers, sex workers and many other wageless categories – has gone unrecognised. Marxist feminist analyses, instead, have illustrated how social reproduction generates value and structures exploitation (Fortunati, 1981; Federici, 2004). This is because it literally produces workers and hence labour power, crucial to ‘make’ everything else: all other commodities and services we produce and consume. Scaling up this argument and building on Early Social Reproduction Analyses (ESRA), I show in this chapter that the recognition of reproductive activities and realms as generators of value is also crucial to understand employment in contemporary capitalism. Today, as processes of labour precarisation and casualisation become increasingly widespread, reproductive activities and realms not only provide unpaid housework to sustain paid work; they also directly expand exploitation rates. Based on these observations, I put forward three related claims. First, I claim that a feminist re-theorisation of value and exploitation represents an important novel horizon for analyses of the global world of work, to capture the features of the contemporary labour processes and regimes. Second, I contend that the recognition of social reproduction as directly linked to exploitation and value generation allows us to establish key links between labour and reproductive struggles. Finally, I briefly discuss some of the implications and possible ways forward for organising across the productive/reproductive continuum, also drawing from my experience as a global anti-sweatshop scholar-activist.
SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND ITS THEORIES Since 2017, there has been a renaissance of studies centred on the concept of social reproduction. Today, this complex body of work epitomises one of the most exciting developments in feminist theory, contributing to contemporary debates on global capitalism (e.g. Federici, 2004; Bhattacharya, 2017; Fraser, 2017), international political economy (e.g. Bakker, 2007; Rai et al., 2014; Elias and Rai, 2019; Bakker and Gill, 2019), feminist geography (e.g. Katz, 2001) and global development and labour studies (e.g. Naidu and Ossome, 2016; Mezzadri, 2019; Rao, 2021).
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Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles 65 The publication of Tithi Bhattacharya’s 2017 edited volume Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression has been central to this process of rediscovery. However, rather than one single ‘theory’, social reproduction analysis is best understood as a complex body of work including varied theorisations, each contributing differently to understandings of capitalism and the labour and life relations it shapes and is sustained by. This is so as the very term ‘social reproduction’ is so complex to lend itself to be explored along different axes. A term first used by Karl Marx to refer to the regeneration of societal capitalist relations and the transmission of inequality (Gimenez, 2018; Cammack, 2020), the concept of social reproduction has then been reappropriated by feminist analyses including Marxist feminist frameworks (Federici, 2019). All social reproduction theorisations centre the making of the ‘worker’ as their central trope. Yet, they use this lens for different purposes. Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), developing lines of enquiry explored by Lisa Vogel (1983) and Laslett and Brenner (1989), explores the centrality of the architecture, institutions and practices of care and reproductive sectors and workforces in sustaining capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal phase (Fraser, 2017). It also analyses the co-constitution between class and social oppression (Bhattacharya, 2017), complementing a number of powerful analyses of intersectionality (e.g. Bannerji, 2005; see also Bohrer, 2018), as well as studies of gender, class and race (e.g. Davis, 1983). ESRA, developed across the 1970s and 1980s, focuses instead on labour processes and relations. It explores the centrality of unpaid domestic and care work and wagelessness in general for the regeneration of capitalist relations, including wage-labour (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Hensman, 1977; Fortunati, 1981; Mies, 1986; Federici, 2004, among others). ESRA unveils links between gendered and other forms of social oppression (e.g. James, 1975; Reddock, 1984) by analysing processes of devaluation of work impacting women and racialised people. More recently, a third body of Marxist feminist social reproduction analysis is arising, concerned with making explicit the links between social reproduction and racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018), and reaching out to both SRT and ESRA in different ways. This Raced Social Reproduction (RSR) approach has proven particularly useful in capturing the impact of COVID-19 and its links to past histories of slave and indenture labour (see Mezzadri, 2022). Whilst all social reproduction frameworks are crucial to understand the regeneration of capitalism and varied aspects of the capital-labour relation, given their emphasis on distinct yet complementary processes ‘making’ the worker and life, ESRA’s insights are particularly relevant for analyses of the contemporary world of work, which is composed of vast segments of unwaged labour, often misrepresented as self-employed or misconstrued as unemployment (Denning, 2010). ESRA’s subversive redrawing of the social perimeter of value to include reproduction and the wageless offers a more inclusive theorisation of labour exploitation, accounting for varied experiences in the world economy. It reaches out to debates on ‘forms’ of exploitation (Banaji, 2003, 2010) and their ‘intersectional’ character (Folbre, 2020). Moreover, ESRA speaks intimately to those who do first-hand field-based research on labour processes, by providing robust conceptual tools to overcome productivist understandings of exploitation that hardly capture how our planet works. Below, I draw on my own experience to explain how the concrete study of the world of work in the Global South not only validates ESRA’s claims, but also provides scope to scale them up.
66 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
REPRODUCING THE WORLD OF WORK: PROBLEMS, STRUGGLES, WAYS FORWARD After decades documenting and writing on exploitation inside garment sweatshops in South Asia, I have become convinced that any toolkit analysing exploitation solely from a productivist vantage point centred on the space of work is bound to be limited. Far more attention should be given to the spaces where workers live, both in industrial areas as well as at their place of origin, as many migrate – more or less temporarily – to work. In the analysis of concrete settings, exploitation emerges as a process taking place across spaces of work and life; that is, bridging productive and reproductive domains. This is an important point, as it means that political strategies need to adopt a far broader focus than the narrow space of work and extend instead to workers’ life domains as well, as sites of the compounded struggle against the wider ‘social factory’ (see Federici, 2012). Quite crucially, expanding our understanding and analysis of exploitation beyond the space of work effectively means rethinking value, what and who makes it, and how. In grappling with questions of exploitation and value, I have always been particularly concerned with the need of rethinking and redrawing the social perimeters of struggles, in ways that may speak to how workers today experience exploitation and fight against it. Theory and politics must always be conceived as in a dialectical relation. These concerns are central to show how feminist frameworks and methodologies can lead to novel ways to think of struggles, which are inclusive and may transgress and/or reappropriate forms and instruments of traditional working class organising, a point powerfully articulated by NiUnaMenos activist-scholar Veronica Gago (2018 and Chapter 42, this handbook), in relation to the feminist strike. But to reimagine different approaches to struggles, we also need a different approach to theory. If we continue theorising exploitation as primarily taking place ‘in production’ – as labour process theory has done for a long time – we miss all those activities that ‘make’ workers and literally accompany them all the way to the factory gates, the office, the street or the home. No wonder that a lot of people may remain excluded from this narrow understanding of exploitation. If we only focus on what happens in the space of work, the history of exploitation and value creation becomes the history of a relatively small cohort of (primarily male) wageworkers (in a handful of regions of the world). Houseworkers, sex workers, domestic and care workers, and other wageless people – like slaves and indenture workers in early capitalism or unfree workers in today’s global commodity chains – get automatically excluded, although one is left wondering how on earth the (mostly white and surely male) wageworkers may suddenly appear on the labouring scene (see Bhattacharya, 2017). Sitting in workshops and in homes with garment workers in India, I have been working on how to rethink exploitation and value under contemporary capitalism to capture the experience of my interlocutors, who experience exploitation as a far more totalising process than one only circumscribed to specific spaces or times. For them – for us all, in fact – exploitation, and the ways in which it manifests from the home all the way to the world economy, is a life rather than a mere work-experience. This problem of characterisation of exploitation is both theoretical and political. Exclusionary conceptualisations of value characterises both mainstream neoclassical/liberal economics as well as orthodox Marxist analyses. For the former analyses, value is obtained by adding together the inputs of production in a specific production process. In this schema, the source of value is in effect capital, as it is only capital that is productive.
Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles 67 Indeed, Marx (1990) has challenged this view, by placing labour at the centre of the equation and showing that all sources of value come from labour through the process of exploitation. Now, this revolutionary shift in thinking about value and value creation, centres analyses of capitalism on inequality and labour-surplus extraction. However, it anchors value creation and exploitation to production. The former schema excludes all workers; the latter excludes non-wage and reproductive workers. Identifying this gap in Marxian analysis, ESRA focused on housework and care work, either in terms of unpaid labour in the home or paid care and sex ‘services’ (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Fortunati, 1981; Mies, 1982, 1986; Picchio, 1992; Federici, 2004, 2012; Hensman, 2011). All these labours and activities, according to ESRA, whilst unpaid, underpaid or excluded from what is considered as ‘productive’ employment, generate value as they regenerate the most precious commodity of all; namely, the worker and their labour power. Today, their insights are not only still valid; they have also acquired further resonance and can be scaled up to capture the mechanisms of the contemporary world of work. Take the Indian garment sweatshop workers whose working conditions I have been documenting (Mezzadri, 2017). For these workers, reproductive activities subsidise low wages – an early feminist observation (Hensman, 1977). Furthermore, the spheres of reproduction where workers are in effect ‘made’ – the villages, the peri-urban/rural areas where they are from and the industrial housing systems in which they are incorporated – either feed and regenerate workers in line with garment factories’ industrial needs or sustain processes of intensification and depletion of work. Whilst unpaid housework was/is a subsidy to low industrial wages, the wider sphere of reproduction in its multiple sites – the industrial dormitory, the village of origin – is a wider subsidy to capital, as it allows it to systematically externalise all costs related to the social reproduction of the workforce. In other words, it allows employers (in this case garment exporters) to sack workers whenever orders are down and send them back ‘home’ to be taken care of, without paying a penny for them during the period of the break in service (Mezzadri, 2017). During the contemporary COVID-19 crisis, millions of Indian migrant workers were simply chucked out of factories, workshops and dormitories, and sent home, walking for miles with many dying in the process (Breman, 2020). By walking home, unpaid, workers were subsidising their employers, who could wash their hands of labour’s reproduction. Villages, households or communities were called to sweep capital’s floor, so to speak, playing the same role housework has always played in sustaining life on a low salary. In short, feminist subversive understandings of value are central to understand labour relations today, well beyond the remit of the early debate premised on housework.
THE CHANNELS OF THE SOCIAL REPRODUCTION OF VALUE The study of the contemporary world of work suggests that social reproduction is central to processes of generation of value in ways which far exceed the original ESRA’s debate on domestic and care work. In fact, by scaling up ESRA key insights, one can develop a theory of value which is inclusive and accounts for the contributions and trajectories of labour exploitation not involving a direct wage (Mezzadri, 2019). Concretely, the study of global labour processes today suggests that there are three mechanisms through which social reproduction contributes to value generation and labour-surplus
68 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work extraction. The first reproductive mechanism of value generation is based on (migrant) workers’ living arrangements at their place of work. Every year, millions of rural workers move to cities looking for work and find accommodation in industrial areas. Industrial housing arrangements vary across the world economy, ranging from dormitories in China to informal hamlets in slum-like industrial villages like Kapashera, in the Delhi metropolitan region. In all cases, however, housing arrangements – in proximity of factories and managed by various contractors connected to them – are central to employers’ ability to easily recall labour onto the global assembly line, and to manufacture compliant workers (Schling, 2017). This organisation of daily social reproduction thus is central to the expansion of exploitation rates, and to the process of labour-surplus extraction and value generation. The second channel through which social reproduction is generative of value is through the complex process of rural-urban migration and the circulation of labour. This process involves millions of internal migrants worldwide – estimated at around 300 million in China and 100 million in India alone (Shah and Lerche, 2020). It enables the externalisation of a significant portion of costs for the social reproduction of labour, which employers (and states) can dump onto migrant workers’ families and their villages of origin. In subsidising capital by socialising reproductive costs, intergenerational reproductive realms de facto perform a function like that of domestic labour in relation to the ‘social factory’ in ESRA – just on a massively magnified scale. Finally, the third channel of the social reproduction of value is shaped by the resilience of processes of formal subsumption of labour across the Global South and – with the rise of platform capitalism and the reorganisation of work triggered by COVID-19 – increasingly also in the Global North (Stevano et al., 2021). Worldwide, homeworkers are incorporated in many value chains. In homework, productive and reproductive times and spaces overlap entirely, a process revealing the problematic nature of theories reifying distinctions between productive and reproductive work. In fact, the exclusion of homeworkers from processes of value generation may well be the result of statistical fiction, as shown in the case of India. Here, where labour markets are structured by stratified familialism embedded in patriarchal and caste norms (Palriwala and Neetha, 2011), women’s contribution to value is entirely invisible. The official estimates of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) exclude a huge number of home-based activities performed by women – and far exceeding definitions of domestic work – from the employment count, de facto hiding women’s contributions to labour and the economy (Ghosh, 2016; Naidu and Ossome, 2016). Inclusive understandings of value beyond productivist readings are not a merely theoretical exercise. They do matter politically, as they set the basis to forge horizontal solidarities based on the recognition of a common history of exploitation under global capitalism. The type of ‘inclusion’ discussed here is a pernicious one – one of subalternity to capital. Yet, it is only by allowing the wageless to reclaim the recognition of their exploitation that we can imagine a future of common struggles where the revolutionary subject is not decided a priori. In this future of common struggles, the fight will be fought simultaneously across productive and reproductive sectors, realms, times and spaces. It is only through this articulation of struggles that we can reclaim the products of our formal and informal, productive and reproductive labours.
Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles 69
LABOUR, REPRODUCTIVE STRUGGLES AND ORGANISING A re-theorisation of value centred on the contribution of socially reproductive labour is crucial to expand the analysis of labour regimes and processes in ways that account for the exploitation of armies of women still confined within the walls of the household – and there are millions around the globe, notwithstanding the rampant processes of marketisation of housework and care services (e.g. Folbre, 1986, 2020) – and the armies of wageless, disguised wage earners, self-exploiting ‘autonomous’ workers and unfree labourers who inhabit the planet, especially albeit not only in the Global South, that is, the majority world (Mezzadri, 2019). In fact, nowadays, also in the Global North, the expansion of precarious labour relations and the rise of the gig economy – with its army of Uber and Deliveroo drivers, Amazon warehouse and delivery workers (Rani and Furrer, 2020) – are symptoms of a restructuring of the world of work along similar routes and trajectories to those crossing the Global South. Millions of these insecure jobs entail oppressive and degrading working conditions and workers, often migrants, are over-exposed to racist, sexist and gendered forms of socio-economic abuse. Their migrant status – that is their condition of social reproduction – deepens their exploitation, making them more exploitable for less. The features of exploitation today can only be understood by placing social reproduction – and its brutal colonisation by capital – at the centre of value generation. If we do not embrace an inclusive theory of value, we cannot theorise capitalism and its meaning for millions of workers. Value-making does not start in production; an assumption establishing a hierarchy of capitalist oppression and excluding women (Federici, 2004), enslaved populations and colonial subjects from trajectories of labour (Davis, 1983; Reddock, 1984; Bhattacharyya, 2018). Notably, workers themselves are drawing their value theory of inclusion, by engaging in struggles beyond the space of work and centred on reproductive spaces. In Asia, reproductive realms are becoming key sites of resistance, resilience and sabotage against global capital (Pun, 2007; Dutta, 2021). In China, industrial dormitories, which are organised as infrastructural devices to further expand exploitation, used by employers to keep labour always available to quickly return to assembly lines (Schling, 2017), are cradles of resistance (Pun, 2007). A great number of protests start from these areas, where the daily social reproduction of the workforce takes place, rather than in factories. In India, spontaneous revolts erupt frequently in industrial hamlets. Workers’ mobilisations are not necessarily only centred on wages. In many instances, they are centred on social contributions. In others, they are either centred on contractors’ abuse or sexual harassment, or on housing or rights more in general – that is, against exploitation more broadly defined. In the process, the line between struggles against capital and the state is fading away, and this is because, since the rise of neoliberalism, the state is increasingly an expression of capital. Thus, the problem of how to mainstream a value theory of inclusion can be overcome by analysing struggles and their features. Crucially, reproductive struggles should always be seen as labour struggles. Now, this is easy when we focus on the actions of workers in key reproductive sectors of society – like schools, colleges or hospitals. Struggles in these reproductive sectors have rightly gained a lot of attention from Marxist feminist analyses. The US teachers’ strikes, for instance, featured prominently in SRT analyses (Bhattacharya, 2017; Arruzza et al., 2019; Ferguson, 2019). However, reproductive struggles should also be acknowledged when lying outside the more traditional remit of labour unions and their politics, that is, when the
70 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work strike may not necessarily take the form of labour withdrawal, becoming instead a far more inclusive, messier process attempting to erase the distance between production and reproduction (Gago, 2020). Or indeed, when the struggles are waged by the wageless, to gain recognition, to fight for social provisions, to battle for subsistence. In fact, we should acknowledge different typologies of reproductive struggles: ● Struggles by reproductive workers in traditional reproductive sectors – such as houseworkers, paid/unpaid domestic workers, care and sex workers. ● Struggles of workers in societal reproductive sectors – such as teachers, health workers, etc. ● Struggles on reproductive issues beyond productivist demands – which may be centred on living or existential conditions, such as housing, social provisions, social policies, or be waged against violence/harassment. ● Struggles kicking off in reproductive realms – like dormitories or hamlets, which I analysed above, and which may be centred on working conditions. ● Struggles for recognition by those denied ‘entry’ or inclusion into the labouring class – what some have called struggles over class (Harriss-White and Gooptu, 2001) waged by the wageless or the unemployed. Obviously, there are a lot of crossovers between these struggles; yet they also need distinct recognition. Once a value theory of inclusion is embraced and the complexity and relation between productive and reproductive struggles is acknowledged, we can imagine new forms of organising in production and beyond. These may take place not only at work or in industrial areas, but also in neighbourhoods, hamlets, dormitories or in workers’ communities or places of origin. That is, the reproductive architecture capital exploits must be the primary locus where we imagine and we perform resistance, exactly in line with early calls for the ‘subversion of the community’ put forward by Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972). Only this time, the call should not only target the potential ‘power of women’, but rather also that of the wageless, informalised proletariat. The global labouring community across the continuum of production and reproduction is the potential revolutionary subject. Today more than yesterday, feminist theories of work and strategies of resistance can lead the way to fight global capitalism.
CONCLUSIONS In this chapter, I have shown the significance of the concept of social reproduction for the analysis of the global political economy of work. I have explored different Marxist feminist theories which are centred on social reproduction, and their distinct contributions to understanding labour and labour relations in the global economy. Notwithstanding the relevance of all these theorisations, I have focused with particular emphasis on ESRA frameworks, as they are uniquely geared to capture the nature of contemporary labour relations and processes, given their subversive take on value generation and exploitation. ESRA, moreover, also provides specific operational tools to capture the workings of labour processes and labour relations in concrete settings. In fact, I have shared how I ‘discovered’ the power of its insights through the concrete analysis of the sweatshop and its complex processes of exploitation and labour-surplus extraction.
Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles 71 Building on ESRA’s insights, I sketched the contours of a labour theory of inclusion (Mezzadri, 2019, 2020), and I identified three specific mechanisms for the social reproduction of value; that is, through which social reproduction activities and realms co-constitute labour-surplus extraction and value generation. The first involves the incorporation of daily reproductive arrangements into the global factory system, expanding its ‘social’ walls, and reinforcing the access by employers to compliant workers whose working day can be extended on demand. The second involves the externalisation of the reproductive costs of labour by the employers, which happens thanks to labour circulations back to the countryside and their ‘invisible economies of care’ (Shah and Lerche, 2020). The third involves the formal subsumption of home-based labour, for which it is impossible to draw a neat separation between ‘the productive’ and the ‘reproductive’. This value theory is inclusive as it accounts for the role all reproductive realms and activities – wageless, unpaid, disguisedly waged, self-employed – play in processes of value generation. The recognition of the centrality of social reproduction in understanding the global political economy of work, and the role it plays in processes of value generation informs analyses of labour struggles and organising strategies. In fact, workers already ‘adopt’ their own value theory of inclusion, as they centre social reproduction in their political demands. Through the lens of workers’ actions, there are many distinct reproductive struggles emerging as labour struggles; those by reproductive workers in traditional or societal reproductive sectors; on reproductive issues beyond productivist demands; struggles kicking off in reproductive realms; and those for recognition. This mapping is important for strategies at organising. These strategies should increasingly centre social reproductive spaces and demands, given ever rising processes of labour informalisation, which make the space of work a precarious and temporary location. In fact, evidence suggests that across the world economy, a number of successful campaigns have recentred the community as the subversive space for struggle.
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Social reproduction, labour exploitation and reproductive struggles 73 Mezzadri, A. (2020) ‘A Value Theory of Inclusion: Informal Labour, the Homeworker and the Social Reproduction of Value’. Antipode 53(4): 1186–1205. Mezzadri, A. (2022) ‘Social Reproduction and Pandemic Neoliberalism: Planetary Crises and the Reorganization of Life, Work and Death’. Organization: The Critical Journal of Organization, Theory and Society 29(3): 379–400. Mies, M. (1982) The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market. London: Zed. Mies, M. (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed. Naidu, S. C. and Ossome, L. (2016) ‘Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 5(1): 50–76. Palriwala, R. and Neetha, N. (2011) ‘Stratified Familialism: The Care Regime in India Through the Lens of Childcare’. Development and Change 12(4):1–30. Picchio, A. (1992) Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of The Labour Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pun, N. (2007) ‘The Dormitory Labor Regime: Sites of Control and Resistance for Women Migrant Workers in South China’. Feminist Economics 13(3–4): 239–258. Rai, S. M., Hoskyns, C. and Thomas, D. (2014) ‘Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction’. International Feminist Journal of Politics 16(1): 86–105. Rani, U. and Furrer, M. (2020) ‘Digital Labour platforms and New Forms of Flexible Work in Developing Countries: Algorithmic Management of Work and Workers’. Competition and Change 25(2): https://doi.org/10.1177/1024529420905187 Rao, S. (2021) ‘Beyond the Coronavirus: Understanding Crises of Social Reproduction’. Global Labour Journal 12(1): 39–53. Reddock, R. (1984) Women, Labour and Struggle in 20thcentury Trinidad and Tobago, 1898–1960. The Hague: Institute of Social Studies. Samaddar, R. (2020) Borders of an Epidemic: COVID–19 and Migrant Workers. Kolkata, India: Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. Available at: https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/ borders-of-an-epidemic-covid-19-and-migrant-workers/ (accessed 3 September 2023). Schling, H. (2014) Gender, Temporality, and the Reproduction of Labour Power: Women Migrant Workers in South China. Sozial. Geschichte Online 14: 42–61 https://sozialgeschichte-online.org/ english/english-articles/(last accessed 16 November 2020). Shah, A. and Lerche, J. (2020) ‘Migration and the Invisible Economies of Care: Production, Social Reproduction and Seasonal Migrant Labour in India’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(4): 719–734. Stevano, S., Mezzadri, A., Lombardozzi, L. and Bargawi, H. (2021) ‘Hidden Abodes in Plain Sight: The Social Reproduction of Households and Labor in the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Feminist Economics 27(1–2): 271–87. Vogel, L. (1983) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory. London: Pluto.
FURTHER READING Farris, S. (2016) ‘Social Reproduction and Racialized Surplus Populations’. In P. Osborne; É. Alliez and E.J. Russell (eds), Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image – Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today. Kingston upon Thames: CRMEP Books, pp. 121–134. Naidu, S. (2022) ‘Circuits of Social Reproduction: Nature, Labor, and Capitalism’. Review of Radical Political Economics 55(1): doi 10.1177/04866134221099316 Ossome, L. (2021) ‘Land In Transition: From Social Reproduction of Labour Power to Social Reproduction of Power’. Journal of Contemporary African Studies 39(4): 550–564. Stevano, S., Ali, R. and Jamieson, M. (2021) ‘Essential For What? A Global Social Reproduction View on the Re-organisation of Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 42(1–2): 178–199.
5. Unfree labour in the 21st century? Siobhán McGrath
INTRODUCTION The following cases have all been publicly condemned as ‘slavery’ in recent years: garment workers in Leicester, England working for less than half the minimum wage during a period of lockdown; workers building stadiums for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 going months without being paid; detainees in immigration detention centres in the United States threatened with solitary confinement if they refuse to participate in a ‘voluntary’ work scheme; workers picking tea in Assam whose compensation is partially composed of accommodation which is unsanitary and meals which are nutritionally inadequate; conscripts in Eritrea’s national service programme unable to leave the mining site where they are working long hours and face appalling living conditions; workers at sea on Thai fishing boats subjected to physical violence and excruciatingly long working days; seasonal migrants manually cutting sugar cane on a piece rate basis in Brazil without access to clean drinking water; and workers brought to the United States on ‘guest-worker’ visas to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina having their passports confiscated. The list could go on and could include numerous other locations and industries. In the above cases, there were various (and often illegal) combinations of dangerous and degrading working conditions; long hours; brutal and inhumane living conditions; verbal, physical or sexual abuse; diverse forms of restricted mobility; threats or violence; and/or under-payment of wages. There is, then, a strong rationale for referring to these cases as ‘slavery’. But there have also been cases where accusations of ‘slavery’ have been debated. What of the California inmates fighting wildfires for $1 a day? What of the apprentices working at supermarkets in Britain who faced losing access to benefits if they left or were dismissed from their assignment after the first week? What of surrogates in various parts of the Global South whose lifestyles are strictly regulated during their pregnancies? In all of these cases, there have been significant differences of opinion as to whether the label ‘slavery’ applies. There is also the question of how ‘everyday unfreedoms’ should be understood in relation to categories such as slavery, forced labour or trafficking. What does it say about ‘free labour’ in the UK that healthcare workers have been fined for calling in sick, for example, or that construction workers have been ‘blacklisted’ for their union activities? What does it say about ‘free labour’ in the US that fast-food workers have been prevented from working at a different location thanks to ‘no poach’ clauses in franchisee contracts? And what of those working in similar jobs to those labelled as ‘slavery’ in the above examples, but who were not (quite) enslaved – how much freedom could they exercise, and what conditions did they experience? Below I outline various approaches to ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour. I start with influential definitions of human trafficking, forced labour and contemporary ‘slavery’. I then discuss a Marxian conceptualisation of unfree labour and debates around it. Next, I highlight recent literature proposing a ‘spectrum’ approach to freedom and unfreedom in labour relations, arguing that this approach has been limited in practice. I then explore how we might conceive 74
Unfree labour in the 21st century? 75 of dimensions of freedom and unfreedom in labour relations in ways that more significantly break through binaries of free and unfree. I argue for attending to the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in all labour relations, not only those that might be categorised as ‘slavery’, trafficking or forced labour.
DOMINANT DEFINITIONS – AND HEGEMONIC APPROACHES The passage of the United Nations’ Trafficking Protocol in 2000 heralded a renaissance of interest in fighting human ‘trafficking’ and ‘modern slavery’. Media attention, government resources, civil society efforts and business concerns around these issues have all steadily increased over the past two decades. This has also been mirrored in increased scholarship on the issue, which now cuts across a range of disciplines. Yet what exactly constitutes trafficking, forced labour or contemporary slavery is subject to profound debate. Forced labour is defined in the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO’s) 1930 convention as ‘work or service … exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty … for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’. It is important to note that there are a number of significant exceptions in this convention – for example, work for public authority imposed ‘as a consequence of conviction in a court of law’. On the other hand, consent is now understood as irrelevant if achieved by deception or the retention of identity documents. These are also included in the ILO’s list of eleven ‘indicators’ of forced labour. The aforementioned UN Protocol specifies the ‘act, means, and purpose’ of trafficking. According to the Protocol, trafficking involves ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons …’ through ‘the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability …’ for the purpose of ‘exploitation’. As Doezema (2010) has shown, however, the definition of exploitation was left purposefully vague in order to reach a compromise between those advocating for a human rights approach on the one hand and those taking a ‘radical feminist’ stance that equates all sex work with trafficking on the other. (The compromise arguably favours the latter group.) Finally, while legal definitions of slavery exist (such as that contained in the United Nations’ 1926 Convention), Bales’s (1999) definition of ‘new slavery’ – as purportedly characterised by violence, economic exploitation and ‘loss of free will’ – has been influential. The definitions are overlapping, changing, subject to interpretation and often conflated (Chuang 2014). One of the problems with all of these terms, however, is that they are defined in relation to an opposed category – one which is almost never specified. What falls outside of slavery/trafficking/forced labour is presumably ‘free labour’ – yet, frequently, these definitions are advanced without comment on what free labour is. The understandings of trafficking and slavery that have emerged as dominant over the past two decades have also been tied up with a hegemonic political approach that has been critiqued as ‘carceral’ in conjunction with interventions characterised by a ‘politics of rescue’ (see O’Connell Davidson 2015 and Kempadoo 2015). It should be noted that these dominant approaches do change over time: a disproportionate focus on ‘sex trafficking’ at the turn of the millennium has (partially) given way to concerns over ‘slavery’ in a variety of industries, with scandals over ‘slavery’ in supply chains becoming prominent. While this holds promise for highlighting instances of severe harm to workers incorporated within global capitalist relations, ‘slavery’ is typically framed as a risk faced by businesses rather than a result of their
76 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work own practices. With ‘slavery’ conceived of a priori as a non-capitalist relation which enters, and thereby taints, supply chains (through no fault of the lead firms), ‘free labour’ – however exploitative or harmful – becomes the obvious solution (McGrath and Mieres, 2022). Further, while examples of good practices for addressing forms of unfreedom and exploitation within supply chains do exist (McGrath 2013a; Mieres and McGrath 2021), the approach which is rapidly spreading instead consists of weak requirements for ‘transparency’ and ‘disclosure’ by corporations. Examples of this include the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, the supply chain provisions of the UK Modern Slavery Act and the Australian Modern Slavery Act.
MARXIST CONCEPTUALISATIONS OF UNFREE LABOUR In light of the above, Marxian scholarship on ‘unfree labour’ offers a more productive starting point for analysis than dominant frameworks, because Marxists have defined and (crucially) critiqued ‘free labour’ itself. At the core of Marxist analysis is also, of course, a critique of capitalism, so Marxists would not fall into the trap of prescribing free markets as a solution to the forms of exploitation and unfreedom that they are concerned with. Both Marxist and liberal notions of free labour have seen it as a hallmark of capitalism, emphasising the freedom to choose amongst different employers. Marxists, however, problematise the notion of free labour. Marxist perspectives underline how the freedom to participate in a labour market, while substantial, obscures the ‘freedom’ from the means of (re-)production – which compels us to work for others in the first place. This second freedom is then revealed as only a ‘freedom to starve’ – not, in reality, a freedom at all. Rather, it is a process of dispossession, enabled through primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession) in which workers are thrown off the land and thereby must seek waged work in order to obtain the means of survival (while the same process grants capitalists the property rights which enable them to offer, and profit from, such employment). While Marxists therefore point to the fact that free labour is underpinned precisely by a significant unfreedom, they see unfree labour per se as something distinct from free labour. From a Marxist perspective both free and unfree labour involve ‘freedom’ from the means of production (i.e., workers are dispossessed), but unfree labour is distinct in that workers are denied the ability to commodify their own labour power. They are therefore doubly dispossessed (Brass 1999). Thus, while free labour can be understood from many different perspectives as a fundamental feature of capitalism, Marxists understand both free and unfree labour according to a distinct analytical lens. Free wage labour exploited through surplus value extraction is central to Marxist thought, and unfree labour has therefore been understood principally in opposition to free labour. Unfree labour is understood by many Marxists as work exacted not only through the threat of starvation but also through ‘extra-economic compulsion’. For some (but not all) Marxists, extra-economic compulsion has been understood as the threat, or actual use, of direct violence. What precisely constitutes extra-economic compulsion and the extent to which it can be identified in particular instances of existing (or historical) labour relations has been debated extensively amongst Marxist scholars. Another strand of debate amongst Marxist scholars has been the relation between unfree labour and capitalism. At one point, some Marxists held that where unfree labour was widespread, this was indicative of a transitional stage of semi-feudalism. Brass, in particular, has
Unfree labour in the 21st century? 77 refuted this point, arguing that unfree labour could be both ‘compatible with capitalism’ and even, under certain conditions of class struggle, capitalists’ preferred form of labour relations (1999). A different view was espoused by Miles (1987) who sees modes of production based on different systems of unfree labour as productively ‘articulated’ with capitalism. Racism is central to Miles’s analysis, but it should be noted that there have been surprisingly few intersections between this body of literature and that of Black Marxism. The latter of course theorises racial capitalism and therefore centres slavery and other forms of racialised unfree labour (Robinson 1983). With this caveat, one key advantage of drawing critically on Marxist scholarship is therefore that free labour is problematised rather than idealised, and that there are strands of Marxist thought which have examined unfree labour as ‘compatible with capitalism’. The concrete analyses of particular forms and regimes of unfree labour formulated by Marxist scholars do not reduce these to individual moral failings or crimes – but rather frame them as embedded within a wider political economy. Nonetheless, some Marxist scholarship has arguably tended to rely on a binary between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ which may serve to obscure the multiple forms of freedom and unfreedom within any particular set of labour relations.
DIMENSIONS OF FREEDOM AND POWER IN LABOUR REGIMES Recent critical scholarship takes critique of binary oppositions between ‘free’ and ‘not free’ (as in definitions of forced labour, trafficking, contemporary ‘slavery’ or even unfree labour) as a point of departure. A ‘spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ approach has emerged as a widely adopted alternative within this literature, in which it is argued that labour relations should be understood as ‘more’ or ‘less’ free. There are, however, some limitations to this. In spite of initially espousing a commitment to viewing freedom and unfreedom as a continuum, many works then go on to discuss forced labour, unfree labour or contemporary ‘slavery’ as a bound category. And in more practical terms, O’Connell Davidson points out that any engagement with policy approaches and interventions around ‘trafficking’ and contemporary ‘slavery’ still necessitates ‘a judgement about the point on that spectrum at which “appropriate” exploitation/force ends and “inappropriate” exploitation/force begins’ (2010: 250). Some recent works also proceed by expanding the reach of categories such as ‘coerced’ labour (e.g., Hatton 2020) but still rely on some form of binary – which implies that some labour relations are not coerced. Is it possible then to conceptualise not only different degrees of un/freedom but also different dimensions of unfreedom (McGrath 2013b) – without falling into a binary approach?1 Rather than seek to identify whether work is free or unfree/coerced, we could start by recognising that there are elements of force in nearly all labour relations – in different forms, imposed by different actors at different scales, and to significantly different degrees. I have also argued that we should make explicit our normative and ethical concerns over conditions of work, rather than only our concerns with somewhat abstract notions of freedom and choice. Such an approach offers us the possibility of identifying unfreedoms within a range of labour relations – but without falsely equating these to ‘slavery’ or other particularly brutal labour regimes. Global labour history (De Vito and Lichtenstein 2015; Sarkar 2017; van der Linden and García 2016) provides a rich tradition of analysing different forms of unfreedom, which can be drawn upon in reflecting on the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in contemporary relations. Some recent scholarship also explicitly attempts to draw historical connections as
78 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work well as comparisons between earlier systems of unfree labour and contemporary labour relations, particularly indenture (e.g., Kempadoo 2017; Kothari 2013). Work on neo-bondage in India has also traced the evolution of labour unfreedoms over time (Breman 2019). As I have argued previously with Kendra Strauss, thinking of struggles over ‘freedom’ as a central aspect of the power dynamics that characterise labour relations may help us to better analyse particular systems of labour control (McGrath and Strauss 2015). From this perspective, freedoms and unfreedoms matter because they are part and parcel of workers’ struggles over their conditions of work (and life). Such a stance does not allow degrading conditions to be accepted simply because workers appear to have agreed to them voluntarily, nor does it (conversely) allow outsiders to determine what does or does not constitute acceptable conditions of work without regard to workers’ own perspectives. A decontextualised understanding of ‘freedom’ cannot, from this perspective, be privileged over the conditions of work and life that workers care about and struggle over. A focus on freedom as power aligns well with a renewed theorisation of labour regimes, within which analysis of labour unfreedoms notably forms a key strand (Mezzadri 2017). We may think of a labour regime as referring to the prevailing standards and expectations governing a given set of labour relationships (enacted through law, culture, institutions, etc.). A regime may be identified for a particular workplace, zone, cluster or nation-state or in terms of industry, recruitment mechanism, migration status, etc. – and these may intersect with each other. Such an approach allows us to see the myriad ways that different groups of workers are divided – and thereby subject to distinct standards, expectations and conditions of work. The fragmentation and dispersion of production under neoliberalism – also referred to as supply chain capitalism – involves the production of commodities through the labour of workers who are separated in myriad ways. This includes geographical differences (including which labour rights are legally protected), employment by different firms (e.g., contractors and subcontractors) and varied employment statuses (including independent contractor or self-employment status), all of which hinder the scope for solidarity. From this standpoint, we can understand supply chain capitalism as enabling the imposition of unfreedom in labour relations through transforming power relations in favour of capital. Feminist perspectives are also important in developing such an approach, particularly in pointing to the centrality of social reproduction. Thinking through social reproduction encourages us to consider the extent to which workers experience the negative ‘freedom’ of dispossession. Landlessness, land grabs, water grabs and other forms of enclosure continue to dispossess workers today, subjecting them to the (un)freedom theorised by Marx. But dispossession is, in practice, often incomplete. Further, workers seek multiple means of social reproduction beyond paid work, and they do so at various scales. Social protection, social welfare and social safety nets can be understood here as providing conditions of (partial) freedom. Such forms of social protection are differentially provided to different groups of workers, and of course the tendency in recent decades (with some exceptions) has been towards the removal and withdrawal of such protections. This is another way in which neoliberalism can be understood as creating conditions of, and for, unfreedom. The labour of social reproduction itself is also of key importance in thinking through labour unfreedoms. It is widely gendered as ‘women’s work’ and unpaid, and thereby devalued. Even when taken up as paid employment, conditions of work are often unfavourable or degrading (see below on the exclusion of domestic workers from legal protections) and often characterised by significant unfreedom. This is not least the case for live-in and migrant domestic
Unfree labour in the 21st century? 79 workers (see below on employer-provided accommodation and migration regimes). A focus on social reproductive labour further cautions us to consider unfreedom in all forms of work, not only employment. And it helps us to attend to the perceived value of different forms of work when considering how unfreedoms are imposed. That the value of the work and the status of the worker are interlinked goes not only for gender but also caste, race and ethnicity. It is salient in this regard that, in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is ‘essential’ workers who are simultaneously being celebrated while often being subject to forms of unfreedom and/or degrading conditions of work, including the risk of contracting the virus (Siegmann 2020). More widely, then, this perspective directs us to examine the structures of unfreedom upon which labour relations are constructed. For example, rather than (only) considering whether particular instances of work carried out by prisoners or detainees meet the legal criteria for forced labour, we can begin with understanding the carceral system itself as a structure which powerfully limits the options that prisoners and detainees have in terms of choosing work and/or resisting the conditions of work (Cassidy et al. 2020). In other words, all of the work carried out by those subject to imprisonment or immigration detention involves a significant unfreedom, with clear implications for the conditions of work, even if this is more extreme in some cases than in others. We can also think about how this structure of unfreedom reverberates through family, kin and community by leaving others to fill the gap in income or social reproductive work previously provided by those imprisoned or detained (and further creating burdens of care work to be carried out in support of imprisoned or detained loved ones). The formerly imprisoned also experience restrictions on their labour market freedoms after their release, whether through exclusion from particular forms of employment or through discrimination. Migration regimes form another structure of unfreedom faced by many of those seeking to exercise labour market freedom/mobility, through assigning undocumented or guest-worker status to workers (or more generally creating a condition of deportability) and denying citizenship rights (usually across nation-states but, in some cases, also within nation-states). Notably, in spite of many governments creating legal pathways for ‘victims of trafficking’ to at least temporarily regularise their migration status, these migrants are treated in practice as deportable. States are deeply implicated here for producing such conditions, which depend heavily on processes of racialisation (which is of course also true of carcerality). This is not a question of what makes migrants vulnerable to trafficking or slavery but of how migration regimes, characterised by state violence, produce unfreedom (Strauss and McGrath 2017). Those classified legally and socially as migrants are often enmeshed in debt relations – whether for the costs of accessing the job (e.g., recruitment, smuggling, etc.) or as induced by the employer once on the job (through legal or illegal deductions from pay). Debt, then, is another underlying structure of unfreedom, one which is by no means limited to migrant labour regimes. It should also be noted that not all forms of debt are strictly economic but may include a sense of obligation. Also intersecting with migration regimes are the spatial arrangements of workers’ accommodation/housing. As key sites of social reproduction, power relations exercised in and through various arrangements of employer-provided accommodation and/or dormitories render many workers less free. Alongside this are newly intensified forms of surveillance enabled by digital technologies, which should rightfully be considered as an imposition of labour unfreedom (Moore et al. 2018).
80 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work From this perspective, we can see how the active exclusion of groups of workers from legal protections is also a structure of un/freedom. In the United States, the exclusion of domestic workers and agricultural workers from New Deal-era labour protections has clear ‘racist origins’ rooted in slavery (Perea 2011). Other authors studying labour history in the United States have also attended to the different forms of (labour) unfreedom imposed on indigenous peoples (e.g., Glenn 2002; Smith 2013) including processes of exclusion from legal protections. Guest workers are also often excluded from labour protections that other workers would be entitled to. As discussed above, the denial of (some or all) citizenship rights is a key axis through which various degrees of unfreedom are imposed. The threat of deportation, discussed above, means that workers are, in many cases, practically unable to access rights and entitlements even where they are theoretically covered by legal protections; in the UK, the crime of ‘illegal working’ renders this unfreedom even more extreme. Finally, both the types of contracts and the forms of compensation are relevant. These are too often considered in isolation from the structural forms of unfreedom detailed above, with freedom and unfreedom read off the employment contract rather than analysed within the wider political economy that structures power relations between labour and capital. But of course, they can be significant in particular cases; the employment relation itself does matter. As recent scholarship on workers in the ‘gig economy’ (or ‘platform economy’) reveals, an illusion of labour market freedom can serve to obscure conditions of unfreedom (Athreya 2020). Similarly, forms of compensation are of relevance: piece rate systems, for example, can enable intensification of work and labour unfreedom (McGrath 2013b).
CONCLUSION Severe exploitation and restricted freedoms take many forms in contemporary labour relations. Above I have outlined several ways of conceptualising the problem, which might in turn shape the ways we respond. Particular understandings of ‘trafficking’ and contemporary ‘slavery’ have been dominant over the past two decades and are associated with hegemonic ‘carceral’ approaches to the issue. Marxian conceptualisations of unfree labour have the advantage of defining and problematising free labour itself. Nonetheless, they still reflect a binary approach. Others have sought to advance a spectrum or continuum approach, but this has limitations. I have therefore argued for a multi-dimensional approach to analysing freedoms and unfreedoms – alongside conditions of work – across all labour relations, not only those that might be classified as forced, unfree, enslaved or trafficked labour. I have also argued that struggles over freedom can be (re-)conceptualised as struggles over power. Perhaps the main advantage of a multi-dimensional understanding of freedom as power within intersecting labour regimes is that it provides a lens on agency and resistance exercised by workers even within labour relations characterised by significant unfreedoms (McGrath and Strauss 2015). Rather than a tautological framework which takes conditions of unfreedom as evidence of workers’ lack of agency, we can see how even ‘small’ acts of agency and resistance can be significant for workers. We can see the imposition of labour unfreedoms as part of ongoing power dynamics between labour and capital. This means that we can acknowledge that some workers are subject to far greater restrictions on their freedom than others, and far more degrading conditions of work. However, we can do so without relying on false divisions between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. In sum, we can see workers’ struggles – to exercise mobility
Unfree labour in the 21st century? 81 across space and within labour markets; to contest conditions of employment that threaten their health and safety; to combat wage theft; to access employment as a person with a criminal conviction; or to obtain employment status as a worker in the platform economy – as freedom struggles.
NOTE 1
Here I should acknowledge that my own article cited here (McGrath 2013b) still clings to a binary approach – therefore I seek to retain and expand on the analysis of different dimensions of unfreedom (and of working conditions), while moving beyond the attempt to fit these into overarching categories of ‘free’ or ‘unfree’.
REFERENCES Athreya, B. 2020. ‘Slaves to technology: worker control in the surveillance economy’. Anti-Trafficking Review (15): 82–101. Bales, K. 1999. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brass, T. 1999. Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates. London: Frank Cass. Breman, J. 2019. Capitalism, Inequality and Labour in India. Cambridge University Press. Cassidy, K., Griffin, P., and Wray, F. 2020. ‘Labour, carcerality and punishment: “less-than-human” labour landscapes’. Progress in Human Geography 44(6): 1081–1102. Chuang, J.A. 2014. ‘Exploitation creep and the unmaking of human trafficking law’. American Journal of International Law 108(4): 609–649. De Vito, C.G. and Lichtenstein, A. 2015. Global Convict Labour. Leiden: Brill. Doezema, J. 2010. Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking. London: Zed Books. Glenn, E.N. 2002. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hatton, E. 2020. Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Kempadoo, K. 2015. ‘The modern-day white (wo)man’s burden: trends in anti-trafficking and anti-slavery campaigns’. Journal of Human Trafficking 1(1): 8–20. Kempadoo, K. 2017. ‘Bound coolies’ and other indentured workers in the Caribbean: implications for debates about human trafficking and modern slavery’. Anti-Trafficking Review (9): 48–63. Kothari, U. 2013. ‘Geographies and histories of unfreedom: indentured labourers and contract workers in Mauritius’. Journal of Development Studies 49(8): 1042–1057. McGrath, S. 2013a. ‘Fuelling global production networks with slave labour?: migrant sugar cane workers in the Brazilian ethanol GPN’. Geoforum (44): 32–42. McGrath, S. 2013b. ‘Many chains to break: “Slave labour” in Brazil as a multi-dimensional concept’. Antipode 45(4): 1005–1028. McGrath, S. and Mieres, F. 2022. ‘The business of abolition: marketizing “anti-slavery”’. Development and Change 53(1): 1–30. McGrath, S. and Strauss, K. 2015. ‘Unfreedom and workers’ power: ever-present possibilities’. In K. van der Pijl (ed.), The International Political Economy of Production. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 299–317. Mezzadri, A. 2017. The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mieres, F. and McGrath, S. 2021. ‘Ripe to be heard: workers’ voice in the fair food Programme’. International Labour Review 160(4): 631–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12204
82 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Miles, R. 1987. Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? London: Tavistock. Moore, P. V., Upchurch, M., and Whittaker, X. (eds.) 2018. Humans and Machines at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary Capitalism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Connell Davidson, J. 2010. ‘New slavery, old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of “freedom”’. Global Networks 10(2): 244–261. O’Connell Davidson, J. 2015. Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Perea, J.F. 2011. ‘The echoes of slavery: Recognizing the racist origins of the agricultural and domestic worker exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act’. Ohio St. LJ 72: 95–138. Robinson, C.J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press. Sarkar, M. (ed.) 2017. Work Out of Place. Oldenbourg: de Gruyter. Siegmann, K.A. 2020. ‘From clapping for essential workers to revaluing them’. Global Labour Column 339 available at: https://globallabourcolumn.org/2020/05/20/from-clapping-for-essential-workers-to -revaluing-them/(accessed 30 October 2020). Smith, S.L. 2013. Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Strauss, K. and McGrath, S. 2017. ‘Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations’. Geoforum 78: 199–208. van der Linden, M.M. and García, M.R. 2016. On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion After Chattel Slavery. Leiden: Brill.
KEY READING Barrientos, S. Kothari, U. and Phillips, N. 2013. ‘Dynamics of unfree labour in the contemporary global economy’. The Journal of Development Studies 49(8): 1037–1041. Brass, T. 1999. Towards a Comparative Political Economy of Unfree Labour: Case Studies and Debates. London: Frank Cass. Kempadoo, K. 2017. ‘“Bound coolies” and other indentured workers in the Caribbean: implications for debates about human trafficking and modern slavery’. Anti-Trafficking Review (9): 48–63. McGrath, S. and Strauss, K. 2015. ‘Unfreedom and workers’ power: ever-present possibilities In K. van der Pijl (ed.), The International Political Economy of Production. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 299–317. Mezzadri, A. 2017. The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Connell Davidson, J. 2015. Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom. Palgrave MacMillan: London. Sarkar, M. (ed.) 2017. Work Out of Place. Oldenbourg: de Gruyter. van der Linden, M.M. and García, M.R. 2016. On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion After Chattel Slavery. Leiden: Brill.
6. World-system, production, and labour Manuela Boatcă
INTRODUCTION Attempts at providing a global framework for understanding labour under capitalism have taken many forms. The notion of a world proletariat had been more or less explicitly formulated several times at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Viewing non-wage labour as part of the capitalist mode of production had been central to Eastern Europe debates on the so-called “second serfdom” as early as the turn of the twentieth century, and Latin American dependency theories, the Bielefeld school of development sociology, and US-based world-systems analysis during the sixties and seventies. A comprehensive framework accounting for both free and coerced labour under capitalism in a global and historical perspective would eventually be formulated in radical dependency theory and world-systems analysis. Disagreement with the Marxian understanding of primitive accumulation at a world scale had led both dependency theorists and world-systems analysts to reconceptualize development. For the dependentistas, capitalism represented an asymmetrical power relation structured around the developed, industrialized West, that constituted the centre of the system, and the underdeveloped, agricultural Third World, economically exploited by the centre and constituting the system’s periphery (Cardoso and Faletto 1969). In this view, development and underdevelopment were not different “stages” in a continuum, but relational notions co-existing in time and mutually reinforcing each other. Radical dependency theorists highlighted the ways in which the international division of labour, established since the European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century, had gradually reorganized the economies of the colonies according to the needs of the European colonial centres (e.g., the extraction of raw materials in exchange for industrial goods). André Gunder Frank accordingly spoke of the “development of underdevelopment” (Frank 1966) as the process actively and systematically producing backwardness in the periphery. In his 1967 analysis of underdevelopment in Chile and Brazil, Frank maintained that the employment of workers in forms of serfdom, tenancy, sharecropping, and unpaid labour alongside forms of wage labour was no proof of a mixture of feudal and capitalist economic structures, but a direct consequence of subsuming Brazilian agriculture under the interests of metropolitan industries (Frank 1967, 230ff.). Although he viewed all of these relations of production as being determined by a single, capitalist world-system, he went on considering them “non-capitalist” in essence. In discussing worldwide capital accumulation through super-exploitation of slaves and the indigenous populations in India, Latin America, and the Caribbean immediately following these areas’ colonization, Frank therefore pleaded for replacing Marx’s notion of “primitive accumulation” by “primary accumulation” as the more adequate label for the exploitative practices that he viewed as continuing until long after the industrial revolution and up to the present day (Frank 1978).1 83
84 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Contemporary capitalism therefore at least partly depended for its reproduction on the conversion of use values – resulted from what Frank considered non- and pre-capitalist relations of production – into exchange values for the capitalist circulation of commodities. Gender relations entered the argument by logically fitting into the discussion of primary accumulation through subsistence labour: the most widespread and important incidence of ... capitalist accumulation of capital on the basis of primary accumulation through “non-capitalist” relations of production is the unrequited production and reproduction performed by the wife and mother within the bourgeois and working-class families! For, if capital had to pay the housewife for the total contribution, she […] makes to the ability of the worker to produce surplus value, and if capital did not have her as a further underpaid labor force and reserve army of labor to boot, capitalist accumulation of capital would be difficult, if not impossible. (Frank 1978, 247)
Frank did not pursue the gender aspect any further. Yet the parallel he drew between types of subsistence income as provided by housewives in households within the core and village production in peripheral areas by grouping them under “primary accumulation” was a crucial step in the reconceptualization of both. He, however, concluded that the process of incorporating pre-existing forms of production into the capitalist system might involve the “trans-formation of relations of production from one ‘non-capitalist’ form to another” (Frank 1978, 251), thus essentially leaving both subsistence production in the household and non-wage agricultural labour outside of the capitalist sphere. According to Frank, however, the validity of any interpretation of Marx’s understanding of capitalism would ultimately come from its capacity to do justice to the fact that: … the sugar slave plantations of Brazil in the 16th century, of more and more Caribbean islands in the 17th and 18th centuries, and of Southern U.S. cotton slave plantations in the 19th century were essential parts of a single system and historic process, in which they contributed materially to the primitive, and then industrial accumulation of capital concentrated in particular parts of the system and times of the process. (Frank 1978, 256f.)
A theory of capitalism accounting for the development of underdevelopment in the periphery as well as for the global inequality structures it generated would therefore have to incorporate plantation slavery, serf labour, housework, and other types of subsistence labour into its definition, instead of declaring them anomalies to the Western pattern of industrial development on the one hand and proletarianization on the other. Focusing on the wide variety of phenomena that orthodox Marxist theory turned into anomalies consequently became a point of access for the reconceptualization of both world capitalism and world inequality. By noting that the key role Marxism attributed to urban industrial proletarians had meant explaining away the very existence of peasants, minorities, women, and the whole peripheral zone as a consequence, such that “[n]ine-tenths of the world became ‘questions’, ‘anomalies’, ‘survivals’” (Wallerstein 1991, 160), proponents of the world-systems perspective for the first time pointed to the fact that the necessary corrections had to be of a methodological nature.
World-system, production, and labour 85
THE UNIT OF ANALYSIS OF LABOUR RELATIONS For one thing, the unit of analysis for patterns of capitalist development as well as of processes of class formation was not the nation-state or any other political-cultural unit, but the historical system corresponding to the capitalist world-economy. Unlike historical systems characterized by the existence of a single division of labour linking various areas through economic exchange on the one hand, and by a common political structure (as in the case of world-empires) on the other, a world-economy is not politically unified, such that the accumulated surplus can only be redistributed unequally through the market. Hence, a world-economy’s mode of production is, of necessity, capitalist. Drawing on dependency theorists’ relational notions of (under) development and the centre-periphery structure, Immanuel Wallerstein defined “relations of production” as (1) pertaining to the whole system of a European-led world-economy in existence since the sixteenth century and as (2) encompassing free labour in the system’s core and coerced labour in its periphery (Wallerstein 1974). Much like radical dependency theorists, Wallerstein held that both Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation and Rosa Luxemburg’s modified version of it had contributed to the construction of anomalies of a capitalist system essentially based on free wage labour. For Marx, the incorporation of non-capitalist spheres of production, both in the form of particular social strata such as peasants, and entire geographical regions such as colonial areas, was important only during the stage of the primitive accumulation of capital, that is, in the mercantile period. For Luxemburg, in turn, they were essential throughout the stages of capitalist development (mercantile and industrial) as markets for the consumption of industrial products, as an extra source of means of production, as well as of labour power, yet remained external to capitalism. Wallerstein concluded that the single major stumbling block of all debates on the advent of capitalism in non-Western areas was the existence of free labour as the defining characteristic of the capitalist mode of production – which, however, stemmed from an undue generalization of Marx’s analysis of the English case: The situation of free labourers working for wages in the enterprises of free producers is a minority situation in the modern world. This is certainly true if our unit of analysis is the world economy. It is probably true, or largely true, even if we undertake the analysis within the framework of single high-industrialized states in the twentieth century. When a deduced “norm” turns out not to be the statistical norm, that is, when the situation abounds with exceptions (anomalies, residues), then we ought to wonder whether the definition of the norm serves any useful function. (Wallerstein 2000, 142f.)
The methodological shift in the unit of analysis from particular nation-states to the level of the entire world-economy made it possible to view precisely the mixture of free and unfree forms of labour control, instead of free labour alone, as constituting the essence of capitalism: while free labour was characteristic of skilled work in core areas, coerced labour was employed for less skilled work in peripheral ones (Wallerstein 1974, 127). Thus, in the capitalist world-economy emerged, with the establishment of Europe’s overseas colonies in the sixteenth century, slavery, serf labour,2 sharecropping, and tenancy, all alternative capitalist modes of labour control, and all of which employed labour-power as a commodity. Understood as expressions of various relations of production within a global capitalist system, anomalies such as capitalist plantation owners or chattel slaves thereby became “not exceptions to be explained away but patterns to be analysed” (Wallerstein 2000, 143).
86 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work At the same time, viewing capitalism as a mode of production of the entire world-system meant that its key actors no longer coincided with the ideal-typical members of the capitalist classes of industrialized core countries, the bourgeois and the proletarian; nor were the corresponding processes – from the bourgeois revolution through industrialization to proletarianization – an adequate description of reality. World-systems analysts concurred with subsistence theorists that privileging the figure of the proletarian and processes of proletarianization on the model of industrial England obscured other key processes of world capitalism, especially what they termed housewifization (Werlhof 1983, 133) World-systems analysis in turn drew attention to another neglected dimension in the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy, bourgeoisification: We are all very conscious that the proletariat, or if you will, waged workers, have not simply been historically there, that they have in fact been created over time […] This shift is called by some “proletarianization” […] There are many theories about this process; it is the object of much study. We are also aware, but it is less salient to most of us, that the percentage of persons who might be called bourgeois […] has no doubt augmented steadily since perhaps the eleventh century, and certainly since the sixteenth. And yet, to my knowledge, virtually no one speaks of “bourgeoisification” as a parallel process to “proletarianization”. Nor does anyone write a book on the making of the bourgeoisie […] It is as though the bourgeoisie were a given, and it acted upon others: upon the aristocracy, upon the state, upon the workers. (Wallerstein 2000, 333)
In both Marxist and liberal theories of history, the role of every bourgeoisie, irrespective of its geohistorical context of emergence, matched the one it was supposed to have played in nineteenth-century Britain: overthrow the aristocracy, seize state power, and industrialize the country. Atypical phenomena such as the “aristocratization of the bourgeoisie” in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Europe, “the betrayal of the bourgeoisie” in non-European contexts in the twentieth, or the “administrative bourgeoisies” in post-decolonization Africa had not unsettled the developmentalist assumptions underlying this conceptualization, but had instead been treated as further anomalies. The shift of focus from the reified notion of the bourgeoisie as an “unexamined essence” (Wallerstein 2000, 334, my emphasis) to bourgeoisification as a historical process of the entire world-system made two apparent contradictions stand out: that more historical instances of the economic and political rise of the “middle classes” did not conform to the British model than instances that did; and that throughout the history of the capitalist system, the possibilities that bourgeoisies could become aristocracies by turning capitalist profit into rent decreased constantly, as did the bourgeoisies’ factual control over the means of production. Increasing bourgeoisification was “the end of the possibility of aristocratization” (Wallerstein 2000, 340), or of the opportunity to convert profit into monopoly profit. In the process, the overall trend had therefore been towards the emergence of ever more administrative or salaried bourgeoisies, themselves living off wages: Over time […] capital has tended to concentrate. […E]nterprise structures have gradually become larger and involved the separation of ownership and control, and the emergence therefore of new middle classes. Where the “enterprises” are in fact state-owned rather than nominally private, as tends to be the case in weaker states in peripheral and especially semi-peripheral zones, the new middle classes take the form, in large part, of an administrative bourgeoisie. (Wallerstein 2000, 340)
Viewed in the longue durée, proletarianization and bourgeoisification are thus strikingly analogous processes, both of which involve the transformation of social actors from individuals
World-system, production, and labour 87 controlling the means of production and living off resources accumulated in the past – land or machines in the case of peasants and artisans, rent in the case of the aristocracy – to social actors controlling neither capital nor means of production and relying on present earnings. By highlighting the phenomenon of bourgeoisification, world-systems analysts did not claim that it was the central process in the capitalist world-economy, as subsistence theorists did for housewifization. Yet the conclusions of both approaches converged in dismissing proletarianization as the governing tendency, and, consequently, as the main instance of class formation in the current capitalist system. This, in turn, called for a second methodological shift, which made the common denominator of the world-systems and the feminist subsistence perspectives even more apparent.
THE UNIT OF ANALYSIS OF LABOUR MARKET PARTICIPATION AND CLASS MEMBERSHIP The centrality of free labour for the definition of capitalism had not only awarded proletarianization a key role. It had also entailed a differentiation of economic activities in terms of the degree of their productivity. Productive forms such as industrial labour had thus routinely been seen as more compatible with a capitalist mode of production than labour forms considered less or non-productive. The “enormous and very useful loophole in the definition of capitalism” (Wallerstein 2000, 142) thus created accordingly relegated housework and other types of subsistence activities to pre- or non-capitalist labour arrangements. Subsistence theorists agreed with world-systems scholars that this definitional loophole was a common trait of Marxist and liberal theories of capitalism. Yet they maintained that it was the capitalist mode of production itself that made the “social invisibility” (Bennholdt-Thomsen 1984, 262) of subsistence production possible: by subordinating subsistence production to the production of commodities, and by relegating the former to the private sphere, capitalism artificially separated production from its basic goal, the reproduction of life. This separation was subsequently naturalized as the difference between work and non-work, thus allowing for the construction of the social role of the housewife. For world-systems analysts, the issue entailed both theoretical reconceptualization and methodological consequences. In the early 1980s, British theorists had proposed that the social stratification patterns of the total population should be derived from the socioeconomic position of the male breadwinner, supposed to be the receiver of a family wage. The subsequent gender-and-class debate centred around arguments for and against considering women’s position in the labour market when measuring a family’s class position by taking the household as a unit of analysis (Britten and Heath 1983; Goldthorpe 1983). Against both sides in the discussion, world-systems scholars argued that, while the unit of analysis of people’s incorporation into the labour force was indeed the household, not the individual, the concept should not be mistaken for the nuclear, wage-earning family (Wallerstein and Smith 1992, 13). Equating the two would reinforce the false premise that capitalism entailed a transition from traditional subsistence households to nuclear, wage-dependent ones and would promote a transhistorical view of the household as an institution. Wallerstein and Smith instead maintained that households were not primordial, transhistorical structures, but institutions constitutive of and inherent in the capitalist world-economy, relying as such on five distinct sources of revenue – only one of which was wage labour. Market sales of homemade products
88 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work (profit from petty commodity production), rental returns from interest, dividends, and lease payments, state or private transfer of welfare and insurance benefits or substantial gifts from kin, and subsistence work (from the production of food to self-manufacture and maintenance services) were counted among further strategies of systematically deriving or supplementing annual household income. Importantly, all of them are articulated with wage earnings for most households in the world-economy today (Wallerstein and Smith 1992, 8f.).3 From a world-systems perspective, households were defined as “systems of reproduction of labor power […] that are able to provide labor to capital precisely because they ensure the combination of income from wage labor with that from non-wage labor so as to form an adequate pool of resources guaranteeing the replenishment of labor power” (Smith et al. 1984, 8). They were thereby clearly differentiated from nuclear families – they were neither necessarily kinship-based, nor necessarily co-residential. This broad definition consequently allowed for households to refer not only to units of sharing unrelated by blood lineage, but also units of consumption larger than individual dwelling units which fulfilled collective income-pooling functions, as found in West African, Brazilian, or Malaysian contexts (Augel 1984; Bennholdt-Thomsen 1984; Elwert 1984). Multiple criticisms had also been voiced in the case of North America and Western Europe with respect to both the theoretical implications and the empirical inaccuracy of assuming that the nuclear family was a ubiquitous, stable, and homogeneous entity that could account for the class position of all of its members (Mann 1986; Kreckel 1989, 2004). Yet, in choosing to go back to analysing individual class positions in order to avoid the pitfalls inherent in this conceptualization of the family, the critics also relinquished the methodological possibilities offered by larger units such as the household as an income-pooling unit. The methodological shift from the individual or the nuclear family to the income-pooling household as a unit of analysis of labour market participation and class membership prompted the notion of “householding” as a label for the multiple processes ensuring individual and collective reproduction within such units (Wallerstein and Smith 1992, 13). The implications went far beyond the insight that income from wage labour is insufficient for reproduction and has thus to be supplemented. In viewing subsistence labour as an integral part of processes of householding in the capitalist world-economy, world-systems scholars concurred with the Bielefeld subsistence theorists that, as a specifically gendered economic activity, housework was a product of capitalist development, not a vestige from a pre-capitalist past. Moreover, by showing how apparently “non-capitalist” relationships and processes like short-term and seasonal work or informal economies both in the core and in the periphery were responsible for a substantial supply of the world’s labour force, “householding” researchers undid the hitherto accepted link between wage labour and (racial and ethnic) whiteness. They argued instead that certain combinations of sources of household income were only made possible through the ethnicization of the workforce within the boundaries of a given state (Wallerstein 2000, 306f., 350).4 The analytical shift from the nation-state to the world-system amounted to the assessment of tendencies of capitalist polarization between the world-economy’s core and periphery instead of national bourgeoisies and national proletariats, respectively. In turn, the shift of focus from the individual to the household meant that existing combinations of forms of income across working-class households correlated with either core or periphery structures in ways that reflected the polarization at the level of the entire world-economy.5 While agreeing that the process could adequately be described as housewifization, Wallerstein and Smith
World-system, production, and labour 89 (1992, 256ff.) cautioned, as Claudia von Werlhof had, against conceiving it as exclusively gender-based, and additionally distinguished between two models of housewifization. First, the peripheralized household type (either in the world-system’s periphery itself or embedded in the core), was characterized by different forms of incomplete proletarianization ranging from a combination of low wage income with subsistence activities in the past, to a growing trend towards a mixture of wages and petty market operations in the present. Examples included the retail sale of factory products such as matches, the renting of living quarters space and services, as well as various illegal transactions, usually subsumed under the (misleading) umbrella term “informal economy” and analysed as a growing trend towards “marginalization”. Second, the core working-class household type (however, estimated using only U.S. data), for which wage income was also found to be insufficient even when available as double income of a cohabitating couple.6 In view of this evidence about the core-periphery distribution of working-class household patterns, the classical proletarian household solely dependent on a family wage turned out to make up for only a tiny, rather affluent minority of households throughout the world. From a world-systems perspective, the increase in the numbers of such households would therefore be proof of a tendency towards bourgeoisification, rather than towards proletarianization: The ultimate paradox is that it is the well-to-do professional or executive who is most often the true full-time wage worker; the proletarian is condemned to remain a partial wage worker. Thus, we do live out the social polarization predicted by nineteenth-century social science in ways quite different from the patterns they thought would express this polarization. (Wallerstein and Smith 1992, 261f.)
Hence, world-systems scholars find themselves in agreement with subsistence theorists as far as the subject of polarization processes is concerned. Neither is the proletarian the model of the future for global capitalism, nor is s/he the cheapest type of workforce for global capital (in fact, far from it). In spite of the substantial modifications and significant methodological corrections they operated on Marx’s theory of capitalism, both the world-systems and the feminist subsistence approach viewed the Marxian account of the polarization of capitalist classes as essentially correct. For both, the key aspect of a rereading of Marx in light of global inequalities consisted in reframing capitalism as a world-economy as well as in understanding capitalist development as a set of processes benefiting core regions at the expense of peripheral ones. This would not only resolve the issue of the constantly growing list of anomalies with respect to the state-centred view of capitalism, but would at the same time reconcile the main theses of Marxian theory with global social reality: As long as Marx’s ideas are taken to be theses about processes that occur primarily within state boundaries and that involve primarily urban wage-earning industrial workers working for private industrial bourgeois, then these ideas will be easily demonstrated to be false, misleading, and irrelevant – and to lead us down wrong political paths. Once they are taken to be ideas about a historical world-system, whose development itself involves “underdevelopment”, indeed is based on it, they are not only valid, but they are revolutionary as well. (Wallerstein 1991, 161)
In focusing on what they viewed as the processes underlying capitalism’s tendency towards class polarization, the two perspectives discarded the classical proletarianization thesis in favour of housewifization (in the case of the feminist subsistence theorists) and of a mix between incomplete proletarianization and bourgeoisification (in the case of the world-systems
90 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work perspective). They also emphasized the processes involved in inequality relations, rather than the static categories whose reified character had more than once formed the focus of heated debates in the twentieth century, and which standard empirical analyses of inequality still focus on. If the social role of the housewife becomes the process of housewifization, and the class category of the bourgeoisie becomes the process of bourgeoisification, have we gained much beyond the mere suffixation of the terms that designated theoretical categories and social roles – and now indicate processes? The answer is a clear yes. The advantages this move offers primarily reside in calling attention to the historical dimension of global inequality structures. The world-systems notion that the capitalist production of gender inequality occurred mainly through the process of housewifization fed into the various debates about the anomalies of capitalist development: patriarchal relations in the household were considered a constitutive component of the modern world-economy, not a remnant of an earlier stage of development. Unlike Marxist feminist scholars, who had tried to reconcile the capitalist exploitation of labour and the patriarchal subordination of women by conceiving of capitalism and patriarchy as two separate and contradictory systems of exploitation (Eisenstein 1981; Hartmann 1981), world-systems analysts claimed that their reconceptualization of the household makes the subordination of women central to any account of accumulation on a world scale (Smith et al. 1984, 13). The concepts of housewifization and householding did encompass the creation of the economic role of the housewife both in its historical dimension and in its present-day empirical manifestations, as well as the function of non-wage and unpaid labour for capitalism. Yet, further aspects of gender inequality outside the household as well as the distribution of goods and power inside it remained thereby unaddressed. A partial recuperation and a further development of the structural explanation world-systems analysis had offered for gender inequity occurred in the context of its theorists’ engagement with or critique of postcolonial (and) feminist literature in the early 2000s (Dunaway 2002; Forsythe 2002; Feldman 2002; Pelizzon 2002).
NOTES 1
2 3
“Thus, the process of divorcing owners from their means of production and converting them into wage laborers was not only primitive, original or previous to the capitalist stage. It also persists through the capitalist stage. Primary non-capitalist accumulation feeds into the capitalist process of capital accumulation; but the latter continues not simply because capitalist development of wage labor divorces producers from their means; it also continues despite this divorce through the maintenance and even re-creation of working relations that are not strictly ‘wage-labor’” (1978, 244, first emphasis added). Wallerstein’s term for the modern variant of serf labour, which, for the very reason of being part of the capitalist mode of production and geared towards a world market, was essentially different from its feudal European form, was “coerced-cash crop labor” (Wallerstein 1974, 110ff.). In previous work on urban wage earners in Southeast Asia and Brazilian favelas, members of the Bielefeld development school had come to similar conclusions as far as transfers from the subsistence sector were concerned, which complemented low wages on a regular basis (Evers 1981; Evers and Elwert 1983). They had, however, not viewed subsistence work and private transfers as two different sources of income, but had grouped both under subsistence and opposed them to monetary income, under which both wage labour and petty commodity production were subsumed. Their resulting typology therefore illustrated the varying degrees to which households combined the two
World-system, production, and labour 91
4
5
6
apparently contradictory economic strategies, rather than viewing the very range of strategies as characteristic for capitalist households in general. The extent of the rereading of world capitalism and global inequality relations made possible by the theory behind the notion of ethnicization would, however, only become apparent in the context of work on coloniality in the Americas as well as on inequality proper (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Balibar and Wallerstein 1996). Wallerstein and Smith additionally explain how the shifts in household patterns correlate with the expansion/stagnation phases of the capitalist world-economy (Kondratieff waves), dealt with in detail in Wallerstein’s earlier work (Wallerstein 1974; Wallerstein 1979). While at least as important for the functioning of households as the system’s core-semiperiphery-periphery structure, the issue extends beyond the emergence of inequality patterns addressed here, and is therefore not explicitly tackled. The second model was additionally subdivided into two patterns of supplementing wages: on the one hand, the pattern of the poor, for whom possibilities of return to subsistence farming no longer existed in the core, involved compensating low wages with welfare payments; on the other, the pattern of the well-to-do working class entailed increasing amounts of self-provisioning labour, i.e., a type of subsistence production, in order to diminish household cash expenses: “... the productive workers (male and female) contribute surplus-value twice, once as a wage worker and once as self-provisioning consumer” (Wallerstein and Smith 1992, 261).
REFERENCES Augel, Johannes (1984). The contribution of public goods to household reproduction. Case study from Brazil. In Joan Smith, Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein and Hans-Dieter Evers (Eds.). Households and the World-Economy. Beverly Hills, California: SAGE, pp. 173–179. Balibar, Etienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel (1996). Is there a neo-racism? In Ronaldo Munck, Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein et al. (Eds.). Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities. London, New York: Verso, pp. 17–28. Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika (1984). Towards a theory of the sexual division of labor. In Joan Smith, Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein and Hans-Dieter Evers (Eds.). Households and the World Economy. Beverly Hills, California: SAGE, pp. 252–271. Britten, Nicky and Heath, Anthony (1983). Women, men and social class. In Eva Gamarnikow, David Morgan, June Purvis and Daphne Taylorson (Eds.). Gender, Class and Work. London: Heinemann, pp. 46–60. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo (1969). Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina. Ensayo de interpretación sociológica. Ciudad de México: Siglo Veintiuno. Dunaway, Wilma A. (2002). Commodity chains and gendered exploitation: rescuing women from the periphery of world-systems thought. In Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Eds.). The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century. Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, pp. 127–146. Eisenstein, Zillah (1981). Antifeminism in the politics and election of 1980. Feminist Studies 7 (2), 187–205. Elwert, Georg (1984). Conflicts inside and outside the household. A West African case study. In Joan Smith, Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, Hans-Dieter Evers (Eds.). Households and the World-Economy. Beverly Hills, California: SAGE, pp. 272–296. Evers, Hans-Dieter (1981). The contribution of urban subsistence production to income in Jakarta. Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 17 (2), 89–96. Evers, Hans-Dieter and Elwert, Georg (1983). Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Kombinierte Produktionsformen im sogenannten Informellen Sektor. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 12 (4). Feldman, Shelley (2002). Intersecting and contesting positions: postcolonial, feminist, and world-system theories. In Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Eds.). The Modern/Colonial/
92 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century. Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, pp. 171–198. Forsythe, Nancy (2002). Revisioning social change: situated knowledge and unit of analysis in the modern world-system. In Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Eds.). The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century. Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, pp. 147–170. Frank, Andre Gunder (1966). The development of underdevelopment. Monthly Review 18 (4), 17. https:// doi.org/10.14452/MR-018-04-1966-08_3. Frank, Andre Gunder (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Frank, Andre Gunder (1978). World Accumulation 1492–1789. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Goldthorpe, John H. (1983). Women and class analysis. In defense of the conventional view. Sociology 17 (4), 465–488. Hartmann, Heidi (1981). The family as the locus of gender, class, and political struggle: the example of housework. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6 (3), 366–394. Kreckel, Reinhard (1989). Klasse und Geschlecht: die Geschlechtsindifferenz der soziologischen Ungleichheitsforschung und ihre theoretischen Implikationen. Leviathan 17 (3), 305–321. Kreckel, Reinhard (2004). Politische Soziologie der sozialen Ungleichheit. 3rd ed. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag. Mann, Carol Elizabeth Clay (1986). Many masks: a sculptural exploration of the nuclear family. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University. Pelizzon, Sheila (2002). Writing on gender in world-systems perspective. In Ramón Grosfoguel and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez (Eds.). The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century. Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Westport, Connecticut, London: Greenwood Press, pp: 199–211. Quijano, Aníbal and Wallerstein, Immanuel (1992). Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the modern world-system. International Social Science Journal 44 (4), 549–557. Smith, Joan, Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice, and Evers, Hans-Dieter (Eds.) (1984). Households and the World-Economy. Beverly Hills, California: SAGE. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974). The Modern World-System I. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Publisher. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979). The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991). Marx and underdevelopment. In Unthinking Social Science. The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000). The Essential Wallerstein. New York, NY: New Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel and Smith, Joan (1992). Households as an institution of the world-economy. In del Carmen Baerga, Maria, et al. (Eds.). Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–23. Werlhof, Claudia von (1983). Der Proletarier ist tot. Es lebe die Hausfrau. In: Claudia von Werlhof, Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen (Eds.). Frauen, die letzte Kolonie. Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, pp. 113–136.
FURTHER READING Arrighi, Giovanni (1999). Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. University of Minnesota Press. Boatcă, Manuela (2016). Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism. Routledge. Dunaway, Wilma A. (Ed.). (2013). Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production. Stanford University Press. Komlosy, Andrea and Musić, Goran (2021). Global Commodity Chains and Labor Relations. Brill. Tomich, Dale W. (2004). Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Rowman & Littlefield.
World-system, production, and labour 93 van der Linden, Marcel (2008). Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. Brill. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004). World-Systems Analysis. An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press.
7. The proletariat and the revolution Marcel van der Linden
INTRODUCTION In late 1843–early 1844, Karl Marx characterized the proletariat as a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetrated against it.
The proletariat was the “all-round antithesis” to existing society, which is “the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man” (Marx, 1975).1 Gradually, the nature of this proletarian self-emancipation became clearer to Marx. In a fragment of 1845–46, written jointly with Friedrich Engels, he asserted that the abolition of bourgeois society would require the collective appropriation of all productive forces. This could be effected only through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society (Marx and Engels, 1975).2
Moses Hess, the philosopher who together with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and others worked on The German Ideology, wrote in 1847 about the Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat (Hess, 2004).3 Engels noted in Principles of Communism, published that same year: “In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity” (Engels, 1975).4 The discovery of radical labour struggle of course related directly to its growing visibility in the three most important countries in Western Europe. Between 1831 and 1834, the uprising by silk workers in Lyon had instigated a general strike unique for that era, as well as two very bloody confrontations with the authorities.5 In England, the proletarian Chartist movement for political reform had an enormous impact from 1838.6 And in 1844, the rebellion of weavers in Peterswaldau and Langenbielau (Silesia) revealed that in Germany the working class was starting to awaken as well.7
THE MARX-HESS-ENGELS HYPOTHESIS Marx, Hess, Engels, and others believed that the growth of capitalism would give rise to continuous expansion of the working class in the decades ahead. Labour would therefore 94
The proletariat and the revolution 95 become ever more important in future revolutions, which would soon result in the subversion of capitalist relations. This view seemed to find resounding confirmation in the revolutions of 1848–49 in France, Central Europe, etc., which explicitly shifted the focus to the working class as an emergent – albeit not yet dominant – vector in the social and political field of forces.8 Was this perception accurate? In answering this question, I shall apply the broad concept of the working class as elaborated in global labour history in recent years. In this perception, the history of capitalist labour must encompass all forms of physically or economically coerced commodification of labour power: wage labourers, slaves, sharecroppers, convict labourers, and so on – plus all labour which creates such commodified labour or regenerates it, that is parental labour, household labour, care labour, and subsistence labour. This broad description enables us to acknowledge the role of housewives (for example, as instigators of the February Revolution in Russia in 1917), as well as the actions by cottage labourers or chattel slaves.9 The rise of the working class according to this broad perception of course largely paralleled the rise of capitalism. After all, capitalism is merely a progressively self-reinforcing commodification of consumer goods, natural resources, means of production, and labour power. Labour-power commodification became widespread early on in certain urban industries, such as in porcelain production in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, where several hundred thousand workers were employed during the Qing Dynasty.10 Only a small share of this industry was capitalist, because most production was not for the market but for the imperial household. Still, many conflicts arose here as well: disputes, which sometimes led to death, […] broke out between workers and kiln owners on the issue of working conditions and wages. The town therefore was often in riot. Indeed, the local gazetteer of Fuliang County attests to this last characteristic, saying that ‘all kinds of people from across the country were taking refuge in Jingdezhen. One intrigue would cause the whole town to react. This town is difficult to govern’ (Hsu Wen-Chin, 1988).11
Labour concentrations in European textile cities in Flanders and Italy were more clearly capitalist from the fourteenth century. From the seventeenth century, relatively large proletarian concentrations also existed in the Caribbean, where entire islands were based on slave labour. The formation of proletarian concentrations was conducive to rebellious sentiment. John Millar, one of the leading intellectuals of the Scottish Enlightenment, already observed the consequences of economic growth towards the end of the eighteenth century: As the advancement of commerce and manufactures in Britain has produced a state of property highly favourable to liberty, so it has contributed to collect and arrange the inhabitants in a manner which enables them, with great facility, to combine in asserting their privileges. […] Villages are enlarged into towns; and these are often swelled into populous cities. In all those places of resort, there arise large bands of labourers or artificers, who by following the same employment, and by constant intercourse, are enabled, with great rapidity, to communicate all their sentiments and passions. Among these there spring up leaders, who give a tone and direction to their companions […]. In this situation, a great proportion of the people are easily aroused by every popular discontent, and can unite with no less facility in demanding a redress of grievances. The least ground of complaint, in a town, becomes the occasion of a riot; and the flames of sedition spreading from one city to another, are blown up into a general insurrection (Millar, 1960).12
The first radical proletarian uprisings remained local, as the capitalist concentrations were also local. Nevertheless, such rebellions could acquire a revolutionary logic. Tuscany in the late
96 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work fourteenth century was a case in point. In those days Florence was a very important city with large textile manufactories, ruled by the aristocracy and the populo grasso (the “fat people” – wealthy merchants and bankers). The city had a population of about 55,000. There were 21 guilds, with a total male membership of 4,000 to 5,000. The other working-age males – about 10,000 or 11,000 souls – never organized; they belonged to the lower strata of the working class, with the wool carders (the unskilled ciompi) as the bottom tier. Political tensions existed in the region between factions of the elite, and a large share of the working population became increasingly dissatisfied about taxes, debt, and irregular employment. The “unorganized” (the populo minuto) were strictly prohibited from convening their own gatherings or forming organizations. Still, over the course of June–July 1378, they convened secret meetings, where workers took ritual oaths to support each other as long as they lived in the struggle against anyone who intended to harm them. The resulting underground network was to be decisive in the subsequent course of events. On 21 July, a crowd of about 7,000 workers and guildsmen from all guilds (except the elitist wool guild, which was in fact an employers’ organization) marched to the city palace, the Bargello. While some of the insurgents destroyed the records of investigations and convictions of workers on the lower floors, others hung the flag of the blacksmith’s guild from the tower – this flag depicted tongs intentionally symbolizing violence. The flags of all guilds (except the wool guild) were suspended from a lower floor. The message was clear: the revolution was the work of the community as a whole. Three new guilds were formed for all those not yet organized, thereby ensuring that the entire working population was represented on the city council. During the weeks that followed, the new administration took forceful measures. For the next two years, nobody was to be imprisoned for indebtedness anymore, the flour tax was abolished, and the salt price reduced. To stabilize employment, the industry as a whole was required to produce at least 2,000 wool cloths (panni) a month, “whether they wanted to or not, or suffer great penalties”. In addition, needy families were to receive a bushel of grain per capita, and money was to be provided to those in need who resided within a three-mile radius of the city limits. These measures were less effective than envisaged, however, because employers undermined them at every opportunity. Especially the ciompi urged a tougher approach. Their ongoing criticism led the other guilds on 31 August, when a large crowd of ciompi gathered on the Piazza della Signoria, to violently chase them from the city and disband their guild. The other two recently founded guilds of dyers and doublet makers continued to exist and for a few more years formed a Government of the Minor Guilds. Their rule ended on 19 January 1382, when the soldiers of the wool guild and patricians toppled the administration.13 The revolt in Florence may certainly be qualified as an attempt at a proletarian revolution. Still, other cases of rebellious workers are known, and in at least one other instance they achieved lasting change. This example concerns the slave uprising on Saint Domingue (presently Haiti) between 1791 and 1804. The island was among the most profitable colonies in the world and comprised a great many lucrative sugar cane plantations, based on slave labour. Of the total population (about 640,000), nearly 570,000 were enslaved. The other inhabitants were white people and free Blacks. Inspired by the French Revolution, many slaves staged an uprising. They drove out the plantation owners and withstood French and British invasions. Their uprising was, as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker aptly described, “the first successful workers’ revolt in modern history” (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000).14
The proletariat and the revolution 97 In both Florence and Saint Domingue these were true social revolutions driven by large numbers of workers – wage workers in Florence, enslaved labourers in Saint Domingue. The revolution in Florence was defeated; the one in Saint Domingue prevailed, despite very lengthy and strong opposition by foreign potentates. Social revolutions are here understood as historical situations in which (i) fundamental contrasts exist between social classes that (ii) lead to a revolt by subordinate classes aimed at seizing political and economic power to (iii) achieve drastic change in social relations. This description does not necessarily mean that a successful change leads the subordinate classes to be the main beneficiaries of such change. Alvin Gouldner even argued that this process followed a general pattern: The Communist Manifesto had held that the history of all hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles: freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, and, then, bourgeoisie and proletariat. In this series, however, there was one unspoken regularity: the slaves did not succeed the masters, the plebians did not vanquish the patricians, the serfs did not overthrow the lords, and the journeymen did not triumph over the guildmasters. The lowliest class never came to power (Gouldner, 1979).15
This argument seems overly adamant. In Saint Domingue the slaves successfully seized control. Admittedly, however, Gouldner’s position nonetheless contains some truth. Moreover, revolutions ordinarily follow a complicated course. There is hardly ever a “clear-cut” situation where two classes (e.g. aristocracy and bourgeoisie) diametrically oppose one another in closed ranks. There will always be more than two classes, and ordinarily (temporary) multi-class blocs arise. In addition, classes are dynamic relationships, and oppositions will also exist within separate classes. A section of the struggling classes will consistently stay outside the conflict. Revolution may even come about “from above,” in that part of the elite wants radical change – such as in Japan during the Meiji Restoration from 1868.16
WORKERS AS AUXILLARIES The relentless capitalist expansion never led to proletarian concentrations that were as dense nationally as they had become in smaller settings in Florence or Saint Domingue. Large local proletarian uprisings continued to occur until well into the twentieth century, for example, in France (Paris, 1871), Argentina (Cordoba, 1969), and Pakistan (Karachi, 1972). Our knowledge of the social aspects of revolutions has increased considerably in recent decades. For a long time, historians paid little attention to the lowest classes or greatly relativized their role. Even in 1972, Lawrence Stone argued with respect to the English Revolution that: “the labouring poor, both rural and urban, played no part whatever in the Revolution except as cannon-fodder” (Stone, 1972). And very recently Boris Mironov defended a similar argument about the Russian Revolution of 1917 (Mironov, 2017).17 However, the work of scholars such as Gregor Benton, Norah Carlin, Daniel Guérin, Dirk Hoerder, Erich Kuttner, Brian Manning, Alexander Rabinowitch, and many others has demonstrated that such views are untenable. Let us consider some major revolutions. The Peasants’ War in Central Europe in 1524–26 was, as the name indicates, waged by rebellious agriculturalists but were on occasion supported by the miners in the Erz Mountains, Bohemia, North Tyrol, and elsewhere:
98 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Influenced by the revolutionary peasant movement, sections of the miner class sporadically joined forces with the peasants in many places, with the former supporting the latter in most cases. Nowhere – except perhaps in the special case of Salzburg – did a broad alliance come about, where the mutual aid societies or the entire community of the miners, respectively, expressed solidarity or engaged in joint actions with the peasants in a place or mining region (Laube, 1975).18
The Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule (1566–1609) started as a revolutionary movement, in which workers, mainly from the textile industry, played a major part. Despite their very strident disposition, their influence remained limited. Erich Kuttner, who was the first to study this revolution from a social-historical perspective, observed: true class-consciousness is rare among the masses. They tend to submit to any leadership from above: the aristocracy or the wealthy bourgeoisie. Still, the class instinct is penetrating the masses in a purely elementary sense, primitive communist slogans […] surface, and we constantly observe an unfathomable hatred of the poor for the rich, without the poor having been indoctrinated about the class struggle. Back in the sixteenth century, only the material power of the authorities withheld the masses from murdering and pillaging the wealthy, whom they regard as ‘bloodsuckers’ – as the moment such power diminishes, that passionate longing consistently resurfaces. Based on this example, we may conclude that class hatred considerably predates its discovery by scholars or even its propagation by political parties (Kuttner, 1949).19
In the run-up to the English Revolution of 1642–60 the popular classes figured prominently, both the “middling sort”, consisting of the social groups ranging “from the larger farmers (called ‘yeomen’) and the substantial tradesmen to the mass of land-holding peasants (called ‘husbandmen’) and self-employed craftsmen,” as well as the “poorer sort” (wage-labourers and paupers) (Manning, 1976):20 Popular disorders in 1640–42 were heterogeneous in causes and aims, sometimes they united the ‘middling sort’ with the ‘poorer sort’, sometimes they involved only the ‘poorer sort’. These disorders ushered in the civil war because they influenced many nobles and gentlemen to rally to the king’s cause. But the popular support which enabled parliament to fight and win the civil war came from amongst the ‘middling sort’ (Manning, 1976 [1991]).21
At no point, however, does an independent workers’ movement appear to have crystallized; the craftsmen and peasants were in charge. “Many of those who took part in the revolt of 1640–42, in the New Model Army during the war and in radical movements later, were indeed independent small producers” (Carlin, 1983).22 Moreover, the radical ideas of the Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters “failed to gel with popular grievances and experiences” (Walter, 2006).23 The American Revolution of 1765–83 was in some respects comparable to the earlier Dutch Revolt, as it was a relatively decentralized process, occurring mainly in the cities on the East coast and varying depending on the place. Gary B. Nash has nevertheless noted: the American Revolution could not have unfolded when or in the manner it did without the self-conscious action of urban laboring people – both those at the bottom and those in the middle – who became convinced that they must create power where none had existed before or else watch their position deteriorate, both in absolute terms and relative to that of others. Thus, the history of the Revolution is in part the history of popular collective action and the puncturing of the gentry’s claim that their rule was legitimized by custom, law, and divine will. Ordinary people sometimes violently took over power and the procedures of the constituted authorities (Nash, 1979).24
The proletariat and the revolution 99 Nevertheless, no social revolution occurred in America in the 1770s. Daniel Guérin has mentioned that during The French Revolution of 1789–99 it was the proletarian bras nus who by marching to Versailles on 5 October 1789 forced the Assembly to adopt the Declaration of the Rights of Man; which would probably not have happened without such action. Nor would the expropriation without compensation of feudal dues on 10 August 1792 have come about without pressure from the masses. More generally, however: Whenever the course of the revolution intensifies one finds the bourgeois equivocating, or stopping half-way, and each time it is the pressure from the bras nus that forces them to push the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion. Even insofar as it was a bourgeois revolution, bringing the bourgeoisie to power in the end rather than the proletariat, the French revolution was a mass revolution. […] But this revolution was not a revolution in which the masses worked on behalf of the bourgeoisie without realizing it. It was also, to a certain degree, a revolution that the masses were making for themselves and nobody else. […] They rose up in the hope that it would alleviate their poverty and misery and throw off an age-old yoke, not just that of the feudal lords, the clergy and the agents of royalist absolutism, but the yoke of the bourgeoisie as well (Guérin, 1973).25
Basically, in the bourgeois revolutions from the 16th–18th centuries the role of the working class gradually became more visible and at some moments even substantial but was never decisive for the outcome. The same holds true for the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. It was driven mainly by peasant communities, who were supported by disaffected urban intellectuals. Many workers embraced this cause as well, such as the cowboys of the northern cattle ranches, labourers on sugar plantations, and trade unions. Their role remained subordinate, however, in part because of their relatively small number. “Some of its struggles were important and its class organization moved forward, but its policy and leadership did not attain independence of the state and the leading bourgeois tendencies of the revolution” (Gilly, 1983).26
WORKERS AT CENTRE STAGE During the twentieth century workers started to figure more prominently in revolutions. At the same time, the complexity of proletarian action became more manifest: Because class conflict is experienced as uneven, discontinuous, and partial, its organisational expressions normally reflect this. The working class is sectionalised and fragmented. One section is fighting while others are not. Workers are opposing the symptoms rather than the root causes of exploitation and oppression. The overall level of conflict – measured, say in the pattern of strikes – rises and falls in intensity and extent. Particular kinds of organisation, with definite kinds of politics, are erected to express this contradictory pattern of consciousness and struggle (Barker, 1987).27
Even in the “new” proletarian type of revolutions, however, workers were never the sole drivers of the revolutionary process. The best-known case of a change often described as “proletarian” was the Russian Revolution of October 1917. This revolution was in fact a combination of three factors: the struggle of the workers, the struggle of the peasants, and the struggle of the oppressed nationalities. The working class was not very large – possibly two million people in 1917 – but its strike movements achieved an enormous impact; in Trotsky’s words, they become “the battering ram which the awakening nation directs against the walls of absolutism” (Trotsky, 1932).28 At the same time, the proletariat could never have brought
100 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work about the downfall of the Tsarist Regime on its own: the very position of the working class as a minority of the nation suggests that “it could not have given its struggle a sufficient scope – certainly not enough to take its place at the head of the state – if it had not found a mighty support in the thick of the people. Such a support was guaranteed to it by the agrarian problem” (Trotsky, 1932).29 Nonetheless, the action by the workers had such an immense impact that the October Revolution became the prototype of a “proletarian revolution”. As Georges Haupt observed: Those were the years of the radicalization of Europe, coming after the First World War. There was a tremendous anticapitalist, antibourgeois feeling. People were looking for a social force able to bring about the revolution, and that social force was going to be the proletariat. […] If one looks at the cultural history of the Soviet Union in the years 1918–1924, one discovers a fantastically interesting phenomenon. Everyone would like to be a worker. This is the mode in the Soviet Union. Everyone wears working clothes. The reference group is the working class, which is the center of the whole self-understanding of the revolution in the future society (Haupt, 1979).30
The October Revolution of 1917 ushered in a series of upheavals, in which workers had an essential role. Their actions brought about the demise of the ancien régimes, because they immobilized key industries. During the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 the peasants were initially passive, whereas the action by the tin miners proved decisive: they defeated the demoralized armed forces and opened the door to massive economic and social changes: The tin magnates, who had created a state within a state, un superestado, manipulating Bolivian presidents and legislators at will, lost their lucrative mines and power. The Army, which had largely functioned as an instrument of suppression and political manipulation, and as protector of the established social order, was abolished. The Indians, who comprised an overwhelming majority of the population of Bolivia, gained for the first time full civil and political rights. The MNR [Revolutionary Nationalist Movement] instituted a radical program of land reform through which the Indian won property rights. The educational system was re-organized along more democratic lines (Arnade, 1959).31
Despite their crucial role, the workers did not achieve a lasting victory. The MNR accommodated only some of their demands, and after the military coup in 1964, their unions and parties were destroyed in violent clashes.32 The course of events in the Cuban Revolution of 1953–59 was entirely different. Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement (MR-26-7) was a declassed populist movement and Castro initially supported the left wing of the Orthodoxo party, the liberal-bourgeois opposition. The struggle of his guerrilleros (possibly amounting to one thousand members at its peak) was supported by spontaneous popular uprisings and strikes with broad participation by parts of the vast labour movement (sugar workers, railway workers) between August 1957 and January 1959. As a social force, the working class contributed substantially to the victory. Politically, however, it remained an appendage of Castro’s initially liberal policy. The first government formed by Castro was therefore still liberal-bourgeois. Only during the next two years did the regime radicalize.33 In the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 workers were not intrinsically pivotal. Until mid-1978, the main operators were “students and intellectuals, the urban poor, and the modern and traditional middle classes” that agitated against the regime of the Shah (Poya, 1987).34 Proletarian resistance increased only later on. The participation of the oil workers from the autumn was
The proletariat and the revolution 101 decisive. They deactivated the most important source of state income, and the battle soon ended. In January 1979 the Shah fled the country.35 The Polish Revolution of 1980–81 was largely driven by proletarian rebelliousness. The revolt began in mid-1980 as a wave of strikes, soon spreading throughout much of the country and reaching its peak in mid-August in the port cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin. With support from the previously founded Committee for the Defence of Workers (KOR), it evolved into a national counterweight organization (Solidarność), gradually bringing about the start of “dual power”; many farmers supported the protest as well. The power and authority of the state visibly declined. Only in December 1981 did the situation change, when “order” was restored via a military coup; Solidarność was suspended and martial law introduced.36 Looking back on the developments over the past five centuries reveals clearly that from 1917 workers figured more prominently in national revolutions than they had previously. Still, during the past century their role was never as great as the Marx-Hess-Engels hypothesis would have led us to believe. Nowhere did a revolution culminate in a stable society that revolved around the interests of workers. Admittedly, the “lowliest class” – contrary to what Gouldner argued – sometimes did rise to power (Russia), but it never managed to retain this power for long.
TWO COMPLICATIONS The analysis becomes still more complicated. The first complication is that even in the twentieth century there have been revolutions in which workers remained entirely subordinate. These uprisings were led by communist parties that believed in the Stalinist two-stage theory: first a bourgeois-democratic change was necessary and then subsequently a socialist (proletarian) change. The most important example of this process was the Chinese Revolution of 1927–49. In 1927 the Kuomintang had achieved a crushing defeat of the labour movement in Shanghai and suppressed it through mass terror. A few years later the Japanese occupation forces dismantled part of the industry, thereby reducing the numbers of the working class. These developments turned the Chinese Communist Party progressively from a proletarian into a military organization of farmers demanding massive agricultural reform. They built an expanding territorial counterforce that ultimately defeated the Kuomintang and established a state. Workers were completely ignored as social forces. When the People’s Liberation Army entered the cities, they urged workers not to strike or demonstrate. Only after 1949 did the social and political importance of the working class start to grow again.37 As the sinologist Andrew Walder has observed: “It is commonly remarked, and with obvious justification, that the working class did not make the Chinese revolution. An equally justified remark is rarely heard: that the revolution, on the contrary, has made the Chinese working class.” The second complication was that the revolutions of the twentieth century all took place in pre-industrial or industrializing countries, and never in fully developed capitalist societies. Some may consider this a coincidence; but the systematic non-arrival of working-class revolutions from below under developed capitalism suggests a structural reason. Although the working class (in the broad sense described) became very large in the course of the twentieth century, under the advanced conditions, it never again behaved so radically anywhere as in Russia in 1917 or in Bolivia in 1952. As an indication to the contrary, consider the events in
102 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work France in May-June 1968. Research reveals that the revolutionary students were vastly different from the considerably less revolutionary workers: Ironically enough, Maoists, Trotskyites, and Les Temps Modernes have rather uncritically accepted PCF [French Communist Party] claims to represent the working class. They assumed that the party controlled the workers and could have made revolution. It is doubtful, though, that even a revolutionary PCF would have been able to convince wage earners to take power. […] Wage earners might have desired to limit the ‘arbitrary’ authority of supervisory personnel and to slow down production rhythms, but little evidence exists to suggest that workers wanted to take over their factories. Instead, they demanded higher pay (especially for lower-paid personnel), a further reduction of work time, total (and not half) payment for days lost to strikes, a nominal recuperation of strike time, and – for the activists – a union presence in the factory (Seidman, 2004).38
Another symptom of the non-arrival of revolutions in advanced capitalist societies seems to manifest in the fact noted by Perry Anderson that counter-institutions of dual power have never arisen in consolidated parliamentary democracies: “all the examples of soviets or councils so far have emerged out of disintegrating autocracies (Russia, Hungary, Austria), defeated military regimes (Germany), ascendant or overturned fascist states (Spain, Portugal)” (Anderson, 1980).39
THE PARADOX AND ITS POSSIBLE EXPLANATION The latter complication gives rise to a paradox: the “purest” proletarian revolutions – with absolute dominance by the proletariat – occurred early on in capitalism. In advanced capitalism, under circumstances that according to the Marx-Hess-Engels hypothesis are supposed to be the most conducive to a proletarian revolution, however, they do not take place. How is this possible? A convincing answer will require much additional research. I can merely speculate about it here. I suspect that three factors come into play: the transition dip, deflection, and incorporation. The Transition Dip The transition dip idea elaborates on the work of Charles Tilly and Adam Przeworski. Tilly has mentioned that states in the advanced capitalist countries function very differently from those in the less advanced capitalist countries.40 In Europe and North America into the nineteenth century (as in many less-developed capitalist countries nowadays), states were not clearly visible to ordinary people, and the occasions where they manifested their presence tended to be decidedly unpleasant. In those “pre-advanced” days states usually maintained a system of indirect rule. They hardly ever intervened in the lives of ordinary people directly but instead had relatively autonomous local representatives. On the rare occasions that states did penetrate everyday lives, their main purpose was to take (money, goods, people) and almost never to give. In these circumstances, workers hoping to halt deteriorating conditions or even to improve their fates did not think first and probably not at all of the state. Under “pre-advanced” conditions groups of workers therefore primarily devised alternatives without a significant role for the state. In the North Atlantic region trade unions, journeymen’s associations, and the like were transnational avant la lettre and in many cases coordinated operations across national borders. Alternative concepts were based on autonomous co-operatives and on anarchist and
The proletariat and the revolution 103 liberal experiments. For “pre-advanced” populations the social revolution idea often exuded a broad appeal as well, as the state tended to be regarded as a hostile military and tax-collecting apparatus that had to be eliminated. This stage ended – at least in the North Atlantic region – during the extended nineteenth century as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath. The immense citizens’ armies of post-revolutionary France and of many other countries that followed the French example, as well as the rise of relatively comprehensive tax systems, made for qualitatively stronger state interference in everyday social relations. This change coincided with the transition to direct rule, in which the central government started to interfere far more directly with the population than it had in the past. Direct rule, in turn, led to a rapid expansion of the purview of involvement. Non-military state expenditures increased exponentially. States “began to monitor industrial conflict and working conditions, install and regulate national systems of education, organize aid to the poor and disabled, build and maintain communication lines, impose tariffs for the benefit of home industries” (Tilly, 1990).41 Somewhat parallel to this process, systems of surveillance were devised to block the emergence of forms of protest and resistance that might threaten states and their clients. As states began to demand more from their subjects and became more closely involved with them, their subjects started to expect something in return. Modern citizenship, which in the past had sometimes existed at the municipal level, became a national phenomenon concurrent with the rise of direct rule. Precisely during this stage, as “subjects” became “citizens”, national trade unions and other national labour organizations gradually consolidated. No longer in a position to ignore the state and no longer interested in immediately destroying it, they sought primarily to influence or even conquer it (possibly with the intention of destroying it at a later stage): In the process, organized claimants including workers and capitalists found themselves embedding their rights and privileges in the state. Establishing the right to strike, for example, not only defined a number of previously common worker actions (such as attacks on nonstrikers and scabs) as illegal, but also made the state the prime adjudicator of that right (Tilly, 1992).42
This in essence meant an enormous increase “in the importance of the [collectively useful] functions, and therefore of the functioning, of public administration in the daily life of the people” (Löwenthal, 1981).43 A revolution would therefore completely disrupt daily life. The changed role of the state considerably drove up the “costs” of attempts to overthrow capitalist society. As Adam Przeworski remarked: Suppose that socialism is potentially superior to capitalism at any moment of capitalist development (or at least after some threshold, if one believes that conditions must be ‘ripe’) but that immediate steps toward socialism leave workers worse off than they would have been had they advanced along the capitalist path. […] Between the capitalist path and the socialist one there is a valley that must be traversed if workers move at any time toward socialism. If such conditions indeed exist and if workers are interested in a continual improvement of their material welfare, then this descent will not be undertaken or, if it is undertaken, will not be completed by workers under democratic conditions. At any time workers would thus face a choice between climbing upward toward the best situation they could obtain under capitalism and a temporary deterioration of their conditions on the road to socialism (Przeworski, 1985).44
104 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The period of direct rule may thus have attenuated any revolutionary influences in the working class and stimulated the rise of movements that aimed to achieve reforms via the state – as a prelude to social revolution or as a cumulative strategy of small steps. Deflection I would describe the second possible factor as institutional deflection. By this I mean that the state – even in the stage of direct rule – is not regarded as having a major part in causing social, economic, political, or cultural injustice. There are two probable causes. First, the duality of state and corporate industry: society is controlled not only by the state but also by the corporations. The antagonism virtually doubles and takes on many different manifestations. Second, many intermediary institutions and organizations emerge and to some extent perform the functions of the state, although they do not pertain to the state or otherwise qualify as “semi-state” apparatuses. These would include what Louis Althusser described as ideological state apparatuses, such as the schools, the family, religions and religious institutions, and the mass media.45 They also include public transport, NGOs, and other non-profit organizations. Incorporation The Marx-Hess-Engels hypothesis underestimated capitalism’s ability to incorporate the proletariat. Marx, as we have seen, considered the proletariat as “a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society” (Marx, 1975).46 Gradually, however, the proletariat has become a part of civil society. At least two influences probably played a role in this process. First, the political incorporation of the proletariat, partly also resulting from the efforts of labour movements. For the British case, Bert Moorhouse has argued that: the majority of the ruling class believed that incorporation was necessary to bind the masses to the prevailing system but also wanted such integration to be constrained and channeled so that, though institutional forms might change, and could be promoted as having changed, the differential distribution of power in society would remain unaltered (Moorhouse, 1973).47
And secondly, the incorporation of proletarians as consumers. It is true, that Marx in his Grundrisse has drawn our attention to the capitalist’s attempts to spur the workers “on to consumption, to endow his commodities with new attractions, to talk the workers into feeling new needs, etc.” but nowhere does he evince to have understood the huge implications of the proletariat’s golden chains (Marx, 1975).48 Consumption’s seductive power culminated in the relations of production and consumption (sometimes called “Fordist”) whereby working-class families not only produce and reproduce labour power to be hired out, but operate simultaneously as units of individualized mass consumption, purchasing many of the consumer goods they produce within a system that permits capital to expand and workers’ material standards of living to improve. The combined effect of the transition dip, deflection, and incorporation probably explains why revolutions have not occurred in advanced capitalist countries. That deflection and incorporation were considerably less important in the so-called “socialist” societies of Eastern Europe may explain why revolutions in which workers were sometimes pivotal did occur there around 1989–90.
The proletariat and the revolution 105
NOTES Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx Engels Collected Works [hereafter MECW], vol. 3, p. 186; translation corrected. 2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology,” MECW, vol. 5, p. 88. 3 Moses Hess, “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat,” in: Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings. Edited by Shlomo Avineri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 128–135. 4 MECW, vol. 6, p. 684 (§17). 5 Fernand Rude, Les Révoltes des canuts, novembre 1831—avril 1834 (Paris: Maspero, 1982); Maurice Moissonnier, La Révolte des canuts, Lyon, novembre 1831 (Paris: Ed. sociales Messidor, 1958). The best monograph in English is Robert J. Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834. Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 6 The literature about the Chartists is vast. See e.g. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1984), or Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Marx and Engels were in contact with a few Chartist leaders. See e.g. Peter Cadogan, “Harney and Engels,” International Review of Social History, 10, 1 (April 1965), pp. 66–104, and Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London: Macmillan, 1965). 7 Lutz Kroneberg and Rolf Schloesser, Weber-Revolte 1844. Der schlesische Weberaufstand im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Publizistik und Literatur (Cologne: C.W. Leske, 1979); Christina von Hodenberg, Aufstand der Weber. Die Revolte von 1844 und ihr Aufstieg zum Mythos (Bonn: Dietz, 1997). 8 Extensive information appears in the journal La révolution de 1848, published in France since 1904. Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, later renamed Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle. Studies focusing explicitly on the role of the workers in 1848 include Rémi Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris. Vol. 1: L’organisation, 1848–1851. Preface by Jacques Godechot (La Roche-sur-Yon: Imprimerie Centrale de l’Ouest, 1968); Maria Grazia Meriggi, L’invenzione della classe operaia. Conflitti di lavoro, organizzazione del lavoro e della società in Francia intorno al 1848 (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2002); P.H. Noyes, Organization and Revolution. Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Stanley Z. Pech, “The Czech Working Class in 1848,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 9, 1 (1967), pp. 60–73; Gyula Mérei, “Le mouvement ouvrier en Hongrie pendant la révolution de 1848,” Le Mouvement Social, No. 50 (1965), pp. 71–80; Kåre Tønnesson, “Popular Protest and Organization: The Thrane Movement in Pre‐industrial Norway, 1849–55,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 13, 2–3 (1988), pp. 121–139. See also the online encyclopedia “Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions” at . 9 See, for an elaboration, Marcel van der Linden, “Proletariat,” in: Marcello Musto (ed.), The Marx Revival. Key Concepts and New Critical Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 70–91. 10 See the eyewitness reports from the Jesuit Francis d’Entrecolles, written between 1712 and 1722. He noted, for example: “The establishments of some of the larger tradesmen occupy a vast area and contain an enormous number of workers. It is generally said that there are more than a million souls here and that ten thousand loads of rice and a thousand pigs are consumed daily. It is over a league long on the banks of a beautiful river and not a heap of houses as you might imagine; the streets are as straight as a bowstring and intersect at regular intervals. All the land is occupied and the houses are too close and the streets too narrow.” Quoted in Michael Dillon, “A History of the Porcelain Industry in Jingdezhen” (PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1976), p. 47. 11 Hsu Wen-Chin, “Social and Economic Factors in the Chinese Porcelain Industry in Jingdezhen during the Late Ming and Early Ching Period, ca. 1620–1683,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1988, No. 1, pp. 135–159, at 146. 12 John Millar, “The Advancement of Manufacture, Commerce, and the Arts, since the Reign of William III and the Tendency of this Advancement to diffuse a Spirit of Liberty and Independence,” [c. 1800], in: William C. Lehmann (ed.), John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 326–339, at 337–339. 1
106 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 13 This description is based on a compilation of data from: “Diario dello Squittinatore,” in: Giuseppe Odoardo Corazzini, I ciompi – cronache e documenti. Con notizie intorno alla vita di Michele di Lando (Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, 1887), pp. 19–92; Alfred Doren, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom vierzehnten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus, (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachf., 1901), pp. 241–242; Richard C. Trexler, “Follow the Flag: The Ciompi Revolt Seen from the Streets,” in: Trexler, Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, vol. 3: The Workers of Renaissance Florence (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), pp. 30–60; Samuel Kline Cohn, Lust for Liberty. The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 59–62; and John M. Najemy, A History of Florence 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 160–165. 14 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press 2000), p. 319. While much has been written about the slave rebellion of Saint Domingue, the best book on the event remains C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: The Dial press, 1938; several re-editions). 15 Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), p. 93. This seems to relate in part to the thesis of Alex Callinicos that bourgeois revolutions need not be achieved by the bourgeoisie: “Bourgeois revolutions should not be conceived as revolutions which are made consciously by capitalists, but as revolutions which promote capitalism. The emphasis should not be placed on the class which makes the bourgeois revolution, but on the implications of such a revolution – for the class that benefits from it. More particularly, a bourgeois revolution is a political transformation, a change in state power, which is a condition for large scale capital accumulation and the establishment of the bourgeoisie as dominant class. This definition therefore requires a political change with definite consequences. It does not say anything about the social forces which carry through the revolution.” Alex Callinicos, “Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism,” International Socialism, Second Series, 43 (1989), pp. 113–171, at 124. 16 Ellen Kay Trimberger, “State Power and Modes of Production: Implications of the Japanese Transition to Capitalism,” The Insurgent Sociologist, 7, 2 (Spring 1977), pp. 85–98; Jamie C. Allinson and Alexander Anievas, “The Uneven and Combined Development of the Meiji Restoration: A Passive Revolutionary Road to Capitalist Modernity,” Capital and Class, 34, 3 (October 2010), pp. 469–490; Mark Cohen, “Historical Sociology’s Puzzle of the Missing Transitions: A Case Study of Early Modern Japan,” American Sociological Review, 80, 3 (June 2015), pp. 603–625. 17 Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 145; Boris Mironov, “Cannon Fodder for the Revolution: The Russian Proletariat in 1917,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 18, 2 (Spring 2017), pp. 351–370. 18 Adolf Laube, “Zum Problem des Bündnisses von Bergarbeitern und Bauern im deutschen Bauernkrieg,” in: Gerhard Heitz, Adolf Laube, Max Steinmetz, and Günter Vogler (eds), Der Bauer im Klassenkampf. Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Bauernkrieges und der bäuerlichen Klassenkämpfe im Spätfeudalismus (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975), pp. 83–110, at 105–106; Adolf Laube, “Der Aufstand der Schwazer Bergarbeiter 1525 und ihre Haltung im Tiroler Bauernkrieg. Mit einem Quellenanhang,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus, 2 (1978), pp. 225–258. 19 Erich Kuttner, Het Hongerjaar 1566 (Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Boek- en Courantmaatschappij, 1949), p. 425. Kuttner’s work was inspired by an essay by the Marxist Sam de Wolff, “Het proletariaat in de beginjaren van den strijd tegen Spanje,” De Nieuwe Tijd, 9 (1906), 378–388. 20 Brian Manning, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in: Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976; second edition London: Bookmarks, 1991), pp. 7–47, at 7–8, 230–241. Also James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000). For an entirely different perspective, see also David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 21 Manning, “Introduction,” p. 25.
The proletariat and the revolution 107 22 Norah Carlin, “Marxism and the English Civil War,” International Socialism Journal, Second Series, No. 10 (1983), pp. 106–128, at 114. 23 John Walter, “The English People and the English Revolution Revisited,” History Workshop Journal, No. 61 (Spring 2006), pp. 171–182, at 180. 24 Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible. Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 383–384; see also Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977). 25 Daniel Guérin, “Preface to the English Edition,” in: Guérin, Class Struggle in the First French Republic. Bourgeois and Bras Nus 1793–1795. Trans. Ian Patterson (London: Pluto Press, 1973), pp. 1–20, at 2–3. Guérin’s book was originally published in French in 1946. Works elaborating on this premise but without admitting it explicitly are Albert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II. Mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793–9 (Paris: Librairie Clavreuil, 1958), and Richard Cobb, Les armées révolutionnaires. Instrument de la terreur dans les départements. Avril 1793 – Floréal An II. Two volumes (Paris: Mouton, 1961, 1963). Compare Daniel Guérin, “D’une nouvelle interprétation de la Révolution française,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 20, 1 (January–February 1965), pp. 84–94. 26 Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution. Trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1983), p. 329. See also Rodney D. Anderson, “Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution, 1906–1911,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54, 1 (February 1974), pp. 94–113, at 112: “Working or fighting, the Mexican proletariat were not engaged in an ‘anti-capitalist revolution,’ as some maintain, though they certainly would have identified the foreign and domestic industrialists as their enemies. Rather, they viewed the struggle from the perspective of Mexican patriots, fighting the conservative, ultramontane forces gathering anew, this time under the banner of ‘Progress and Order.’” 27 Colin Barker, “Perspectives,” in: Colin Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals (London: Bookmarks, 1987), pp. 217–245, at 221. 28 Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution. Trans. Max Eastman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), vol. 2, p. 24. 29 Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 2, p. 32. 30 Georges Haupt, “In What Sense and to What Degree Was the Russian Revolution a Proletarian Revolution?” Review [Fernand Braudel Center], 3, 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 21–33, at 32–33. 31 Charles W. Arnade, “Bolivia’s Social Revolution, 1952–1959: A Discussion of Sources,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, 1, 3 (July 1959), pp. 341–352, at 341–342. 32 Guillermo Lora, Historia del movimiento obrero boliviano. 4 volumes (La Paz, Cochabamba: Editorial Los Amigos del Libro, 1967–1980), esp. vol. 4, covering the period 1933–1952; a summary is to be found in Lora’s A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement, 1848–1971. Edited and abridged by Laurence Whitehead. Trans. Christine Whitehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 33 Opinions vary on the relative importance of the labour movement in the Cuban Revolution. Steve Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution. How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016) argues that workers carried more weight than, for example, Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 34 Maryam Poya, “Iran 1979: Long live Revolution!... Long live Islam?” in Barker, Revolutionary Rehearsals, pp. 123–168, at 139. 35 Proefschrift Peyman [Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).] 36 Colin Barker and Kara Weber, Solidarność: from Gdansk to Military Repression (London: International Socialism, 1982); Roman Laba, The Roots of Solidarity. A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working Class Democratization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 37 Andrew G. Walder, “The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949–1981,” Modern China, 10, 1 (January 1984), pp. 3–48, at 4. 38 Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution. Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), p. 197.
108 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 39 Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), p. 196. 40 See also the discussion of Tilly’s vast oeuvre in Marcel van der Linden, “Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology,” International Review of Social History, 54, 2 (August 2009), pp. 237–274. 41 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 115. 42 Charles Tilly, “Futures of European States,” Social Research, 59 (1992), pp. 705–717, at 711. 43 Richard Löwenthal, “‘The ‘Missing Revolution’ in Industrial Societies: Comparative Reflections on a German Problem’,” in: Volker R. Berghahn and Martin Kitchen (eds), Germany in the Age of Total War (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 240–260. 44 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 176–177. 45 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London: Verso, 2014 [1970]). 46 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843–44),” MECW, vol. 3, p. 186. 47 H.F. Moorhouse, “The Political Incorporation of the British Working Class: An Interpretation,” Sociology, 7 (1973), pp. 341–359, at 346. 48 MECW, vol. 28, p. 217; Michael A. Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), p. 308.
REFERENCES Allinson, J. C. and A. Anievas (2010), “The Uneven and Combined Development of the Meiji Restoration: A Passive Revolutionary Road to Capitalist Modernity,” Capital and Class, 34, 3 (October), pp. 469–490. Althusser, L. (2014 [1970]), On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso. Anderson, P. (1980), Arguments within English Marxism. London: Verso, p. 196. Anderson, R. D. (1974), “Mexican Workers and the Politics of Revolution, 1906–1911,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54, 1 (February), pp. 94–113, at 112. Arnade, C. W. (1959), “Bolivia’s Social Revolution, 1952–1959: A Discussion of Sources,” Journal of Inter-American Studies, 1, 3 (July 1959), pp. 341–352, at 341–342. Barker, C. (1987), “Perspectives,” in: Colin Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals. London: Bookmarks, pp. 217–245, at 221. Barker, C. and K. Weber (1982), Solidarność: from Gdansk to Military Repression. London: International Socialism. Bezucha, R. J. (1974), The Lyon Uprising of 1834. Social and Political Conflict in the Early July Monarchy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cadogan, P. (1965) “Harney and Engels,” International Review of Social History, 10, 1 (April), pp. 66–104. Callinicos, A. (1989), “Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism,” International Socialism, Second Series, 43, pp. 113–171, at 124. Carlin, N. (1983), “Marxism and the English Civil War,” International Socialism Journal, Second Series, No. 10, pp. 106–128, at 114. Chase, M. (2007), Chartism: A New History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cohen, M. (2015), “Historical Sociology’s Puzzle of the Missing Transitions: A Case Study of Early Modern Japan,” American Sociological Review, 80, 3 (June), pp. 603–625. Cohn, S. K. (2006), Lust for Liberty. The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 59–62. Collins, H. and C. Abramsky (1965), Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement. London: Macmillan. Corazzini, G. O. (1887), I ciompi – cronache e documenti. Con notizie intorno alla vita di Michele di Lando Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, pp. 19–92.
The proletariat and the revolution 109 Cushion, S. (2016), A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution. How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory. New York: Monthly Review Press. Dillon, M. (1976), “A History of the Porcelain Industry in Jingdezhen,” PhD thesis, University of Leeds, p. 47. Doren, A. (1901), Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom vierzehnten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachf., pp. 241–242. Farber, S. (2006), The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gilly, A. (1983), The Mexican Revolution. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, p. 329. Gossez, R. (1968), Les ouvriers de Paris. Vol. 1: L’organisation, 1848–1851. Preface by Jacques Godechot. La Roche-sur-Yon: Imprimerie Centrale de l’Ouest. Gouldner, A. W. (1979), The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, p. 93. Guérin, D. (1965), “D’une nouvelle interprétation de la Révolution française,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 20, 1 (January–February), pp. 84–94. Guérin, D. (1973), “Preface to the English Edition,” in: D. Guérin (ed.), Class Struggle in the First French Republic. Bourgeois and Bras Nus 1793–1795. Trans. Ian Patterson. London: Pluto Press, pp. 1–20, at 2–3. Haupt, G. (1979), “In What Sense and to What Degree Was the Russian Revolution a Proletarian Revolution?” Review [Fernand Braudel Center], 3, 1 (Summer), pp. 21–33, at 32–33. Hess, M. (2004), “Consequences of a Revolution of the Proletariat,” in: M. Hess (ed.), The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings. Edited by Shlomo Avineri. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 128–135. Hoerder, D, (1977), Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts 1765–1780. New York: Academic Press. Holstun, J. (2000), Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso. Hsu, W.-C. (1988), “Social and Economic Factors in the Chinese Porcelain Industry in Jingdezhen during the Late Ming and Early Ching Period, ca. 1620–1683,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1, pp. 135–159, at 146. James, C. L. R. (1938), The Black Jacobins. New York: The Dial Press. Keddie, N. R. (2003), Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Kroneberg, L. and R. Schloesser (1979), Weber-Revolte 1844. Der schlesische Weberaufstand im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Publizistik und Literatur. Cologne: C.W. Leske. Kuttner, E. (1949), Het Hongerjaar 1566. Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Boek- en Courantmaatschappij, p. 425. Laba, R. (1991), The Roots of Solidarity. A Political Sociology of Poland’s Working Class Democratization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Laube, A. (1975), “Zum Problem des Bündnisses von Bergarbeitern und Bauern im deutschen Bauernkrieg,” in: G. Heitz, A. Laube, M. Steinmetz and G. Vogler (eds.), Der Bauer im Klassenkampf. Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Bauernkrieges und der bäuerlichen Klassenkämpfe im Tiroler Bauernkrieg. Mit einem Quellenanhang, Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus, 2, pp. 225–258. Laube, A. (1978), “Der Aufstand der Schwazer Bergarbeiter 1525 und ihre Haltung im Tiroler Bauernkrieg. Mit einem Quellenanhang,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte des Feudalismus, 2, pp. 225–258. Lebowitz, M. A. (2009), Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis. Leiden and Boston: Brill, p. 308. Linebaugh, P. and M. Rediker (2000), The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 319. Lora, G. (1967), Historia del movimiento obrero boliviano. 4 volumes. La Paz: Cochabamba. Lora, G. (1977), A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement, 1848–1971. Edited and abridged by Laurence Whitehead. Trans. Christine Whitehead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Löwenthal, R. (1981), “The ‘Missing Revolution’ in Industrial Societies: Comparative Reflections on a German Problem,” in: V. R. Berghahn and M. Kitchen (eds), Germany in the Age of Total War. London: Croom Helm, pp. 240–260.
110 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Manning, B. (1976, [1991]), “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in: Brian Manning (ed.), The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, pp. 7–47, at 7–8. Marx, K. (1975), “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 186. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1975), “The German Ideology,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 88. Mérei, G. (1965), “Le mouvement ouvrier en Hongrie pendant la révolution de 1848,” Le Mouvement Social, 50, pp. 71–80. Meriggi, M. G. (2002), L’invenzione della classe operaia. Conflitti di lavoro, organizzazione del lavoro e della società in Francia intorno al 1848. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Millar, J. (1960), “The Advancement of Manufacture, Commerce, and the Arts, since the Reign of William III and the Tendency of this Advancement to diffuse a Spirit of Liberty and Independence,” [c. 1800], in: W. C. Lehmann (ed.), John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 326–339, at 337–339. Mironov, B. (2017), “Cannon Fodder for the Revolution: The Russian Proletariat in 1917,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 18, 2 (Spring), pp. 351–370. Moissonnier, M. (1958), La Révolte des canuts, Lyon, novembre 1831. Paris: Ed. sociales Messidor. Moorhouse, H. F. (1973), “The Political Incorporation of the British Working Class: An Interpretation,” Sociology, 7, pp. 341–359, at 346. Najemy, J. M. (2008), A History of Florence 1200–1575. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 160–165. Nash, G. A. (1979) The Urban Crucible. Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Noyes, P. H. (1966), Organization and Revolution. Working-Class Associations in the German Revolutions 1848–1849. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pech, S. Z. (1967), “The Czech Working Class in 1848,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 9, 1, pp. 60–73. Poya, M. (1987), “Iran 1979: Long live Revolution!... Long live Islam?” in: C. Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals, Haymarket Books, pp. 123–168, at 139. Przeworski, A. (1985), Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 176–177. Rude, F. (1982), Les Révoltes des canuts, novembre 1831—avril 1834. Paris: Maspero. Seidman, M. (2004), The Imaginary Revolution. Parisian Students and Workers in 1968. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, p. 197. Soboul, A. (1958), Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II. Mouvement populaire et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793–9. Paris: Librairie Clavreuil. Stone, L. (1972), The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642. New York: Harper & Row, p. 145. Thompson, D. (1984), The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution. London: Temple Smith. Tilly, C. (1990), Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, p. 115 Tilly, C. (1992), “Futures of European States,” Social Research, 59, pp. 705–717, at 711. Tønnesson, K. (1988), “Popular Protest and Organization: The Thrane Movement in Pre‐industrial Norway, 1849–55,” Scandinavian Journal of History, 13, 2–3, pp. 121–139. Trexler, R. C. (1993), “Follow the Flag: The Ciompi Revolt Seen from the Streets,” in: R. Trexler (ed.), Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence, vol. 3: The Workers of Renaissance Florence. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, pp. 30–60. Trimberger, E. K. (1977), “State Power and Modes of Production: Implications of the Japanese Transition to Capitalism,” The Insurgent Sociologist, 7, 2 (Spring), pp. 85–98. Trotsky, L. (1932), The History of the Russian Revolution. Trans. Max Eastman. New York: Simon and Schuster, vol. 2, p. 24. Underdown, D. (1987), Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. van der Linden, M. (2009), “Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology,” International Review of Social History, 54, 2 (August), pp. 237–274. van der Linden, M. (2020), “Proletariat,” in: Marcello Musto (ed.), The Marx Revival. Key Concepts and New Critical Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–91.
The proletariat and the revolution 111 von Hodenberg, C. (1997), Aufstand der Weber. Die Revolte von 1844 und ihr Aufstieg zum Mythos. Bonn: Dietz. Walder, A. G. (1984), “The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949–1981,” Modern China, 10, 1 (January), pp. 3–48, at 4. Walter, J. (2006), “The English People and the English Revolution Revisited,” History Workshop Journal, No. 61 (Spring), pp. 171–182, at 180.
Section B. Shifting regimes of exploitation: from the workplace to the territory to the global economy
8. Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work1 Kendra Briken
INTRODUCTION In the second decade of the 21st century, media attention and academic publishing in the Global North has rediscovered work as a focal point of interest. This increased awareness is fuelled by two trends. First, technology seems to have reached a stage where the ever- increasing affordability of access to both ‘big data’ and the computing potential to work with these resources leads to a significant change in the capitalist mode of production, captured as platform capitalism (Narayan 2022). Secondly, workers’ struggles have reappeared in shapes and forms contesting traditional trade union structures and strategies (Atzeni 2020). Workers are challenging transnational companies at the local level in the realm of the gig economy, highlighting changes in a predominantly urban labour market that impacts on precarious workers (Briziarelli and Armano 2020). Times of technological change are significant for labour process analysis. The introduction of technology developed under capitalism is never neutral but comes with changes in dominant forms of control and modes of exploitation, furthering division of labour and alienation. Labour process analysis has deemed it useful to understand these changes, both the implications for working conditions and workers’ agency.2 In this chapter, I outline the theoretical-analytical underpinnings for a materialist labour process analysis, and how it can support the challenges to critically engage with labour in the global economy. My contribution is based on a peculiar selection; that is, through the lens of mainly Western, Anglo-Saxon approaches which have influenced debates ever since the 1970s, namely the contributions by US American authors Harry Braverman (1974) and Michael Burawoy (1979), and the British scholar, Paul Thompson (1983). I outline the richness of their analytical perspectives to grasp the complexity of the labour process to show their distinctively different contributions to analysing labour in the global economy. I conclude that all three theory-led approaches come with methodological choices and research designs that impact on their analytical scale and scope. In the final section, I argue in favour of a more varied use of methods for labour process analysis to expand its potential from punctualised case studies to a more connected labour process analysis.
THE NATURE OF WORK: ANALYSING THE LABOUR PROCESS The point of departure for a materialist labour process analysis lies, first, on a shared understanding of the nature of work, with its origins going back most commonly to Karl Marx. Marx described the elementary factors of the labour process as ‘1, the personal activity of man, i.e. work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments’ (Marx 2015: 127). In other words, work is characterised by human activities aiming at the appropriation, exploitation, and 113
114 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work transformation of (raw) materials by the use of technologies. Second, labour process analysis aligns the three dimensions to broader social relations, or, to the political economy: ‘As the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner’s brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist (…)’ (Marx 2015: 128). In Marx Capital, the analytical focus on the labour process as presented in Chapter seven is through the lens of the specificities of the capitalist mode of production. Third, and most importantly, the labour process under the capitalist mode of production is unique in that the ‘personal activity of man’ is based on the buying and selling of labour power. Within this exchange, two opposing interests clash. The capitalist seeks to extract surplus value to generate profit by squeezing socially necessary labour time. The worker seeks to avoid the exploitation connected to the capitalist valorisation process by engaging in individual or collective forms of resistance and in securing room for autonomy: hence the capitalist need for control of workers’ time and performance. In this conceptualisation, the workers have a specific power; that is, to withhold labour in the process of exhausting their own labour power. But this power comes with a crucial limitation. The workers, Marx argues, are free in a double sense. They are free from the means of production apart from their own capacity to work. And they are free to choose their employer, a legal freedom that distinguishes the modes of production based on unfree, slave labour, or workers chained to feudal rules. With the new freedom comes the lack of any other source but the workers’ own labour power to sell. Here we see why a Marxist analysis is materialist. Marx makes the important distinction between the supposedly free exchange on a labour market as appearance, and the underlying dialectics that are both allowing and restricting the freedom for the workers. Workers are dependent on their individual capital, their labour power. They are competing with each other both on internal and external labour markets. The possibility of exerting power by withholding labour both individually and collectively is complex. In Marx’s Critique of the Political Economy, the labour process is far from being a simple antagonistic opposition that can be analysed at workplace level. The capitalist and the worker are embedded in complex social relations. The capitalist extracts surplus value through exploiting human labour. It is the transformation of the workers’ capacity to work, or labour power into labour that allows for surplus value creation. Two different but connected processes are an important characteristic guiding the interest in the analysis of the labour process under capitalism: exploitation and alienation. In Marxist debates, these concepts are discussed as marking the distinction between the ‘early’, sociologist, Hegelian, philosophic anthropologist Marx, and the ‘later’, economist, historical materialist, writings of Marx (Sharma 1979). The early Marx assumed that under capitalism, workers are structurally alienated by necessity from their labour power (sold to the capitalist) from the product (due to high division of labour); from each other (due to competition); and lastly, from their species being. Exploitation reflects Marx’s critical stance to the political economy of his time. The term relates to the wage effort bargain, and how the expenditure of workers’ effort can be maximised while wages can be minimised. For Marx, the production of surplus value, or, value creation, is a complex social relation he captures with the distinction between concrete labour done by the workers, and abstract labour. Abstract labour is an outcome of different intersectioning processes. The product of labour needs to be transformed into an exchangeable commodity. During this transformation, different contributions to the production process (weaving, sewing, cutting) are homogenised and their differences are disguised in the unitarist commodity form. It is in this
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work 115 form that the valorisation of a product is taking place on the market, where it is sold for a price, bought with money. In this reading of Marx, ‘concrete labour comes to take a role in the production of value only by means of its mediation through the immaterial process whereby value is assigned to a quantity of abstract labour’ (Pitts 2014: 342). Workers’ or trade unions’ claims for a fair pay usually are based on the concrete exhaustion of labour power. They can change what is perceived as exploitative labour, but under the capitalist mode of production, they will not change the social reality of wage labour being structurally exploitative and alienated, no matter their individual job satisfaction. We have gone through these ideas in some detail to understand why a Marxist approach to a labour process analysis sets some challenges for researcher and activists alike. The core assumption and distinctive feature for Marxist analysis is to understand the labour process as the privileged site for the analysis of capitalism because it is labour, and only labour, that is capable of producing surplus value. At the same time, also in line with Marx, only the transformation to abstract labour allows us to understand the valorisation process in full. This process is intangible and invisibilised, and hence the workplace is the ‘hidden abode of production’ (Marx 1976: 279). How can empirical research shed light into this very peculiar space? A materialist approach analyses the labour process from the workplace understood as the infrastructure engineered to extract surplus value.
THE CAPITALIST LABOUR PROCESS AND THE DEGRADATION OF WORK Analysing the workplace through the lens of the labour process allows for engaging with the attempt by management at ‘applying science to production, or using organisational strategies to change the balance of returns on the labour process’ (Smith 2015: 6). Technology in this context is not just a tool but includes and encompasses an understanding of aligned skills and organisational processes. The specific machines and instruments implemented and shaping the labour process are a reflection of powerful social relations.3 Management, including engineering and research and development units inside and outwith businesses, plan and analyse the labour process continuously to increase efficiency and productivity gains. Thus, the individual labourer is subordinated under the forces of production (skills, machinery, physical properties) meaning that his or her skills might become substitutable one day (Briken 2020). In the early 1970s, the American political economist and Marxist Harry Braverman took these ideas as a vantage point for his now seminal work Monopoly Capital and the Labour Process (1998 [1974]). By the time neoliberalism kicked in on the global scale, and sociologists were concerned with the rise of the service economy in the Western world, Braverman had analysed new, technological trends in rationalising the workplace, specifically the impact of computerisation. He gave a detailed account of changing skill needs, for example, in clerical work. Braverman though was not interested in deskilling per se, but in broader social relations. How is the collective worker subordinated by the forces of production, where ‘(t)he skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science’ (Marx in Braverman 1998 [1974]: 158). Braverman’s contribution is misleadingly known as the deskilling thesis. In policy debates on the impact of technology on skills, for example, we often find a reference to Braverman. But as the quote shows, Braverman argued on a different level of analysis. He was not interested in individual workplaces, but in subordi-
116 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work nated labour that ultimately is alienated. In this perspective, politicians’ much-loved upskilling is likely to have a temporary effect as it is embedded within a capitalist mode of production and the tendency for degradation of work more generally. A more recent example is provided by software developers. During the 1990s, software developers were seen as the new knowledge society elites, but their expertise has become increasingly standardised through ever more efficient code, sometimes created by the same software developers. Tasks have become transferable through the use of libraries and a software stack that has made processes easier to handle. Empirical studies of the labour process of games developers, for example, have shown how these professionals, once seen as creative and autonomous, have become deskilled, and how work intensification and their shrinking autonomy has degraded their work effort both objectively and subjectively (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2006; Thompson et al. 2016; Woodcock 2016). Another example might be the changes within higher education (Ivancheva and Garvey 2022). Braverman concluded that unless the means of production, including the planning and creation of technologies, was owned by workers, there would be no end to alienation and exploitation: ‘It is truly in this way that workers, so long as they remain servants of capital instead of freely associated producers who control their own labor and their own destinies, work every day to build for themselves more “modern”, more “scientific”, more dehumanized prisons of labor’ (Braverman 1998 [1974]: 161). Braverman probably came closest to a labour process analysis in the spirit of a Marxist dialectical-materialist methodology. In his analysis, he uses statistical data on sectoral shifts and use of technologies. Littler summed up this approach as follows: ‘Braverman attempted to reintegrate a consideration of the division of labour, technology and management methods with an analysis of occupational structure, class structure and the phases of capitalism’ (Littler 1982: 47). However, Braverman was accused of neglecting workers’ agency, and the potential of workers’ resistance and collective struggles. Critics of his time disagreed with his dark totality where there seemed to be no escape from the progression of capitalism. This criticism of Braverman was fuelled by a political concern, too. A review at the time wrote, ‘he gives us no leads as to what we might expect by way of worker militancy or organization as they result from the developing processes’; and, with a somewhat desperate tone, ‘there is no hint of what directions organizers or rank-and-file workers should take’ (Goldman 1975: 100). Despite these criticisms, reading Braverman today is an important reminder of the essence of the capitalist mode of production, and how to reflect on the division of labour, class structure, and stages of capitalism through the lens of the organisation of work. His approach inspired, for example, David Noble to examine the convergence of science, technology, and corporate capitalism. In his book ‘America by Design’ he picks up where Braverman left off to outline the appropriation and exploitation of knowledge by the professional and managerial class (Noble 1977) and showcase the structural power relations that exist ‘before the fact’ (Noble 1978). Equally, Braverman inspired Friedman (1977) to engage with ‘managerial strategy for maintaining and augmenting authority over workers’ (p. 265). Friedman suggested that firm level analysis of management strategies mattered for understanding the active creation of social inequalities within the workforce. Direct control by management over some groups of workers would be combined with relative autonomy for other groups, hence pacifying resistance of what he called ‘central’ groups that are crucial for upholding the labour processs and not as easily replaced as other workers. Friedman’s central-periphery argument also is impactful today, for example, in Amazon warehouses (Briken and Taylor 2018), where precarious
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work 117 workers work alongside a permanent workforce, and can be aligned to analysing global supply chains and levels of exploitative strategies within. These managerial strategies, of course, are driven also by cost considerations and labour market supply. Friedman, though, highlights the need to understand the potentially detrimental effects on workers’ solidarity. Labour process analysis based on materialist assumptions about technology, skills, and managerial strategies contributes to understanding the global political economy, and delivers a subset of dimensions to engage with in comparative case studies. Still, workers’ agency at a workplace level is so far dismissed, and this raises two main questions about labour process analysis and the broader focus on the employment relationship. First, why do workers consent to exploitation at work; and second, what about resistance at work? Both questions, while still in line with broader Marxist ideas, stem from different theoretical assumptions. Consent aims at understanding how technological, managerial, and ideological relations frame workers’ actions and behaviours at work. Resistance assumes that workers are aware of their exploitation. However, waged labour is necessary to survival in capitalist society. Caught in this tension, workers will find ways to resist in their everyday working lives to uphold their own identity. 4
THE LABOUR PROCESS, CONSENT, AND RESISTANCE AT WORK As outlined above, the structure of the employment relation is based on the indeterminacy of labour, and managerial control is imperative for converting labour power into labour. The general labour market might impact on skills availability and privileging specific hiring practices, but the organisation of production forms the basis for the assertion of control over the labour process. Control is part and parcel of workplace design and technologies, and the frontier of control may move back and forth by intent or accommodation. It is here where what now is known as Labour Process Theory (LPT) positions its analytical focus: the dynamics of the employment relationship. In line with Braverman, the theory suggests a continuous change of technology in the broad sense of skills, organisation, and processes at workplace level. In addition to Braverman though, LPT engages with the tensions arising from the employment relationship during the execution of work, or concrete labour as a value creating activity. If the employment relationship under capitalism is seen as antagonistic, and the transformation of the potential to labour to concrete labour is indetermined, by definition workers have agency, and control strategies will be met with resistance. The core arguments of LPT were outlined in the book The Nature of Work (1983/1989) written by the British sociologist Paul Thompson. The theory keeps a materialist approach in that the workplace is seen as crucial for surplus value production. The analytical twist comes with the decision to acknowledge the structured antagonism between capital and labour, but to bring in workers’ agency framed as relative autonomy (Edwards 1990). It derives from the Marxian legacy in that there is no assumption of any social totality impacting on concrete labour. Exploitation and alienation are analytically dismissed. Instead, labour process analyses start with the contradictions of the employment relation and the indeterminacy of labour. In this respect, control and resistance are often translated to levels of autonomy (in decision making), skills use, workers’ voices, and an evaluation of managerial control technologies, i.e. performance management. A particular strength of LPT is that it enables researchers and activ-
118 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ists alike to gain a nuanced understanding of the fundamental dynamics of control and resistance at the point of production. It thus can inform organisers and rank-and-file trade unionists on what sort of resistance workers can enact under specific socio-technological circumstances. Contrary to the Marxist understanding that ‘valorization and exploitation are the central coordinates for analysing the operation of the capitalist labour process and, importantly, to the politics of workers’ resistance’ (Cohen 1987: 34), LPT does not explicitly engage with these notions. And for Thompson, ‘(…) there are simply no necessary theoretical or empirical links between conflict and exploitation at work and those wider social transformations’ (1989: 246) (class consciousness and class struggle, note from the author). In line with these assumptions, LPT no longer sees the Marxist value form as a social relation characterising the capitalist mode of production. Instead, for LPT, value is based on concrete labour, based on the empirical argument that: ‘The link between the “value theoretic approach” and labour process is simply not demonstrated … . It lacks explanatory power and functions more as an article of faith or theoretical fidelity’ (Thompson and Vincent 2010). The value form in a Marxist perspective reflects the subordination of social agents to the impersonal domination of a temporal logic imposed by the market. For Braverman, the value form did not matter because he was not interested in the social consequences of the degradation of work but more in the impact they had on collectivism and power relations. His empirical trend analysis is driven by Marxist general arguments, but, in essence, he uses the work of the Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was more a consultant, or, influencer for the ‘scientific movement’. Opposite to this, LPT as suggested by Thompson follows a strong analytical approach based in a Weberian tradition of theory building, that is focussing on the observable. The approach stresses a ‘relative autonomy’ of managerial agency from wider structural economic compulsions (Edwards 1990). In doing so, LPT opposes any conceptualisation of labour process analysis that mitigates between essence and appearance – such as the value form. In doing so, LPT sought to surpass the Marxist foundations of Braverman’s association of job design with the capitalist imperative to accumulate, with the effect as it is argued by its critics, of ‘hiv[ing] off – conceptually or analytically – the labour process from the valorisation process’ (Reveley 2011: 328–9). From a political economy perspective, by eschewing a totalising theory of value, LPT has been accused of failing to properly account for the systemic factors underpinning social relations under capitalism, foreshortening its capacity to reckon with their political consequences (Spencer 2000; Martínez Lucio and Stewart 1997). LPT instead delivered on developing and refining the understanding of resistance at work, a field usually dominated by more managerially oriented organisational behaviour studies. Deliberately calling their book Organizational Misbehaviour, Ackroyd and Thompson aimed at ‘seeing beneath the surface of formal organization and the apparent consent of employees in the capitalist employment relationship’ (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 31). They developed an analytical framework to discover oppositional practices based on different levels of appropriation, namely time, the product, work tasks, and work identities (through humour, or the building of subcultures). Levels of appropriation expand on the concepts of commitment and engagement (the focus of organisational behaviour) to consider also concepts such as simple cooperation, compliance, or active hostility, for example, theft and sabotage. Analysing acts of misbehaviour is of course essential to understand the diversity of workers’ agency including their observable behaviour. The limitation of this strand of LPT though lies in the further individualisation of the research subject. Although resistance and misbehaviour
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work 119 are based on a structural conflict, their outcome is ‘to be treated as a phenomenon in its own right rather than a conceptual and practical derivation of class struggle’ (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 165). As contested as this argument might be, if turned the other way around, the question remains on how workers’ struggles form class struggles and class consciousness. LPT holds no tools to investigate the collective worker, and hands over any attempts at organising to collective actors and their representatives. Spencer (2000) concluded that with this decision, the potential for a radicalisation of the labour process debate is cut away. In a conceptual extension, Smith (2006) extended resources for workers’ power from effort to mobility power, so that the labour process would be characterised by a ‘double indeterminacy of labour’. External labour markets impact on the mobility power of the workforce. His suggestion is important insofar as it mitigates between the workplace and external factors and distinguishes different analytical levels of workers’ power: effort and mobility (see Heiland 2021 for a recent application to food delivery workers). If and how mobility power works in favour of workers though is often questionable, and other approaches have shown it often is enhancing employers’ power. LPT and its methodological individualism is weaker in analysing the strategies of specific groups of workers and the competition that arises between them within the workplace. With LPT, resistance becomes both ubiquitous, but also limited in its outcomes. The aforementioned methodological individualism in empirical LPT research gives snapshots of resistance rather than insights into resistance as process, or workers’ consent. Workers may obey their own exploitation out of necessity or, as our third approach assumes, because the social form of value creation, including exploitation, is hidden from their everyday working lives. This point is where Michael Burawoy starts his 1979 inquiry in Manufacturing Consent. Changes in the Labour Process under Monopoly Capitalism. For Burawoy, exploitation is at the heart of the labour process, and management constantly has to secure value creation at work while obscuring they are exploiting the workers. His ethnographic study based on participatory observations shows how this mechanism works on three levels. First, management seems to be able to rely on exploiting workers’ own collectivism and group dynamics, for example, workers collectively engaged in secretly producing surplus quantity to be able to have some extra breaks, or to prepare for planned interruptions. They used competitive games to reappropriate time, identity, or the product, all constituting a collective response to the control strategies used by management – while at the same time their strategies equally helped to secure extracting surplus value for management and even pacified tensions with management. Second, Burawoy argues that the organisation of labour markets, market competition, and the position of workers within this impacted on the labour process. What are the conditions for workers to be able to sell their labour power? Burawoy here extends the idea of the ‘free workers’ logic mentioned earlier in applying it both to the external and internal market logic. What career paths do workers have and how are they played against each other? For the external labour market, Burawoy includes the state as important in that he takes into account ‘the level of intervention in the ties between reproductive labour and production (Burawoy 1983: 589), for example, care regimes, or today’s workfare models. Here, Burawoy is in strict agreement with Marx’s conclusions: It can even be laid down as a general rule that the less authority presides over the division of labour inside society, the more the division of labour develops inside the workshop, and the more it is subjected there to the authority of a single person. Thus authority in the workshop and authority in society, in relation to the division of labour, are in inverse ratio to each other (Marx 1847 [1955]).
120 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Burawoy concludes that the higher the level of autonomy in the labour market, the higher the level of despotism characterising the organisation of the labour process; and vice versa, hegemonic consent is sought under more regulated state apparatuses. Burawoy extends characteristics of the Fordist welfare state and applies them in their impact on the shop floor. If the level of social insurance policies, collective agreements or (according to feminist Marxists) care provision is high, management needs to put in more effort to avoid turnover. Last but not least, Burawoy encourages comparative studies and makes a point similar to what today is known as varieties of capitalism in stating that ‘the form of despotic regime varies among countries according to patterns of proletarianization, so that where workers retain ties to subsistence existence various paternalistic regimes with a more or less coercive character emerge to create additional bases of dependence of workers on their employers’ (Burawoy 1983: 590). The latter point is important for aligning labour process debates to the global political economy of labour. Through the lens of factory regimes, the vulnerability of collective labour facing the national and international mobility of capital becomes evident in its impact on the organisation of the labour process and how either consent or coercion are prioritised by management (for an empirical case study using this approach see Sproll 2013). In this conceptualisation, consent can also be sought by companies to refer to market forces and the pressure from competition to achieve hegemonic consent. Workers, then, face the threat of losing their jobs not as individuals but as a result of threats to the viability of the firm. This externalised threat enables management to turn the hegemonic regime against workers, relying on its mechanisms of coordinating interests to command consent to sacrifices.
CONCLUSION: RESEARCHING THE LABOUR PROCESS – THE POVERTY OF METHODOLOGY5 The starting point for this chapter was a question: How can a workplace-centred labour process analysis contribute to the literature critically engaging with the global political economy? For example (Pradella 2017); global labour studies in general (Van der Linden 2008); migration and feminist studies (Salzinger 2003; Mezzadri 2021a, b); analysis of work in the global political economy, including the impact of new technologies (Huws 2006, 2016); pressures on the labour force stemming from outsourcing (Chan et al. 2013). Two conclusions might be drawn from this chapter. First, reading the three approaches together focussing on their strength supports the argument to maintain a materialist approach to labour process analysis. With Braverman, we can see the ‘social determinacy’ that capitalism reflects and its social forms as a historic process that is determined on an abstract level. Braverman’s thinking allows us to reflect on cycles of upskilling of different workplaces, and subsequent attempts to standardise tasks with degradation of work as a general trend. The same holds true for management strategies, and as a consequence, these would be ‘realized by capital within definite limits and unevenly across industries’ (Braverman 1974: 171). For labour process analysis in a global political economy, the materialist approach supports a greater understanding of the choice of production technologies and the impact of the detailed and social division of labour on exploitation. LPT, in contrast, zooms into the workplace level. With LPT, research engages with structure-agency dualism by emphasising individual workers’ voices and perceptions to understand resistance and organisational misbehaviour. LPT-inspired research shows that workers’ agency is unpredictable, and in no way prede-
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work 121 termined by the labour process. Each and every workplace remains a contested terrain, independent of local or national regimes. In this approach, patterns of resistance can be observed and help support building strategies for other workers. Burawoy’s approach spans the two approaches by raising awareness of the ideological embeddedness of workers into regimes of production, shaped by institutional settings, managerial settings, and the workplace (Hürtgen 2022). Burawoy also explicitly reflects on workers as a collective and brings to the fore social relations at work. Second, the review makes clear that all three approaches suggest different methodological approaches to research. Braverman uses statistical data and secondary literature. Researchers from the LPT tradition usually design their research around case studies, including semistructured interviews, mostly relying on workers reporting on their working conditions and on stories of resistance more than on questions around their impact or sustainability. Burawoy used ethnographic studies and his participatory observation was crucial to fully understand the materiality of the labour process. My second conclusion hence is that a materialist labour process analysis that fits a global political economy approach itself needs to overcome academic individualism and might need more collaborative attempts. Martínez Lucio and Stewart (1997) flagged the issue that LPT, for example, focusses on the worker as an individualised employee, or on identities, but never on the collective worker. They argue that although technology is an important aspect for LPT when it comes to understanding the labour process, LPT ignores the necessarily cooperative character of the capitalist labour process. The fallacy of LPT in this respect is that in their methodological choices, researchers are imposing the same individualising approach used in managerial practice – the standardisation and individualisation of the employee. This is even more so with the ‘datalogical turn’; the move from representation to non-representation of the human in big data (Clough and Gregory 2015). The disconnect of the worker from other digital materialities, such as in the realm of digital click work (Irani 2015), has shown how workers are literally left to their own devices at work. It is here that Burawoy’s pledge for an extended case study approach closes a gap between the methodological choices offered by either Braverman or LPT. He explicitly engages with workers’ collectives, collaboration, and conflicts at work but at longue durée. He can show that consent and resistance are more than an individual reflex, and stem from a conjunctive space of shared experiences, which means, in this context, at work. The predictability of class struggle and industrial action does not increase by using different methods. But understanding impactful collective forms of resistance would add to research on workers’ struggles without losing their grounding to the production technologies and a materialist labour process. Unravelling the potential for seeing connections between empirical workplace studies and collective action requires us to engage with different methodological approaches more creatively. Rather than constituting a set of observable and researchable practices that allow us to get to the bottom of value-producing labour, research must instead be geared towards the social form in which abstract labour is brought into existence (Dinerstein and Pitts 2022). Group discussions, ethnographic methods, and workers’ inquiry would provide ways to overcome the individualising effect research often has on the participating workers. Or, as Burawoy states in his pledge for global ethnographies, ‘Only in the locality – the ethnographers hearth – can one study the effects of globalisation’ (Burawoy 2001: 149; see Tsing (2009) for an example from anthropology), and, in conclusion, the global political economy of labour. To gain a wider understanding of the said collective worker, their shared suffering and successes, their ideas around what counts at work, these approaches
122 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work amplify a truly collective voice, or even class consciousness that is not mitigated by either surveys led by human resource managers or trade unions. These methods when combined with collective tools such as workers’ inquiry (Figiel et al. 2014; Woodcock 2014; Gallo Lassere and Monferrand 2019) are empowering tools, too. Sharing experiences in a saved space for workers who often are forcedly individualised, and even more so in the age of the gig economy, means they can share acts of resistance or fears, and discuss options on how to fight back collectively. Labour process analysis could learn from traditions such as research on workers’ centres (Zanoni 2008), where spaces for sharing information on legal and social rights have been combined with empowerment; from workers’ inquiry projects such as the UK-based initiatives from Notes from Below (https://notesfrombelow.org/category/inquiry), the Edinburgh-based Workers Observatory (https://workersobservatory.org) and many more, globally (Chan et al. 2021; Ovetz 2020). These examples also show that the global political economy needs a collective effort in connecting and encouraging collaboration between researchers and activists along the global chains that workers are left with to lose. Keeping the spirit of Braverman would mean that activist researchers stick to the idea that labour emancipation is ‘based on the transcendence of abstract labour and value’ (Spencer 2000: 233). Burawoy’s (1998) claim for extended case studies and global ethnographies allows for including social relations into the analysis, and moving towards a research agenda that takes into account analytical issues with the value form. A process-oriented empirical research agenda benefits from the conceptualisation of consent, conflict, and resistance as suggested with the core LPT, but would require research designs aimed at capturing the role of power, such as domination, silencing, objectification, normalisation and individualisation. Connecting labour process analysis to struggles and collectivism would allow the re-consideration of the notion of class struggle not as an objective antagonism, but centering class struggle as the (collective) subject itself.
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I am grateful to Eleanor Kirk, Dora Scholarios, and Maurizio Atzeni who commented on earlier versions, and helped me shape my argument. As of June 2022, there is an abundance of articles written about platform labour. Explicitely focussing on materialist labour process analysis see Amorim and Moda (2020); Moore and Joyce (2020); Flanagan (2019) for housework; Gandini (2019) for drivers; Cant (2020) and Woodcock (2020) for delivery riders; van Doorn (2017) for low paid service work, and James (2022) for gendered divisions of gig work. Labour process analysis historically (Noble 1978; Mackenzie 1984) and most recently engaged with the topic of technological determinism (Thompson and Laaser 2021; Briken and MacKenzie 2022; Howcroft and Taylor 2022; Joyce et al. 2023). What is summarised as (post-)operaist studies gives a great insight into workers and workers’ struggles, understood as an independent variable in the analysis of work under capitalism. In these approaches, the argument is flipped and technological development including changes in management strategies is seen as an outcome of workers’ resistance and collective struggles. For an overview see Negri (2021). The subtitle is a reference to Marx: ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’.
Analysing the labour process and the global political economy of work 123
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9. Exploitation and global value chains Benjamin Selwyn, Liam Campling, Alessandra Mezzadri, Elena Baglioni, Satoshi Miyamura and Jonathan Pattenden
INTRODUCTION Recognition of and concern about labour exploitation within global supply chains is increasingly on the agenda. High profile laws have been designed and passed in California, France and the UK aiming to eliminate exploitative practices within these chains.1 While representing a legal recognition that one country’s consumption of commodities can negatively impact the lives of people producing them in other countries, these new laws remain anchored to a (liberal) framework, where ‘exploitation’ is seen as unusual within capitalism rather than inherent to it.2 Under contemporary capitalism production has been increasingly globalised in many sectors (Dicken, 2007). Global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) frameworks (henceforth ‘chain’ approaches) represent the principal conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies for tracing these processes and their developmental impacts. For the most part, however, these approaches eschew any analysis of the ways in which exploitation underpins the existence and reproduction of such chains. While Cattaneo et al. (2010, 7) suggest that ‘GVCs have become the world economy’s backbone and central nervous system’, this article illuminates how capitalist exploitation is the DNA of that system. In this chapter, we raise and begin to address two interlinked questions: (1) How does capitalist exploitation underpin the formation and reproduction of GVCs? (2) How does the formation and proliferation of GVCs impact upon dynamics of capitalist exploitation? This endeavour is necessary since, in much chain analysis the social relations of production remain intellectually side-lined, as if existing in a ‘hidden abode’ (Marx, 1990). In pursuing this endeavour, however, we aim to avoid the pitfalls associated with ‘productivist’ variants of Marxism which understand capitalist exploitation as occurring exclusively within the ‘productive’ sphere (the workplace). We argue that for exploitation to occur at the point of production in GVCs, it requires combinations of social relations that exist beyond the workplace and the chain and we use the chain approach to investigate and elucidate such dynamics. By looking beyond the workplace to identify and trace social relations that enhance exploitation, we seek to contribute to a better understanding of how exploitation exists within, and underpins, the commodity chains that constitute so much of the world economy. The chapter is structured as follows. Section two outlines the usefulness of rooting GVC analysis in a Marxist conceptualisation of exploitation in the circuits of production and finance. Section three discusses a number of GVC-related approaches that recognise the reality of capitalist exploitation but stop short of placing it at their analytical centre. Section four provides three short examples – oceanic seafaring, export horticulture and garments – to show how exploitation is central to these chains but is co-constituted by other forms of social 126
Exploitation and global value chains 127 difference (race, gender, space). Section five concludes with suggestions of how to advance this research agenda.
MARX, LABOUR EXPLOITATION AND GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS Much Marxist political economy, including those that adopt chain approaches conceive of exploitation as a process occurring in the ‘hidden abode’ of production. Focussing on the latter, however, only reveals part of the way in which capital is able to reproduce its dominance over labour and to enhance its ability to extract surplus value from it. In this section we restate the core Marxist conception of exploitation to show how it exists within, and contributes to, a context of globalising production. From this vantage point we are able to move on to show how extra-workplace social relations are central to reproducing the exploitative dynamics within the ‘hidden abode’ of production. The ‘inner secret’ of capitalist profit, as Marx (1990) put it, is capital’s ability to reap a greater portion of value from workers’ labour power (surplus value) than the cost of its initial purchase. Legally defined ‘free’ labour is exploited because it yields to capital greater value than it receives as defined by the labour contract. Having purchased (or secured in other ways) a person’s labour power, and compelled by competition with other capitals, firms seek to increase the surplus value appropriated from workers through increasing rates of a) absolute surplus-value extraction (lengthening the working day); b) relative surplus-value extraction (intensification of the working day). Historically, in the case of women and subaltern groups – and across a rising number of labour regimes – surplus-value extraction takes place also through c) immiseration (by pushing down wages, sometimes below workers’ subsistence costs), often resulting from complex combinations of absolute and relative surplus value extraction. In fact, whether firms pursue one, another, or a combination of these strategies, are empirical and conjunctural questions. Marx highlights how exploitation under capitalism is a process where commodities are produced, surplus value generated and extracted, and where class relations are reproduced: On the one hand, the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization. On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it – a personal source of wealth [for the capitalist], but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for [themselves] … in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production (Marx, 1990, 716 emphasis added).
However, contrary to productivist variants of Marxism these dynamics of class reproduction are co-constituted by other forms of social difference as we will show below. Finance and financialisation are intrinsic to the globalisation of production. The integration of production and finance minimises social, spatial and temporal gaps between each moment of the accumulation process. In Marx’s words: The circuit of capital proceeds normally only as long as its various phases pass into each other without delay. If capital comes to a standstill in the first phase, M-C, money capital forms into a hoard; if this happens in the production phase, the means of production cease to function, and labour-power remains unoccupied; if in the last phase, C’-M’, unsalable stocks of commodities obstruct the flow of circulation (Marx, 1981, 133).
128 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Table 9.1
Top 2,000 TNCs annual average revenues and profits, 1996–2015 (in trillions of US dollars) 1996–2000
2001–05
2006–10
2011–15
Net sales/revenues
12.8
18.7
29.7
36.8
Net income or profits
0.7
1.0
2.0
2.6
5.7%
5.4%
6.8%
7.0%
Rate of profit to revenue
Note: All data are based on annual averages for the period specified (UNCTAD, 2018)
The globalisation of production labelled ‘hyperglobalisation’ by UNCTAD (2018), is perhaps the defining characteristic of the contemporary world economy, with profound implications for the reproduction of capitalist and labouring classes. Not only are the world’s top 2,000 firms controlling a greater proportion of the global economy, they are increasing their proportion of total sales/revenue and capturing an even higher rate of profit in the process (Table 9.1; UNCTAD, 2018). Contemporary global production and finance has created new forms of leverage and arbitrage over labour and taxation jurisdictions (Quentin and Campling, 2018), and ever greater degrees of legal distance and complexity between the owners of lead firms and those involved in actual production (IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group, 2016). These processes have, in turn, generated new articulations of ‘relations of domination and subordination’ (Hall, 1980, 325), from the domestic (Elson, 1998) to global racialised divisions of labour (Chakravartty and da Silva, 2012). These forces are generating ‘cascade effects’ (Nolan et al., 2008) whereby the tendency towards concentration and centralisation among ‘lead’ firms is mimicked by their suppliers as lead firms seek to directly articulate with a smaller number of suppliers to more effectively ‘appropriate value [and] pass on risk and costs’ (Havice and Campling, 2017, 294). Lead firm governance strategies and practices enable them to both directly and indirectly influence supplier firms’ labour processes through the ‘extreme levels of control … exerted in the chains from which they source product’ (Robinson and Rainbird, 2013, 97, 101–2; Selwyn, 2019). For example, Apple’s Supplier Responsibility 2014 Progress Report states how the company requires its ‘suppliers to achieve an average of 95 percent compliance with our maximum 60-hour week’ (Apple, 2014). Moreover, lead firms’ coordination of relations between nominally independent firms enables them to ‘distance themselves from their own role in creating an environment for exploitation’ (Du Toit, 2001, 3). Given that exploitation lies at the heart of capitalism, how have some of the more critical chain approaches attempted to analyse it? To this question we now turn.
EXPLOITATION IN CHAIN ANALYSIS This section engages with recent chain analyses that recognise and draw upon Marx’s conception of exploitation: Bair and Werner’s disarticulations project, Pickles and Smith’s articulations of global capitalism approach, and Herod, Pickren, Rainnie and McGrarth-Champ’s global destruction network perspective. Each of these conceptions contribute novel dimensions to chain analysis – and we seek to complement these insights in our own approach by placing Marx’s theorisation of the dialectical relationship between capitalist exploitation in and through global production at the analytical centre (Table 9.2 provides a summary).
Exploitation and global value chains 129 Table 9.2
Key concepts and contributions of critical chain analysis
Authors
Key Concept
Bair and Werner
Dis/articulations of value Investigates constitutive role of social relations in the pre-history of chain formation,
(2011a and 2011b)
chains
Analytical Value Added and ongoing chain reproduction, and how these relations are causal effects and outcomes of chain inclusion/exclusion.
Bair and Werner (2015) Pickles and Smith
Articulations of global
Investigates how different fractions of capital articulate with different social forces to
(2016)
capitalism
generate diverse and uneven geographies of development.
Herod et al. (2014)
Global destruction
Investigates how chains simultaneously ‘end’ and start again through the
McGrath-Champ et networks
reproduction, in new physical forms, of congealed labour.
al. (2015) Authors
Workplace and
Investigates how diverse forms of social difference co-produce relations of
extra-workplace
exploitation in historically and geographically specific contexts, and how these
dynamics of exploitation co-constitute local processes of capitalist development.
Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner (2011a, 2011b) propose a dis/articulations approach to the study of GVCs. They note that much chain analysis is characterised by an ‘inclusionary bias’ that emphasises participation within chains, rather than upon broader socio-spatial dynamics that enable the formation and reproduction of these chains. Their perspective aims to illuminate and explicate ‘the layered histories of dispossession, disinvestment and accumulation that shape a region’s position in global circuits of commodity production’ (Bair and Werner, 2011b, 1001). In this vein, and in contrast to various studies of labour within existing chains, Bair and Werner conceptualise the reproduction of class relations as occurring simultaneously within and beyond the chain or network (Bair and Werner, 2015). They note Marx’s observation that ‘the relative surplus population is the background against which the law of demand and supply of labour does its work’ (Marx, 1990, 792). In this way, they illuminate how interconnected class relations within and beyond GVCs co-determine each-other’s social reproduction. From a related but distinct angle, John Pickles and Adrian Smith (2016) seek to explain how ‘articulations of capital’ combine with, and shape, dynamics of uneven regional development. They emphasise how GPNs are not simply constellations of firms in varying socio-institutional environments but are constitutive parts of a broader dynamic of capital accumulation. This endeavour is pursued by specifying how different fractions of capital (e.g. industrial, financial, commercial, service-providing) are hierarchically but conjuncturally structured. Such conjunctural structuring explains a) how particular GPNs (re)produce specific forms of surplus value production/extraction and capital accumulation, b) the unequal distribution of surplus value within and through these networks, and c) how these dynamics influence and are influenced by processes of uneven regional development. As they note, such articulations: [A]re precisely about the ways in which firms and other actors (such as service providers, state authorities, trade unions and civic organisations) are interdependently connected/disconnected (articulated and disarticulated) to/from particular circuits of capital and their corresponding economic geographies of production and consumption. … [And] about the ways in which capital intersects, and is co-constituted in relation to, a whole manner of social relations which are not reducible to the capital relation, but are articulated with it (Pickles and Smith, 2016, 39).
Pickles and Smith (2016) explore these dynamics empirically through studies of Central and Eastern European clothing industries. While they emphasise dynamics of labour exploitation,
130 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work their theoretical and analytical starting points are the (dis)articulations of different fractions of capital with each other and with other social organisations, and the developmental processes that they generate. Finally, Herod et al. (2014) and McGrath-Champ et al. (2015) offer a useful corrective to conceiving of chains in linear terms, by highlighting the co-constitutive relationship between GPNs and global destruction networks (GDNs). While much chain analysis assumes that the consumption of a commodity represents its end-state, the GDN perspective highlights the ‘ongoing-ness’ of many commodities. It roots this ongoing-ness in the transfer of congealed labour (value produced and extracted from labour and embodied in commodities) from one commodity to another. For example, the electronic waste sector in Accra, Ghana imports and reworks substantial volumes of second-hand electrical and electronic equipment. Parts taken from old computers may be incorporated into new machines, or may be processed for use in other GPNs – with ferrous metals, aluminium and copper used for the production of kitchenware, jewellery and copper wire (McGrath-Champ, 2015, 634). In this way the GDN prism highlights ‘the geographical connections between where old commodities are disassembled and new ones assembled’ (McGrath-Champ et al., 2015, 637). The relationship between many GPNs and GDNs is suggestive of ongoing spirals of accumulation and exploitation, as we explore below. These three approaches advance chain analysis. Yet exploitation represents a secondary category in them all. The primary categories – co-constitutive relations of network exclusion and inclusion (Bair and Werner), articulations/hierarchies of different fractions of capital (Pickles and Smith), the non-linearity of productive chains as determined by the transfer of congealed labour (Herod et al.) – all require labour exploitation but are not explained by it. Our approach, by contrast, seeks to disaggregate constitutive elements, enablers and moments of capitalist exploitation that underpin the formation and expansion of GVCs.
LABOUR EXPLOITATION: WITHIN AND BEYOND THE WORKPLACE We use three vignettes that draw on our wider research projects to illustrate how our widened understanding of capitalist exploitation helps to make sense of global production within and beyond the workplace. Financialisation and Exploitation In GVCs/GPNs, processes of financialisation and the disaggregation of production, and the socio-spatial inequalities they have generated, are mutually constitutive in three analytically distinct but empirically interconnected ways. First, with reference to the US economy, William Milberg (2008) has shown the positive correlation between the global outsourcing of production and the rise in corporate profits. In this light, financialisation can be seen as an instrument of chain governance in itself, further deepening the international division of labour and the polarisation of the world economy in commodity producing and (finance) capital-owning regions. Secondly, the ways in which finance and credit shape exploitative practices in GVCs/GPNs are concretely related to price mechanisms. Evidence on price formation and price transmis-
Exploitation and global value chains 131 sion in global commodity markets suggests highly unequal patterns of adjustment of producer and consumer prices linked to potential financial fluctuations. Producers, far away from the financial markets that determine much of the future price of their produce, are ultimately price-takers. Negative changes in financial prices – triggering falls in the production price – are quickly passed onto and socialised by them, while price rises reach them with a more considerable time lag (Krivonos, 2004; Fafchamps and Vargas Hill, 2008). For example, the uneven nature of price transmission mechanisms from financial markets to ‘the farm gate’ (Bargawi and Newman, 2017) is likely to intensify exploitation, by expanding the scope of self-exploitation of small farmers, and/or by impacting on the wages offered to casual labourers in the context of declining production prices and returns. A third way in which finance and credit directly impact upon exploitation in GVCs/GPNs relates to the lack of access to formal credit markets for the working poor. This generates informal modes of financing that are endemic to the lower rungs of GVCs/GPNs – whether through micro-credit (see Taylor, 2011), or the collateralisation of social security to secure social inclusion (Lavinas, 2018). In GVCs/GPNs, endogenous sources of finance and credit for petty commodity producers and for the working poor often appear in the form of money advances. While portrayed as aimed at supporting livelihoods in contexts of ‘missing markets’ (e.g. Bardhan, 1980), in many instances advances are shown to reinforce relations of exploitation (Pattenden, 2016), also by ‘interlocking’ labour and credit relations, particularly when these take place between the working poor and the dominant class/caste credit providers (Srivastava, 1989; Mezzadri, 2016a). Racialised Labour Processes in Oceanic Seafaring An example of how racialised divisions of labour reenforce the power of (and profits to) capital is to be found in oceanic seafaring. The relatively understudied work of seafaring – part and parcel of the rapidly evolving and expanding global logistics industry (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008) – provides an example of how racialised capitalist labour processes are organised and have evolved historically. In the oceanic cargo sector, the rate of labour exploitation has increased substantially over the post-war era. Technological change in shipping is characterised by the ability to employ fewer crew to move greater volumes of cargo across the global ocean. The intensification of the rate of exploitation of crew has seen average pay reduced; a halving of the number of crew employed on the average cargo boat despite that the average boat increased its carrying capacity substantially; and the speed up of turnaround time in port which reduces seafarers’ shore leave (Campling and Colás, 2021). In this way, not only is the quantity of a seafarer’s leisure time reduced, but their socio-psychological embeddedness in the ship is intensified. Social hierarchy is physically reflected in the design of cargo ships with ratings’ (unlicensed crew) accommodation normally being located on lower decks and those of officers, especially senior ones, on higher decks. This is a throwback to the hierarchical organisation of the ship in the Royal Navy where officers stood on the quarterdeck and common crew worked on the forecastle and were not to approach the quarterdeck without officerial assent (Campling and Colás, 2021). Most modern ship design reproduces this social organisation of living space and the pressures of tight competition among boat owners to maximise labour productivity per tonne of cargo means that space is further segmented and squeezed. For example, crew accommodation is often smaller today than in the 1970s.
132 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Racialised divisions of labour and working conditions articulate with class divisions on boats in the twenty-first century. Seafarers from the global South tend to be employed as ratings, while senior officers tend to be recruited from the ‘traditional’ maritime states, with the latter not only being paid better but enjoying shorter voyages. When officers are recruited from the global South, they normally receive much lower salaries than the equivalent from an OECD country (Sampson, 2013). In combination, these strategies save money and time for capital, while intensifying fatigue and stress and decreasing wellbeing for crew. Gendered Paternalism in Export Horticulture An example of how societal gendered norms are deployed to increase labour exploitation is to be found in West African export horticulture. Coastal Senegal’s Niayes region has long been a horticultural producing region, but exports to Europe boomed from the 2000s onwards to become one of the country’s most dynamic economic sub-sectors. Exports are concentrated among French beans, cherry tomatoes and mangoes. The region’s export horticulture sector is based upon a dynamic and shifting combination of large-scale exporting estate farms, employing wage labour under various contracts, as well as medium-scale and small-scale family farms. Crucially, the sector has always depended on employing an army of cheap labour in the form of women workers in fields and packaging centres, with different degrees of formality (Baglioni, 2015, 2018, 2021). A key to obscuring relations of exploitation in both small- and large-scale farms has been a long-standing ideology and practice of gendered paternalism. Through the lens of paternalism (see also Du Toit, 1993, on South Africa), Senegalese horticultural farms can be conceptualised as existing along a spectrum, between the small-scale ‘families as firms’ and the large-scale ‘firms as families’. On small-scale farms this ideological framing has the effect of blurring exploitation within family labour and fundamentally combining and clouding capitalist production with social reproduction. On large exporting farms paternalism serves to generate extra-economic relations between employers and workers. Managers often refer to workers by ‘ici c’est la famille!’, invariably portraying firms as homes for crowds of workers otherwise ‘lost’. The owner of one of the largest companies praised the strong ‘familial’ bonds pervading the company, and the firm had even set up a union to solve all problems ‘at home’. In these ways, labour is made available, is disciplined outside and inside the workplace, and is cheapened through gendered norms about women’s work. Spatial Dynamics of Exploitation through Circular Migration Alongside gendered and racialised norms, spatial (dis)location of labour in relation to capital represents a forceful means to intensify labour exploitation. India’s share of world exports of apparel and clothing, and their value, has boomed over the last three decades. One of the most important garment production clusters is the National Capital Region (NCR) formed by Delhi and its neighbouring industrial areas in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana (Mezzadri, 2017). There are between 3,000 and 4,000 garment production units in the NCR. Large-scale exporters sub-contract garment production to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Work in these production units is low paid and intense. Typical working days are between 10 to12 hours across the sector, but can reach 13 to16 hours for around one third of workers in
Exploitation and global value chains 133 non-factory domestic settings. Intense labour exploitation and degradation within the NCR is secured through three interrelated dynamics: (1) circular rural-urban migration, (2) industrial circulation of labour within the NCR and (3) ejection from the sector following workers’ physical exhaustion (Mezzadri, 2017). Approximately 90 per cent of NCR garment workers, in factories and non-factory work units come from rural areas, 70 per cent of whom own land in their place of origin. Of these, over 40 per cent consider land to be crucial for their subsistence. Roughly one third of these workers circulate between the NCR and their place of origin on a yearly, seasonal basis, and are usually linked to production units by labour contractors, the latter who may be either employed as contractors by firms, and/or combine contracting with direct labour supervision within production units (Mezzadri and Srivastava, 2015). This rural-urban migration is paralleled by ‘industrial circulation’ – between different production units within the NCR: The majority of workers (over 60 per cent) work for the same employer for less than one year. Such patterns of multiple spells of short-term employment reduce to a minimum employers’ legal requirements for, and actual provision of, health, safety and pension provision. In these ways, and backed up by purposefully lax state regulation, employers largely avoid responsibility for workers’ social reproduction costs. Most workers leave, physically worn out, by the time they have reached 30 to 35 years of age (Mezzadri, 2017). Living conditions in the NCR are brutal. Workers either live in urban industrial hamlets or rent rooms in slums within or near the NCR. Typically, five to eight garment workers share a tiny, unsanitary, living space, where access to water and sanitation are considered luxurious. During circular annual migration, and following their ejection from the sector, workers’ villages represent their principal social security cushion. Women are at the heart of this (re) productive system. In northern India, they generally remain in the villages as men circulate between these and garment jobs, to look after the land, look after children and the elderly, and engage in other collective responsibilities. When they are incorporated in productive networks that are home-based, their contribution is generally hidden as unpaid, as are their daily domestic chores (Mezzadri, 2016b), which hence work as a subsidy to capital (Mezzadri, 2021).
SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH This chapter has posed and sought to answer the following, interlinked, questions: (1) How does capitalist exploitation underpin the formation and reproduction of GVCs? (2) How does the formation and proliferation of GVCs impact upon dynamics of capitalist exploitation? The specific form of exploitation under capitalism – (predominantly) the sale and purchase of labour power between so-called ‘freely’ contracting entities – ensures that surplus value is produced by workers, extracted/captured by their employers and distributed between capitalists across multiple geo-political borders. Under contemporary capitalism, global economic integration and technological change have established conditions for new forms of globalised sourcing, production and distribution of commodities. The proliferation of GVCs across borders and expanding numbers of global workers have, in turn, generated new forms of leverage for capital, through which to extract, secure and transfer surplus value. Our analysis provides an alternative approach to thinking with, and about, exploitation in global supply chains, in direct contrast to policy conceptions, such as the UK’s in the
134 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Modern Slavery Act, that focus only on the worst aspects of employment and/or forced labour, and to the majority of GVC/GPN analysis. We show that exploitation is a complex and multi-dimensional process, one that is constitutive of global capitalism and its value chains and production networks. It is characterised and shaped by sets of social relations cutting across spheres of production, social reproduction, inter-firm governance, finance (all backed up by the international state system) which, in turn, constitute the formation and operation of GVCs. While various critical chain approaches incorporate into their frameworks Marx’s notion of exploitation, for the most part they do not identify it as their central focus. By contrast, we place exploitation and its myriad supporting relations at the core of our analysis. This enables us to highlight the diverse forms and relations through which exploitation underpins GVCs, and how GVCs, in turn, draw upon pre-existing, and create new forms of, exploitation. Those that promote GVCs under global capitalism are effectively promoting new rounds of labour exploitation. For these reasons, we need critical social science and a notion of human development orientated to transcending exploitation.
NOTES 1
2
In 2015 the UK Parliament passed the Modern Slavery Act. In California since 2010, big manufacturing and retail businesses in this US state are required to provide detailed disclosure on their global supply chains in an effort to better understand and thus combat human trafficking (Pickles and Zhu, 2013). While in France, the 2017 law on the Duty of Vigilance requires companies to monitor their supply chains so as ‘to identify risks and prevent serious breaches of human rights and fundamental liberties, health and security of people’ (Law 2017-399 as cited by Vercher-Chaptal, 2017). For example, see the definition of ‘exploitation’ in Part 1, Section 3 of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/section/3/enacted.
REFERENCES Apple Inc. (2014), Supplier Responsibility 2014 Progress Report. http:// www .apple .com/ supplier -responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2014_Progress_Report.pdf (last accessed May 2017). Baglioni, E. (2015), ‘Straddling contract and estate farming: accumulation strategies of Senegalese horticultural exporters’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 15: 17–42. Baglioni, E. (2018), ‘Labour control and the labour question in global production networks’, Journal of Economic Geography, 18: 111–137. Baglioni, E. (2021), ‘The making of cheap labour across production and reproduction: control and resistance in the Senegalese horticultural value chain’, Work, Employment and Society, 36(3), https://doi .org/10.1177/0950017021999569 Bair, J. and Werner, M. (2011a), ‘Guest editorial. Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: a disarticulations perspective’, Environment and Planning A, 43: 988–997. Bair, J. and Werner, M. (2011b), ‘The place of disarticulations: global commodity production in La Laguna, Mexico’, Environment and Planning A, 43: 998–1015. Bair, J. and Werner, M. (2015), ‘Global production and uneven development’. In Newsome K. et al. (Eds.), Putting Labour in its Place, New York: Palgrave, pp. 119–134. Bardhan, P. (1980), ‘Interlocking factor markets and agrarian development: a review of the issues’, Oxford Economic Papers, 32: 82–98. Bargawi, H. and Newman, S. (2017), ‘From futures markets to the farm gate: a study of price formation along Tanzania’s coffee commodity chain’, Economic Geography, 93(2): 162–184.
Exploitation and global value chains 135 Bonacich, E. and Wilson, J. B. (2008), Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution, Cornell University Press. Brenner, R. (1977), ‘The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, (104): 25–92. Campling, L. and Colás, A. (2021), Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, London and New York: Verso. Cattaneo, O., Gereffi, G. and Staritz, C. (2010), ‘Global value chains in a postcrisis world: resilience, consolidation, and shifting end markets’. In Cattaneo, O., Gereffi, G., and Staritz, C. (Eds.), Global Value Chains in a Postcrisis World: A Development Perspective, Washington DC: The World Bank. Chakravartty, P. and da Silva, D. F. (2012), ‘Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: the racial logic of global capitalism—an introduction’, American Quarterly, 64(3): 361–385. Dicken, P. (2007), Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy, SAGE Publications Ltd. Du Toit, A. (1993), ‘The micro‐politics of paternalism: the discourses of management and resistance on South African fruit and wine farms’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 19(2): 314–336. Du Toit, A. (2001), ‘Ethical trading: a force of improvement, or corporate whitewash?’, ODI Natural Resource Perspectives, 71, PLAAS. Elson, D. (1998), ‘The economic, the political and the domestic: Businesses, states and households in the organisation of production’, New Political Economy, 3(2): 189–208. Fafchamps, M. and Vargas Hill, R. (2008), ‘Price transmission and trader entry in domestic commodity markets’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 56: 729–766. Hall, S. (1980), ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, Poole, Dorset): 305–345. Havice, E. and Campling, L. (2017), ‘Where chain governance and environmental governance meet: interfirm strategies in the canned tuna global value chain’, Economic Geography, 93(3): 292–313. Herod, A., Pickren G., Rainnie, A. and McGrath-Champ, S. (2014), ‘Global destruction networks, labour, and waste’, Journal of Economic Geography, 14(2): 421–441. IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group (2016), ‘Recognising the constitutive role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto’, London Review of International Law, 4(1): 57–79. Krivonos, E. (2004), The Impact of Coffee Market Reforms on Producer Prices and Price Transmission. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3358. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract =610401 Lavinas, L. (2018), ‘The collateralization of social policy under financialized capitalism’, Development and Change, 49(2): 502–517. Marx, K. (1981), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume III, London: Penguin Books. Marx, K. (1990), Capital, Vol.1, London: Penguin. McGrath-Champ, S., Rainnie, A., Pickren, G. and Herod, A. (2015), ‘Global destruction networks, the labour process and employment relations’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 57(4): 624–640. Mezzadri, A. (2016a), ‘Class, gender and the sweatshop: on the nexus between labour commodification and exploitation’, Third World Quarterly, (37)10: 1877–1900. Mezzadri, A. (2016b), ‘The informalization of capital and interlocking in labour contracting networks’, Progress in Development Studies, 16(2): 124–139. Mezzadri, A. (2017), The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mezzadri, A. (2021), ‘A value theory of inclusion: informal labour, the homeworker and the social reproduction of value’, Antipode, (53)4: 1186–1205. Mezzadri, A. and Srivastava, R. (2015), Labour Regimes in the Indian Garment Sector: Capital-Labour Relations, Social Reproduction and Labour Standards in the National Capital Region, London: CDPR SOAS. Milberg, W. (2008), ‘Shifting sources and uses of profits: sustaining US financialization with global value chains’, Economy and Society, 37(3): 420–451. Modern Slavery Act 2015, c.10. Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/ enacted (last accessed 12 November 2018). Nolan, P., Zhang, J. and Liu, C. (2008), ‘The global business revolution, the cascade effect, and the challenge for firms from developing countries’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 32(1): 29–47.
136 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Pattenden, J. (2016), Labour, State and Society in Rural India: A Class-Relational Approach, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pickles, J. and Smith, A. (2016), Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Quentin, D. and Campling, L. (2018), ‘Global inequality chains: integrating mechanisms of value distribution into analyses of global production’, Global Networks, 18(1): 33–56. Robinson, P. K. and Rainbird, H. (2013), ‘International supply chains and the labour process’, Competition & Change, 17(1): 91–107. Sampson, H. (2013), International Seafarers and Transnationalism in the Twenty-First Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Srivastava, R. (1989), ‘Interlinked modes of exploitation in Indian agriculture during transition: a case study’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 16(4): 493–522. Taylor, M. (2011), ‘“Freedom from poverty is not for free”: rural development and the microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh, India’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 11(4): 484–504. UNCTAD (2018), Trade and Development Report 2018: Power, Platforms and The Free Trade Delusion, Geneva: UNCTAD. Vercher-Chaptal, C. (2017), ‘Limitations and perspectives of responsible management of global value chains: from codes of conduct to the French law on the duty of vigilance’, Paper presented to Uneven development in global value chains Workshop, MSH Paris Nord, 16 November 16. Werner, M. (2016), Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
FURTHER READING Mezzadri, A. (2016a), ‘Class, gender and the sweatshop: on the nexus between labour commodification and exploitation’, Third World Quarterly, (37)10: 1877–1900. Quentin, D. and Campling L. (2018), ‘Global inequality chains: integrating mechanisms of value distribution into analyses of global production’, Global Networks, 18 (1): 33–56. Selwyn, B. (2019), ‘Poverty chains and global capitalism’, Competition & Change, 23(1): 71–97. Werner, M. (2016), ‘Global production networks and uneven development: Exploring geographies of devaluation, disinvestment and exclusion’, Geography Compass, 10(11): 457–469.
10. Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South: reflections on accumulation and social reproduction Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros
INTRODUCTION This paper seeks to situate, conceptually and empirically, the patterns of labour connections across ‘rural-urban’ spaces to interrogate some important processes of survival and social reproduction, under contemporary capitalism in the Global South. From the point of view of work and working people, the most important feature worth highlighting is the fluidity across these geographical boundaries, leading to multiple occupations and social identities. Thus, distinctions such as ‘rural’ versus ‘urban’, or ‘farm’ versus ‘non-farm’, and even within each one of these, such as within ‘non-farm’ mobility across tasks, has resulted in the blurring of old-fashioned divisions for a large number of working people. To use an evocative expression from Jan Breman, large swathes of workers are ‘wage hunters and gatherers’ (Breman, 1994), perambulating within, and across, both rural and urban spaces. Multi-tasking is increasingly becoming the norm in the quest for survival as a systemic tendency, which has gained considerable momentum during the currently dominant neoliberal regime. Frequent spatial mobility with changing identities, such as agricultural worker today, construction worker tomorrow and yet another role the day after, have become an increasingly common phenomenon. Unfortunately, there is a serious dearth of appropriate data in the Global South to arrive at reasonable counts of such workers; however, going by provisional estimates for China and India alone, we possibly are talking of numbers in the vicinity of half a billion, who intermittently, seasonally or even on a daily basis straddle rural-urban boundaries as workers. Drawing on the secondary literature on the Global South, the paper seeks to highlight the systemic tendencies and processes at the heart of accumulation, social reproduction and struggles for workers across these circuits. There is indeed a growing and large literature on the important relevant issues, along with serious gaps and troubling silences, relating to many of these. This short essay is necessarily selective and focuses on what in our assessment ought to be important, if not central, pegs in constructing narratives of rural-urban migrations. What we offer here are best viewed as starting points in empirical and analytical constructions that may be useful in fuller assessments for the task at hand. The second section of this chapter provides a critique of modernising paradigms and their understanding of the agrarian question. The third section, which is the core of it, drawing on a varied, almost chaotic, but immensely rich literature, seeks to underpin a sense of the scale and a couple of critical features that constitute, arguably, the most significant features of rural-urban circuits of labour in the contemporary Global South. We suggest that the recent trends and patterns of rural-urban mobility ought to be located primarily in currently dominant neoliberal regimes of accumulation, which are pervasive everywhere in spite of their varieties. The fourth section concludes with brief 137
138 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work remarks pertaining to the relevant structural correlates which are critical in shaping the current juncture, and sums up the overall thrust of the paper. The brief exercise attempted here is from a Marxist political economy perspective centred on the South.
FICTIONS OF MODERNISATION AND THE DISAPPEARING RURAL The core of the conventional wisdom associated with dominant discourses on trajectories of economic transformation, framed in modernisation paradigms, which were prevalent for a few decades around the mid-20th century, projected a simple yet politically compelling schema of rural-urban connections, and by implication of labour. To put it starkly, these perspectives presumed that with certain prerequisites in place, a process of ‘modern economic growth’ (MEG), as Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets put it, advances; as this journey proceeds, a stage is reached where the share of agriculture in total output and workforce declines and ultimately becomes insignificant. Thus, ‘rural’, whose pre-eminent economic trait was agriculture, in conjunction with a host of ‘traditional’ non-agricultural, artisanal activities, etc., loses its salience to the ‘urban’, which is predominantly characterised by ‘modern’ industries and services.1 It was suggested that the faster the process of such a transition, the more successful the trajectory of MEG. The ‘rural’ as an economic category, in terms of its weight in total GDP, as well as the size of workforce, cedes space and significance, ultimately, to the ‘urban’ or ‘non-rural’. Further, as per the dominant modernisation paradigms, such an outcome is not only desirable but inevitable, provided appropriate prerequisites/ingredients were in place. In short, this was the much needed transition from ‘backwardness’ to ‘development’. This schema of ‘modernisation’ was shared across the ideological spectrum. It was not only the conceptual formulations of ‘dualism’, ‘stages of growth’, etc. in the writings of eminent influential scholars such as Arthur Lewis, Simon Kuznets, W.W. Rostow, Colin Clark and several others in mainstream/heterodox tradition in development economics and related fields of development studies, but also in intellectual contributions by quite a few prominent Marxist intellectuals who were powerful votaries of structural transformation embedded in modernisation paradigms. Implicitly or explicitly, presumed economic transformation experiences of 19th-century Europe and its extension were taken as the ‘stylised models’ to make the above noted essential claims and it was suggested that contemporary developing countries, or today’s peripheries, could very well imitate similar trajectories of industrial transformation and economic transition. Thus, it was simply a matter of time that the ‘rural’ would become marginal in the overall economic structures and the ‘urban’ would hold sway. With the benefit of hindsight and scholarship in the subsequent decades, it hardly needs emphasis that both the claims are highly exaggerated, if not utterly mistaken (Moyo et al., 2013). It is eminently clear that the ‘rural’ is very much here to stay, it is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future, and there are multiple complex circuits of accumulation connecting the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’, both their economies and workers. Current estimates put the count of the rural population at approximately 3.5 billion, out of the global total of 7.8 billion. Moreover, the UN estimates project that even in 2050 about 32 per cent of the global population will continue to reside in rural areas. It is also worth noting here that of the total workers currently in the global economy, close to half are largely degraded peasantries of the South, in a proto-/semi-proletarianised state, and a substantial section of these are caught in multiple
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South 139 interconnected ‘rural-urban’ circuits of accumulation, with inadequate and irregular access to wage labour (Moyo and Yeros, 2005). Overall, this is where a large segment of the world’s labour reserves are located, serving to keep a lid on global inflation, while indulging in diverse strategies of petty accumulation and social reproduction. These serve to reproduce both the active labour force and the marginalised, thus consisting of a systemic subsidy to capital by the appropriation of unpaid labour. Petty accumulation within the labour reserves assumes various forms across geographies, occupations and genders, frequently rooted in, and reconfiguring, structures by race, caste and other hierarchies; in these processes, however, social reproduction remains largely the responsibility of women across rural and urban areas, frequently leading to the intensification of gender hierarchies. In all cases, a feature of petty accumulation is access to land, rural and urban, which remains among the key objectives of struggles and contestation.
RURAL-URBAN CIRCUITS The core concern of this chapter, namely, contemporary rural-urban circuits of labour in the South, has a vast canvas, and we can hardly do justice to its manifold dimensions in this short paper. Indeed, two major limitations of our exercise ought to be flagged at the outset. First, in this paper, we stay away from a discussion of the international/cross-country labour mobility circuits which, inter alia, clearly have rural-urban geographical interactions, both historically and in the contemporary world. Some well-known examples of such mobility that have drawn considerable attention in recent times are: from several countries in Latin America to the USA; from Africa and the Middle East to the West, both to Europe and the USA; significant inter-country flows in Africa itself within broad macroeconomic regions; movements across countries within East Asia, especially to China; substantial mobility within South Asia, for instance, from Nepal and Bangladesh to India.2 A substantial chunk of these flows, especially to the ‘West’ from the ‘Rest’, is constituted by irregular migration, often high-risk with potentially life-threatening consequences. Areas around the Mediterranean have become theatres of death, especially for migrants from Africa and the Middle East.3 Thus, our observations in this paper largely draw on within-country scenarios pertaining to mobility across rural-urban spaces in the South. However, as we know, massive diversity and complexity within the South would require a careful engagement with specificities of migration circuits in particular countries, or at least broad regions, within the three continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America/Caribbean, for a satisfactory consideration of a range of relevant issues. However, for reasons of space, we are unable to do so, and the paper essentially flags some broad generalisations, in the spirit of a ‘lowest-common-denominator’ approach, around a couple of key questions. We submit that our inability to engage adequately with critical particularities across the diversity of South, and several crucial concerns therein, is the second major limitation of our brief exercise here, although we obviously draw upon specific cases to illustrate our arguments. With these caveats we proceed in the following with our sketch of a set of issues central to the paper. As noted in the earlier section, in spite of a large literature on rural-urban flows, coverage of specific issues remains uneven, along with serious data challenges for several variables. Considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to various aspects of rural-urban mobility, such as patterns, trends, drivers, socio-economic attributes, time-scales, distances and boundaries, recruitment channels, role of kinship and social networks, consequences and outcomes,
140 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work and several other dimensions. From this rich and voluminous literature a few big-ticket messages stand out. It is clearly the case that the scale of domestic migration, a good deal of it rural-urban, is substantial and growing, across countries in the South, but there are no reasonably accurate and timely estimates of such flows. At best, we can hazard guesses in different ranges, based on official data, independent research initiatives, anecdotal evidences, etc. Thus, for the South as a whole, of its approximately 3 billion workforce, the count of domestic migrants is likely to be somewhere between 15 and 25 per cent, with considerable variations beyond this range for individual countries. For the two most populous countries, China and India, accounting for almost 1.3 billion of the global labour force, i.e. close to 40 per cent, the count of internal migrants is estimated to be in the range of 400 to 450 million. Apart from the unevenness and deficiencies of the data systems across countries, a major cause responsible for such a state of affairs is the inability of official statistics to cast its net wide enough to capture short-term/circular/seasonal mobility. This is due to several reasons, inter alia, methodological challenges, gross incapacities of national statistical systems and deliberate neglect of hyper-vulnerable, footloose ‘floaters and drifters’, from public policy imagination and discourses.4 On all these counts the situation has deteriorated in most countries with the ascendency of neoliberalism. However, in spite of serious data challenges in arriving at credible estimates of internal migration in general, and rural-urban in particular, it is evident from official data itself that such flows are on the rise, and dramatically so in some countries, such as China and Vietnam. Primary correlates of increased mobility of labour, for the last half century or so, are to be located in major drivers of neoliberal globalisation. Of course, as is well documented, there are varieties of neoliberalism, and we have a large literature exploring and analysing its dialectics and differences across particular countries and regions. The simple fact, however, is that there has been a push towards laissez-faire regimes everywhere, in varying degrees, including in countries with socialist trajectories, such as China and Vietnam; and this has resulted in significant acceleration in population mobility, in particular rural-urban migration. This is largely due to the accentuation of primitive accumulation, which is a permanent feature of capitalism, and extends into socialism but gets contained to varying degrees in the phases of regulated capitalism. As Prabhat Patnaik suggests, it is useful to distinguish in capitalism’s immanent tendency of primitive accumulation between the ‘stock’ and ‘flow’ forms, the first largely pertaining to dispossession from the means of production, and the second through income deflation, via a host of measures, even when outright alienation of assets is not involved (Patnaik, 2019).5 As we know, with respect to both the above noted forms, the arsenal deployed by historical capitalism has had a wide range, from unimaginable brutalities to sophisticated chicanery, and we need not get into a listing of all the horrifying features generated by primitive accumulation. The point worth emphasising here is that contemporary neoliberal capitalism has given a fresh lease of life to several retrogressive tendencies such as, inter alia, renewed assaults on petty production, the grabbing of natural and other resources, unequal exchange, and deindustrialisation, in active collusion with both domestic and international capital and with devastating consequences in several countries of the South. Fiscal, monetary, social and in general, public policies have been reconfigured, through so-called economic reforms, which have accelerated the overall vulnerability of working people in general, and the masses in the countryside in particular, resulting in an expulsion of people on a significant scale from rural areas.
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South 141 As already noted, China and Vietnam have witnessed unprecedented rural-urban migration, subsequent to their respective ‘reforms’, which began in the former after 1978, and was followed by the latter a decade after; of course, in both countries, economic and political restructuring have been guided and largely controlled by their respective communist parties, which have shaped their migration trajectories as well (Tsui et al., 2018; Amy and Meng, 2019). Without getting into a substantive discussion of important factors that have shaped mobility patterns and trends in these countries, it may be noted that there were serious restrictions, more so in China where it was almost an embargo compared to Vietnam, through the household registration system in both the countries (hu kou in China and hộ khẩu in Vietnam), for a peasant/rural worker to seek employment in urban area, until their respective reforms. The situation has been far more fluid since the commencement of the ‘market socialist project’ as the system of household registration no longer operates as a barrier to migration from rural areas, but essentially to regulate access to urban citizenship, which is very difficult to come by. Otherwise, there is not only a surreptitious endorsement, but active encouragement, for the floaters from rural areas to serve the ‘cause of modernization and industrialization’. For China alone, recent official estimates of migrant workers from rural to urban areas are in the range of 250 to over 280 million. Clearly this would easily be the largest rural-urban outflow of workers from rural to urban areas anywhere in the world, over a few decades (Pringle, 2014; Shah and Lerche, 2020). Furthermore, the weakening of policy support for rural economy, increasing rural-urban income inequality and growing land alienation,6 among others, have incentivised the surge of out-migration from rural areas, and both from Vietnam and China, a large proportion of the working age population has been flocking to urban centres. Export-led manufacturing hubs and special economic zones are the high-profile destinations, but migrants increasingly occupy every nook and corner of urban spaces, with profound spatial transformation in both the countries, although there are significant variations in their respective trajectories; as, indeed, is the case with different regions and countries in the rest of the South, where too these processes have been at work. However, what binds together the recent experiences of the South as a whole is that the push towards a market-driven surge has added considerably to shifts from rural to urban, in pursuit of livelihoods and employment. In this process, the fact of accelerated primitive accumulation is unmistakable everywhere, with workers thronging into the urban areas at a pace which is unprecedented during the post-WWII era. Thus, as Mike Davis had noted, more than a decade ago, in his Planet of Slums (Davis, 2006 (reprinted 2017)), the human habitat is witnessing an epochal shift in its rural-urban composition in our times. Currently 55 per cent of the global population is urban and this is projected to go up to 68 per cent by 2050. More importantly, as per UN-Habitat’s latest estimates, 33 per cent of the urban population in developing countries, on an average, consists of slum dwellers, with this proportion being as high as two-thirds to three-quarters in several countries (UN DESA, 2019). In short, there has been a massive shift out of the rural, to the urban, in search of better livelihoods, but mostly resulting in scrounging for survival and subsistence. A substantial component of it is caught up in relentless rotation, between nowhere and everywhere, straddling the rural and urban as an infantry brigade of neoliberal capitalism. Many leave the rural but, metaphorically speaking, never quite arrive as ‘urban workers and citizens’; the transition is pretty murky and incomplete. This brings us to the next critical issue to be underscored here: circulating labour, or labour in the ‘grey zones’ of various types – those residing in informal urban settlements/slums,
142 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ‘illegal’/undocumented workers, etc. – in short, a very diverse mass of labour operating on the margins of the urban, serves as a powerful wage depressor for capital, in active collusion with the State. These vulnerable, ‘in-and-out’ drifters and wage hunters constitute very much part of what Marx had designated as the Relative Surplus Population (RSP), consisting of three major components namely, floating, latent and stagnant. For Marx, as is well known, labour under capitalism has two broad constituents, namely, the ‘active labour army’ and the RSP (or ‘labour reserves’/‘industrial reserve army’/‘reserve army of labour’), in a perennially unstable relation with each other, as is also the case with the three segments within the RSP. Furthermore, Marx’s ‘absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’ posits that as spontaneous capitalism proceeds RSP increases in proportion to the active labour army. We have discussed the relevant conceptual/empirical issues elsewhere (Jha et al., 2017; Jha, 2019). The important point is that, among the most profound differences between the North and the South, given their respective accumulation trajectories and experiences historically, carrying the massive positive spin-offs for the former, there is a huge chasm as regards respective balances between the active labour army and the RSP. Of course, there are no operational measures as ‘perfect fits’ of these concepts, but going by the sense of Marx’s suggestion as regular wage/salaried work constituting the active labour army, the South in general is characterised by notoriously high incidences of RSP. Compared to the metropolitan countries, the overwhelming majority of producers in peripheral social formations are trapped in the ranks of self-employed, casual and irregular workers, unpaid workers, etc., in an episodic and uncertain relationship with wage labour. Using the ILO data sources, such as the Key Indicators of Labour Markets (KILM), we may make a distinction between two broad categories of workers: ‘non-vulnerable’ and ‘vulnerable’, the former consisting mainly of those in employment with wage/salaries, the latter constituting self-employed, own-account workers and contributing family members. If we take ‘non-vulnerable’ and ‘vulnerable’ as proxies for active labour force and RSP respectively, in spite of all the limitations of data and lack of conceptual fine-tuning (especially for the latter, i.e. RSP), differences between the North and the South are huge and almost mirror-opposites; thus, for Europe and North America, using the ILO (2018) estimate for 2019, the share of the active labour army would be around 85 per cent, whereas for Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia the comparable figures are between 20 and 30 per cent.7 The stark and overwhelming difference between the North and the South not only underscores the fact of a massive RSP, but also the structural traps of semi-proletarianised social formations in the latter, which have been aggravated further by the ascendency of neoliberal ‘development’ trajectories. As noted above, a substantial mass of workers in the South remain in a fluid state between the rural and the urban, and even many among those who find a foothold in the latter have a tenuous acceptance as ‘citizens’, with respect to even elementary rights; in extreme cases, demolitions or relocations of their habitat to accommodate the demands and claims of the well-heeled is not uncommon. Increasingly, in most metropolitan and large cities in the South, urban sprawls of slums are on the outskirts, often merging with the countryside, with a substantial chunk of workers travelling on a daily basis for work from the rural to the urban (Jha, 2015; Prasad, 2016). A significant mass of urban workers, in spite of being centrally integrated in circuits of production and consumption within such spaces, are very much at the mercy of the State and multiple power lords, and their work and life remain trapped in a systemic vulnerability with frequent threats of violence of a pervasive nature. In short, here is a structural
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South 143 context that is nasty and brutish, with inexhaustible reserves of cheap and disposable labour trapped in it, much to the delight of capital. Not surprisingly, it is easy to manipulate and divide along the lines of ‘migrant’ versus ‘local’ and a whole range of primordial loyalties including caste, tribe, ethnicity, race, region, religion and so forth; given these structural vulnerabilities, and the challenges of juggling with multiple survival strategies, desperate economic situations often translate into despairing political responses. A proportion of migrants from rural labouring classes do manage to get on the ladder, in urban spaces, materially and socially, and improve their lives by a significant measure; they become magnetic aspirational metaphors and examples to emulate. However, for the overwhelming majority, even if the urban alternative occasionally appears to be a marginally better prospect, particularly in view of the relatively greater damage done to the economic prospects in the countryside, the dominant pattern is one of labour circulation along multiple circuits, as needed by capital, across tasks and places. One major implication of such a phenomenon is an increased blurring of categories like ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ labour, or of operational distinctiveness of tasks; multi-locational diversity of livelihoods, or survival strategies, across the rural-urban landscape, have tended to become increasingly significant in the neoliberal era.8 Fluidity and rural-urban circulation of labour has significant implications for household dynamics and for social reproduction, and these issues have been subjects of renewed and considerable attention in recent research, with formulations such as ‘translocal’, ‘global and supra-local’ householding gaining much traction. Evidence from across the countries in the South clearly establishes the increasingly spatially dispersed nature of households, with members in different places and diverse roles, organically connected with major economic, and broadly overall household welfare decisions (e.g. assets, income, remittances, expenditure patterns, familial duties, active kinship engagements, etc.). To be sure, phenomena of ‘multi-locational households’, and their profound connects with accumulation processes, along with strategies of survival, coping and the well-being of labouring classes, are not new and have long theoretical and empirical ancestry in Marxist political economy (Kollontai, 1977). Apart from helpful insights scattered over Conditions of the Working Class in England by Engels (Engels, 1887), or Marx’s discussion of the interaction between different components of labour (including RSP), the first generation of Marxist scholarship onwards have contributed to a robust and substantive framework for interrogating the relevant issues. Much of the early literature developed in the context of analysing production-reproduction interactions with occasional focus on migration issues. For instance, to name only one debate, important contributions by Meillassoux (1981), Mafeje (1981), Rey (1975), Wolpe (1980), among several others, with a focus on Africa in conceptualising articulation of capitalism in conjunction with ‘traditional modes’ or a combination of modes of production, emphasised how at least part of social reproduction costs of labour are externalised to the labour-capital relationship, thus facilitating super-exploitation; access to, and use of, migrant labourers, who partly rely on their cost of maintenance elsewhere, in their traditional habitat, comes in very handy for capital. Migrants circulating between their place of work and home, as Burawoy (1976) suggested with reference to gold mines in South Africa, contributes to a cheapening of labour power in general. Similarly, it has been argued that the logic of dependency systematically undervalues wages in the peripheries and increases the rate of surplus value generally (Marini, 1990). More recently, Samir Amin has encapsulated this process as ‘imperialist rent’ (Amin, 2018). There are several other debates and contributions from across the three continents that are quite illuminating with respect to these issues (Moyo and Yeros, 2005).
144 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work More generally, a powerful strand of Marxist-Feminist scholarship has emphasised the extremely important role of intra-household reproductive dynamics, in particular, issues of unpaid activities by women – which have a huge range from typically domestic work and care to economic tasks outside the four walls of home – in subsidising capital, as these are absolutely critical in sustaining and renewing the so-called productive labour (Federici, 1975; Mies, 1986). In the last few decades, with the ascendency of neoliberalism, circuits of labour and social reproduction processes have been subjected to significant reconfigurations, as already indicated in the foregoing. These ongoing changes have contributed to a rich literature, extending the boundaries of our understanding, through richly textured grounded work across the North and South, and through important theoretical interventions in many productive directions (Vogel, 2013; Naidu and Ossome, 2016; Prasad, 2016; Tsikata, 2016; Bhattacharya, 2017; Mezzadri, 2020). One major message, and possibly most significant for this chapter, we can draw from the relevant research from three continents is that the range and depth of strategies employed by neoliberal capitalism, in the context of accelerated primitive accumulation, has resulted in the deepening of super-exploitation, through the increased burden of meeting the cost of social reproduction by the working classes, including the RSP. Migrant labour along with their households have been particularly vulnerable in this respect. Those on the lower rungs of economic and social hierarchy, among them women, children and the elderly, end up, through unpaid or massively underpaid labour, shouldering a disproportionate burden of social reproduction.
CONCLUSIONS In mapping and reflecting on rural-urban circuits of labour, our focus in this chapter has been on the current context, and hence on contemporary neoliberal capitalism. However, very briefly, we must also state the historical-structural backdrop that shaped the South and continues to influence its present in ways that cannot be ignored. Two final remarks are in order. First, as we know from the compelling evidence marshalled by economic historians, the South, as late as the middle of the 18th century, was ahead of the North in per capita income, not only with respect to the indices of agricultural performance but non-agriculturally too. As a result of colonial and imperial conquests, with primitive accumulation at its core, the North and South were subsequently shaped in the ‘combined and uneven development’ of capitalism, in which the latter was structurally deformed; one major outcome was almost permanent conditions of mass poverty and huge labour reserves in the South. Second, post-decolonisation regimes in the South were taken in by dominant discourses of modernisation and industrialisation, as we mentioned in our introductory sections. Within strands of progressive scholarship, support for such a trajectory of economic transformation was premised in part on a narrow rendering of the Agrarian Question, which was seriously flawed. We have discussed these issues in earlier writings (Moyo et al., 2012, 2013; Jha et al., 2017) and one of our core conclusions is that such a strategy precluded the possibility of an autonomous, democratic and equitable trajectory of economic transformation that would guarantee decent outcomes with respect to labour absorption. Many post-decolonisation regimes remained embedded within an over-arching imperialist context, and finally ended up facilitating transitions to neoliberalism. We need to keep in mind
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South 145 these structural correlates when we focus on contemporary labour outcomes, characterised by structural hurdles for labour absorption, deepened informality and vulnerability for all workers and even more so for migrants. We end this chapter by recalling the profound insights of Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism – that capitalism can hardly solve either the colonial question or the proletarian one.
NOTES 1
Both ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ have many connotations and several dimensions. We avoid getting into the complexity of these issues here and use these concepts in their simplest economic meanings. 2 See Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Ness, 2013). 3 The ILO count of international migrant workers currently is 164 million, accounting for 4.7 per cent of the global workforce. Of these, 60.8 per cent are in three sub-regions; Northern America (23 per cent), Northern, Southern and Western Europe (23.9 per cent) and the Arab States (13.9 per cent). The share of migrant workers as a proportion of all workers in a particular region is highest for the Arab States, at 40.8 per cent. 4 Even for a country like India reputed for its statistical system, the relevant data sources have been grossly inadequate for capturing the count of seasonal, temporary and circular workers. 5 It is for this reason that Patnaik’s formulation of ‘accumulation through encroachment’ may be more accurate than David Harvey’s ‘accumulation through dispossession’. 6 Reliable estimates on land dispossession in the South are scarce. China’s Ministry of Land and Resources reports that between 1998 and 2005 some 40 million Chinese farmers lost their land and sought non-farm work. 7 These estimates for the South are likely to be overestimates. In many countries, wage workers have intermittent, casual and unstable employment and should be put in the broad category of the ‘vulnerable’. Further, it is common across the South for the elderly and children, especially women and girls, to be part of both paid and unpaid work, thus adding to the stock of RSP. 8 There is a burgeoning literature on these, and many other relevant dimensions, relating to rural-urban mobility of workers, from across the South. Some examples are: for Africa, Cross and Cliffe (2017); Bernards (2019) and Yeros (2023); for China and Vietnam, Nguyen and Locke (2014); for Southeast Asia, Rigg (1998); for India, Breman (1994) and Shah and Lerche (2020); for Latin America, Beneria and Feldman (1992); and for the South, Moyo and Yeros (2005).
REFERENCES Amin, S. (2018). Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital and Marx’s Law of Value. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amy, L. Y., and Meng, X. (2019). Rural-Urban Migration in Vietnam. Switzerland: Springer. Beneria, L., and Feldmen, S. (1992). Unequal Burden, Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work. Boulder: Westview Press. Bernards, N. (2019). ‘Placing African Labour in Global Capitalism: The Politics of Irregular Work’. Review of African Political Economy, 46 (160). Bhattacharya, T. (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Breman, J. (1994). Wage Hunters and Gatherers: Search for Work in the Urban and Rural Economy in South Gujarat. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Burawoy, M. (1976). ‘The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labour: Comparative Material from South Africa and United States’. American Journal of Sociology, 81 (5). Cross, H., and Cliffe, L. (2017). ‘A Comparative Political Economy of Regional Migration and Labour Mobility in West and Southern Africa’. Review of African Political Economy, 44 (153). Davis, M. (2006 [reprinted 2017]). Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
146 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Engels, F. (1887). Conditions of the Working Class in England. Leipzig: Otto Wigand. Federici, S. (1975). Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. ILO. (2018). ILO Estimates on Global International Migration Trends. Geneva: Department of Statistics, International Labour Organisation. Jha, P. (2015). ‘Labour Conditions in Rural India: Reflections on Continuity and Change’. In C. Oya and N. Pontara (eds), Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries: Theory, Evidence, and Policy. New York: Routledge. Jha, P. (2019). ‘Prospects for Labour Under Contemporary Capitalism: An Assessment with Reference to India’. Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 62 (3). Jha, P., Moyo, S., and Yeros, P. (2017). ‘Capitalism and Labour Reserves’. In C. Chandrasekhar, and J. Ghosh (eds), Interpreting the World to Change It: Essays for Prabhat Patnaik. Delhi: Tulika Books. Kollontai, A. (1977). Communism and the Family (1920 Pamphelt reprinted). In A. Kollontai, Selected Works of Alexandra Kollontai (Trans by Alan Holt). London: Allan and Busby. Mafeje, A. (1981). ‘On the Articulation of Modes of Production: A Review Article’. Journal of Southern African Studies, 8 (1). Marini, R. M. (1990). Dialética da dependência. Cidade do México: Editora Era. Meillassoux, C. (1981). Maidens, Meals and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. London: Cambridge University Press. Mezzadri, A. (2020). ‘A Value Theory of Inclusion: Informal Labour, the Homeworker, and the Social Reproduction of Value’. Antipode, 53 (4). Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and the Accumulation of Capital on a World Scale. London: Zed Books. Moyo, S., Jha, P., and Yeros, P. (2013). ‘The Classical Agrarian Question: Myth, Reality and Relevance Today’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2 (1). Moyo, S., and Yeros, P. (2005). Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. 1st edition. London & Cape Town: Zed Books & David Philip. Moyo, S., Yeros, P., and Jha, P. (2012). ‘Imperialism and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on the New Scramble for Africa’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 1 (2). Naidu, S., and Ossome, L. (2016). ‘Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 5 (1). Ness, I. (2013). The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Volume 2–5. USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Nguyen, M. T., and Locke, C. (2014). ‘Rural-Urban Imperative in Vietnam and China: Gendered Householding, Production of Space and the State’. Journal of Peasant Studies, 41 (5). Patnaik, P. (2019). ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Petty Production. The Marxist, XXXV. Prasad, A. (2016). ‘Adivasi Women, Agrarian Change and Forms of Labour in Neoliberal India’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 5 (1). Pringle, T. (2014). ‘Labour as an Agent of Change: The Case of China’. In L. Pradella, and T. Marois (eds), Polarising Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis. London: Pluto Press. Rey, P. P. (1975). ‘The Lineage Mode of Production’. Critique of Anthropology (111). Rigg, J. (1998). ‘Rural-Urban Interaction, Agriculture and Wealth: A Southeast Asia Perspective’. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (4). Shah, A., and Lerche, J. (2020). ‘Migration and the Invisible Economy of Care: Production, Social Reproduction and Seasonal Migrant Labour in India’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45 (4). Tsikata, D. (2016). ‘Gender, Land Tenure and Agrarian Production Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa’. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 5 (1). Tsui, S., Jaisheng, Q., Xiaohui, Y., Wong, E., and Tiejun, W. (2018). ‘Rural Communities and Economic Crises in Modern China’. Monthly Review, 70 (4). UN DESA. (2019). ‘World’s Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision’. New York: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Vogel, L. (2013 [Revised Edn]). Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory. London: Brill. Wolpe, H. (1980). The Articulation of the Modes of Production. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Yeros, P. (2023). ‘Generalized Semiproletarianization in Africa’. The Indian Economic Journal, 71 (1), 162–186.
Rural-urban circuits of labour in the Global South 147
FURTHER READING Agnihotri, I., Mazumdar, I., and Neetha, N. (2012). Gender and Migration: Negotiating Rights. A Women’s Movement Perspective. Centre for Women’s Development Studies. Breman, J. (2012). Outcast Labour in Asia: Circulation and Informalisation of a Workforce at the Bottom of the Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, J. (2009). Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India. Delhi: Women Unlimited. Jha P., Chambati W., and Ossome L. (eds) (2021). Labour Questions in the Global South. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Mejivar, C., Ruiz, M., and Ness, I. (eds) (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises. New York: Oxford University Press.
Section C. Contemporary debates
11. Commoning labour power Dario Azzellini
INTRODUCTION Several authors see in the commons a strategy to undermine or overcome capitalism. Following David Harvey (2013), as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009), the context for the development of an alternative society based on the commons is the metropolis. However, most examples of commons in the relevant literature are set in rural areas and concern natural resources (Bennholdt-Thompson and Mies 2001; Federici 2011; Federici and Caffentzis 2014; Klein 2001; Linebaugh 2014; Ostrom 1990). Examples of urban commons usually refer to the collective appropriation of public space (occupation, protest, etc.), access to commodified public space and its prolonged collective use, most prominently urban gardens, collective housing and the recommunalisation of water (Dellenbaugh et al. 2015; Özkan and Büyüksaraç 2020). However, inasmuch as individualisation and commodification of labour power is central to the capitalist mode of production and the transformative potential of commoning resides on collective action and efforts at decommodification, the question of how labour power can become a commons is of great interest. Explicit contributions to a debate about labour power as a commons are, nevertheless, rare. Akbulut attributes this to “the dominant understanding of commons as fixed, and mostly physical, forms of wealth (e.g. ecological commons), rather than a conceptualization that envisions them as relational, dynamic and continuously (re)produced” (2020, 194). Among those who have advocated conceiving labour as a commons is Wainwright, based on a feminist critique of wage labour and capitalism (2012, 2014), Walker (2013), and Vieta (2016), connecting labour as commoning to autogestion and some debates in international meetings and conferences (COPAC 2011; HBF 2013). So far, however, the debate lacks empirical grounding. Examples tend to focus on digital production. Very few authors provide other concrete examples for “labour commons”. De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford connect cooperatives and commons (2010), Azzellini, offers a detailed analysis of worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs) (2018b), and Akbulut analyses Free Kazova Cooperative and Komşu Kafe Collective in Turkey (2020). According to de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, in cooperatives “the workplace is an organizational commons, the labour performed is a commoning practice, and the surplus generated, a commonwealth” (2010, 45). Their analysis of cooperatives remains, nevertheless, rather general. Despite the gap in research and the difficulties to decommodify labour power in societies with a capitalist mode of production, practices of labour as commoning exist, although they are mostly not self-defined as such. In order to provide a more concrete idea of what commoning labour could look like, the focus of my analysis is on WREs: former capitalist companies that were closed down by their owners or went into bankruptcy leading to a workers’ occupation and a struggle to restart operations under collective and democratic self-management. The individual private property of the means of production is transformed into collective property with a social purpose and with no individual ownership (CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013, 27, 30; Ruggeri 2014, 16). 149
150 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Since the year 2000, workers have recuperated hundreds of companies worldwide. To proceed to the analysis of WREs as instances of labour commoning, it is necessary to outline the conception of the commons employed. I will first introduce the idea of commoning as a means of social transformation, and then elaborate a definition of labour as a commons. Based on these premises I analyse WREs in South America and Europe. In the conclusion I point out some problems in Ostrom’s conceptualisation of commons (Ostrom 1990, 90).
THE COMMONS ARE BACK Originally the commons referred to collectively used resources, as was the case with most natural resources before they were progressively enclosed by capital. The commons preceded private property and capitalism (Linebaugh 2014, 14; Rifkin 2014, 29–38). Capital needs the commons for the on-going accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005). With increasing enclosure by capital and the prevalence of the dualism of public and private, the commons faded away from being the focus of attention. Traditional commoning practices have in part survived to this day, especially in the Global South. Although many are based on age-old customs, they should not be mistaken for residual traditions: they are self-organised systems of “collective reproduction of life through daily practices” (De Angelis 2010, 955), adapted to the ever-changing circumstances of contemporary societies. In the Global South, commons regained visibility from the mid-1990s, mainly as indigenous practices, and especially related to the Zapatistas in Mexico (Federici 2011; Federici and Caffentzis 2014). The commons are at the core of collective struggles in the Global South such as the “Water War” (2000) and the “Gas Wars” (2003/2005) in Bolivia, land occupations by the landless movement in Brazil and other struggles to preserve land, water, seeds, etc. as commons, (De Angelis 2014, 302; Hardt and Negri 2012, 89–90; Linebaugh 2014, 17, 24). In Europe, conceptions of commons are present in struggles to preserve resources or recommunalise privatised public resources turning them into locally controlled commons, especially water, electricity, parks and open spaces in inner-city areas. Further debates and practices of commoning are connected to digital and creative commons, currencies and knowledge (Bollier and Helfrich 2012).
COMMONING AS A TRANSFORMATORY PRACTICE The commons is not an object, it is a social relationship based on human activity. It consists of both a resource and a manner of using, caring for and preserving it by a collective subject (Fattori 2011; Federici 2011; Federici and Caffentzis 2014; Helfrich 2008; Linebaugh 2008, 2014; Rifkin 2014). “Commons are not given, they are produced” (Federici and Caffentzis 2014, 101). The commons become commons through commoning (Linebaugh 2014, 17). The commons are administered collectively, by adopting a set of norms regarding their use that ensures their preservation for future generations. This means that the commons depend on self-constituting and self-organising communities, while commoning fosters self-organisation within communities (Ostrom 1990). The commons is neither state nor market: it is not a public good administered or regulated by the state, and it is not private property or a source of surplus
Commoning labour power 151 value extracted by outsiders offering “participation”. Commoning is the alternative to the supposed dualism of state vs. private. The use of the verb “commoning” (Linebaugh 2008, 279) shifts the focus to collective activity. This also reminds us that the commons as such is not an automatic solution to all contradictions, as, for example, gender inequality or racism, but rather is a social process. The outcome depends on specific deliberate practices of commoning and the context in which they take place. To rule out that the fruits of the commons are appropriated by others in order to extract surplus value and that commons become a privilege reserved to a small and wealthy minority, it is necessary to tether the concept of the commons to equality. The value practices of the commons are predicated on the needs of the community and the preservation and reproduction of the commons (De Angelis 2014, 302), opposed to the value practices of capital that are driven by the generation and diversion of surplus value. Contrary to capital, which is sustained on inequality and competition, the commons connects individuals in networks founded on cooperation, mutualism and equality. While “[c]apitalism has been a program for the commodification of everything” (Wallerstein 2000, 157), the commons tend to build spaces free of capital relations. It is “[t]his value struggle [which] lies at the heart of the commons’ potential as a social system and force that might overcome the hegemony of capital” (De Angelis 2014, 606). Anti-capitalist commons, should function as autonomous spaces “from which to reclaim control over the conditions of our reproduction” and “increasingly disentangle our lives from the market and the state” (Federici and Caffentzis 2014, i101). Accordingly, commoning necessitates a process of decommodification, abolition of exploitation and transformation of the social relations of production. It is essentially what Wallerstein (2000, 157) calls a long process of “the elimination of the category of profit”.
LABOUR AS COMMONING “Labour” is generally understood as wage labour, the form most labour is forced to assume in capitalism. Wage labour as such cannot be organised as commoning praxis. I therefore use the distinction between labour and labour power. Following Marx, labour is “the activity of work”, the physical activity or effort of producing use value. While labour power, the ability for labour, is “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form (Leiblichkeit), the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use value of any kind” (Marx 1976, 270). The characteristics of labour and labour power are determined by the form of society. The capitalist mode of production commodifies use values and turns them into “material bearers” of exchange value (Marx 1976, 126). The employer purchases the worker’s labour power as a commodity and becomes the owner of the goods produced by that worker. Under capitalism, workers must sell their labour power to employers in exchange for a money wage. Different from any other commodity, labour power is a commodity attached to the worker, it exists only as a capacity of the living individual (Marx 1976, 274). Moreover, it is “a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption is therefore itself an objectification (Vergegenständlichung) of labour, hence a creation of value” (Marx 1976, 270). The surplus value “depends, in the first place, on the degree of exploitation of labour power” (Marx 1976, 747). Once the labour power has been acquired it is not a generic potentiality anymore but turns – for the time it has been purchased – into abstract labour (that
152 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work means surplus value creating labour). But for the duration that labour power is not purchased and put to work, it is usually lost forever because in a capitalist system it is not transformed into concrete labour (i.e. labour creating use value). This waste of social potential is inherent to capitalism. Thus, governing labour as a commons represents a significant paradigm shift in society (Rifkin 2014; Wainwright 2012). Within capitalism labour power is considered an individual capacity. The human ability to create is a collective social capability and not an individual gift. It is dependent on knowledge and skills developed by others in the past; on the socially organised systems of preserving and passing them to the new generations; on the cooperation with others; and on the social reproduction of individuals. Treating labour power as an individual commodity exchangeable on the market is a mechanism for the appropriation of collective socially produced value by private entities. Labour as the capacity to create is “essential for life”; it “connects individuals to one another”; it is a resource that would be best used if maintained and reproduced together “according to rules established by the community” and being “self-governed through forms of participative democracy” (Fattori 2011). If labour is an inherently social activity that depends on the flow of cooperation within society and is in turn socially beneficial, it follows that the way to make best use of it is to govern it collectively as a commons. I suggest that WREs are a concrete example for this.
WORKER-RECUPERATED ENTERPRISES Worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs) refer to the companies taken over by workers for production under self-management since the 1990s, most prominently in Argentina since the 2000–2001 crisis. Most of the occupations occur because the workers have no other job prospects or means of subsistence. Usually, they cannot count on the support of the main unions or institutional political forces. The machines are often old, broken or have been taken away by the owners and the former business relations have broken down. Despite the adverse circumstances, the workers engage in self-organised offensive struggles. (Azzellini 2018a; CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013; Ozarow and Croucher 2014; PFA 2010; Ranis 2016; Rieiro 2015; Ruggeri, Novaes and Sarda de Faría 2014; Vieta 2012). In early 2022 there were approximately 430 WREs with 15,000 workers in Argentina; at least 78 in Brazil, with more than 12,000 workers; 29 in Uruguay; 60–100 in Venezuela; and more in other Latin American countries. In Venezuela, an increasing number of companies have been taken over jointly by workers and communities (Azzellini 2017; PFA/CDER 2018; Rebón, Kasparian and Hernández 2016; Rebón and Rieiro 2020; Vieta 2020). Almost all WREs are small to medium in size. There are WREs in most industries, such as metal, textile, ceramics, food processing, plastic, rubber and print shops, and they are increasingly also in the service sector, for example, clinics, education facilities, media, hotels and restaurants (Azzellini 2015c, 2018a; CDER 2014, 72–75; Henriques et al. 2013, 249–51). Despite differences regarding material conditions, laws and political context, there exist common characteristics. Any WRE begins with a self-organised group of workers that refuses to accept that private ownership determines whether the workplace will continue existing and, instead, advance a collective alternative. Most WREs transform into cooperatives, thus providing a legal base for the operation of the company under collective management (Azzellini 2015c; Novaes and Sardá de Faria 2014,
Commoning labour power 153 86–87; Ruggeri 2014, 14–17).1 Unlike most common cooperatives, WREs are not formed by a pre-established group of volunteers who share a set of values. The inclusion of different subjectivities opens up the possibility that the commons-based economic activity can “create a social basis for alternative ways of articulating social production, independent from capital and its prerogatives” (De Angelis 2013, 185). WREs originate from the contradiction between capital and labour. The struggle and self-managing the workplace reaffirm the workers’ identities as workers, which entails the question of class, that often gets lost in cooperatives (Ruggeri 2014, 16). WREs do not have individual property shares, unequal distribution of shares or external investors (Azzellini 2018a). In most WREs the workers see the means of production – as the Greek Vio.Me. workers – “as collectively managed commons that enable them to work and produce, rather than as the property of individuals” (Kioupkiolis and Karyotis 2015, 316). WREs socialise the former private capitalist property. A workplace recuperation is not only an economic process but also a social process. It entails the transformation of a hierarchically structured capitalist business, which pursues primarily the increase of surplus value, into a democratically self-managed company with the workers’ well-being at its centre. In this process almost everything changes: the workers’ subjectivities; social relations among the workers; labour processes; internal dynamics and the relationships with the providers, customers and communities. Economic viability is important, but in WREs it is intrinsically connected with the aims of democratisation, solidarity, justice, dignity, alternative value production and overcoming workers’ alienation. (Azzellini 2015c; CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013; Ruggeri 2014; Vieta 2020).
WORKERS’ SELF-MANAGEMENT, DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY WREs are democratically self-managed by a self-organised community, in line with the principles of the commons. The democratic process is at the centre. Most WREs maintain the directly democratic practices they introduced during their struggle, hold regular assemblies, where all workers have voice and vote, and make all important decisions in common (Azzellini 2015c; CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013; Ness and Azzellini 2011; PFA 2010; Vieta 2020). In Argentina, 88 per cent of the WREs hold regular general assemblies, 44 per cent hold weekly assemblies and 35 per cent monthly assemblies (PFA 2010, 47). Brazilian WCRs have fewer general assemblies, but hold regular department meetings, 75 per cent have wall newspapers and 11 per cent internal publications (Henriques et al. 2013, 124). Daily department meetings, workgroups for specific areas and meetings of the workgroup delegates are widespread. Traditional cooperatives meet much less often and the members frequently delegate their decision-making power.2 Once the workers have experienced relationships of equality in the struggle, they almost never reintroduce formal hierarchies and have no or relatively small differences in payment. A study of 81 Argentinian WREs revealed that 45 were maintaining an absolute equality of payment; 34 WREs had differences in payment, but the average difference between the lowest and highest pay was only 33 per cent; and two of the surveyed companies had a payment structure where the highest pay was 75 per cent more than the lowest. The main reasons for higher pay were: differences in work tasks (41 per cent) and in hours worked (27 per cent) (PFA 2010,
154 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 55–56). In Europe, Venezuela and Uruguay, the situation is similar (Azzellini 2015c; Rieiro 2015). Large income inequalities exist only in Brazil. They are mostly due to market pressure: WREs fail to fill certain specialised positions if they offer all workers the same pay (Henriques et al. 2013, 128). WREs can overcome workers’ alienation and anxiety, which are always present in conventional companies (Azzellini 2015c, 2017; Azzellini and Ressler 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; CDER 2014; PFA 2010; Vieta 2020). In WREs, the workers’ commitment is the driving force. Surveillance by superiors, cameras and guards does not exist. Before the takeover, as Vio.Me. worker Makis Anagnostou expresses it, “there was a regime of fear” (Azzellini and Ressler 2015b). By regaining collective control over the product of their own labour, the workers engage in a process of “progressive disalienation” (Mandel 1971, 187–210). Job rotation is a further characteristic feature of WREs: 70 per cent of WREs in Argentina have had some kind of job rotation (PFA 2010, 54). The same can be observed in other countries. At first, rotation often comes out of necessity: not all employees participate in the recuperation. The remaining workers have to perform tasks they were unfamiliar with before the occupation. On the other hand, there is a strong interest on behalf of most workers to learn other tasks. Often rotation comes about with debates on alienation and the fragmentation of work processes. Collective decision-making also demands and promotes a broader knowledge of the company’s functioning. Commoning in WREs unleashes the workers’ creativity. Workers improve production processes, build replacements and invent new products and new activities (Azzellini 2015c, 2017; Azzellini and Ressler 2014, 2015b, 2018; CDER 2014; Vieta 2020). How labour power is used is determined in a process of commoning. Knowledge also becomes a commons as many workers prepare themselves to assume new functions. In Venezuela, workers can attend the programme Bolivarian Workers’ University Jesús Rivero, thereby learning to systematise and contextualise their knowledge of labour and the production process. In Argentina, the popular bachilleratos (high school diploma programmes) were created in 2004 by the Cooperative of Popular Educators and Researchers (CEIP) together with the National Movement of Recuperated Enterprises. In 2010, the Impa Workers University began courses in the premises of the WRE Impa (metal works).
NETWORKING, SOLIDARITY AND NEW VALUE PRODUCTION The work regime and business decisions of WREs do not have as their main goal to increase profits. The value practices are based on the needs of the community and the preservation and reproduction of the WRE (De Angelis 2014, 302). What Ranis notices at the Argentine tile-producing WRE FaSinPat applies generally to WREs: redundancies do not exist, workers are only fired because of “malfeasance, proven neglect of the machinery and products, or a consistently unexplained absenteeism” (Ranis 2016, 67). WREs build relationships with other movements, political and social organisations as well as the community (Larrabure, Vieta and Schugurensky 2011, 191). The strongest support for Argentine WREs comes from other WREs: 82.3 per cent have received such support; 64.7 per cent received the support of unions (mostly legal advice); 64.6 per cent of social movements and parties; and 29.4 per cent of nearby communities (PFA 2010, 21). Commoning at the workplace and networks of mutualism and solidarity turn many WREs into a Common Pool Resources (CPR) institution. Almost all Argentine WREs engage in cultural, social and
Commoning labour power 155 political activities. Thirty-nine per cent even offer permanent space to cultural centres, radio stations, day-care facilities, popular bachilleratos and other activities (PFA 2010, 80). In Brazil, 71 per cent of the WREs are connected to other WREs or solidarity economy endeavours; a third maintains good relations with unions; 39 per cent are connected to other social movements and parties (Henriques et al. 2013, 161–66). There is, for example, the plastic packing material factory Flaskô in Sumaré, São Paulo, under workers’ control since 2003 (Henriques et al. 2013, 37, 244). In 2005, the workers along with local families occupied a plot of land next to the factory and built a “workers’ and people’s neighbourhood” with housing for 560 families. An empty storehouse was occupied and transformed into a sports and cultural centre and a community radio station was set up within the grounds of the factory. The number of workers rose from 50 to 80 and Flaskô is cooperating in recycling projects with local communities and schools, which collect plastic waste used by Flaskô as raw material (Flaskô 2015). In Uruguay, unions are historically connected with the workers’ cooperative movement. Workers of WREs are usually unionised and the WREs have strong ties with the union federation and the solidarity economy sector. In Venezuela, WREs and struggles for workers’ control receive strong support from self-organised communities (Azzellini 2017). In Europe, the most important support comes from social movements and solidarity initiatives, only the French WREs have enjoyed a relevant union support. Instead of competition, a new collaborative culture prevails both within and among WREs. Half of the Brazilian WREs have economic relations with other WREs (Henriques et al. 2013, 163). A study of 82 WREs in Argentina revealed that 16.05 per cent of their supplies come from other WREs and 2.47 per cent from social economy companies (PFA 2010, 35–36). This is despite WREs making up less than 0.1 per cent of the total workforce and GDP. WREs support each other and exchange knowledge and experiences in national, continental and global encounters. The European WREs have been inspired by the Argentinian movement and several have been visited by workers from Argentinian WREs.
CONTRADICTIONS WREs have to enter hegemonic capitalist market relations (PFA 2010, 36). Being “neither state nor market” is therefore complex. Pressure to abide by the rules of capital is not only external; internal conflicts are most often linked to payment, social hierarchy at work, working hours and commitment (Azzellini 2018a; PFA 2010, 55–56). To a certain extent WREs are autonomous spaces “from which to reclaim control over the conditions of our reproduction” (Federici and Caffentzis 2014, i101). But “in a situation in which capital and commons are both pervasive systems that organise the social, it is clear that often a solution will imply […] a particular form of their structural coupling” (De Angelis 2014, 304). While WRE workers “have taken it mostly upon themselves to restructure their enterprises […], restart production and make these firms economically viable once again” (Larrabure, Vieta and Schugurensky 2011, 189), state institutions in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and France responded to pressure from below and intervened to facilitate a political solution (Azzellini 2015c, 70–74; 2017; Henriques et al. 2013; PFA 2010, 71). Almost all WREs – with exceptions in the education, health, media and textile sectors – have an overwhelmingly male workforce: in Brazil, among 21 companies studied, 77 per cent
156 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of the workforce was male (Henriques et al. 2013, 71); the equivalent figure was 82 per cent in Argentina (PFA 2010, 45). Female workers mostly receive less support from their families and are challenged more (Azzellini and Ressler 2014). A paradigm shift in regard to labour has to aim at “the democratized organization of productive and reproductive work” (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2010, 45). WREs are a space in which this can be discussed. Commoning at the workplace fosters common and collective activities beyond it. WREs often shift some of the burden of social reproduction into the workplace, with, for example, food cooked collectively and organised child care. Stronger social networks, solidarity and mutual care also make it easier to get support or time off from work when needed. Female workers in WREs can also take time and space for specific organising, as during the struggle for legal abortion in Argentina in 2019–2020. The print shop MadyGraf in Buenos Aires, for example, has a company’s women’s committee that discussed the subject at the workplace and organised the participation in the campaign at the workplace (Varela 2021).
CONCLUSION Despite all contradictions, hurdles and external attacks, WREs are an important example of labour power as a commons. Workers create self-constituting and self-organising communities, accomplishing “collective reproduction of life through daily practices” (De Angelis 2010, 955). What workers do in a WRE is what is “essential for life” (Fattori 2011), the reproduction and production of life as commoning. The self-constituted community assumes control of the abandoned workplace, takes care of it with the aim to restart production and also opens the space to other initiatives. The workers build a free association of producers, in Marx’s terms. The labour power of the workers of a WRE is put to use for and by the collective. Work has stopped being a burden, it “has become synonymous with the recovery of dignity, self-esteem and self-realisation” (Ozarow and Croucher 2014, 1000). Democratic control over their work, understanding of the whole production process and the new social relations built contribute to the disalienation of workers. The production of different values based on solidarity and mutualism show the transformative potential of labour power as a commons in WREs. WREs put into evidence the problems in Ostrom’s “design principles” of long-enduring CPR institutions (1990, 90). Because of the formally illegal status of the occupations there is no conflict resolution mechanisms “between appropriators and officials”. And that the “rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities” is also not the case. This does not call into question the status of WREs as CPR institutions, but only how enduring they might be. Nevertheless, in the case of Argentina, of 205 WREs studied in 2010, only six had shut down at the end of 2013 while there were 63 new WREs (CDER 2014, 10, 13). The starting point of WREs is precisely the moment a capitalist enterprise closes down. In this disadvantageous situation WREs have proven their viability. They maintain “their central values, even while being forced to interact with the market and the state. Managerial decisions are made and applied within a framework of non-capitalist ideas” (Ozarow and Croucher 2014, 1003), as shown for most WREs (Azzellini 2015a; CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013). Research and empirical evidence indicate that WREs are enduring, not despite, but because of struggle and conflict. Rupture and struggle are at “the centre of the problematic of the commons re-production” (De Angelis 2007, 74). Expropriations, financial support and the drafting of new laws in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela
Commoning labour power 157 demonstrate that WREs have influenced state policy (Azzellini 2015b, 2018a; CDER 2014; Henriques et al. 2013; Rieiro 2015).
NOTES 1 2
Only Venezuela recognises different company models with a collective administration (Azzellini 2017). See also Vieta and Heras in this volume.
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Commoning labour power 159 PFA – Programa Facultad Abierta. 2010. Las Empresas Recuperadas En La Argentina: Informe Del Tercer Relevamiento. Buenos Aires: University of Buenos Aires. PFA/CDER. 2018. ‘Las empresas recuperadas por los trabajadores en los comienzos del gobierno de Mauricio Macri’. Buenos Aires: Programa Facultad Abierta/Centro de Documentación de Empresas Recuperadas. Ranis, Peter. 2016. Cooperatives Confront Capitalism: Challenging the Neoliberal Economy. London and New York: Zed Books. Rebón, Julián, Denise Kasparian, and Candela Hernández. 2016. ‘The Social Legitimacy of Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina’. Socialism and Democracy 30 (3): 37–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300 .2016.1214006. Rebón, Julián, and Anabel Rieiro. 2020. ‘Consolidación Cooperativa de Empresas Recuperadas Por Sus Trabajadores En Argentina y Uruguay’. Psicoperspectivas 19 (2). https://dx.doi.org/10.5027/ psicoperspectivas-vol20-issue2-fulltext-1907. Rieiro, Anabel. 2015. ‘Collective Self-Management and Social Classes: The Case of Enterprises Recovered by Their Workers in Uruguay’. In An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy, edited by Dario Azzellini, 273–97. London and New York: Zed Books. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruggeri, Andrés. 2014. ‘Crisis y Autogestión En El Siglo XXI’. In Crisis y Autogestión En El Siglo XXI. Cooperativas y Empresas Recuperadas En Tiempos de Neoliberalismo, edited by Andrés Ruggeri, Henrique Tahan Novaes, and Maurício Sardá de Faria, 13–26. Buenos Aires: Continente. Ruggeri, Andrés, Henrique Tahan Novaes, and Mauricio Sarda de Faría, eds. 2014. Crisis y Autogestión En El Siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Continente. Varela, Paula. 2021. ‘What Are We Fighting for? Women Workers’ Struggles’. In If Not Us, Who? Global Workers against Authoritarianism, Fascism, and Dictatorships, edited by Dario Azzellini, 23–31. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag. Vieta, Marcelo. 2012. ‘From Managed Employees to Self-Managed Workers: The Transformation of Labour at Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises’. In Alternative Work Organizations, edited by Maurizio Atzeni, 129–56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vieta, Marcelo. 2016. ‘Autogestión. Prefiguring a “New Cooperativism” and the “Labour Commons”’. In Moving Beyond Capitalism, edited by Cliff DuRand, 56–63. Routledge Critical Development Studies. Oxford: Routledge. Vieta, Marcelo. 2020. Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión. Leiden: Brill. https:// doi.org/10.1163/9789004268951. Wainwright, Hilary. 2012. ‘From Labour as Commodity to Labour as a Common’. P2P Foundation. 2012. http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Labour_as_Commodity_to_Labour_as_a_Common. Wainwright, Hilary. 2014. ‘Notes for a Political Economy of Creativity and Solidarity’. In The Solidarity Economy Alternative: Emerging Theory and Practice, edited by Vishwas Satgar, 74–79. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Walker, Tom. 2013. ‘Labour as a Common-Pool Resource’. Social Network Unionism (blog). 2013. https://snuproject.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/labour-as-a-common-pool-resource-by-tom-walker/. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. ‘A Left Politics for the 21st Century? Or, Theory and Praxis Once Again’. New Political Science 22 (2): 143–59.
FURTHER READING Azzellini, Dario. 2018. ‘Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies’. Critical Sociology 44 (4–5): 763–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920516661856. Peuter, Greig de, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. 2010. ‘Commons and Cooperatives’. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action 4 (1): 30–56. Wainwright, Hilary. 2012. ‘From Labour as Commodity to Labour as a Common’. P2P Foundation. 2012. http://p2pfoundation.net/From_Labour_as_Commodity_to_Labour_as_a_Common.
160 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Walker, Tom. 2013. ‘Labour as a Common-Pool Resource’. Social Network Unionism (blog). 2013. https://snuproject.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/labour-as-a-common-pool-resource-by-tom-walker/.
12. Social and solidarity economy and self-management Marcelo Vieta and Ana Inés Heras
INTRODUCTION Social and solidarity-oriented and self-governed processes of organizing economic life have existed since humans have collaborated to survive. However, the conscious demand and conceptual realization of the social aspects of the economy only arose in Western thought with the emergence of a primarily market-based exploitative economy and the enclosed commons, forcing working people into capitalism’s system of production and exchange (McMurtry, 2010; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). This chapter first reviews the most cited definitions of what is increasingly termed the social and solidarity economy (SSE), related concepts, and their contextual and theoretical perspectives. Secondly, we present four dimensions of the SSE as entry points for discussing and summarizing its most salient components, taking up both concepts and practices developed over time and across geographies. Throughout, we also remain sensitive to trans-cultural and cross-linguistic practices and ways-of-knowing in regard to non-Western social and solidary economics, which remain mostly inaccessible to mainstream and mostly Western SSE debates. Finally, we offer summative thoughts on the continued promises and potential of the SSE and why the work of conceptualizing and visibilizing it is important in the search for other ways of “doing economy” (Gibson-Graham and Dombroski, 2020, p. 1).
THE CONTESTED DEFINITIONS OF THE SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY While the SSE and related concepts such as the social economy or self-management/ autogestión, are relatively new from a world-historical perspective, socialized economic practices pre-date capitalist markets by millennia (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]), since they are as old as humans have been cooperating and sharing in the “results of their labour” (Fontan and Shragge, 2000, p. 3). Moreover, myriad diverse economies co-exist and are socially constituted (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Encompassing a wide array of socio-economic practices, definitions of the SSE today are polysemic and contested, referring both and at the same time to: (1) Ways of doing economy, constructing organizations where capital and surpluses are socialized, not only amongst members but also between organizations or the broader community, and where the main goal is not exploitative but generative. (2) Theoretical economic orientations that differ from mainstream liberal or orthodox economic thought and concepts. 161
162 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Broadly, the SSE encompasses formal and informal collective economic endeavours, including waged/un-waged work, and market/non-marketized forms of production, distribution, and exchange (Bastidas et al., 2001; Fonteneau et al., 2010), where the process and results are social, socialized, and solidary. Related notions such as the popular economy or the solidarity economy focus primarily on the informal, non-waged, or domestic sphere of economic activity (Pérsico et al., 2017), while the social economy tends to embrace more formal organizations and institutionally recognized waged or voluntary work functioning between and overlapping with the private and public sectors (Defourny et al., 2014; Pearce, 2009; Quarter et al., 2018). In regions of the world marked by colonialism and continuing dispossession, debates still unfold as to what the naming of long-held local and contextually situated economic practices under the mantle of the SSE both reveals and conceals, and what kind of politics and policies are fostered and reproduced, such as with the World Bank’s discourses or programmes of international loans and development aid (Bähre, 2020; Baron, 2007). In geographies such as India, African Francophone and Portuguese colonized countries, and Spanish-conquered regions, specific notions of the SSE were imported and continue to be intensely debated against other local terms in use, making the SSE field we are trying to systematize here deeply complex. For example, “the social economy”, “the third sector”, or “the non-profit sector”, are used mainly in the global North; “la economía popular” (the popular economy), “la economía solidaria” (the solidarity economy), and “la otra economía” (the other economy), but also “la economía social” (the social economy) or “la economía social y solidaria” (the social and solidarity economy), are all variably used in Latin America. Additionally, the increased uptake of sustainability-based, reduce-and-reuse economic models embraced by global programmes like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) increasingly resonate across the globe – including related concepts such as the “circular economy”, “doughnut economy”, the “sharing economy”, and, more radically, “degrowth”. Lately, the SSE tends to be acknowledged as the umbrella concept, with other related notions representing different local practices or sets of organizations (Kawano, 2018; Utting, 2015). This diversity of cultural–geographic perspectives privilege different aspects of the SSE when positioning themselves in relation to other perspectives, or when they are being imposed upon by others, hegemonic economic discourses, or the capitalist-inclined nation-state (Ould Ahmed, 2015). In short, understanding the SSE depends on a complex set of factors, the particular theoretical or political perspective from which one views it, the regional or national conjuncture one homes in on, or the specific organization or networks wherein one participates (Sahakian, 2016). Thus, for Dash (2016), conceptualizing the SSE is an epistemological issue, a struggle over meaning. Moreover, the points of entry one takes with the SSE reveal one’s ethico-political perspective and commitments in regard to what are considered to be socio-economic values, practices, and organizational forms. In the predominantly white Anglo-Saxon world, the social economy draws historically from traditions of Christian charity and utopian socialism, articulated early in the nineteenth century by Robert Owen and, later in that century, the early cooperative movement in the UK, migrating soon after to Britain’s colonies in North America and the Caribbean, Australia, Asia, and Africa (Moulaert and Ailenei, 2005; Poirier, 2014). In English-speaking Canada, this includes a wide assortment of organizations that embrace different social objectives and participate, in varying degrees, within or outside of markets, involving cooperatives, social enterprises, mutual associations, formal and informal community initiatives, charities and foundations,
Social and solidarity economy and self-management 163 civil society non-profits, and even quasi-public sector entities such as hospitals and universities (Quarter et al., 2018). While there is recognition in the US of the concept of the social economy (Mook et al., 2015), researchers there tend to limit these activities and organizations to what is widely known as the non-profit sector (Salamon, 1999), where “tertiary activities not viable for commercialization or market exchanges” are brought together by “non-profits and voluntary associations” (Vieta, 2020, p. 340), thus excluding cooperatives and social enterprises that do trade in markets. Importantly, more radical, social movement-driven, and practitioner understandings of the SSE also co-exist in the US (Kawano, 2018) and Canada (Poirier, 2014). These have been mostly sustained by historically marginalized groups such as African-descendent and diasporic organizations, Indigenous communities, and groups who self-identify as non-mainstream (Hossein, 2019; Koukkanen, 2011). SSE views and practices from marginalized and oppressed groups have developed over centuries, although they have more recently been made visible to Western-trained academic audiences; have produced complex concepts, theories, and spiritual and cultural perspectives; and are usually rarely acknowledged by mainstream sectors of the SSE. In turn, historically marginalized groups and peoples and diverse, inter-ethnic coalitions gathered in social movements have been key in bringing to the public agenda issues of collective property, action, and practices based on caring for others, including the human and the non-human. What we could call a Continental-European approach to the SSE has been especially influential in France, Belgium, Québec, and Southern Europe, drawing on a long tradition concerning l'économie sociale dating back to early-to-mid nineteenth-century, post-revolutionary France (Moulaert and Ailenei, 2005). Today, this approach considers the SSE as part of a pluralist or mixed economy offering a variety of coordinating mechanisms of production and distribution that complement and/or fill in the gaps not reached by the purely for-profit or public systems but that nevertheless act within some market activity. For instance, the notion of the social economy taken up by most EU countries includes “formally-organised enterprises, with autonomy of decision and freedom of membership” (Monzón Campos and Chaves Ávila, 2012, p. 22), such as cooperatives, mutual-aid organizations (mostly in insurance and health), social enterprises, and some non-profits (Pearce, 2009). A growing group of scholars have critically assessed these Eurocentric approaches to the SSE, noting that they offer limited options for more profound alternatives to capitalist exploitation (Amin et al., 2003; Dinerstein, 2014). Among these critiques are notions of the SSE with conceptual and experiential roots in Latin America, with specific marginalized communities in the US, as well as with other global-South viewpoints such as African notions of ubuntu and ujamaa, Islamic economic justice, and African North American, African Brazilian, Zapatista, African Colombian, or mestizo-criollo Chilean socio-cultural and -economic practices, to name a few (Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Egri and Kizilkaya, 2015; Hossein, 2019; Kawano, 2018; Razeto Migliaro, 1995). Many of these non-Eurocentric notions of a social and solidarity economy were first articulated as such and disseminated widely in the years spanning the turn of the millennium (Coraggio, 2011; Gaiger, 2017; Singer, 2004), gaining wider usage in debates held at the World Social Forum and in emerging networks of practitioners and researchers such as RIPESS (2020) and RILESS (2020). They are currently being furthered by activists and scholars in debates about diverse and community economies (Gibson-Graham and Dembroski, 2020).
164 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work At the centre of these non-Eurocentric debates are the meaning of solidarity, the reclaiming and nurturing of the commons, and the ways in which life in all its forms can be supported. These perspectives are critical of mainstream SSE, and include an array of activities and organizations ranging from formalized cooperatives and socially focused non- and for-profits, to worker-recuperated and self-managed companies (empresas recuperadas), to informal collectives, Indigenous and campesino ways of organizing and redistributing resources, local barter clubs, communal banking, community kitchens and free health clinics, and other locally based socio-economic organizations self-determined by those most affected by the economic activity (Heras et al., 2017; Hossein, 2018; Vieta, 2020). Further, many of these initiatives extend the concept of the SSE to localized self-governance and worker or community/neighbourhood control, practising self-determined and self-managed ways of decision-making, both in rural and urban areas (Monje et al., 2018; Miano et al., 2020a, b). Taken together, these critical approaches to the SSE tend to be grounded more markedly in explicitly political and often anti-capitalist perspectives connected to broader social and ethico-political movements, e.g., those advanced by radical feminism, by Indigenous peoples, by colectivos autogestionados (self-managed collectives), and by groups that occupy and recuperate land, such as Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra and the Zapatistas of Chiapas. They also tend to be influenced by a history of defiance against colonization, struggles for decolonization, and, more recently, in community responses to ongoing crises wrought by neoliberal capitalism. In what follows we draw on the commonalities across several of the definitions we have highlighted so far, articulated via a methodological perspective that we term entry points for understanding the SSE.
FOUR ENTRY POINTS TO THE SOCIAL AND SOLIDARITY ECONOMY As we have argued, how the SSE is defined depends on one’s point of entry. From our discussion thus far, we draw out four entry points to more clearly understand the SSE: (1) the central place of work and working people; (2) the characteristics of its organizations; (3) the types of socio-economic activities; and (4) the values and ethical dimensions embraced.
THE SSE AND THE CENTRALITY OF WORK AND WORKERS TO ECONOMIC LIFE The definition of economy in the SSE from this entry point can be summed up as “all the work that human beings perform”, including the production and distribution of “the things we need and use in our lives” (Stanford, 2015, p. 18). Recognizing that those who work may also jointly decide how to organize production and how to distribute what they produce is an affirmation of the social nature of work and a reminder that the results of labour can be controlled collectively. To use Marx’s concepts, we can say that the SSE privileges living labour (actual
Social and solidarity economy and self-management 165 working people) over dead labour (tools, machines, property, capital). What thus comes to the fore are considerations of the kind of work done in the SSE, how decisions are made in allocating the work, and who gets to decide what to do with the results of the collectively produced effort by “associated labour…with the means of production in common” (Marx, 1967 [1867], pp. 77–8). We can thus view the SSE as grounded in a workers’ economy organized via workers’ self-management/autogestión which takes up – but also moves beyond – working conditions, fair pay, and benefits, and unfolds where property and decision-making are socialized and democratized by associated producers sharing control and ownership over the means of production. In the most radicalized self-managed spaces, the capitalist contexts from which they emerge are ultimately questioned and addressed practically in how work is reorganized and market activity engaged with and mitigated (in varying degrees) by other forms of solidary production and exchange (GREP, 1981). When taking work as the entry point, the SSE concerns itself with ensuring: decent and fair work; that people can support themselves, their families, and others in their community; that their work is not exploited by a third party; that workplaces are collectively owned and fairly organized democratically; and that the very process of organizing work challenges common sense (read “capitalist”) definitions of what counts as “real work”. For example, the very notions and terminologies associated with work in a capitalist-based economy, such as getting a job, having employment, receiving a salary, making profit, securing private capital and private property, and so on, are contested in the SSE, while other forms of work effaced by capitalist discourses, such as care work and domestic/reproductive work, are explicitly considered, justly recognized, and remunerated. In other words, work is thought of more amply – and more radically – in the SSE when it considers the centrality of workers in defining their own labouring activities and economic doings.
THE SSE AS DEMOCRATIC AND SOCIALLY FOCUSED ORGANIZATIONS Taking the perspective of the organization as an entry point, what becomes visible in the SSE is the complex set of relations across sites of work aimed at social, cultural, and environmentally beneficial ends, together with the multiplicity of groups, human agents, and even non-human elements that constitute doing economy. Approached from the entry point of organizations, then, the SSE is constituted by spaces whereby: ● members or community stakeholders autonomously manage the productive activity, having control over their capital and labour process while collectively deciding how to distribute surpluses; ● the state does not take on ownership or control (although the state might partially fund or support the organization); ● private investors/shareholders tend not to take on ownership, nor do they have decision-making capacities (although private investors may contribute to a social enterprise in some way during start-up and for a limited time period); ● profit-making is not the guiding aim, but rather dignified work and collective processes of community provisioning (although surpluses can be created); and
166 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ● the mutual needs of members and the broader community are actively addressed by making contributions to or sharing surpluses with the localities or communities of interest within which they are located. Cooperatives are illustrative of these types of organizations, and consist, most broadly, of four types as defined by the main membership base/activity: consumer, worker, producer, and multi-stakeholder cooperatives. Formal cooperatives emerged in the UK and France in the early-to-mid nineteenth centuries as working-class responses to the growing challenges of industrial capitalism, preceding labour unions by several decades in some geographies (Craig, 1993). In recent years, and in countries hard-hit by neoliberal crisis and austerity, one way of creating cooperatives has been via the conversion of failing or struggling capital-centred businesses into co-ops, merging the community empowerment possibilities of the SSE with worker- or community-run workplaces (Azzellini, 2018; Vieta, 2020). These conversions can be led by the broader community or by workers themselves. In Latin America, where most conversions are initiated by workers of struggling firms, they are known as empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises/companies). Conversions to co-ops can foster short- and long-term economic stability for localities because they tap into the “cooperative advantage” (Vieta and Lionais, 2015), proving to be better than conventional businesses in terms of responding to and surviving crises since they root capital locally rather than with distant shareholders, meet local needs first, and provide good local jobs while fostering social trust (Bianchi and Vieta, 2020; Michie et al., 2017; Novkovic and Webb, 2014; Pérotin, 2017). The organizational entry point to the SSE also makes visible power differentials and inequality in that SSE organizations put into question other organizations that channel their activities into solely private gain rather than the common good. They also put into question hierarchical managerial control and underscore how inclusivity and social benefit also means designing organizations more horizontally and democratically. The SSE is thus in a constant state of emergence and tension, constituted by ongoing socio-political processes of organizing, including network and alliance building. There are several examples of regional and international networks of the SSE, such as the “Economía de las/los Trabajadoras/es” international network, the “Hacia Otra Economía” Latin American forum, the “Community Economies Research Network” (CERN), and “La Vía Campesina” international network. These have been formed over time in order to build transnational networks of solidarity that, in turn, aim to support smaller and more local SSE organizations. For instance, there are several examples of local SSE initiatives such as MOCASE in Santiago del Estero, Argentina that, over time, decided to be a part of the broader network of La Vía Campesina in order to become stronger locally and to also contribute via solidarity initiatives to the transnational movement.
THE SSE AS A SET OF ACTIVITIES The entry point of SSE as a constellation of activities allows for an understanding of the social and cultural practices of doing economy that usually remains hidden in liberal economic thought. In liberal economics, for instance, the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services are often analysed and described as reified processes with a life of their
Social and solidarity economy and self-management 167 own, without considering the deeper socio-political contexts that situate actual economic activities. On the other hand, innumerable examples can be found where groups of people engage in the production, distribution, or consumptive areas of socialized value chains collectively, and articulate and self-determine the entire production and consumption process. Here the focus is on supporting life, decent and just work, and the (re)production of social wealth. One such example is the multi-stakeholder co-op Cooperativa 1610, engaged in agro-ecological produce provisioning in Argentina, where producers and buyers self-organize to determine what should be produced and in what amounts, how it should be distributed, and how much should be paid for the final produce. The method of co-planning has allowed this local initiative to support the families producing the food as well as provide access to quality food for the families that purchase the produce and that otherwise could not access high quality organic food (Más Cerca, 2020). An SSE network initiative constituted along similar lines is Italy’s Fuorimercato (Out of the Market), linked to the Italian worker-recuperated initiative RiMaflow and the global La Via Campesina movement (Orlando, 2021). The set-of-activities entry point to the SSE reveals how participants of economic doing across the value chain are interconnected and share a common vision of broader well-being without compromising economic efficiency, while also limiting growth to environmentally sensitive and local scale. Moreover, governance and decision-making processes do not have to be centralized but can be done by all interested parties collectively, if and when a solidarity-based perspective guides the process. For example, when the pathway from production, distribution, and consumption is made visible to all and decisions are taken jointly, as in Cooperativa 1610 or Fuorimercato, two important things happen: people understand the economy not as an invisible and mystical thing, but as a humanly-driven, socially rooted, and ecologically connected process, and that access to quality products (such as sustainably sourced food) and good work can be controlled and guaranteed by the very communities most affected across the value chain.
THE SSE’S VALUES AND ETHICS OF INTERDEPENCY AND MUTUAL AID The very processes of work in the SSE, the character of its organizations, and its activities must be strongly orientated to benefitting all involved and all impacted via a central ethical commitment to mutual aid – where people are co-responsible for caring for each other in mutually beneficial and reciprocal exchanges (Kropotkin, 1989 [1902]). The issue of who benefits and how thus opens up a normative/ethical dimension to the SSE (McMurtry, 2010), forefronting the interdependency between people and between humans and non-humans. Even though differences and tensions continue to arise in the struggles over equity and inclusivity, the chance to overcome these tensions while continuing to assert difference within the SSE lies in the participative nature of its decision-making via its initiatives’ assemblies, where workers, producers, and/or consumers come together to openly discuss key issues, collectively learn, and co-create shared perspectives. Offering the possibility of much more open and accessible organizations in contrast to privately owned capitalist firms, in other words, allows for the collective values of interdependency and mutual aid to be worked out not abstractly but in shared and co-constructed spaces and moments of interaction.
168 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Several different examples around the world illustrate the co-constructed, values-driven characteristic of the SSE, including, for instance, in countless African American (North and South American and the Caribbean) SSE networks and organizations (Hossein, 2019); in Mapuche communal organizations for self-support and cultural affirmation in Chile (Guzmán and Krell, 2020); in India’s Dalit and Adivasi women’s agricultural cooperative groups (Chitranshi, 2019; Mookerjea, 2010); and in Aymara and Quechua communities in Bolivia, Argentina, and Peru organizing for supporting communal ways of living that acknowledge human and non-human interactions (Apffel Marglin, 2002; Osco, 2009). What these and myriad other cases show is that ancestral ways of knowing and doing economy have not only survived colonial genocide and “epistemicide” (Santos, 2014), but have also created new ways of “being-in-common” (Nancy, 1991, p. 64) within and beyond the capitalist system as they bridge traditional ways of knowing and organizing with contemporary socio-economic realities, while beginning to teach us how to overcome issues of injustice, terror, trauma, and violence produced by centuries of colonial, patriarchal, and exploitive practices.
CONCLUSION: THE PROMISES AND POTENTIAL OF THE SSE AND SELF-MANAGEMENT We conclude with three potentialities of the SSE and self-managed experiences for articulating another world. First, the SSE and the related experiences we reviewed – driven by strong social, cultural, and increasingly environmental objectives and infused with values and practices of care and mutual aid – provide a promising foundation from which to rethink our socio-economic ways of being more broadly, and an already-existing alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Contemporary pressing issues, such as climate justice, racialized and gendered oppressions, the relation between humans and non- or more-than-humans, and other central questions concerning how to most ethically inhabit the world have brought to the forefront notions and practices that the SSE has long embraced. Second, conceptualizations of the SSE – including its diverse, social, and grass-roots economies – begin from practices and lived experience that have long predated attempts at theorizing and defining it. Indeed, several authors mentioned in this chapter, most of them active protagonists of the SSE, have been theorizing and grappling with the implications of the SSE long before it was conceived as such. In doing so, they have helped eventually make visible the SSE as a vibrant and efficacious sphere of economic doing. However, none of this research-based work could have occurred without actual people putting their lives on the line – that is, without the day-to-day practices that concretize the SSE in the quotidian world. It is thus the stubborn, driven, and constant struggle of hundreds of thousands of groups, small and large, articulated across local and more-than-local spaces, that has made it possible to enliven the SSE, enriching its practices and organizations via lived experience and self-reflective theorization over time. Third, there is an important and increasingly recognized epistemological contribution of the SSE emanating from both practice and theory. SSE practitioners and scholars continue to re-introduce and re-formulate perspectives for addressing economic doing in ways that seemed novel during the 1980s and 1990s, but that now are taking on widespread interest and acceptance. In the process, the re-visibilization of old forms of socio-economic organizing in
Social and solidarity economy and self-management 169 new ways for new times and struggles are revivifying the organizations of the SSE to meet the challenges of transforming economic social relations via values and practices of reciprocity and mutual aid. In this vein, the contributions of the SSE in terms of an other, less- or non-capitalist economic epistemological perspective, especially in light of recurring crises, makes it also a crucial test bed for today’s global debates and proposals for more sustainable, more equitable, and more just ways of producing and provisioning the things we need and desire to live and thrive.
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170 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Gibson-Graham, J. K. and Kelly Dombroski, (eds.) (2020). The Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. GREP (1981) La autogestión a examen. Groupe de Recherche pour l’ Education Permanente (GREP). https://grep-mp.org/publications/ Guzmán, Alison and Ignacio Krell (2020) Informe de evaluación de impacto del grupo de apoyo mutuo 2014-2018. http://www.maplemicrodevelopment.org/impacto-multidimensional Heras, Ana Inés, Amalia Miano, and María Alejandra Pagotto (2017) Una apuesta por la vida: Ética y estética en formas colectivo-solidarias. Nómadas, 46: 129–149. Hossein, Caroline (ed.) (2018) The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Markets. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hossein, Caroline (2019) A Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy: The Black Social Economy. The Review of Black Political Economy, 46(3): 209–229. Kawano, Emily (2018) Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People & Planet. The Next System Project. https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/solidarity-economy-building-economy-people-planet Koukkanen, Rauna (2011) Indigenous Economies, Theories of Subsistence, and Women: Exploring the Social Economy Model for Indigenous Governance. American Indian Quarterly, 35(2): 215–240. Kropotkin, Peter (1989) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Marx, Karl (1967) Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: International Publishers. Más Cerca (2020) Más Cerca Es Más Justo. http://mascercaesmasjusto.org.ar/es/?perfil_productor& alias_productor=cooperativa-1610 McMurtry, J. J. (2010) Living Economics: Canadian Perspectives on the Social Economy, Co-operatives, and Community Economic Development. Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications. Miano, Amalia, Joaquín Rotman, and Ana Inés Heras (2020a) Vivir, educar y luchar en el campo. Acciones y coaliciones de pobladores rurales. Revista Temas Sociológicos, 27. https://doi.org/10 .29344/07196458.27.2458 Miano, Amalia, Erik Said Lara Corro, and Ana Inés Heras (2020b) Escuelas rurales de alternancia y cogestión: Un análisis sociolingüístico y etnográfico de las tomas de decisiones en el Consejo de Administración. Revista Brasileira de Lingüística Aplicada, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.1590/1984 -6398202016456 Michie, Jonathan, Joseph R. Blasi, and Carlo Borzaga (eds.) (2017) The Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-operative, and Co-owned Business. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monje, Ana María, David Burin, and Ana Inés Heras (2018) Dislocando la propiedad: Un análisis sobre usos del espacio en una experiencia colectiva en Rosario, Argentina. Revista Huellas, 22(2): 35–54. Monzón Campos, José Luís and Raul Chaves Ávila (2012) The Social Economy in the European Union. Brussels: The European Economic and Social Committee. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2864/19534 Mook, Laurie, John Whitman, Jack Quarter, and Ann Armstriong (2015) Understanding the Social Economy of the United States. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mookerjea, Sourayan (2010) The Sangham Strategy: Lessons for a Cooperative Mode of Production. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 4(1): 110–132. Moulaert, Frank and Oana Ailenei (2005) Social Economy, Third Sector and Solidarity Relations: A Conceptual Synthesis from History to Present. Urban Studies, 42(11): 2037–2053. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991) The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Novkovic, Sonja and Tom Webb (eds.) (2014) Co-operatives in a Post-Growth Era: Creating Co-operative Economics. London: Zed. Orlando, Giovanni (2021) Recovering Solidarity? Work, Struggle, and Cooperation Among Italian Recovered Enterprises. Economic Anthropology, 8: 74–85. Osco, Marcelo (2009) El Ayullu y la reconstitución del pensamiento Aymara. PhD thesis. Department of Romance Studies, Duke University. Ould Ahmed, Pepita (2015). What Does “Solidarity Economy” Mean? Contours and Feasibility of a Theoretical and Political Project. Business Ethics, 24(4): 425–435. Pearce, John (2009) Social Economy: Engaging as a Third System? In Ash Amin (ed.), The Social Economy: International Perspectives on Economic Solidarity, pp. 22–33. London: Zed Books. Pérotin, Virginie (2017) Workers’ Cooperatives: Good, Sustainable Jobs in the Community. In Jonathan Michie, Joseph R. Blasi, and Carlo Borzaga (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Mutual, Co-operative, and Co-owned Business, pp. 131–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Social and solidarity economy and self-management 171 Pérsico, Emilio, Fernando Navarro, Martín Navarro, Ariel Geandet, Alexandre Roig, and Pablo Chena (eds.) (2017) Economía popular: Los desafíos del trabajo sin patrón. Buenos Aires: Colihue. Poirier, Yvon (2014) Social Solidarity Economy and Related Concepts: Origins and Definitions: An International Perspective. RIPESS Working Paper, 1–24. Polanyi, Karl (2001 [1944]) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Quarter, Jack, Ann Armstrong, and Laurie Mook (2018) Understanding the Social Economy: A Canadian Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Razeto Migliaro, Luis (1995) Los caminos de la economía de solidaridad. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Lumen. RILESS (2020) RILESS: Red de Investigadores Latinoamericanos de Economía Social y Solidaria. EMES International Research Network. https://emes.net/network/riless-red-de-investigadores -latinoamericanos-de-economia-social-y-solidaria-riless/ RIPESS (2020) What is Social Solidarity Economy? RIPESS. http://www.ripess.org/what-is-sse/what-is -social-solidarity-economy/?lang=en Sahakian, Marlyne (2016) The Social and Solidarity Economy: Why Is It Relevant to Industrial Ecology? In Roland Clift and Angela Druckman (eds.), Taking Stock of Industrial Ecology, pp. 205–227. New York: Springer. Salamon, Lester M. (1999) Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector. Boulder, CO: Kumarian Press. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. London: Routledge. Singer, Paul (2004) Economía solidaria. In A. David Cattani (ed.), La otra economía, pp. 199–213. Buenos Aires: Editorial Altamira. Stanford, Jim (2015) Economics for Everyone: A Short Guide to the Economics of Capitalism. London: Pluto. Utting, Peter (ed.) (2015) Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe? London: Zed Books. Vieta, Marcelo (2020) Workers’ Self-management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión. Leiden: Brill. Vieta, Marcelo and Doug Lionais (2015) Editorial: The Cooperative Advantage for Community Development. Journal of Entrepreneurial and Organizational Diversity, 4(1): 1–10.
FURTHER READING Gibson-Graham, J.K. and Kelly Dombroski (eds.) (2020) The Handbook of Diverse Economies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Hossein, Caroline (2019) A Black Epistemology for the Social and Solidarity Economy: The Black Social Economy. The Review of Black Political Economy, 46(3): 209–229. Utting, Peter (ed.) (2015) Social and Solidarity Economy: Beyond the Fringe? London: Zed Books.
13. Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity Gigi Roggero
INTRODUCTION Why talk about operaismo1 today? Any analysis of a past political experience that does not want to limit itself to a simple historiographic reconstruction, but wants to set militant goals, must clarify this question. This is even more important in the case of Italian political operaismo, for some reasons that I summarize here. First, operaismo contains in its etymological root the word operai (workers), or rather classe operaia (working class). The material referent of the operaista experience is the working class of the Taylorist factory and Fordist society, which expressed both in Italy and internationally an extraordinary cycle of struggles in the 1960s. Having exhausted its political centrality (note: we are talking about the quality of the possibilities of conflict, and not about numerical quantity), what can an experience that has in its definition an explicit reference to that centrality still tell us? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible to talk about a punto di vista operaio (workers’ point of view) beyond the political end of that specific working class? The matter needs to be further explained in the English translation, as operaismo is often referred to as workerism. In fact, workers indicate both the workers generically understood, and operai (factory workers). On the one hand, however, the operaio referred to by operaismo is not necessarily the worker with calloused hands and grease-stained overalls; instead, he is a subject potentially at the center of the class struggle. On the other hand, in English perhaps even more than in Italian, workerism is an extremely equivocal term. It is an ambiguity already present in the original concept of operaismo, which it will be good to clarify immediately. And this is the second aspect. At first glance, in fact, the term suggests a strong pride in one’s condition, an identity to be defended and used as a model for the whole of society, a love of work. After all, it is precisely on this ethic of work and the proletarian condition that the icon of the working class has been built in the Marxist tradition, and in socialist and communist experiences. On the contrary, operaismo is born precisely from the destruction of this icon. It searches for workers who do not love but refuse work, who hate their own condition, who can go against themselves. This is not an ideological research, but materialistically embodied in the specific figure of the Italian factory workers of the 1950s and 1960s, which would later be baptized by Romano Alquati and Sergio Bologna operaio massa (mass worker) (Alquati 1975). He is the assembly line worker, forced into an alienating and repetitive job, and for this very reason, however, extraneous from any pride in his craft. Just this pride was decisive for an earlier form of workerism, that of councilism, who had as a reference point a figure who was not completely dispossessed of his residual craft skills, and who even fought to defend them. The difference between Italian political operaismo and councilism, as well as other previous forms of workerism (e.g., Workers’ Opposition in the Soviet experience), is a third relevant aspect. 172
Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity 173 Finally, it is important to distinguish operaismo from so-called post-operaismo. The latter is a term coined by global academia to turn into an academic matter what is instead, irreducibly, a matter of conflict. That is, to reduce the class struggle and the refusal of work into the political economy of knowledge and disciplinary enclosures. However, the label refers to the set of theories and concepts that, since the 1990s, have tried to interpret the so-called transition to post-Fordism, emphasizing the emergence of an autonomous social cooperation. This differentiated and heterogeneous milieu has produced important theoretical hypotheses, and above all has attempted to overthrow the Left’s defeatist thinking, that is, the idea of the end of history and that capitalism had won, imposing a totalitarian thought. In this attempt, however, it ended up proposing a mirror image of that thought, seeing victory where others saw defeat, an autonomy already conquered where others saw irreversible subordination. In this way, concepts became detached from the materiality of class composition, and the post took over from operaismo.
IN THE BEGINNING THERE IS CLASS COMPOSITION The operaismo we are talking about here is developed in the 1960s, linked primarily to the experiences of the journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia. After 1968–69, a biennium that indicates the relationship between worker and student struggles, the operaista constellation took different paths: a part entered or re-entered the Italian communist party (PCI), in an attempt to move it to revolutionary positions; another part continued within the experiences of revolutionary organizations as Potere Operaio, outside and against the PCI, and later in the different forms of Autonomia Operaia. In the meantime, the central figures of the class struggle were changing, namely, the class composition was changing. We can say that the concept of class composition is the lintel of the political theory and praxis of operaismo (see also Wright 2002). It indicates the relationship between the capitalist articulation of labor power, in its combination with machines, and the formation of the class as a collective subject. It is the relationship between technical and political composition. Be careful, however: we must not understand either term in a static way, but within a processual and conflictual dynamic. That is, technical composition is not a simple snapshot of the structure of exploitation, nor is political composition an indication of an autonomous subject already realized. The articulation and hierarchization of labor power are set in motion by workers’ behaviors, while the political formation of the class lives in a permanent tension between autonomy and subsumption. The social relation of capital, insofar as it is antagonistic, is as much internal to the technical composition as to the political composition; it determines and transforms them. Nor should technical and political composition be understood as a reiteration of the linear and symmetrical relationship between “class in itself” and “class for itself,” mediated by consciousness. Both these terms, in fact, contain a supposed objectivity and teleology, in a classical dialectical relationship from one to the other thanks to the action of the party, which reveals to the workers what they already possess without being able to know it. From Marx onwards, and mainly in the Marxist tradition, the quite idealistic concept of class consciousness has become the place of workers’ truth, mystified and concealed by capitalism. A consciousness to be unveiled rather than constructed, proper to the objectivity of history and not to the sub-
174 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work jectivity of struggles. As a place of mediation between “class in itself” and “class for itself,” this function became the exclusive property of the party. So, what is decisive in class composition is not consciousness, as an abstract attribute of class, but subjectivity. This entails a radical change of perspective. Subjectivity goes beyond the simple determinateness of origin, work location and income, although obviously these are factors that contribute to its formation. And it has nothing to do with the psychologist and psychoanalytic fashions that will rage in the following decades. As Alquati (1994) points out, subjectivity is the system of behaviors, beliefs, visions, representations, knowledge, culture, needs, desires, imaginaries, etc. It is a system characterized by historicity, therefore it is transformed processually. Thus, far from being objectively determined, subjectivity is a battlefield, a battleground between potentially opposing forces, between capitalist formation and possible counter-formation. It is, therefore, the central element and stake of a relation of production, that is, of a relation of forces. Subjectivity is not in itself antagonistic, just as saying political composition does not mean affirming the immediate autonomy of the class. The point is to transform subjectivity into counter-subjectivity, and to transform composition into class recomposition, that is, the process of formation of an autonomous collective subject. Because, without rupture in the relationship between technical and political composition, there is no class recomposition, and therefore collective autonomy.
THE REFUSAL OF WORK What is the subjectivity that operaists seek and discover, in co-research (conricerca) practices? Let’s briefly outline the context of Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular, its most advanced industrial areas. This is the period of development of Taylorism-Fordism,2 relatively late compared to other countries of the capitalist West. The operaists were able to make this “delay” a strong point to their advantage since they could look at how the relationship between struggles and development was determined in other countries. Not because there was a linearity or a necessary re-proposition of that relationship, but, on the contrary, because that relationship could be diverted and transformed. Who was the mass worker in the industrial areas of northern Italy, and especially in its factory-town par excellence, Turin? He is mostly young and an immigrant from the South, the one that left, literature and cinema would have portrayed, with “cardboard suitcases,” that is, miserable and oppressed, to the use and consumption of the tears and the desire for victimhood of the left public. In his early years in the factory-town, he was harshly ostracized even by some of the local workers, especially those considered more “conscious,” i.e., the members of the party and the union. They considered him alien and even hostile to the culture of the workers’ movement; they blamed him for his opportunism, because he often voted for the “yellow” unions;3 they labeled him as passive, since he rarely took part in strikes. Certainly, he would be a stranger to the culture of the workers’ movement, even though he may well have brought with him the experiences or stories of other forms of struggle, such as the occupation of land: worker mobility thus became the mobility of struggles. That extraneousness, then, was not a limitation, but rather a possibility. Of course, it is true, that foreignness often pushed the worker to vote for the “yellow” unions, without any scruples of conscience. But at the same time, it indicated – albeit in a confused way and without any explicit political form – the negation of traditional representation, suggesting the possibility of an autonomous political
Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity 175 initiative. Opportunism existed, but it was profoundly ambivalent, because it was also the expression of a unilateral, concrete, direct and immediate interest. And then yes, no doubt, they did not participate in strikes. The operaists asked: “Why?” The workers answered: “Why participate in useless strikes, which only serve to strengthen the role of the union institution?” In some situations, passivity becomes a form of struggle. That is, it becomes refusal. Thus, the operaists did not look for the workers iconized by the socialist and communist tradition, bearers of universal and general interest, conscious, generous, lovers of work and proud of their condition. On the contrary, they looked for those “un-conscious” workers who practiced partial interest, refused work, instinctively hated their own condition, and therefore may come to hate the capital that produces it. Workers against themselves, this is the force that the operaists searched for. Workers who deny themselves as labor power because labor power belongs to the enemy. The sacred icons of the workers’ movement were finally shattered. This is where the operaists place their bet: to overthrow victimhood into force, foreignness into unrepresentability, opportunism into partiality, passivity into refusal. The cycle of struggles of the mass worker is the development of this process of overthrow. Was this development necessary, that is, an objective tendency contained in capitalist evolution? It wasn’t. It was a possible development, not a necessary one. The political action is situated exactly here, in the organization of possibility against the necessity of the logic of capital. And this is the tendency of which operaismo speaks: as a field of possibilities in which contradictory and conflicting forces act, not as a linear evolution of stages of development. Before proceeding further, a very short clarification about co-research is pertinent here. In militant or activist environments that connect to, or are at least familiar with, the operaista legacy, the term co-research is used frequently. We could say that, since the 1990s, there has been more talk about co-research than there has actually been. Thus, any small inquiry or simple questioning in a workplace or university or elsewhere, as long as it was done by activists, was called co-research. The term, in fact, is extremely suggestive, interpreted by most as a particular declination of workers’ inquiry, or a radical use of sociology, or even – in a populist version – a “going to the people” of intellectuals. Co-research is something very different: it is first and foremost a method of political action, the transformation of objective forces into subjective forces, a process of autonomous organization within the class composition itself. Co-research, then, is a subversive praxis, not a sociological methodology (although it can also make counter-use of sociology or other sciences). That prefix, co, does not indicate an impossible position of equality or horizontality between militants and workers. In the capitalist system, which reproduces itself through the continuous construction of hierarchies and differences, equality and horizontality are the stakes of a path of struggle, they are never the starting points. Instead, that prefix indicates the combination between figures placed in different positions, in order to break down the class formed by capital and recompose it in an autonomous form, against capital. The production of knowledge is therefore at the same time the production of organization and counter-subjectification. Co-research is, on the whole, this process of revolutionary political production (see Alquati 1993; Borio et al. 2007; regarding concrete attempts of co-research see Curcio and Roggero 2018; Curcio 2018).
176 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
WITH MARX AND WEBER, BEYOND MARX AND WEBER “Within ‘Quaderni Rossi’ there was a group of non-Marxist sociologists, I remember that the dispute was whether to start from Marx or from Weber, then we resolved it by saying ‘let’s start from Marx Weber instead of Max Weber’. And we started from Marx Weber, we found a synthesis.”4 Tronti’s statement offers us an important interpretative track. If left each to his fate, Marx and Weber end up in the vicious circle of a logic of capital invincible in its reproduction, or in a steel cage from which there is no escape. It is therefore a matter of breaking with economic objectivism on the one hand, and sociological individualism on the other. And in this double rupture, we have to subtract the question of subjectivity as much from the rigidity of economic structure, as from the fluidity of individual choice. Capital as a total social relationship is a machine. Not just a bureaucratic or economic machine, but first and foremost a machine of production of subjectivity. How does one break this terrible and enveloping machine? It will not collapse under the weight of its contradictions unless those contradictions are acted upon by an organized force of a collective part. This collective part is called class. A collection of workers does not make the working class. Nor, as we have seen, is consciousness the decisive variable. Only struggle allows a set of actors who share a common condition to become a collective subject. There is no class without class struggle. Let us open a brief parenthesis. Starting with what we have argued, it should be clear why the trendy category “intersectionality” is misleading. It is not because classically understood labor or economic relations are more important than race or gender relations, as orthodox Marxists claim. Race and gender are, in fact, changeable lines of force and exploitation internal to the capitalist social relation; likewise, struggles on the terrain of race and gender can determine class composition to the extent that they challenge the relations of production of subjectivity. Understood in this way, class is not a variable that stands next to gender and race, in a list or summative chain of closed and static identities; on the contrary, class is that subject that is formed through the conflict and rejection of such identities imposed by the system. Thus, the term intersectionality is a weak and mistaken version of the concept of class composition, incapable of reading capital as an overall social relation, that is formed by a hierarchy of lines of force that are processually determined by struggles or the absence of. What is at stake in intersectionality is the recognition of individual identities within the reproduction of the capitalist machine, while what is at stake in class recomposition is the rupture of that machine. So, in this shift from the critique of the political economy of labor to the critique of the political economy of subjectivity (understood as the central ground and stakes of the relations of production), operaismo breaks with structural objectivism and individual subjectivism, with economism and psychologism, that is, with the ways used by Marxism and sociology to identify class. Consequently, there is no necessity in the relationship between social being and consciousness, in the supposed passage between class in itself and class for itself. Individuals are inserted into a structure made up of hierarchically ordered levels, of course, but this does not mechanistically determine their role in the class struggle, or its absence. Counter-subjectivity is an incessant struggle between the will and the social being. We can say that operaismo is a materialism of possibility, not of necessity. A materialism against history and its teleology. And the point of view is that of the class struggle, not of the logic of capital. The problem is to identify not where capital is weakest, but where the working class is potentially strongest.
Operaismo: in search of the political economy of subjectivity 177
RETURN TO PRINCIPLES Let’s come back to the original question: Why talk about operaismo today? The history of Italian political operaismo ends with the 1960s: already in the 1970s it takes different forms because the emerging class composition is different. What remains today, more than half a century later, after the radical redefinition of the coordinates drawn between Taylorist factory and Fordist society? It remains a method, a style, a point of view. The point of view of the partiality and conflict, i.e., of a collective part to build: not the exploited, but those who fight against exploitation; not those who live off their labor, but those who struggle against labor in order to live freely; not the poor and the victims, but the working class (which is a matter of qualitative vanguard strength, not gray sheds). The point of view of subjectivity, or rather counter-subjectivity. The point of view of tendency and recomposition. The point of view of autonomy. This is the essence of the operaista overthrow: first class, then capital. It is not a hypothesis to be entrusted to universal empirical verification, however empirically verified in many cases. It is first and foremost the affirmation of a rupture, the rupture with the thought of subordination and dependence on history, on the logic of capital and its internal contradictions. It is the affirmation of an anti-liberal freedom. This Machiavellian “return to principles” that we propose does not mean ignoring the more than half a century that has passed since that history. On the contrary, it is a political legacy that we can only appropriate if we force and reinvent it, over and over again. Nor does it mean throwing out what has come since, particularly since the 1990s and which has been academically called “post-operaismo.” The problem of this “post” is to have confused technical and political composition, or rather to have imagined that the latter was a necessary consequence of the former, or even absorbed by it. That is, it has imagined that the communism and social individual was a product of capitalist development, and not instead the rupture of that development. Here the tendency has become teleology. And paradoxically, social being is back to mechanically determining consciousness. After having gone beyond Marx, as in a vicious circle, one has fallen back into Marxism: the post becomes pre. Today, if we look at reality with the traditional lenses of Marxism and sociology, we see unchallenged domination and formless chaos. Those lenses are of little use to us. After all, when there are no significant struggles there is always, phenomenally, unchallenged domination and formless chaos. We must try to change lenses, hypothesizing bets about possible trends. In trying this, we can make two serious mistakes. The first is to see in reality what is not there. This is the mistake made by “post-operaismo,” which has substituted concepts for subjective materiality. The other is not to see in reality what can be there. This is the mistake made by the orthodox fustigators of “post-operaismo,” who suffocate subjective materiality with the cloak of an objectivity that becomes totalitarian, immutable, invincible. Only by putting the will back on the legs of historical materialism, that is, of class composition, can we get back on the mysterious curve of the operaismo straight line.
NOTES 1
For more on the genealogy, history and method of operaismo I refer to Roggero 2020, and Roggero 2023.
178 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 2
3 4
The two terms have often been confused with each other, especially in theories of so-called “post-Fordism.” Although there is a historically determined relationship, they must nevertheless be distinguished in their specificities: Taylorism is a model of organization of work in the factory. Fordism is a model of organization of workers in society. Taylorism-Fordism is, on the whole, the regime that draws the coordinates between factory and society in which workers live and are exploited, and which will be further developed by the welfare policies of the following decades. The corrupt unions at the service of the bosses. Intervista con Mario Tronti, CD-ROM with Borio et al. 2002.
REFERENCES Alquati, Romano (1975), Sulla Fiat e altri scritti, Milan: Feltrinelli. Alquati, Romano (1993), Per fare conricerca, Padua: Calusca. Alquati, Romano (1994), Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune, Turin: Velleità alternative. Borio, Guido, Pozzi, Francesca, and Roggero, Gigi (eds.) (2002), Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano, Rome: DeriveApprodi. Borio, Guido, Pozzi, Francesca, and Roggero, Gigi (2007), Conricerca as Political Action, in Mark Cotè, Richard Day and Greg de Peuter (eds.), Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Curcio, Anna (2018), Italy: The Revolution in Logistics, in Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft (eds.), The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century, Leiden-Boston: Brill. Curcio, Anna and Roggero, Gigi (2018), La logistica è la logica del capitale, ‘Primo maggio’, pp. 30–38. Roggero, Gigi (2020), Interview conducted by Davide Gallo Lassere, ‘A Science of Destruction’, Viewpoint Magazine, April 30, at https://viewpointmag.com/2020/04/30/a-science-of-destruction-an -interview-with-gigi-roggero-on-the-actuality-of-operaismo/ Roggero, Gigi (2023), Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wright, Steve (2002), Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press.
KEY READING Alquati, Romano (1975), Sulla Fiat e altri scritti, Milan: Feltrinelli. Borio, Guido, Pozzi, Francesca, and Roggero, Gigi (eds.) (2002), Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano, Rome: DeriveApprodi. Negri, Antonio (1979), Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale, Milan: Multhipla. Roggero, Gigi (2023), Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Tronti, Mario (1966), Operai e capitale, Turin: Eionaudi, translation in Id. (2019), Workers and Capital, London: Verso. Tronti, Mario (2009), Noi operaisti, Rome: DeriveApprodi. Trotta, Giuseppe and Milana, Fabio (2008), L’operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Da ‘Quaderni rossi’ a ‘classe operaia’, Rome: DeriveApprodi. Wright, Steve (2002), Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press.
14. The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? Mark Graham and Mohammad Amir Anwar
INTRODUCTION The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus, the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. (Marx, 1973, p. 524)
Our world of work is seemingly in crisis. Everywhere we look there are bold proclamations about the ways that technologies are expected to destroy, move, and deskill jobs.1 This chapter seeks to begin from these visions of a rapidly changing world of work and argue that we are witnessing the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ in digital work. By changing the geography of work, a planetary labour market introduces some serious concerns for the livelihoods and structural power of workers. Now more than ever is David Harvey’s famous maxim about the relative power of capital over labour relevant.3 This chapter points to a need for a reinvigorated programme of research and activism to tackle this fact. Today’s online outsourcing platforms host all manner of jobs: ranging from click work to the training of machine learning systems to transcription to live personal assistance and everything in between. These online outsourcing platforms, by becoming key intermediaries in the labour process of outsourced work (Casilli and Posada, 2019), potentially augur a radical shift in the scales at which capital can interact with labour.4 Upwork, a platform with 12 million registered workers, explains the advantages to clients with the following text on their website: “online work can happen wherever there’s a reliable internet connection — an office, home, café, or rooftop. This also means you can choose who you work with, among a larger pool of people from around the globe.” One of the world’s largest online outsourcing platforms, Freelancer.com, display their logo and the statement “25 million lives changed” over a map of the planet (noting that their location is ‘everywhere’). Similarly, Appen, a platform company with workers who train machine learning systems in 180 countries, explicitly advertise their ‘global crowd’ of workers on their website. The increasing digitisation of work and recent advancements in automation and communication technologies don’t just augment the labour process with digital data, digital processes, and machines; they also embed it in stretched-out networks of production: with tasks quickly passed in complex assemblages from person to person, person to machine, and machine to machine. While these arguments are better covered elsewhere, this chapter instead seeks to build on them to make an argument about the spatial implications of these changes. We will use online outsourcing/platform work as a key case of ‘digital work’ in the rest of the chapter. Work, in other words, done over the wires and mediated through a platform; work that does not necessarily require proximity between the worker, the work itself, and the site 179
180 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of the immediate delivery of the work. The relative lack of fixed organisational infrastructure needed for the online outsourcing sector means that it can be characterised by a broad geographic spread. Unlike traditional forms of employment, companies that outsource digital work, and platforms that mediate those relationships, tend to avoid any formal employment of workers and don’t need to share proximity to workers. Jobs are instead listed on digital platforms that allow workers to bid for them. These jobs might take anything from minutes (e.g. click work or image tagging) to months (large writing tasks or web design) to complete. According to Heeks (2017), there are about 70 million registered platform workers globally, in the market for work that the World Bank estimates will grow to $15–$20 billion by 2020 (Kuek et al., 2015). The economist Guy Standing (2016), meanwhile, predicts that by 2025, platforms will mediate one third of all labour transactions. The scale and scope that some of these platforms can achieve is in part driven by the development of planetary-scale infrastructures of computation (Bratton, 2016). Because of the rapid rise of digital work around the world, we ask in this chapter whether we are seeing the emergence of a ‘planetary labour market’ in digital work. To answer this question, we outline the scalar and spatial changes that have been occurring in labour markets, review their implications for the balance of power between labour and capital, and advance some possible responses to ensure that we do not get trapped in a global race to the bottom in which there are constant downward pressures on wages and working conditions. The argument that we make here is largely conceptual. However, we illustrate our argument with examples from a five-year (2014–2018) study of digital work in some of the world’s economic margins. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 65 online platform workers in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, recruited from one of the world’s biggest online labour platforms, Upwork. We sought maximum diversity in our sample, and our respondents were characterised by a range of different attributes, such as number of hours worked on the platform, different types of work activities, and income earned. Most workers in our sample had multiple accounts on various platforms such as Freelancer.com, Fiverr.com, and Peopleperhour.com. We also recruited Upwork workers through social media (Facebook and LinkedIn) and snowballing. The primary sampling goal was to ensure a diversity of worker experiences. As such, this paper presents selected cases that indicate the existence of activities, issues, and concerns, rather than a representative view. Through the interviews we sought to understand the socio-economic background of workers; the nature and types of work done by these workers; career prospects, livelihood challenges, income, worker-worker and worker-client interactions; strategies to win bids, to stay competitive, to demand higher wages and negotiate working hours; and actions to avoid the various risks inherent to platform work. All the worker names have been changed.
MOVING BEYOND LOCAL LABOUR MARKETS To describe what is meant by a planetary labour market, it is first useful to describe what labour markets are. A nineteenth-century hiring fair, such as the one described by Thomas Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd, is used by Fevre (1992), in his book about the sociology of labour markets, as a way of illustrating an abstract definition of labour markets through five distinct key processes. These are: (1) informing employers (employers learning about availability and skills of workers); (2) informing workers (workers learning about jobs);
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 181 (3) screening workers (employers obtaining enough information about workers to decide if they could be hired for a job); (4) screening employers (workers learning about their employers); (5) and offers to buy or sell labour (the actual negotiations and pitches made by workers and employers). Labour markets, in other words, are a way of describing a convergence of workers and employers in specific places and times. While scholars as far back as Karl Marx posited that this convergence in competitive labour markets is a fundamental characteristic of capitalist society, various planned economies in the late twentieth century likewise relied on the concept of a labour market to govern the management and distribution of the labour force (Brown, 1970). In Hardy’s hiring fair, the spatial and temporal co-presence of agricultural workers and employers allowed the five above-mentioned processes to converge. However, while co-presence has traditionally been a necessary prerequisite for most of these conditions, it has not been a sufficient one. Kalleberg and Sorenson (1979, 351) define labour markets as the arenas in which workers exchange their labor power in return for wages, status, and other job rewards. The concept, therefore, refers broadly to the institutions and practices that govern the purchase, sale, and pricing of labor services. These structures include the means by which workers are distributed among jobs and the rules that govern employment, mobility, the acquisition of skills and training, and the distribution of wages and other rewards obtained contingent upon participation in the economic system.
But, ultimately, those institutions and practices still require some level of space-time convergence between employers and workers. It is important here to distinguish between the way that labour markets have been conceived in orthodox classical economics, and their actual characteristics. Orthodox conceptions put forward a perfectly competitive market that can provide both firms (buyers) and workers (sellers) with perfect information. Wages are set by the relationship between supply and demand, and “workers can move freely in response to changes in supply and demand in different parts of the market” (Kalleberg and Sorensen, 1979, p. 354). Kalleberg and Sorensen (1979) give examples of such markets as the migrant labour market in California, and the 1970s labour market in Afghanistan. In both cases, wages were relatively uniform and institutional forces only had a small influence. In practice, it is rare for labour markets to fit these sorts of perfect property, instead, labour markets function in imperfect and uneven ways. Workers comprise different classes, genders, races, nationalities, and other groups that can get segmented into different functions in labour markets. These markets are further built on, and performed through imperfect information, irrational social behaviours, politics, institutional arrangements and practices, customs, and prejudices. As Peck (1996, p. 5) has argued, labour markets are “socially constructed and politically mediated” arenas, “structured by institutional forces and power relations”. Thus, we get segmented labour markets functioning at multiple scales and spaces to produce variegated outcomes for workers (Craig et al., 1982). In these segmented or split markets, workers have little opportunity to cross into other groups and are thus constrained to a limited set of outcomes: with factors like gender or race influencing segmentation (with, for instance, women earning lower wages than men) (Bonacich, 1972; Reich et al., 1973).6 The takeaway point here is that labour markets function in complex, imperfect, exclusionary ways. When speaking about a physical meeting place, like a hiring fair, the very concept serves as a multi-scalar abstraction. We use the idea of national or regional labour markets not to
182 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work imply that everyone in those nations or regions have equal opportunities to read or access the market; but rather as a way of indicating that there are distinct economic, social, and political enablers and constraints that put rough, porous, but still real geographic boundaries around Fevre’s five processes. This is not to say that workers are not enrolled into global-scale associations and production networks. Indeed, workers in many economic sectors have been for centuries (Hunt, 2010). But, as Fevre (1992, p. 14) notes, “Labour markets need have neither a fixed time nor a fixed place, but they must have some sort of time and place otherwise how could people use them? If they do not know when and where, workers cannot find jobs and employers cannot hire workers.” Much of this discussion assumes a located place of work – a farm, factory, or office that a worker needs to be physically present in, in order to perform their duties. But, as the nature of work changes, so too must our conceptions of the boundedness of labour markets. Here it is useful to draw on the concept borrowed from geography of a relational understanding of space (Massey, 2005). Instead of only thinking of space as a canvas, it is rather something that can also emerge from social relations (Hudson, 2001). This vision of space as relational and emergent, rather than pre-existing, is useful because it offers a productive way of understanding the impact of digital technologies on labour markets. Stephen Graham (1998, p. 174), in an influential piece on the intersections between technology and space, builds a relational understanding, noting that “such a perspective reveals how new technologies become enrolled into complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artefacts, to form actor-networks”. He continues: “new information technologies, in short, actually resonate with, and are bound up in the active construction of space and place, rather than making it somehow redundant.” If we apply these sorts of understandings to the contexts of work, the boundedness of earlier visions of labour markets evaporate. Building on an actor-network understanding of work as constituted through a broad range of associations with objects, Jones (2008, p. 12) further argues that “working practices, the experience of work, the nature of workplaces and the power relations in which people’s working lives are entangled require a theoretical understanding of global-scale interrelationships if they are to be properly understood”. Describing how work is increasingly performed through global networks of human and non-human objects, he adds: “Contemporary work is becoming less constituted through localised, physically-proximate relations and increasingly constituted through distanciated relations. These multiple spatial associations increasingly extend to the planetary scale” (p. 14). This starting point – moving beyond an understanding of work as inherently local – allows Jones (2008, p. 15) to then build his ‘global work’ thesis: Rather than understanding work as a practice undertaken by social actors located in discrete material spaces and framed in a linear chronology, work is reconceptualised as a complex set of spatialised practices involving humans and non-humans … and which is constituted in relational space with a disjunctive, non-linear chronology ... This is ‘global’ work because this reconfigured concept captures the qualitative degree to which all work practices are constituted through distanciated … socio-material relations.
As the places of work move beyond single locations, this offers us a pathway for thinking through the impacts of globalisation on workers.
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 183
TOWARDS A PLANETARY LABOUR MARKET Although the ‘global work’ thesis is useful for providing a framework that allows us to carefully think through the impacts of globalisation on workers and the ways that the places of work move beyond single locations, in the rest of this chapter we will argue that it is important to think about the relationships between employers and workers as more than simply distanciated social relations. Using the idea of a ‘planetary labour market’ allows us to show that not just work can be highly (globally) connected, but rather temporary states of co-presence between workers and employers that can be brought into being. Like Jones (2008), we build our understanding of a planetary labour market on a relational understanding of space. Specifically, we draw from Doreen Massey (1993, p. 61) who argued that: Different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to … flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.
As such, the moments of co-presence that will be described below rarely fit either the orthodox idea of labour markets or resemble Hardy’s nineteenth-century hiring fair. While digital work platforms have enabled the potential coming together of employers and workers on a planetary scale, the labour market for digital work that is developing is characterised by both asymmetrical scalar relationships and uneven spatial ones: with workers and employers having very different possibilities to read and participate in the labour market. In other words, the argument put forward in this chapter is that a planetary labour market is not simply a ‘global’ extension of Hardy’s hiring fair. It facilitates coming-togethers that can transcend the spatial boundaries that constrained the convergence of employers and workers, but remains shaped and characterised by multi-scalar and asymmetrical technological, political, social, cultural, and institutional factors.
APPLYING FEVRE’S CHARACTERISTICS This section returns to Fevre’s (1992) five characteristics of labour markets ‘(1) employers learn about workers; (2) workers learn about jobs; (3) employers obtain information about workers; (4) workers obtain information about employers; and (5) offers to buy and sell labour transpire’) and asks how they apply to the planetary labour market brought into being through online outsourcing. Within each of the following sections, we outline a range of concerns that relate to the structural power of labour vis-à-vis that of capital. This strategy is neither intended to imply that these are the only concerns, or that there are not benefits (such as flexibility) to workers at the individual scale.
184 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 1.
Employers Learn About Workers
In the case of online outsourcing, employers (i.e. ‘clients’) have genuine planetary reach when learning about workers. Employers list requirements needed from their workers on online labour platforms, and workers from around the world then bid on those jobs – allowing employers to collect certain information they need about any potential worker. The fact that online outsourcing platforms tend to have a massive oversupply of workers on them (Graham et al., 2017a) means that workers are eager to supply any information that potential employers require. This will typically include location, ratings, reviews, and previous clients’ feedback, but may also include work history, previous experience, number of hours worked, education, and a host of interpersonal skills. When we compare the ways in which employers learn about workers to the ways that workers learn about jobs, the scalar differences in how workers and employers can read the planetary labour market become apparent. Figure 14.1 shows where workers on the world’s largest online labour platforms are based. It demonstrates that Upwork and Freelancer’s claims to host workers from almost everywhere on the planet are true, and that there are very few countries with a ‘no data’ label that do not host at least some workers in online labour platforms. However, it is also obvious that there are distinct patterns to the supply of online labour power with large concentrations of workers in a few countries. Employers can join these platforms to either find workers in specific places (for instance when language skills are needed) or to put a job out to competition from workers that can be located anywhere.
Source:
Reproduced from Ojanperä et al. (2018)
Figure 14.1
The availability of online workers
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 185 Table 14.1 Country
Oversupply of labour on Upwork.com. Data for October 24, 2018 Potential workforcea Successful
Oversupplyc
Oversupply percentage (%)
workersb Global
1,891,648
128,259
1,763,389
93.2
United States
581,717
23,845
557,872
95.9
India
249,698
22,772
226,926
90.8
Philippines
164,757
18,869
145,888
88.5 90.9
Pakistan
66,681
6,032
60,649
United Kingdom
56,644
2,924
53,270
94.8
Ukraine
55,604
8,506
47,098
84.7
Egypt
35,299
1,295
34,004
96.3
Kenya
18,508
898
17,610
95.1
Malaysia
13,385
317
13,068
97.6
South Africa
12,723
593
12,130
95.3
Nigeria
8,032
297
7,735
96.3
Vietnam
7,574
669
6,905
91.1
Ghana
1,656
50
1,606
96.9
Uganda
1,176
31
1,145
97.3
Note: Data for October 24, 2018, collected and analysed by the authors. a Total searchable worker profiles. b Searchable worker profiles with at least one hour worked and US$1 earned. c Potential workforce minus successful workers.
This huge number of people who sign up to look for jobs ends up creating an enormous oversupply of labour. In Table 14.1, we present data collected from Upwork on a single day in October 2018, to estimate the potential oversupply of labour on the platform. The table compares the number of people signed up on the platform by country, with the number of workers who have ever earned at least US$1 or worked at least one hour on the platform. Even with such a low threshold of what constitutes work, we see a massive oversupply in the sample of countries in Table 14.1. Globally, less than seven per cent of people who register for jobs are ever able to secure one.7 While the geography of online labour is far from equally spread around the world, the relative ubiquity of digital connectivity, and the affordances that digital labour platforms provide, mean that employers can now find new workers on the other side of the world in minutes, as long as workers have relevant ICT tools and internet connectivity. However, for workers, the combination of the global market and the oversupply of labour power (or at least the perception of the oversupply of labour power) is experienced as something that significantly depresses the wages they are able to command (see also Graham et al., 2017b and Wood et al., 2018b for more on this point). Adele, a data entry worker in South Africa described how this situation played out on the platform Upwork: You go apply for a job and somebody else will come and apply for less than dollar. Other people are bidding too low and it was people from the Philippines and India. I was angry because they bid too little and yet they are happy. Yeah, I was quite pissed off there; I was like no way are they doing this!
2.
Workers Learn About Jobs
Workers on online outsourcing platforms naturally have a geographically expanded pool of jobs to bid for, compared with the jobs available in their local labour markets. Most platforms
186 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work allow workers to bid for jobs from anywhere. However, this differs from a simple state of co-presence for two reasons. First, while workers can learn about task vacancies on platforms, clients often reveal relatively little about themselves. Second, these platforms tend to facilitate vertical communication rather than horizontal communication (between workers), thus limiting the associational power of workers. On the first point, the ability for workers to learn basic information about the jobs, but relatively little about their bosses is particularly pronounced for workers doing short-term and fixed-price jobs such as document conversion, transcription, and writing jobs. Some longer-term jobs such as web-chat support, digital marketing, and virtual assistants should in theory allow workers to learn more about clients and their businesses over the course of time and therefore build a relationship of trust with them. Yet, even with these longer-term jobs, many workers struggle to get know their clients. A Kenyan data entry worker, Eidi, noted that despite working on a content generation project for over a year, she only knows her line manager who sits in Uganda and has no idea who the main client is, or the owner of the project. Some clients don’t tell workers in detail what the job actually requires them to do (see Figure 14.2, simply advertising “repetitive” work).
Figure 14.2
Job advert on an online outsourcing platform, revealing little detail of the task being advertised
Here it important to remember that the affordances of online outsourcing platforms are designed for workers and clients to connect with one another, rather than for workers to connect with each other. Historically, the inability for workers to have any effective virtual co-presence has severely limited associational power (Wood et al., 2018a). While Fordism enhanced workplace bargaining power (based on the ability of workers to threaten to stop the entire production chain) by uniting workers at the point of production (i.e. physical factories), it decreased marketplace bargaining power (based on the possession of scarce skills and low levels of general unemployment) by bringing a global reserve army of labour under capital’s
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 187 control (Silver, 2003). The point is if by fixing labour in a place often gives it power, it can also be undermined by multiple spatio-temporal fixes created by capital since the crises of the 1970s (1973 oil price crisis, 1973–1974 Stock Market crash, the fall of the Bretton Woods System) (Harvey, 2001, 2011). Put differently, relocation of production gave new entrant labour forces a sense of class identity and bargaining power at the workplace, but the ease with which production can be relocated meant an undermining of marketplace bargaining power and threats of job losses. The mobility of capital through the reorganisation of production techniques (fragmentation and relocation of production) has tended to weaken the associational power of workers due to the incorporation of a mass of unemployed and unorganised workers who are hard to unionise. Workers lack a sense of collective identity as a working class and a weak state regulatory framework delegitimises trade unions, making it incredibly hard for such organisations to deliver benefits to workers (Silver, 2003). These trends have continued with the emergence of digital work that can be performed by a global pool of unorganised workers separated by large physical distances, and workers lacking common linguistic and cultural characteristics. The inability for platform workers to have any effective virtual co-presence severely limits their associational power (see also Wood et al., 2018a). This largely relates to the nature of digital work, the technical structure of platforms, the transaction of digital work through the internet, and a global pool of workers who are fragmented and commoditised. The demand by clients for work to be completed before a set deadline forces workers to confine themselves to their workplaces (usually their rooms), working long hours with high work intensity to avoid losing wages. Mukondi, in Kenya, was doing internet research for a US-based company dealing with sales of second-hand and end-of-life mobile phones. She was working close to 80 hours a week and as a result, did not have enough time to meet other online workers in the locality or socialise with them. We asked all workers in our sample if they knew anyone in their locality and if they met with them regularly. While some workers knew other digital workers in their cities, they usually found it hard to socialise with them. One of Mukondi’s co-workers on this job contract went to the same university in Nairobi, and they never met. Instead, workers tend to utilise whatever time they have to find new work, instead of trying to establish connections with workers either through the internet or locally. As another Kenyan worker, Isa, who does search engine optimisation, said: “when you’re busy you have no time to go look for another guy.” Since there is intense competition between workers on a global scale on these outsourcing platforms, it is understandable that workers will want to prioritise continuously looking for work instead of developing capacities for collective organisation. The extreme physical separation of digital workers also makes any collective organisation or physical co-presence unlikely. We found a few local networks of platform workers in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, where multiple small groups of workers (two to three workers in a group) have developed close working collaboration. Workers also develop networks through social media, although the utility of such networks to transform worker power is debatable. Figure 14.1 indicates that a range of underlying economic, social, and political factors end up bringing into being particular geographies of work. While work can in theory be done from anywhere, myriad factors end up influencing concentrated economic geographies of jobs. Irrespective of its actual geographies, digital work is sufficiently mobile for workers and clients to feel that the marketplace they are operating in is truly global. The result is that workers can lose a sense of any collective organisation and feel replaceable, while clients
188 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work exploit this lack of associational power of workers to exert their demands on workers (also see point 5, below). Ben, a virtual assistant in Kenya, explains the feeling of being replaceable. He said, basically I can do what I want but there is always that feeling like what happens tomorrow if the company can’t afford me, do I have to cut my salary or what happens if I wake up in the morning and there is this email from Upwork, contract ended. That’s the email I fear the most.
3.
Employers Obtain Information About Workers
The way platform work is designed and transacted over the internet reveals stark asymmetries in the ways in which employers and workers obtain information about each other, and what they do with that information. While the bidding process enables labour power to be bought as a commodity in the market, a real sense of this commodification comes from the nature of the digital work and types of job contracts offered on digital platforms. Due to the digitally intensive nature of work activities traded on these platforms, these work tasks can be broken down into simpler tasks (or ‘gigs’) which can be completed by individual workers in a matter of minutes or hours from their homes. Since these tasks can be finished quickly, they have to repeat the same bidding process in order to secure new jobs (though some experienced and top-rated workers may get repeat clients who offer work to them directly). There are relatively few jobs advertised that allow some form of trust or working relationship to develop between workers and the employers – usually hourly contract jobs such as digital marketing, social media management, and virtual assistant. But even here there is a problem. Some platforms give clients the power to pay workers only if they are satisfied with their work, and as a result, some workers do not get paid even after they submit their work to clients. This level of fragmentation of work and commoditisation of labour power means the employer-employee relations become contingent (Barker and Christensen, 1998; Barley and Kunda, 2006), and employers are under no obligation to help workers build long-term careers on platforms. The potential for workers to gain experience and build up knowledge and skills for future career development is also constrained, meaning less scope for workers to upgrade to high-skilled and high-income jobs on platforms. A data entry worker with no formal education and training is highly unlikely to go on to software development tasks or graphic design. Clients don’t usually provide/offer training to upskill their platform workforce.8 Employers are able to demand any information they want prior to the job offer and workers are obliged to supply that information in a codified and quantified form (ratings, hours worked, and wage rates), allowing clients to assess the workers’ quality and ability to work. Since only workers bid for jobs posted by employers, they signal (or give information to) employers on platforms about their quality which employers then use to screen workers and make an informed decision about who will be awarded the contract. Employers, with all the information about bidding workers at their disposal, are able to choose the workers they want to work with, which might be the worker with the lowest hourly rate, or the top-rated worker irrespective of their rate. In other words, clients have the ability to access all the information they need before awarding the job contract to workers, who usually know little about their clients (see point 4, below). The technical infrastructure of the platforms generates and amplifies an information asymmetry between buyers and sellers of labour – in order to favour the buyers (see Graham et. al., 2017b for more on this point).
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 189 One of the most significant tools that employers use to learn about workers is the rating system (Wood et al., 2018b). As one worker, Mukasa, in Uganda, told us, no client is willing to work with new freelancers with no ratings or feedback, making it difficult for newcomers to land a job easily on platforms. During a group discussion with five platform workers in Abuja, Nigeria, they told us that they had to spend months searching for their first job due to an initial lack of ratings. Clients sometimes use this power asymmetry to exploit workers, by offering extremely low-paid work in return for good reviews and high ratings. Adele, in South Africa, told us that she did her data entry work for a client at less than one dollar per hour for about a week (usually eight hours a day). She said “it was quite tough and I’m like okay, but at least he gave me that shot. He gave me that because after he did give you a good review and feedback”. Onochie, a virtual assistant in Nigeria, explained the importance of ratings for his profile and said: I will say my secret is, every client that I work with, I try to leave the best type of impression. Even if the job is not great, I can actually offer to give the client a refund. Not that it was my fault that the whole thing went wrong … So, I paid him back and I told please I do not want a review from you. I do not want a [negative] feedback. That is why I decided to give your money back. So, for every client I work with, I try to do the best possible job that I can, so you can give me the best possible feedback.
4.
Workers Obtain Information About Employers
While the information that employers gain about workers can be used as a form of control, some information about clients can also be visible to workers, such as location, whether or not their payment method has been verified, and an overall feedback score from other workers at the time a bid is placed. However, some specific platforms like Freelancer.com do not allow information on clients hiring history such as total money spent on hiring workers, or average hiring rates to be made available at the time of bidding. Such information would be useful to workers during the bidding process. As already discussed in point two above, many workers do not know the identity of their clients or even the nature of their business when placing bids for specific jobs. Referring to her client, Adele in South Africa explained: “She said just do the job and then send it to her. I don’t know what she is using these for.” Similarly, Kobi in Ghana did data entry work for an American client by sorting 5000 questions into different subject categories. He said, “It is like a high school website where students post questions and then they get tutors to answer for them. I think I was doing some kind of back-end work, I’m not too sure what I was doing, but I know that there were questions that people needed to answer.” The fact that workers can usually only obtain the type of information employers want to release about themselves makes it hard for these workers to upgrade into new job types. Workers we spoke to told us that they would often find that the person hiring them on a platform is actually an intermediary working for a client who is located elsewhere (a finding replicated in Graham et al., 2017b). Since digital work can be transferred easily from one location to the other, multiple levels of intermediation can take place, which can effectively obscure knowledge about the source client. This inhibits the ability of workers to take action against their clients in the events of threats of unfair dismissal and non-payment of wages. Since workers and clients are usually separated by large distances and often based in different legal and regulatory landscapes/settings, it is hard for workers to imagine how they would hold clients to account through the courts.
190 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Workers are ultimately given just enough information about clients in order to allow transactions to take place. But the fact that workers often cannot see much about the production networks that they are embedded into, or learn much about their clients, limits their bargaining power. For instance, a worker who doesn’t even know what industry they are working in would have a hard time offering knowledge they learnt on the job to other potential employers. 5.
Offers to Buy and Sell Labour Transpire
The four previous characteristics all allow a planetary labour market to be brought into being,9 supporting offers to buy and sell labour across the world. According to Horton et al. (2016), 90 per cent of transactions on Upwork.com are across international borders. The offers that occur in this international market are characterised by a huge power imbalance between workers and clients. The high-level of individualisation and commoditisation of labour power, the planetary scale of the labour supply for the platform work, and an intense competition between workers means that they are both left to fend for themselves and compete against one another. The international nature of the transactions that occur leave many workers with an understanding that local labour regulations are of little use in protecting them against some of the worst problems they experience in the platform economy. Some workers we spoke to in places as varied as Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria earned $1 per hour or less for some of their jobs. However, it was generally understood that not only do their clients have no sense of what a local minimum wage is in their jurisdiction, but also that such considerations would be unenforceable due to the contract types and the fact that local regulators would have little power over foreign clients. Not only are wages often bad, but so too are working conditions. Zain in Ghana explained: “Yes, there’s been days that I’ve stayed up for two days of no sleep at all, not even 30 minutes of sleep because there’s a project, I have to get it done and the pay is shit, but you have to get it done.” Again, the international nature of the market leaves the sorts of relationships that are set up to encourage Zain to work for days without sleep entirely unregulated. Workers’ lack of bargaining power is also exemplified by the fact that clients can decide to end the contract at any time (without payment of wages), if they are not satisfied with the work submitted by workers. This is particularly pronounced for workers doing fixed-rate or ‘piecework’. Several article writers (mostly paid per article) we interviewed reported that they did not get paid for their article after they submitted their work to their employers because the employers did not like it. One platform worker in Ghana, Quinn, (editor, web research, and data entry) edited a book for an American client and clocked 40 hours for a total of US$400 but only got paid US$200 and despite several complaints made to the platform, she had still not been paid at the time of the interview. The lack of structural power for platform workers both manifests in, and is manifested through, the inability of workers to collectively bargain. Offers to buy and sell labour happen at the individual level, making it hard or impossible for workers to take advantage of collective bargaining agreements, or use their collective power to withdraw labour. Dabiku in Kenya was of the opinion that collective bargaining through unions is a good idea. But he remarked, “locally it is unfortunate guys do not trust each other that is one thing. So actually, even [setting up] meetings is always a problem.” He was also of the view that while unions would be of help for local work, nothing can be done when clients are located in the US or Canada.
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 191 As the millions of offers to buy and sell labour transpire on digital labour platforms, the asymmetries of information and pre-existing asymmetries of power are put into practice by clients. In other words, while people buy and sell labour in a spatially unbounded way, there is a scalar mismatch in reach, mobility, and information that severely limits the bargaining power of workers.
PLANETARY LABOUR FUTURES Following the call by Strauss (2018, p. 626) for “sustained critical attention to what is distinctly spatial about the processes that are of interest, how place matters to those processes, and how scale is relationally constructed […] and experienced in the production of precarious work situations”, this chapter has explored the ways in which inequality is structured into online labour markets when they are scaled up to the planetary level. We have seen, following Fevre (1992), that employers can learn about workers, workers learn about jobs, both parties learn about each other, and transactions take place in ways that seemingly ignore some of the traditional limitations of time and distance. Employers and workers, through the affordances of digital technologies, can seek each other out on a genuinely world-spanning scale, escaping some of the constraints that previously bound them exclusively to their local labour markets. Most importantly, many previously bounded labour markets were both transactionally and discursively insulated from a global reserve army of labour and the downward pressure on wages and working conditions that it brings about (Huws and Leys, 2003).11 A market that is planetary in scale will cease to have any of those brakes on the erosion of working conditions. Yet, while all these interactions occur between economic actors in different parts of the world from one another, what we see is not just Hardy’s hiring fair scaled-up to a global level or scaled-down onto the head of a pin. Instead of seeing the space of the labour market through a Euclidean lens in which geography is a pre-existing canvas on which economic relationships can be formed, the spaces of labour markets are instead relational and emergent. It is this understanding of space that we seek to bring to discussions about digital work. The discussion in this paper should encourage us to move away from thinking about labour markets as bounded spaces that you could draw on a map. In a planetary labour market, everything does not happen everywhere. But, key spatial constraints (e.g. the need for commuting, to leave the house, and to obtain visas and permits) can be circumvented. This forces us not to imagine away the always-existing economic geographies of work, but to ask questions about how they will shape and be shaped by the potentials for planetary-scale interactions. Thomas Friedman (2005, p. 110) famously pointed to a globalised world that would allow for “the sharing of knowledge and work – in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language”. But, as much as some firms and clients might want it to, a planetary market doesn’t do away with geography; it rather exists to take advantage of it. Platforms use uneven geographies to facilitate labour arbitrage, cross-border competition, and are able to foster what Peck (2017, p. 42) refers to as an “offshore consciousness”. To be clear, references to local labour markets, national labour markets, and planetary labour markets should never be made to ignore the myriad ways that those labour markets are brought into being by multi-scalar exogenous factors which, in turn, lead them to be socially and spatially segmented and fragmented. The spatial and scalar prefixes (urban-, local-, national-, etc.) that we add to labour markets instead are intended to signify enablers and constraints that serve to
192 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work cluster coming-togethers of employers and workers within particular economic geographies. These enablers and constraints can be technological barriers (e.g. transportation costs and the availability of broadband), political (e.g. the availability of visas and work permits), social (e.g. availability of skills and language fluencies), economic (e.g. local reserve wages), and spatial (e.g. work and workers that inherently have to be in particular places). Underlying material economic geographies of workers and clients are therefore never fully transcended, work is never fully commoditised, and there remain national and regional practices and institutions which govern the purchase, sale, and pricing of labour on platforms. But none of those national and regional practices determine the shape of the market as a whole. This is not to say that labour markets in non-digital contexts do not have similar ways of empowering and disempowering different groups. The material architectures, norms, laws, and relationships in traditional labour markets all bring particular power dynamics into being. However, what is different in the digital context is that co-presence and the transitory proximity that platforms bring into being is illusory. While workers can, in theory, connect from anywhere, they lose the ability to control a key part of their agency that they otherwise have in any other context: their control over space, and their ability to bring into being labour geographies that are at least in part on their own terms (see e.g. Herod, 2001). Because employers and workers have significantly different abilities to control space, the planetary labour market is a context that serves to further undermine the structural power of labour vis-à-vis that of capital. This manifests in six key ways. First, mass global connectivity is bringing onstream a massive oversupply of labour power, mainly from lower-income segments of the world population. There are far fewer digital jobs than there are people able and willing to do them. The ‘elemental rationale’ of offshoring has always been to cut and suppress costs (Peck 2017: 10), it should therefore come as no surprise that online outsourcing continues the trend. Second, many workers seeking jobs in a planetary labour market are replaceable and interchangeable. This is not just due to the oversupply of labour power, but also to the fact that production networks can be footloose while workers are tethered to place. Third, workers mostly interact as competitors rather than collaborators. For digital workers, this situation arises primarily because there are few physical sites at which to assemble with co-workers and because the highly commodified nature of their jobs can lead to competition on price above all else. Digital platforms deliberately limit the amount of horizontal information that workers can glean about one another, and the distributed nature of work means that workers have few opportunities to engage in collective action afforded by spatial proximity. Fourth, there is a lack of transparency. Although workers can use digital tools to find jobs on the other side of the planet, the networks and platforms used to mediate those jobs can also conceal much about the nature of those activities. In other words, workers often know little about the production networks that they are embedded into and are offered few opportunities to economically upgrade skills or value chain positions. Fifth, there is a relative lack of agency among workers to have a voice in, or shape, their labour conditions. The affordances of most types of digital work tend to be closed to workers, in part because workers rarely have any stake or control in the physical or digital means of production in the digital economy. If we extend spatial metaphors to online labour platforms, they are not public markets; they are rather private spaces. Finally, workers tend not to be protected by labour laws. Because the labour market extends well beyond any individual jurisdiction’s ability to regulate it, self-regulation tends to be carried out by
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 193 platforms and clients. Labour laws that exist to protect workers are ignored in some cases, sometimes even wilfully. These issues amplify each other, and all serve to undermine the structural power of workers. And they are all possible because of the specific designs of planetary labour markets that use space against workers. The issues outlined in this paper paint a picture of a grim future for the balance of power between labour and capital that is likely unsatisfactory to anyone who doesn’t run an outsourcing company. But what can be done if we want to envision and see more equitable outcomes? The solution cannot simply be to turn our backs on innovations in information and communication technologies. We can likely never go back to a world only characterised by local labour markets. Despite the concerns presented here,12 the digitally mediated relationships put forward in this chapter are far from inevitable. There are two primary reasons why we believe this to be the case. First, all of the digital and virtual infrastructure deployed to bring a planetary labour market into being ultimately depends on material infrastructures, organisations grounded in physical places, and real-world regulation. Current configurations of infrastructure and regulation are thus far from inevitable. Interventions such as platform cooperatives, attempts at cross-border regulation, and horizontal organising among workers are more effectively covered elsewhere (Graham and Anwar, 2018; Graham and Woodcock, 2018; Irani and Silberman, 2013; Wood et al., 2018a), but the simple point here is that by understanding the spatialities and temporalities of contemporary labour markets, we can better shape them. We can no longer think about labour markets for digital work as being simple shapes on a map. Second, the ways in which technologies are deployed to produce specific time-spaces and not others do not dictate how we necessarily use, produce, or jump over geographies. Indeed, code and algorithms co-produce spaces that are often malleable and hackable (Zook and Graham, 2018). Workers and their advocates have thus far certainly found ways of using technological infrastructures in unintended ways that work in their favour (Wood et. al., 2018a), and we will need more of this if workers are to exert any significant amount of agency in the labour process. But to build or perform alternatives, we again need to base our efforts on realistic understandings of the relationships between economic actors, technologies, and the spaces they bring into being. In Hardy’s hiring fair, we wouldn’t expect workers to be able to collectively bargain or form a picket if they misread the opportunities and constraints provided by their spatial proximities. This paper ultimately builds on Doreen Massey’s (1994) ‘global sense of place’ – a sense of how distant people, places, and processes are always inherently enrolled into any local relationships. We do that by showing that we can use five characteristics of labour markets to think about how online labour platforms create labour markets that are planetary in scope. It has also shown some of the ways in which constructing a planetary labour market changes the balance of power between labour and capital. We have demonstrated not that geography has been eliminated, nor that places have been made irrelevant. No virtual space has been created allowing employers and workers to co-exist beyond the confines of the physical realm. Rather what has happened is that digital technologies have been deployed in order to bring into being a labour market that can operate at a planetary scale, and has particular affordances and limitations that rarely bolster both the structural and associational power of workers. Digital technologies that underpin online labour markets help clients operate unboundedly and trans-spatially, and allow them to reconfigure the geography of their production networks for almost zero cost.
194 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Workers meanwhile can sell their labour power globally, but still are tethered to the locales in which they go to bed every night.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like thank David Sutcliffe, Jamie Woodcock, and Alex Wood for their extensive feedback on earlier drafts and anonymous referees for their comments. We are grateful to the European Research Council (ERC Grant Agreement number 335716), the ESRC (ES/S00081X/1), and The Alan Turing Institute (under the EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1) for funding our research on digital work.
NOTES 1 2 3 4
5
6
7
8
In addition to numerous models that have been created to predict how many jobs Artificial Intelligence will destroy, it is estimated that up to one third of all jobs in the United States are offshorable (Peck, 2017). As David Harvey (1991, p. 19) noted, “labour power has to go home every night”. Capital therefore is always able to take advantage of its relative mobility compared to labour. As David Harvey (1991, p. 19) noted, “labour power has to go home every night”. Capital therefore is always able to take advantage of its relative mobility compared to labour. Large platforms began to emerge after 2008 as a new business model that controlled information in bottlenecks in between digitally mediated economic, social, and political activities. According to Srnicek (2016, p. 48) “Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterised by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidisation to draw in different user groups, and by having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities.” The precursor to the segmented theory of labour markets is the ‘dual labour market’ theory which describes two distinct sectors in economy that do not have mobility between them. The primary sector is characterised by strong wages, benefits, and security, while the secondary sector is characterised by jobs that often require little training, have high-turnover, low wages, and insecure contracts (Doeringer and Piore, 1985). The dualist model failed to incorporate the processes of social reproduction and the role of the state in correcting market failures, contributing to workforce reproduction, and also regulatory functions, such as enforcement of employment contracts (Peck, 1996). The precursor to the segmented theory of labour markets is the ‘dual labour market’ theory which describes two distinct sectors in economy that do not have mobility between them. The primary sector is characterised by strong wages, benefits, and security, while the secondary sector is characterised by jobs that often require little training, have high-turnover, low wages, and insecure contracts (Doeringer and Piore, 1985). The dualist model failed to incorporate the processes of social reproduction and the role of the state in correcting market failures, contributing to workforce reproduction, and also regulatory functions, such as enforcement of employment contracts (Peck, 1996). Too much should not be read into the specific oversupply percentages. On one hand, these numbers could be overestimates because it is possible that many people create profiles without having any intention to search for jobs. On the other, it is possible that they are underestimates, because platforms have an interest in keeping pay just above the reserve wage in a variety of industries, and there have been time-limited efforts to limit worker sign-ups from some countries. This is not to say that opportunities for workers to learn new skills and earn a high income from platform jobs are not present at all. But the point is those who succeed in doing so often come from prosperous family backgrounds and with previous training and education. For example, white South
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 195 Africans are much more likely to succeed and earn money on platforms than other groups in the country, largely due to their better socio-material conditions. There are 104 workers on Upwork. com in South Africa (on October 25, 2018), who have completed 1000 hours and earned US$10,000 worth of work and all but seven are white. 9 Furthermore, the nature of many digital work platforms, with work done remotely, collaboratively, and in-real time, means that the ‘workplace’ rather than just the labour market could be considered to be planetary (bearing in mind similar geographic caveats discussed in this paper). This, however, is a topic for another paper. 10 This is not to claim that local labour markets ever reach any sort of equilibrium. Indeed, much important scholarship has taken place refuting such ideas and instead argue that labour markets are locally constituted (Craig et al., 1982; Hanson and Pratt, 1992; Harvey, 1989; Peck, 1989). It is nonetheless clear than many bounded labour markets have been able to avoid an erosion of working conditions through the relative scarcity of labour power and better regulatory frameworks instituted by states. 11 This is not to claim that local labour markets ever reach any sort of equilibrium. Indeed, much important scholarship has taken place refuting such ideas and instead argue that labour markets are locally constituted (Craig et al., 1982; Hanson and Pratt, 1992; Harvey, 1989; Peck, 1989). It is nonetheless clear than many bounded labour markets have been able to avoid an erosion of working conditions through the relative scarcity of labour power and better regulatory frameworks instituted by states. 12 Here it is worth bearing in mind that the planetary scale of the market allows many workers to access jobs and incomes that they simply would not otherwise have access to. The biggest problem for many potential workers is not that the labour market is full of bad jobs, but rather that they are excluded from those jobs in the first place (as we outline in the section on oversupply). However, the fact that bad jobs are better than no jobs should not stop us from interrogating the conditions that bring these jobs into being.
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196 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Graham, Mark, Isis Hjorth and Vili Lehdonvirta, 2017b. “Digital Labour and Development: Impacts of Global Digital Labour Platforms and the Gig Economy on Worker Livelihoods”. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23 (2): 135–162. Graham, Mark and Jamie Woodcock, 2018. “Towards a Fairer Platform Economy: Introducing the Fairwork Foundation”. Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, 29: 242–253 Graham, Stephen, 1998. “The End of Geography or the Explosion of Place? Conceptualizing Space, Place and Information Technology”. Progress in Human Geography, 22 (2): 165–185. Hanson, Susan and Geraldine Pratt, 1992. “Dynamic Dependencies: A Geographic Investigation of Local Labor Markets”. Economic Geography, 68: 373–405. Harvey, David, 1989. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harvey, David, 1991. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford, Cambridge Mass: Wiley-Blackwell. Harvey, David, 2001. “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix’”. Geographische Revue, 2: 23–30. Harvey, David, 2011. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books. Heeks, Richard, 2017. Digital Economy and Digital Labour Terminology: Making Sense of the “Gig Economy”, “Online Labour”, “Crowd Work”, “Microwork”, “Platform Labour”, Etc. Centre for Development Informatics. Herod, Andrew, 2001. Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford Press. Horton, John, William R. Kerr and Christopher Stanton, 2016. “Digital Labor markets and Global Talent Flows”. Working Paper No. 23398, National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/ papers/w23398. Hudson, Ray, 2001. Producing Places. New York: Guilford Publications. Hunt, Edwin, S., 2010. The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huws, Ursula and Colin Leys, 2003. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press. Irani, Lilly and M. Six Silberman, 2013. “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk”, in CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 611–620. Jones, Andrew, 2008. “The Rise of Global Work”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33 (1): 12–26. Kalleberg, Arne and Aage Sorensen, 1979. “The Sociology of Labor Markets”. Annual Review of Sociology, 5: 351–379. Kuek, S. C., C. Paradi-Guilford, T. Fayomi, S. Imaizumi and P. Ipeirotis, 2015. The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing. World Bank: Washington D.C. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Classics. Massey, Doreen, 1993. “Power Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place”, in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam and Lisa Tickner (Eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London, New York: Routledge. Massey, Doreen, 1994. Space, Place, and Gender. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Massey, Doreen, 2005. For Space. London: SAGE Publications. Ojanperä, Sanna and Mark Graham, 2018. “Mapping the Availability of Online Workers”. At, https:// geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/mapping-the-availability-of-online-workers/, accessed on 27 October, 2018. Peck, Jamie, 1989. “Reconceptualizing the Local Labour Market: Space, Segmentation and the State”. Progress in Human Geography, 13: 42–61. Peck, Jamie, 1996. Work-place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. New York: Guilford Press. Peck, Jamie, 2017. Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reich, Michael, David Gordon and Richard Edwards, 1973. “A Theory of Labor Market Segmentation”. The American Economic Review, 63 (2): 359–365. Silver, Beverly, 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Srnicek, Nick, 2016. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity Press.
The global gig economy: towards a planetary labour market? 197 Strauss, Kendra, 2018. “Labour Geography 1: Towards a Geography of Precarity?” Progress in Human Geography, 42 (4): 622–630. Wood, Alex, Vili Lehdonvirta and Mark Graham, 2018a. “Workers of the Internet Unite? Online Freelancer Organisation Among Remote Gig Economy Workers in Six Asian and African countries”. New Technology, Work and Employment, 33 (2): 95–112. Wood, Alex, Mark Graham, Vili Lehdonvirta and Isis Hjorth, 2018b. Good Gig, Bad Big: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy. Work, Employment and Society, 33 (1). https://doi .org/10.1177/0950017018785616 Zook, Matthew and Mark Graham, 2018. “Hacking Code/Space: Confounding the Code of Global Capitalism”. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43: 390–404.
15. Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times Maurizio Atzeni
INTRODUCTION The structure vs agency debate is one of the longest standing within Marxism, given its centrality in understanding possibilities of social change and emancipation. How does the existence of objective conditions of exploitation get translated by people into demands for change and social justice and into forms of effective collective organisations? How do economic, cultural, institutional and socio-political factors combine in providing mobilising opportunities for people? How do pre-existing structural conditions shape people’s experiences of struggle and organisation while also being shaped by those same experiences? These questions, which are important because they directly interrogate our conceptualisations of labour conflict and the possibility of building workers’ collective power and organisation, are constantly reformulated and reshaped by changes in the dynamics of capitalist development. The political economic landscape of global neoliberal capitalism has completely altered previous paradigms and common understandings of what is labour and of workers’ role in societies. Classical conceptual dichotomies (formal/informal; development/ underdevelopment; productive/unproductive; manufacturing/service; manual/mental), central to providing a framework of analysis in the field but rooted in the Fordist model of production and post-World War Two social Keynesianism, have been put into question. The existence of a formal sphere of work in which the regulation of work and the institutionalisation of class struggle provide workers with dignified salaries and their representative organisations with a social political role in national contexts is increasingly eroded by precariousness and informality. Rather than a virtuous process of formalisation of the informal, cities and productive hubs across the Global North and South of the world are displaying common patterns of labour exploitation. Interconnected global value chains, which have made delocalising production possible, are creating poverty chains for the big majority of those involved (Selwyn 2018), reproducing patterns of imperialist domination and exploitation (Smith 2016) and calling into question the possibility of establishing even basic international regulations of work. Technological development associated to digitalisation and algorithmic artificial intelligence applied across industries and services and logistic platforms, while purposefully deskilling work, is potentially creating a new mass of cyber proletarians (Schaupp 2021) and workingclass communities in and around newly formed logistic hubs (Moody 2017) where surveillance and exploitation of workers is at an all-time high (Moore 2019). Migration flows from poor and war-torn nations towards rich countries, by providing a cheap and controllable labour force, increase working-class precariousness across ethnic and racial lines. Socio-economic crises, such as the one sparked by Covid 19, are heavily impacting on the poorest sections of the populations in all countries, further expanding social inequality. 198
Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times 199 These technological and political economic changes affecting capitalism accumulation processes also put into question how value is produced today. Wage labour, the paradigmatic form of exploitation through which value is extracted within capitalism, is not just increasingly devalued through the mechanisms outlined above but it is also displaced from its central role in understanding the reproduction of wealth and social injustice within capitalism at the global level, by other forms of exploitation and value capture which are made possible by extra economic forms of coercion (as in the case of slave, indentured or dormitory labour regimes) and social domination and oppression (as with patriarchy). The variety of forms of exploitation through which capitalism has historically reproduced itself (Banaji 2010), whose interconnection is becoming visible again in the value chains that structure production and consumption across the globe, force us to think of labour value as produced across the productive and social reproductive spheres and thus of workplaces, communities and households as interlinked spaces of exploitation (Mezzadri 2021 and in this handbook). How have these system-level changes, which are representing for some a return to the pre-industrial forms of merchant capitalism (Van der Linden and Breman 2020), reconfigured the working class? Which forms of working-class organisations seem to be appearing on the horizon? Which methodological and theoretical challenges will shape the study of labour conflict and workers’ collective action and organisation in the future? My aim in the following sections of the chapter is to attempt to answer these questions in light of debates on conflict, collective action and workers’ organisation. These themes have always been central for the field of industrial relations and labour studies, given their role in shaping the outcomes of capital-labour relationships inside and outside workplaces. However, new empirical evidence and theoretical contributions are broadening a field originally structured around the capital-labour antagonism in the confines of factories to new forms of conflict and collective organisation that could be better understood in the wider framework of class analysis.
THE THEORETICAL ROOTS OF WORKERS’ RESISTANCE: BETWEEN WORK AND CLASS In their vision of history as the history of class struggles, Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto, that ‘our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms’ (Marx 1847, p. 197). Looking at this with contemporary insights, one may say that the proletariat/bourgeoisie class antagonism has become more complex rather than simpler. The global market expansion and the constant technological advancements that Marx and Engels rightly noted as vital for the bourgeois society’s own existence have produced a complex variety of class configurations and divisions of the working class along race, gender and geographical lines which are not all immediately conducive to clear class alignments. Still, the mutual interdependency within capitalism between labouring people, the bearers of value and capitalists, the appropriators of value, continuously creates conditions of struggle and opposition. Here, within this system-generated dynamic, is where class antagonism becomes simplified, to use the Manifesto wording. The existence of a basic struggle over value production and capture is most evident in productive contexts in which a relation of dependency has been established and where the wage/ labour power exchange has been formally or informally regulated. Here is where the processes
200 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of valorisation, with capitalists needing to capture, through the labour process, as much value as possible in order to outperform competitors in the market, ‘surface routinely at the point of production as conflict of interests between workers and managers’ (Cohen 1987, p. 7). Time and performance/output measurements through either physical or algorithmic control, increase in the speed of production, mechanisms to create competition among workers, poor pay, unhealthy and stressful working conditions, and oppression and violence in the working environment are just some of the areas in which a conflict of interest structured in the labour process appears and where an ‘invisible frontier of control is defined and redefined in a continuous process of pressure and counter pressure, conflict and accommodation, overt and tacit struggle’ (Hyman 1975, p. 263). The labour process, intended as a production and valorisation process, thus creates the conditions for the existence of a constant, though often latent, conflict, in other words a ‘structured antagonism’ (Edwards 1986). A focus on the labour process in generating this antagonism is important, especially in terms of generating solidarity linkages and embryonic forms of organisations, an issue I will consider in the following section. However, very often resistance emerges in contexts of economic and social crises in which workers have lost their jobs and wages, or when broader political changes create instability, where precariousness and poverty are widespread and chronic, or where racial and gender oppression dominate societies. In these contexts, the capital-labour contradiction, that becomes manifest in the labour process, mixes up with broader contradictions of capitalism, particularly with those that emerge from the workers’ role as consumers (Harvey 2014). In these circumstances, labour conflict morphs into broader social manifestations of discontent and moves from being a struggle generated by the existence of opposed interests and needs limited within the sphere of production, to a struggle over work as a means to generate basic conditions of social reproduction. Here, thus, we can see how labour and social conflict can mutually influence each other and how broader class concerns can emerge from work or the lack of it. Different streams of social sciences research have investigated the processes through which work and capitalist production shape working-class formation and is shaped by its agency: E. P. Thompson’s ‘history from below’ on working-class culture and class formation, documenting the manifold practices used by the early British working class in challenging capitalism social order; the Marxist autonomist tradition on the power of the working class in forcing capitalism to introduce technological and social changes; the comparative historical sociology of Beverly Silver with her transcontinental and transhistorical reconstruction of the ‘making, unmaking and remaking’ of the working classes at the compass of capitalist historical and geographical development; the political sociology of Francis Fox Piven with her argument that the interconnectedness of the world is creating, even for precarious and poor workers, the possibility of exercising power, ‘interdependent power’, over others who depend on their work. These streams of research are just part of a more generalised search aiming to reconnect transformations of capitalism and the world of work to a class dimension. Variously defined as ‘the multitude’, ‘the precariat’, ‘the subaltern’, the ‘urban outcasts’ or ‘the plebeians’ and composed in a variety of ways, class as a theoretical perspective and a ‘compass of orientation – towards the classes of the people, the exploited, the oppressed and disadvantaged in all their variety – rather than a structural category to be filled with consciousness’ (Therborn 2012, p. 26), seems to have come back in social sciences studies after decades of virtual disappearance.
Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times 201 In a context in which wageless life is becoming the condition that best characterises human labour in our epoch, as Denning argues (Denning 2010), researchers are increasingly focusing on the ways in which precarious, devalued, wageless, indentured, forced work, often based on women’s unpaid domestic work and on ethnic migrant status segregation, is used to generate value in global commodities chains, in the platform economy, in the urban economic circuits providing essential care and domestic services, as well as in agriculture. These new lines of interdisciplinary investigations, by looking at the interconnections between regimes of accumulation, work exploitation, social reproduction and social marginalisation, are providing insights to understand how contemporary capitalism shapes class formation and the structure of opportunities and organisational forms available to workers.
LABOUR CONFLICT AND ITS EXPRESSION: LOOKING FOR A THEORY OF COLLECTIVE ACTION1 When we consider the way in which labour conflict finds its expression, which combination of factors determine mobilisation? How do other non-labour process factors influence conflict? In the last decades the theoretical debate on workers’ collective action and the forms of their organisation has showed little signs of development, despite the evidence of continued working-class mobilisations particularly by precarious migrant and platform workers. Mobilisation theory, proposed by John Kelly in 1998 in his book Rethinking Industrial Relations, has continued to remain, within and beyond the field of industrial relations, the theoretical reference point in explaining and analysing workers’ collective action. This longevity is of course a sign of its merits in relation to both the broad framework proposed, anchored in Marxist political economy and social movement studies and including micro and macro dynamics influencing mobilisations, and the political scope of trade union revitalisation that motivated the publication of the book. In 2018, the book reached a level of citations comparable in numbers to those of the most relevant texts in the field. A journal special issue celebrated the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication with various articles, including an assessment by John Kelly himself, engaging with specific aspects of mobilisation theory (leadership, injustice, organising, long waves) and with the theory as a whole and its influence in the field. Holgate, Simms and Tapia (2018) have argued that is important not to conflate mobilisation with organising and that, while mobilisation theory is useful to analyse moments of collective action, it is less able to give answers for the more sustained organising efforts made by trade unions. Kirk, drawing on labour process analysis, has considered mobilisation theory fundamental to understand strike types of collective action but less adequate for alternative forms of conflict and dispute solutions. Most importantly, she questions the sequential model of mobilisation (a point already made clear in my book Workplace Conflict in 2010 and in an earlier article, Atzeni 2009), making the claim that ‘Mobilisation appears as a clean process of “ready, aim, fire!”’ (Kirk 2018, p. 651). On the contrary, Darlington, while acknowledging the lack of clarity of mobilisation theory in relation to those forms of unplanned conflict in which leaders appear as ex post products of mobilisation, considers fundamental, though in need of further refinement, the centrality Kelly assigns to leaders and to their role. More generally, Darlington is convinced that the theory ‘integrates and gives equal consideration to objective and subjective (structure and agency) factors and their interplay’ (Darlington 2018, p. 631).
202 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Mobilisation theory has rarely attracted antipathies and critiques, including this one, have normally aimed to be constructive. When I started applying the framework to my own research on collective actions in the Fiat and Renault factories in Argentina (Atzeni 2010), I was confidently looking for injustice and leaders but, by empirical research, I discovered instead a number of discrepancies with what the theory proposed. The micro framework of mobilisation theory is based on injustice (the condition sine qua non of mobilisation), a feeling that leaders first activate, by attributing it to an identifiable cause external to workers, and then use in view to start, given contextual positive circumstances, a process of collective organising. The first discrepancy with this framework concerned the sequence of the theory: in one case mobilisation was the result of the contemporaneous unplanned uprising of many individual workers in different departments rather than the result of leaders framing and attributing injustice. Thus, this led me to think that unorganised actions of this sort, usually defined as walkouts or wildcat strikes and of which we have empirical historical and contemporary evidence, could not be explained by mobilisation theory. The second, that solidarity and comradeship (compañerismo), rather than injustice, appeared in workers’ reconstructions of the events. Thus, this latter evidence started to pose doubts over the validity of the concept of injustice as the condition sine qua non of mobilisation and what should be at the core of the industrial relations agenda, as Kelly states in his book (Kelly 1998, pp. 27 and 126). These two major discrepancies led in turn to: (a) reconsidering the validity of the whole mobilisation theory, at least in its micro dimension: a framework for union organising centred on leadership rather than a general collective action theory; (b) criticising the subjective dimension of injustice; (c) developing an alternative conceptualisation to ground collective action in the solidarity generated by the exploitative conditions of the capitalist labour process; (d) identifying two stages of dynamics in the development of solidarity: solidarity in its embryonic form, the mutual dependency and cooperation between workers generated by the labour process; and solidarity in its activated form, as a living encounter empowering workers; (e) explaining how socio-political external factors and internal workplace dynamics regarding workers’ representation and companies control and differently shape solidarity. Kelly never really engaged with these issues. This might have been partly for the wrong reading of my texts in which he equated the unplanned spontaneous uprising without leaders described in the book with an idea of spontaneity as an ‘absence of organisation’, whether formal or informal. ‘If the phrase “spontaneous” collective action simply denotes the absence of formal organization, then it is an uncontentious if infelicitous formulation; if however, it implies that organizing is neither necessary nor sufficient for collective action, then it is an error’ (Kelly 2018, p. 704). We could open an endless debate about when exactly we could say a process of organising, however rudimentary, starts. However, the important point to make in cases of unplanned action is not that there’s not an organising process but rather that this is revealed in the making, before informal leaders can appear or issues discussed and debated. There is in other words a class, antagonistic dimension of collective action, that goes beyond organising and leadership, directly questioning the sequence of Kelly’s theory and calling for a different level of analysis. Beyond this wrong interpretation, Kelly makes some general statements about the compatibility of his theory with ‘the claims about the role of exploitation and the solidarities that can emerge within the capitalist labour process’, arguing that ‘conflict depend, inter alia, on a variety of contingencies, including the activities of leaders and the beliefs of the protagonists
Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times 203 themselves’ (Kelly 2018, p. 704). Of course, none deny the role of other factors and leaders, particularly left-wing leaders (Darlington 2002; Cohen 2011), are fundamental in many ways. What is wrong and what cases of unplanned action show is to believe that collective action can be explained only as a function of the leaders’ role in shaping and giving meaning and attribution to injustice. This logic of collective action construction attributed to the subjective nature of injustice (as opposed to, for example, dignity or decency) is certainly functional to trade-union organising and revitalisation. However, it takes us away from the conditions of exploitation affecting people as workers and thus away from a general theory of collective action rooted in objective conditions, promoting a less trade union-centred construction of workers’ power and one more in tune with contemporary struggles. In the last few years, indeed, the focus of research on the forms of organisation and mobilisation of precarious migrant workers, for instance, have showed the way in which race, ethnicity, language and gender rather than injustice have strengthened and activated solidarity, moving group of migrants from a ‘community of coping’ to a ‘community of struggle’ in new independent unions (Pero 2019). The emergence of workers’ organisation and collective action among delivery and logistic workers in the platform economy has also opened up a new field of inquiry more attentive to the collective dynamics preceding trade unionism. What puzzled more researchers and activists analysing this phenomenon was the existence of processes of collective identity formation in unfavourable contexts characterised by performance-based individualised employment, algorithmic management, the absence of trade unions and precarious labour markets (Cant and Woodcock 2020; Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020; Cini et al., in this handbook). How could an atomised labour process performed across the spatiality of cities produce collective identification? Here is what a platform delivery worker interviewed in the UK argues: ‘As long as there is a shared condition, as long as two people interact at some point and they find some way to communicate with each other, it doesn’t matter if there is no shared factory space, because there is a shared condition. Which is, the job is bullshit’ (Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020, p. 9). The job is bullshit, that’s the shared condition! This kind of labour process-based explanation is astonishingly similar to that of a pre-platform delivery worker in Argentina, despite changes in technology and in the labour process exploitation mechanisms, When, after a rainy winter week, you finally arrive to a Friday afternoon to drink a mate (typical Argentine infusion) with the other guys that have suffered like you, this produces very strong, very human ties, which later on in the street get transformed into solidarity … our job is highly individual, you are alone in the street, the boss threaten you, cars crowd you, police ask for bribe and the only person that can help you is another delivery worker who has experienced the same situations as you did (Atzeni 2016, p. 205).
These two cases clearly show how, in new non-unionised precarious contexts, which are far from the trade union represented working-class settings imagined by Kelly, it is the sharing of the same working conditions and of the same suffering, even in cases of individualised employment, that creates antagonism, that creates solidarity in its embryonic non-activated form. This is the central point to make in theorising workers’ collective action before asking how other factors such as circumstances, opportunities or resources can activate and strengthen solidarity.
204 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work In this chapter reasons of space do not allow a detailed analysis of the theoretical relevance of single factors. However, there is an already established tradition in industrial relations (leadership, democratic vs bureaucratic trade unionism, state role in industrial relations) and social movement theories (cultural and political sources of mobilising power) and ongoing empirical investigations are constantly providing new insights. In Workplace Conflict the mobilisations studied are located within an historical analysis of labour struggles and trade unionism in Argentina. In later work, I have considered how workers’ power, workers’ effective possibility of building collective organisation and action, and the forms of their organisations are influenced by different socio-political/institutional settings and type of labour process (Gutierrez Crocco and Atzeni 2021; Rizzo and Atzeni 2020; Atzeni 2016). The need of blending workplace/labour process resources with those external to it is becoming imperative to any empirical analysis wishing to investigate workers’ power and capabilities in non-represented sectors (Cini and Goldmann 2020).
WORKERS’ ORGANISATION: ABANDONING TRADE UNIONS FETISHISM, REDISCOVERING CLASS Against the evidence of the changes produced to the world of work by the political economic landscape of global neoliberal capitalism we mentioned at the beginning, it is striking to note how working-class representation continues to be largely framed in the trade union form (Atzeni 2021). I argue, paraphrasing Marx and as a way of provoking discussions, that the dependency of research on the trade union as the par excellence form of organisation is creating a fetish of the union form, an interest in the form itself that hides from view broader processes of struggle and collective formation and of working-class mobilisations outside/in parallel/alternative to the union form currently occurring in the underworld of precariousness, the contemporary hidden abode of production. Trade unions have played a fundamental role during the twentieth century in the most industrialised parts of the world and in the rural sector of many Global South realities. They have contributed to gradual improvements in working conditions and labour rights and have given workers an effective voice of representation at the workplace and in the political sphere, forging political parties of the working class responsive to the interests of trade unions and workers. From either a reformist industrial relations perspective or a Marxist revolutionary approach, the central focus of labour research on workers’ organisation was legitimately based on trade unions, institutional actors in the regulation of work and class organisations in the struggle against capitalism. However, since the end of the 1970s, the advent of neoliberalism, the speeding up of globalisation processes, the collapse of the Soviet world and the renewal of imperialist exploitation in the Global South have completely reshaped processes of capital accumulation and the world of production. These forces have reconfigured labour processes, changing industrial and urban landscapes, and with this altering the composition of the working class around the world. In this changed context, the industrial working class represented by socialist parties and by the twentieth-century trade union – which had to a certain extent been able to achieve, in some parts of the world, collectively shared social improvements – has largely disappeared as a politically important movement. Trade unions have declined worldwide, the labour parties
Workers’organisation, class and collective action in precarious times 205 that they helped to forge have vanished and their role as social policy institutions has increasingly been questioned. Labour research on workers’ organisation has nonetheless remain attached to trade-union-based frames of reference. This is the case, for instance, in the debates on the sources of power (Schmalz, Ludwig and Webster 2018; Ellem, Goods and Todd 2020), on mobilisation and collective action (Holgate, Simms and Tapia 2018), on the organisation of migrants (Connolly, Marino and Lucio 2019; Gorodzeisky and Richards 2020), precarious work (Doellgast, Lillie and Pulignana 2018), informal workers (Spooner and Mwanika 2018) or on the role trade unions might still have in shaping long-term frameworks of employment relations (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2013). Clearly, this kind of research remains relevant to understanding the manoeuvring room that existing trade unions can have today in the representation of excluded categories of workers, or in assessing their relevance in shaping social policies and sustaining a left agenda of reforms. However, by considering policies, strategies and practices of trade unions, these studies necessarily adopt top-down organisational perspectives whose relevance for understanding the changed context of work is minimal. The reification of trade unions, a danger that the early Hyman (1975) noted in the mid-1970s at the zenith of the labour movement, as well as their transformation into the fetish of labour studies research on workers’ organisation and representation, is hiding from view the manifold ways in which the collective proletariat continue to exist (mobilised or not), even in these times of class fragmentation. There are important shifts in research about workers’ organisation that aim to be beyond trade union fetishism. Studies critical of the power resources approach (Gallas 2018; Nowak 2018; Runciman 2019) have discussed at length the limitation of perspectives that are centred exclusively on unions. Studies on developing countries and focusing on precarious informal workers have already put into evidence the existence of different expressions of workers’ organisation, that are alternative to (Agarwala 2013) or antagonistic to (Rizzo 2017; Anner 2018; Marinaro 2018) trade unions. These studies have analysed the possibilities in the context of different labour regimes (Smith and Pun 2006) and the role played by gender, ethnicity, race and migration status in work exploitation (Mezzadri 2017; Morrison, Sacchetto and Croucher, 2020). Other studies, drawing from the labour process tradition, have looked at workers’ organisation in the new platform economy, starting from the construction of collective identity and solidarity, thus adopting a more processual view in which trade unionism is a means towards an end rather than a means in itself (Cant and Woodcock 2020; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). These and similar studies are important to recover a class dimension in our understanding of the possibilities of workers’ organisation and more broadly of workers’ exploitation within capitalism.
CONCLUSIONS The capital-labour relation typical of industrial manufacturing has always been at the centre of our understanding of the relations between industrial relations actors; they are an expression of surplus value generation and exploitation in workplaces and reflect the subordination of wage-dependent workers at society level. The political strength of the trade union movement and workers’ parties during part of the twentieth century, together with the construction of
206 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work systems of regulation of the employment relationship, helped to create a consensus around the existence of a wage-based class. From the political point of view which is intrinsic to studies of labour, studying trade unions meant studying class and its organisation. Today, in the context of a new proletarianisation of vast sectors of the world’s working population, and with the advent of a broader conception of class (not necessarily coincident with wage labour), we need to enlarge the scope and aim of studies looking at workers’ organisation. The capital-labour relationship is but one of the contradictions of capitalism and needs to be reconnected to other spheres of life and to the diverse social, geographical and historical contexts in which class exploitation occurs. Understanding how the articulation of these complex dynamics is expressed, and in which specific forms organisation is shaped, will be crucial in building workers’ power and long-term working-class politics. In doing this, labour studies’ rediscovery of class would be conditional on the abandonment of trade union fetishism.
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16. Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change Linda Clarke and Melahat Sahin-Dikmen
INTRODUCTION The climate is changing due to human activities, with potentially catastrophic consequences for life on earth. The climate crisis symbolises the separation of humans from nature under capitalism and the antagonistic construction of the relationship between them. For capitalism, nature is a ‘resource’ to be tamed, controlled and used for production and to meet human needs; humans are thus opposed to the environment, rather than being part of it, respecting and preserving natural resources. The profit maximisation motive means the economy operates like a ‘treadmill of production’ whereby production is perpetually sped up, increasing environmental extraction and waste and encouraging hyper-consumption (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020). The narrative of development entails unquestioning control of nature with human and environmental costs excluded from classical economic models of growth (Clark et al., 2010). The transition to a low-carbon economy is a prerequisite for addressing the consequences of climate change and preventing future rises in CO2 emissions and temperatures, which have major implications for the world of work. Though the predominant focus of policy and academic discussion is on the energy sector, all areas of the economy are impacted – from industry to transport and public services to education. Employment impacts include: the disappearance of jobs as high-carbon industries are phased out; the creation of new jobs in emerging ‘green’ industries, such as renewable energy production and retrofitting; expanding environmental protection and adaptation services; and demand for training and education for workers to adapt to low-carbon materials and production systems. The labour movement has a long history of engaging with environmental problems, dealing with the impact of hazardous production systems on workers and workplaces and taking action alongside communities and environmental organisations in response to environmental crises, be this at local, national or global levels. The major impact of climate action on workers, combined with the increasing prominence of climate change on the international political agenda and growing public attention, have prompted unions to look beyond the occupational health and safety implications of environmental breaches. Green transitions present both a challenge to labour organisations, as climate action prioritising long-term environmental gains comes into conflict with the traditional union role of protecting members’ interests in the workplace, and an opportunity to transform the capitalist economy and re-shape the human-nature relationship (Räthzel and Uzzell, 2013). Labour organisations play an increasingly active role in climate and green transition politics, with the worker perspective broadly encapsulated in calls for a ‘just transition’. The International Labour Organisation (ILO, 2015) and the International Trade Union Congress (ITUC) set out the principles of ‘just transition’, encompassing the ideas of environmental sustainability, ‘decent work’ and union voice. However, union strategies for combatting climate 209
210 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work change are diverse, even under the umbrella of ‘just transition’, and include market-based, ecological modernisation and radical transformation approaches (Stevis et al., 2018). This chapter identifies the range of strategies and interventions adopted, their sectoral specificity and realisation, the challenges to developing policy proposals, and tensions arising in implementing ‘just transition’ at global, regional, national and local levels as political, economic and social dynamics diverge. The agenda of just transition provides unions with a platform to pursue a socially just green transition that counters purely technological and market-oriented solutions. Nevertheless, the ITUC-led vision proposes ecological modernisation of the economy and institutional reforms to regulate the market, side-stepping the inherent conflict between the resource-hungry capitalist growth model and ecological survival (Morena at al., 2019). In contrast, at local level, the context-dependent nature of just transition(s) is apparent as environmental interventions foreground the significance of power inequalities between stakeholders, the challenges of ensuring effective union representation, sectoral differences, and diverse union identities. With its focus on waged-labour, the union-centred social dialogue approach can marginalise large segments of the world’s working population in informal- or self-employment, migrant workers, the communities impacted by the transition and grass-root organisations, whose inclusion is critical for democratic policy making and equitable outcomes (Stevis et al., 2018; Velicu and Barca, 2021). Notable is the top-down nature of union engagement and lack of involvement by members in the governance of the transition process. The more bottom-up climate action involving direct input from front-line communities, workers and activists can be the well-spring of transformative transition strategies, challenging existing inequalities and exclusions.
CLIMATE CHANGE, GLOBAL LABOUR ORGANISATIONS AND JUST TRANSITION Evidence is unequivocal on the anthropogenic causes of climate change. Emissions have risen gradually since the industrial revolution, accelerating from the 1950s in parallel with increasing economic activity. Temperature rises, 0.9°C since the late nineteenth century, follow a similar pattern, with much global warming occurring in the last 35 years and the past decade recording the hottest five years. According to the 5th assessment report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is the exponential increase in the amount of CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere that is rapidly changing the earth’s climate through unprecedented rises in temperature, leading to the melting of ice caps as oceans absorb much of the extra heat, rising sea levels and frequent and intense extreme weather events (Pachauri et al., 2015). To prevent catastrophic and irreversible damage to the earth’s ecology, it is essential to limit global warming to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrialisation levels and to reduce emissions by about 45 per cent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels, reaching net zero by 2050. The IPCC (2018) recommends rapid action involving mitigation measures to tackle the causes of climate change and prevent further rises and adaptation measures to respond to the consequences. Energy production is the main emitter, with all industries – from construction to agriculture and transport of goods and people – identified as major contributors. The climate crisis has thus brought to the forefront the connections between work, labour and environment
Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change 211 and the solutions imply a fundamental transformation of the relationship between humans and nature and of the dominant economic paradigm. Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the primary inter-governmental forum for negotiating the global response to climate change, with its annual Conference of the Parties (COP) bringing together representatives from signatory countries, environmental non-government organisations (NGOs), employer organisations and unions. The first international agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, was adopted in 1997, binding only 36 industrial countries and the European Union (EU) to emissions reduction targets on the understanding that developed countries bear the greatest responsibility for rises in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Measures introduced included market instruments such as emissions trading, in effect allowing developed countries to continue emitting, offset through ‘green’ investment in developing countries. The Kyoto Protocol was superseded by the Paris Agreement in 2015 at COP21 where all 197 signatory countries committed to keeping the global average temperature increase to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) frame each country’s responsibilities towards reaching these commitments, reviewed by verifiable reports that feed into UNFCCC stocktaking exercises. Led by ITUC, global unions are active participants in the UNFCCC process, influencing inter-governmental negotiations and shaping global climate policies and action. A ‘just transition’ is encapsulated in labour proposals and represents an approach dating back to a 1960s Canadian uranium mining dispute and subsequently pursued by Tony Mazzocchi, leader of the United States (US) Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) union, who called for a Superfund for workers to provide financial support and opportunities for those displaced by the closure of toxic production facilities. In 1996, Canadian trade union leader Brian Kohler defined ‘just transition’ as an approach reconciling, on the one hand, the protection of the environment and workers and communities from the consequences of industrial transformations and, on the other, the provision of decent jobs (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020). Within the UNFCCC process, just transition was first included by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU), predecessor of the ITUC, in its 1997 Kyoto Conference call for equitable sharing of the costs of climate policies. A step change occurred in 2006 with the formation of ITUC, which made climate action central to its political strategy. At COP14 in 2008 ITUC presented detailed climate proposals, bringing a labour perspective to debates previously framed as questions for environmental scientists and outside the realm of economic and social policy. As a result, ITUC was officially recognised as a constituency alongside representatives of business, research and environmental movements. Subsequent COP meetings called for a multi-lateral framework for tackling the environmental, economic and social crises through a planned and just transition. A significant shift was the challenging of the jobs versus environment dichotomy as a ‘false choice’, signalling an end to the conflictual construction of the relationship between labour and the environment. In 2015, ‘just transition’ was included in the Paris Agreement pre-amble, that NDCs ‘must take into account the imperative of the just transition of the workforce, and the creation of decent work and quality jobs’. This established climate justice, equity, employment rights and worker voice as essential to the transition to a zero-carbon economy, commitments strengthened at COP24 in 2018 in the Solidarity Just Transition Silesia Declaration (Morena et al., 2019). The ITUC also led the development of the ILO Just Transition Guidelines, intended to facilitate the implementation of just transition (ILO, 2015). The ILO, an active participant of UN envi-
212 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ronment conferences since the 1970s, introduced ‘just transition’ into the green jobs agenda of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), defining social justice in terms of economic inequalities, access to decent jobs, employment rights and social protections, so merging the UN2030 Sustainable Development agenda with that of equitable transition. Efforts at international level have thus resulted in the mainstreaming of ‘just transition’, though this represents an approach that continues to be appropriated, re-interpreted and challenged within and outside the labour movement. Adaptation by ‘official’ constituencies, such as international and inter-governmental organisations and platforms, business representatives and national governments, has led to an interpretation heavy on environmental measures and technological solutions but lighter on social aspects. Within the labour movement, divergences reflect varying visions of the extent to which the transition is centred on transforming political and economic power structures and achieves distributive justice through democratic structures and processes that enable equal and effective representation of the working class and the local communities impacted (Felli, 2014). These political divisions are cross-cut by differentiations emerging in practice, dependant on the impact of climate change in a particular sector and shaped by the national context in which unions operate, including historical and contemporary industrial relations dynamics and union identities.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO JUST TRANSITION Union approaches to climate change range from those supporting market-based solutions and ecological modernisation to those proposing a radical eco-socialist transformation of social relations of production. Ecological modernisation approaches emphasise: the role of the state; alliances with non-state actors, such as environmental social movements and businesses; technology-led mitigation measures to reduce emissions; the social implications of climate change and climate policies; and a range of adaptation measures, including training and compensation for workers. Proponents of eco-socialist transformations challenge the green capitalism implied by ecological modernisation, arguing that the growth and profit driven economic system is the main driver of environmental degradation and that the interests of both labour and the environment lie in a radical restructuring of the capitalist political economy (Stevis et al., 2018). The just transition perspective promoted by the ITUC and ILO represents a strong version of ecological modernisation with scope for comprehensive adjustments to economic policies and institutional structures. It encompasses a planned, managed and government-led transition, social dialogue from national to enterprise levels, including all stakeholders, comprehensive measures protecting workers and communities impacted by climate action, enabling the environmental sustainability of industries, and social reforms ensuring inclusive and decent work (ILO, 2015). The emphasis on addressing the economic, social and environmental aspects of the transition echoes the UN Sustainable Development agenda, pursued through 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) agreed on in 2015 and addressing, for instance, decent work, poverty, education, equality, peace and climate action. Both the ITUC and ILO campaign for the protection of workers and communities in the transition and a minimum floor of labour standards, employment and human rights, and social protections in the future sustainable society. Whilst the significance of this ambition for large segments of the world’s workers cannot be underestimated, it implies the regulation of the capitalist economy and a liberal
Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change 213 rights and justice agenda without fundamentally challenging economic and political power structures. In this framing of just transition, though capitalist economic growth strategies are identified as the root cause of the climate emergency, capital is still accorded a major role in tackling climate change. The solution envisaged is green and socially responsible capitalism, reached through a consensual process involving governments, business and unions and idealising a European form of the managed market economy and social dialogue model of industrial relations. Labour is positioned on the side of economic growth and hopes pinned on jobs to be created in the green economy. Absent from this iteration are the alternatives of ‘de-growth’, ‘slow-growth’, emancipation from paid work through reducing working hours, reorganisation of the economy to value social reproduction and a more expansive view of ‘labour’ to include workers outside the organised labour movement (Velicu and Barca, 2020). Whilst global unions support the ITUC-led rallying call for economic and social justice in the transition to a sustainable economy, this is challenged by unions proposing radical transformation of the political-economic structures. Significant points of divergence relate to the kind of transition envisaged, union approaches to climate change and proposals for a ‘new green deal’, whether based on the market (e.g. carbon trading), local initiatives (e.g. renewable energy production and control) or government-led public investment. The need for alternatives to defensive and market-based strategies, such as those favouring hydrogen to replace gas, has prompted calls for a new vision, a paradigm change, and for unions to become subjects rather than objects of history to overcome an unsustainable production model and shape the restructuring process towards a resource efficient and low-carbon economy. An alternative socio-ecological union strategy is called for, seeking to address the social relations of production at the heart of the climate crisis and overcome ‘business unionism’, green capitalism and the concern of ecological modernisation only with value redistribution. Worker agency is seen as essential to shifting green transition strategies from technological solutions towards such a social, political and economic transformation (Räthzel and Uzzell, 2013). At the global level, such an approach is exemplified in calls by the International Transport Federation (ITF) and the Public Services International (PSI) to restructure the profit-driven neo-liberal political economy emphasising public ownership and pointing to the ineffectiveness of non-binding global agreements, issues on which the ITUC and ILO just transition narrative is silent. A related issue is the role of unions as environmental actors, whether as social partners in European countries such as Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia, as green representatives in relation to health and safety issues in the United Kingdom (UK) or in alliance with environmental groups like the Blue Green Alliance in the US. A more direct and leading role for unions, challenging the status quo, is exemplified in the Lucas aerospace experiment of the 1970s in the UK, when 13,000 workers were threatened with redundancies and sought to convert production from weapons to socially useful goods. Different union networks have questioned the role that social dialogue can play in a transformational decarbonisation strategy and whether a ‘just’ transition is possible without challenging ownership relations and ‘green growth’, expanding public ownership, participatory planning and economic democracy. These networks include, for instance, the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) based in the US, the Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA) in the UK and the global Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), established in 2012 and representing 89 trade union bodies covering 26 countries across the globe, including: four Global Union Federations, three regional organisations and 10 national centres (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Italy, Nepal, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Scotland and South Africa), as well as allied policy, academic
214 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work and advocacy organisations. TUED seeks to advance democratic control and social ownership of energy in ways that promote solutions to the climate crisis, address energy poverty, resist the degradation of both land and people, and respond to the attacks on workers’ rights and protection. The ITF and PSI, both members of TUED, voice similar concerns, pointing out power inequalities in social dialogue structures and calling for direct worker control. In contrast, the European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions and the Building Workers International (BWI), though noting the systemic causes of the climate crisis, are committed to social dialogue, envisaging a facilitator role for unions in the transition and seeking the implementation of ILO’s just transition guidelines.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND JUST TRANSITION – COSATU AND TUCA In the Global South, calls for a just transition are intertwined with demands to forge a new, low-carbon development path, supported by funds from the Global North, based on the principle of ‘polluters must pay’ (Glasgow Climate Dialogues, 2021). Although similar in principle to ITUC’s bridging of environment and labour, there is a distinctive emphasis on leveraging the just transition to build regional/national/local economies to benefit local communities, those in poverty and workers. This is evident in the just transition strategy of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which calls for localisation of manufacturing, small scale farming to empower communities, technology transfer from developed countries and investment in infrastructure. Underlining the connection between capitalist development and climate change, COSATU rejects market mechanisms as a solution. The Trade Union Confederation of the Americas, TUCA-CSA, in a similar fashion, claims a role for trade unions as development actors. Whilst arguing that climate action be combined with calls to forge a sustainable development path to eliminate poverty and improve the lives of people in developing countries, it is critical of the UN’s SDG agenda for its depoliticisation of the climate crisis, the attempt to tackle the consequences of the capitalist economic model without acknowledging that it is fundamentally exploitative and will continue to generate inequality, and for ignoring the power of corporations. TUCA is part of the Development Platform of the Americas (PLADA), a network involving feminists, environmentalists and peasants, which proposes a programme for workers and communities, developed through a long, participatory process taking a bottom-up approach and adopts a regional and counter-hegemonic perspective as an alternative to the neo-liberal development path (TUCA, 2019). TUCA argues that just transition must also ensure the preservation of the commons and food and energy sovereignty, supports alliances with social and political movements, questions the distribution of wealth, challenges GDP-based measurements of development and profit driven growth, and calls for deepening participatory democracy. Just transition strategies of unions in the Global South are also beset by internal tensions. COSATU, for example, has developed a range of proposals intended to put South Africa on a sustainable development path that benefits workers, communities and those suffering poverty, including: the transformation of the state-owned energy company ESKOM; expansion of renewable energy production, such as solar panels; compensatory measures for workers and communities affected by the coal transition; and the construction of electric
Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change 215 vehicle manufacturing plants. At the same time, COSATU gives support to ‘clean’ coal and extending the life of power plants using fossil gas from fracking.
DIFFERENT UNION IDENTITIES, NATIONAL CONTEXTS AND SECTORS Underlying distinct union strategies are their different strengths, sectoral identities and national contexts, as exemplified in Poland and Germany in relation to the phasing out of coal. In Poland, with some of the highest levels of GHGs (416m tons) in Europe and a relatively low overall union density, at 12 per cent, the coal sector, employing about 80,000, is 100 per cent unionised. Here, the Polish union NSZZ Solidarność, in denial of human-induced climate change, opposes green transition measures and any change in relations between society and nature. Germany too has a relatively low overall level of unionisation, at 17 per cent, as well as the highest GHGs in Europe in terms of tons of CO2 equivalent (936m). However, as a coordinated market economy, Germany is characterised by strong networks of social institutions, including employer associations and unions, embedded in the constitution and regulating economic action. Thus, despite the low unionisation rate, unions play a critical role, particularly in the coal sector, which is 80 per cent unionised in the German Industrial Union for Mining, Chemistry and Energy (IG BCE), with its 650,000 members, representing 10 per cent of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB or Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) members. In contrast to Solidarność, IG BCE, whilst arguing for the continuity of the fossil regime, seeks to minimise compliance costs, accepting that some transformation of jobs and transfer of workers is inevitable though subject to negotiation with unions and requiring more state responsibility towards workers put at risk (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020). In this respect, the German union position can be regarded as a weak version of ecological modernisation. However, in comparison to the numbers employed in the Polish coal sector and the 330,000 people employed in renewables in Germany, the German coal sector employs only about 20,000, two-thirds of whom go into retirement by 2030, so that a just and well-planned phase out is possible without significant harmful effects for those currently working in the sector. Unlike the coal sector, strategies are generally more positive and supportive of measures addressing climate change in sectors critically important to the realisation of a green economy and thus anticipating employment gains, such as construction. This is reflected in the BWI’s embrace of the green transition not only as an employment creator but also as an opportunity for deeper greening by switching to environmentally friendly building materials such as wood and embedding sustainable forestry within a circular economy, as pursued by the Swedish GS union. Between countries, construction union approaches also diverge. In Italy, for example, FILLEA-CGIL (the Federation of Wood, Building and Industry Workers, part of the second-largest union in Europe, the Italian General Confederation of Labour), underpinned by its historically radical political identity, profoundly questions the underlying economic rationale by challenging the construction industry to replace high-carbon cement and stop building for building’s sake, exemplifying radical transformation (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020). In contrast, as partners of government and employers, the Danish United Federation of Danish Workers, 3F, which covers the construction sector, and the German Industrial Union in building, agriculture and environment, IG BAU, are involved in the formulation of green transition policies through social partnership. Their institutionalised relationship with employers and the
216 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work government is designed to prevent conflict so contributes to a consensual response to climate change. In these examples, therefore, unions see responsibility for the structural changes required as dependent on either social partner negotiation, along the lines of the European social model, or, as in the Italian example, on the socialisation of the means of production. IndustriALL, which embraces unions in sectors subject to major change in order to reduce their carbon footprint and environmental impact, including the automotive and steel industries, adopts a mix of strategies. Whilst emphasising the roles of private corporations and the profit drive in climate change, IndustriALL proposes social dialogue and multi-stakeholder just transition strategies driven by governments and involving employers, calling on multinational corporations to adopt sustainability policies and begin to decarbonise production and supply chains. This reflects individual union responses to environmental dilemmas, which can be both varied and multi-layered as, even if unions accept the integration of environmental sustainability in their industrial relations agenda, many still depend on partnership with private capital to combine environmental and labour protection. If private investment in the green economy is available and public resources are unavailable or insufficient, institutional cooperation between firms, unions and public authorities is seen as a just transition enabling factor. This situation is apparent in the case of ENEL, the second-largest electricity company in Europe, employing 75,000 people worldwide and regarded as having good industrial relation practices. In 2017 ENEL announced its Future-e Program, with a plan to close all its coal and lignite generation plants by 2030, intending to become the world’s first ‘truly green energy giant’ and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The programme, which involves the reconversion of 23 power stations and closure of two large coal power plants, has significant employment implications and unions were initially critical, especially of the lack of information and their scarce involvement, putting forward proposals for a gradual approach to decommissioning, adjustment and new investment in plants. The Italian union partners then entered into a social dialogue with ENEL on a just transition framework agreement, with provisions for a recruitment plan that uses traineeships to ensure knowledge transfer of competences of older towards younger workers and dedicated training measures to retain qualifications and employability and create new skills (Clarke and Lipsig-Mummé, 2020).
CHALLENGES AND DILEMMAS An important challenge is the jobs versus environment dilemma whereby unions strive to protect jobs at an environmental cost, representing a defensive and conservative as opposed to proactive and progressive position with regard to climate action. Union concern both to protect employment and make jobs more environmentally responsible, as with the phasing out of coal power generation in Australia, can result in a focus away from social aspects towards emphasising a ‘technological fix’, such as carbon capture and storage innovations or ‘clean’ coal uses as part of an ‘energy mix’, advocated for example by IndustriALL (Stevis et al., 2018). In other sectors, union involvement in favour of innovation can be a positive force for introducing environmental technologies either through bargaining or disseminating information. For instance, instead of fighting to preserve existing jobs, autoworkers might bargain for a strategy of public investment in the production of ecologically sustainable vehicles. Unions may also adopt contradictory climate change policies, as exemplified by the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) in relation to Norwegian petroleum extraction (Houeland et al., 2020).
Workers and labour movements in the fight against climate change 217 A prominent example of union division on the jobs versus environment dilemma is illustrated by the pipeline in the US from the Tar Sands in Canada. This has been questioned as being in labour’s interest by the Transport Workers Union and the Amalgamated Transit Union, whilst the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the US made up of 55 national and international unions and representing more than 12 million workers, took no position. The LNS, which promotes ecologically sustainable policies, good jobs and a just transition in the US, has bemoaned the absence of a coordinated and proactive response to climate change from organised labour though this provides labour’s greatest opportunity to reconstruct the economy. These dichotomies – jobs versus the environment, technical innovation versus social unionism, and alternative strategies, including public investment, a just transition, a new deal and eco-socialism – mirror challenges faced by the labour movement globally and give rise to divisions within it. The cases given exemplify the dilemmas faced by unions, including: their role as environmental actors; how far they engage with market-based technological solutions; the effectiveness of social dialogue on environmental issues; differences between sectors set to be phased out to reduce emissions and those presented with new employment opportunities; and whether to depend on private capital or public intervention. However, as exemplified in this chapter, whilst increasing prominence is given to just transition interventions by unions in the Global North, including the European Union countries, the US, Canada and Australia, far less attention is given to the actions of unions in the Global South, whether Africa, Latin America or Asia, where climate change is having severe and devastating consequences.
CONCLUSIONS Just transition symbolises the possibility of an equitable and environmentally sustainable way of organising the economy and society, recalibrating the relationship between humans and nature. Its different interpretations by labour and non-labour organisations represent radically different visions of environmental sustainability and economic and social justice, amounting to a contest between, on the one hand, preserving the economic and social order and, on the other, reversing the earth’s ecological imbalance and establishing a fair distribution of resources and wealth. Within the labour movement, the contestation reflects different perspectives on the nature of the challenge posed to the capitalist economic model, ranging from within-system environmental and social reform proposals to a complete transformation based on eco-socialist ideals. Struggles over the definition of just transition and evidence from its implementation by unions reveal that it is not a fixed notion but is rather defined and redefined in practice. Currently, the concept is, to a large extent, informed and shaped by the experiences and perspectives of labour in the Global North in a process orchestrated by global labour unions involved in the regulatory space of international climate governance and with limited involvement of non-European affiliate organisations and the rank-and-file union membership. Just transition has been mainstreamed within the UNFCCC process and ‘popularised’, but lack of direct worker involvement and the small number of exemplary practical union initiatives imply limited embedding of the agenda within the labour movement. Empowering workers for a proactive role, however, is crucial if a just transition grounded in the realities of their expe-
218 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work riences and responding to their needs is to take place and succeed against other stakeholder interests (Cha et al., 2022). Such a just transition is not only important for economic and social justice but also to ensure effective climate action. Even if planned emission reduction strategies are implemented, the IPCC predicts that temperatures will continue to rise throughout the twenty-first century. Evidence suggests that internationally agreed targets need to become more ambitious as global warming and sea level rises are accelerating, with some estimates suggesting that temperatures could increase by 3°C degrees by 2100 (IPCC, 2018). A critical question is the extent to which adaptation measures proposed through the ecological modernisation of the economy represent an adequate response in the face of the need for more radical and rapid mitigation measures to tackle the causes of climate change. How can a ‘green growth’ strategy based on the introduction of sustainability measures and ‘greener’ technologies produce a zero-carbon economy without changing the profit motive driving excessive increases in carbon emissions? These very real dilemmas faced by unions and the challenges of implementing just transition in practice show how slow the pace of change is likely to be unless climate change is treated as a true emergency.
REFERENCES Cha, J. M, Stevis, D., Vachon, T. E., Price, V. and Brescia-Weiler, M. (2022) A Green New Deal for all: the centrality of a worker and community-led just transition in the US, Political Geography, 95 (102594). Clark, B. Foster, J. B. and York, R. (2010) The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York: NYU Press. Clarke L. and Lipsig-Mummé, C. (eds.) (2020) Trade unions, climate Change and just transition, European Journal of Industrial Relations, special issue, 26:4. Felli, R. (2014) An alternative socio-ecological strategy? International trade unions’ engagement with climate change, Review of International Political Economy, 21:2, 372–398. Glasgow Climate Dialogues (2021) Just Transition – Voices of the Global South, Event Report, 9 September, hosted by the Scottish Government. Houeland, C., Jordhus-Lier, D. and Angell, F. H (2020) Solidarity tested: the case of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO‐Norway) and its contradictory climate change policies, Area, 53:3, 413–421. ILO (2015) Guidelines for a just transition towards environmentally sustainable economies and societies for all, Geneva: International Labour Organisation. IPCC (2018) Summary for Policymakers. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty, Geneva, Switzerland: World Meteorological Organization. Morena, E., Krause, D., and Stevis, D. (2019) Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World, London: Pluto Press. Pachauri, R. K., Mayer, L. and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (eds.) (2015) Climate change 2014: Synthesis Report, Geneva, Switzerland: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Räthzel, N. and Uzzell, D. (2013) Trade Unions in the Green Economy, London, New York: Routledge. Stevis, D. Uzzell, D. Räthzel, N. (eds.) (2018) The labour-nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism, Globalisations, special issue, 15:4. TUCA (2019) Plada X 2030 Agenda, Trade Union Confederation of the Americas. Velicu, I. and Barca, S. (2020) The just transition and its work of inequality, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 16:1, 263–273.
17. Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe Dario Azzellini, Sebastian Brandl and Ingo Matuschek
INTRODUCTION Today’s work-based societies are going through several transformations: work is becoming more digitised and flexible, as globalisation, demographic shifts, and migration are taking place. How work has to be transformed in order to be up to the challenges of the future and ensure everyone can participate and earn a decent livelihood is a widely discussed topic. However, there is one central gap: the ecological aspects of specific kinds of work, and the potential consequences of respecting ecological limits for work, the labour market, and administration are largely absent from the discussion. At the same time, ecologically focused discourses on sustainability centre on consumers and companies as the key actors – while workers and the work they perform are generally not addressed (Jochum et al. 2019). In contrast to the ‘Human Development Report 2015’ (UNDP 2015), which calls for a transition to sustainable work and defines this as work promoting human development, reducing, or excluding negative impacts for future generations, according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, sustainable work should respect human dignity, promote development, and safeguard the natural and social foundations of future labour (UN 2015a). By no means a fixed concept, ‘sustainable work’ does generally address specific work-related values and measures1 and refers to an understanding of intra- and inter-generational justice. The goal is to uncover the social, ecological, and economical potential of all work, the productive and destructive aspects. Beyond monetary issues, topics such as the uneven distribution of work between North and South and between genders are to be addressed. A basic standard for dignified work that promotes development is defined, culminating in an understanding of sustainable work that involves expanded analysis-based normative standards. (Jochum et al. 2019). The thesis addressed here is that international political discourse generally understands the commitment to justice in the transformation (‘just transition’) as a more or less clear definition of ‘good work’, or referring to the ILO and UN concept of ‘decent work’. However, such approaches do not necessarily lead to governmental action. The following analysis of national sustainability discourses and strategies identifies which values and standards of sustainable work are referred to, to what extent these are based on a critical reflection on work in the respective society, whether other forms of work and their social organisation are called for, similar to the UNDP definition, and whether, therefore, there are identifiable ideas or even a will to overcome the dominant capitalistic and anthropocentric narrowing of the concept of work and the values that underlie it. The empirical base is a study conducted at the University of Applied Labour Studies of the Federal Employment Agency on the national discussion of ‘sustainable work’ in nine European countries (Azzellini 2021). 219
220 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work First, we define the term sustainable work, then we analyse the developments regarding sustainable work in nine European countries along four differentiated orientations. A summarisation of the findings on value standards for sustainable work follows before the conclusions on the different developmental pathways are presented contextualised by a uniform European strategy.
VALUES OF SUSTAINABLE WORK AND DEVELOPMENT Discussions on the productive as well as the destructive potential of paid employment have long been thematised in gender, environmental protection, and sustainability discourses. They focus on a wide range of different concepts of justice and morality. Starting from the ‘basic value’ of gender equality, various socially valorised concepts are problematised in order to take into consideration a variety of activities that are relevant from a social standpoint: the societal recognition of paid vs. unpaid work; differences in the valorisation of paid work with either a feminine (care work) or masculine (industrial work) connotation; inter-generational responsibility; and many other topics. ‘Value-creating’ (paid) work, based on growth and consumption of natural resources, is contrasted with actor-specific attributions of socially necessary work which should be re-evaluated and gain in appreciation. Both social and environmental resources appear threatened by exploitation and destruction in the value-creation process; the overuse and exhaustion of external and internal natural resources, as well as society as a whole, are the consequences of the industrial model of prosperity. Calls for other values as the guiding foundation for change are frequent, such as the symbolic valorisation of nature (for example, CO2 pricing schemes) and society (for example, including unpaid work under social insurance;) and beyond. They sum up in an effort to make all labour realities visible by expanding the definition of work. The value standards inherent within this perspective, and the call to design a sustainable concept of work have been partially reflected in international documents and agreements (such as in the UNDP report (2015), the UN resolution ‘Transforming our World’ (2015b) and the ILO report ‘Work for a Brighter Future’ (2019)) without developing any fundamental power to shape policy. However, they are potential points of reference for national sustainability discourses and official sustainability strategies; actors in civil society refer to them more or less systematically. The EU claims also to root its activities in sustainability; in the current 2020–2027 budget, there are countless sub-goals designed to achieve this purpose, while stricter CO2 reduction targets are proclaimed and a European Green Deal are addressed (Azzellini 2021). Reflections on this topic in different European countries are very diverse, and sustainability debates are heterogeneous. This goes beyond just different national and regional problem areas (unemployment/labour force participation, informal work vs. regulated labour markets, environmental standards, migration and ageing, energy policy impacts on the labour market, etc.). There are different standards for how work and social insurance should be organised, as well as its (gender-based) foundation. We differentiate between the following social systems: Liberal Anglo- Saxon, Conservative, or continental European (Rhine Capitalism), Nordic or social democratic Scandinavian, the rudimentary or Mediterranean welfare states and Eastern European transition states, as an expansion of the basic topology outlined by Esping-Andersen (1990), with consequences for the enacted and de facto labour regulations and the way in
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 221 which public sectors are linked with individual needs, etc. All these factors structure the public debates on the nexus between work and sustainability, as well as the values discussed in the transformation to sustainable development, facing very different requirements in different countries. The UNDP report (2015) focuses on the development of innovative technologies for more energy- and resource-efficient forms of work and production in the transition to a green economy. Such eco-innovations are certainly important for sustainable work and production. However, the goal of the UNDP definition and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to understand sustainable work as a comprehensive social and ecological transformation of work-oriented societies which includes not only technological and economic innovations, but also many other aspects: ecological sustainability, human dignity, meaningfulness, etc. – a framework to be filled with content in the political, economic, and public discourse. Accordingly, practices must be developed, implemented, and promoted. Country-specific contexts, conditions, requirements, and needs will result in different answers. Several central aspects of sustainable work as a guiding principle refer to the interaction of ecology and work; these aspects are likewise governing rules for this article: 1. ‘Sustainable work’ reduces the conceptual understanding of development not to economic or technological aspects, but rather connects to the guiding principle of decent work (ILO 2016). Work should originate from the needs and potential of the subjects, and not only provide social and economic security, but also open up opportunities for personal development: ‘work can enhance human development when policies expand productive, remunerative and satisfying work opportunities, enhance workers’ skills and potential and ensure their rights, safety and well-being’ (UNDP 2015, 1). 2. Such work is based on the ability to reproduce the labour force and life energy. Accordingly, work must be ecologically sustainable, take into account the capacities of ecological systems, and not endanger the (re)productive capabilities of nature (UNDP 2015, 137) in order to secure dignified work that will promote development for future generations. Negative ecological consequences of work must be minimised, and processes must be careful and reduced, if needed, in light of the threats facing ecological systems and over-exploitation of many (renewable) resources. 3. The guiding principle of sustainable work attempts to expand the definition of work, by eliminating the artificial separation between productive and reproductive, (de)commodified, formal, and informal work in order to include all types of activity. ‘From a human development perspective, the notion of work is broader and deeper than that of jobs or employment alone’ and includes ‘care work, voluntary work and such creative work as writing or painting’ (UNDP 2015, 3). The transformation must overcome separations and hierarchies established between these types of activities, and consider their interdependency. 4. The economy, social considerations, and ecology should be thought of as a whole and not applied individually in spheres conceptualised as separate from one another. Sustainable business – even including the concept of growth (see SDG 8) – should not be considered in isolation, or reduced to a focus solely on value creation or generating added value, since this does not conceptualise the economy as a whole and does not take into account its destructive potential. An expanded concept of work in a sustainable economy addresses
222 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work safeguarding opportunities for (re)productive interaction between humans and between humans and nature. The transition to sustainable work follows different values and standards than work in an industrial and service-oriented society, which fundamentally addresses only material well-being and perpetual quantitative growth. Whether such a transition itself represents a value of adaptability or versatility, and therefore represents a new overarching standard, should be discussed. Respective national discourses are taking steps to do so.
NATIONAL SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES AND HOW THEY RELATE TO WORK The following section illustrates how work is addressed in nationally specific, official governmental, and civil society sustainability discourses and strategies (and contrary perspectives), and which key values can be identified as underlying these discourses. Discussions surrounding sustainability and climate change overlap with one another, with the latter occasionally appearing more pressing in national sustainability discourse, and with addressing this topic often being understood as pivoting to a sustainable development path. Ecological challenges have become an important part of national strategic discourse. The EU activities seem to serve as an impetus, point of reference, and resource for legitimation. Work is discussed in very different ways in sustainability discourses across Europe. Multiple clusters have become clear, in some cases interacting or overlapping with one another: (a) Sustainability without any reference to work. (b) Green jobs: sustainability as an opportunity for the economy, companies, and employment. (c) ‘Climate jobs unlike green jobs’ and just transition. (d) Ensuring prosperity after the initial transformation. Here we address only one or two countries in more detail for each cluster (see in depth Azzellini 2021). National Discussions: Clusters Sustainability without any reference to work (a) Countries pursuing environmental targets (primarily) without any central reference to work (or jobs) make up the first cluster. The Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom,2 for instance, rely on environmental policies by omitting green jobs as a main structure of greening policies. Their environmental policies tend to focus on renewable energy sources, using resources efficiently, and climate change. Some aspects of work, such as increased employment or global supply chains, are addressed in a more additive fashion, without establishing any closer links. Renewable sources are the base of Norway’s electricity structure, which leads in new passenger vehicle registrations with over 50 per cent being electric vehicles. But it is also Europe’s largest oil producer with around 1.7 million barrels per day in 2019. Profits are used
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 223 to convert to renewable energy or funnelled into a national fund which only divested from coal after criticism. In 2019, the parliament resolved to de-invest from carbon, but continued to award new licences for oil drilling and retains its investments in multinational oil companies. Sustainable employment governmental policies are rare, like targeted measures to create ‘green jobs’ or ensure the quality of employment or sustainable work. Environmental movements, trade unions, and the church promote goals such as expanding green jobs. Although there is a huge potential to create green jobs based on renewable resources, the high level of technological expertise, and extensive funding, thus far the campaign to do so has not been particularly successful. Employment during the transition is a weak topic in climate policies, against general commitments to highly qualified work. Economic and political actors are committed to a ‘technological fix’, a climate strategy focused on technology, including the high-quality work that comes from it. As in other countries, the transformation is a social and technical one, and is built on a changing technological infrastructure, political regime, and economic structures. Despite all the existing national differences, in this cluster of countries the value of sustainable work is rarely addressed on a strategic level, although civil society and the academic sector at least require its inclusion to some extent. (b)
Green jobs: sustainability as an opportunity for the economy, companies, and employment Portugal, France, Spain,3 or the United Kingdom/Scotland focus on ‘green jobs’4 Sustainability is generally translated into a green growth strategy; according to this, the number of green jobs should increase. With respect to the economy, however, options for industrial development are emphasised, while the aspect of employment is often treated as less significant. Although there are country-specific differences between the government, business, and civil society (including trade unions), generally the development of a sustainable economy is associated with work and with the creation of green jobs. This does not extend, however, beyond paid work in the narrower sense; overall the social and ecological implications of work and structural transformation of the work-oriented society as a whole are addressed to a lesser extent. Green jobs focus on ecological modernisation and the idea of a technological fix; jobs associated with natural conservation and ‘greening’ jobs in France, or even jobs in the nuclear industry (UK) are included. To what extent ‘greening jobs’ intend to initiate or have already caused any transformation is unclear. Ultimately, quantitative aspects of work are emphasised over qualitative ones, even though they are associated with adjustments to qualification, as is the case in Scotland. The ecological implications of green jobs, what their quality will be, and whether they will initiate a long-lasting, socially sustainable increase in employment, remain uncertain. Clearly, traditional economic perspectives are dominant, with stronger growth and a potential increase in jobs by more ecologically friendly technology, including the circular economy. Aspects such as dignified work are more marginal,and are often demanded by trade unions and movements without these actors having any conceptual focus on the standards of sustainable work (Littig 2017). (c) ‘Climate jobs unlike green jobs’ and just transition Cluster C includes a perspective of civil society regarding the alleged transformational quality of green jobs: they are important and necessary, but unable to stop climate change. Only
224 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work climate jobs cut emissions and decelerate climate change. This is an alternative to the fixation on current job or job growth and the technological fix described above. The values of sustainable work are addressed mainly by trade unions and/or civil society. Across multiple countries, the focus is on a ‘just transition’. The goal of the Portuguese campaign transição justa is to establish a sustainable strategy to create jobs and good working conditions that do not negatively impact the poor. In contrast to Great Britain or Germany, for instance, environmental organisations and not trade unions initiated the movement, although the latter participate in some cases. Social justice and labour and environmental justice are central in the transition to a zero-CO2 economy, and both the burdens and profits of climate change must be distributed. The climate policy should care less about investor interests and create clean jobs and protect employees and their communities creating alternatives to the precarious working conditions in Portugal. Similar coalitions exist in France. Calls there come closest to the values of sustainable work and are close on a conceptual level to a just transition in the calls for a nation-wide sustainability strategy including a reduction of work hours. The ecological transition is associated with issues surrounding employment, retraining, and continued education, and will require jobs for the climate and a social as well an ecological transformation. This spectrum regarding pathways out of the social and ecological crisis states that the ecological transformation is complementary with creating jobs in an important scale and a professional reconversion to retain existing jobs while creating high-quality new work. In the Netherlands, trade unions (FNV) and environmental organisations have been working more closely together since 2013 despite existing conflicts. Plans for a CO2 tax are countered with arguments about preserving jobs, while references are made to the insufficient quality of new jobs. At the heart of the Spanish just transition strategy are conventions with broad national and regional support (Convenios de Transición Justa) that, inspired by the directives of the ILO, are based on investments in local endogenous economic, social, and ecological resources. The draft of the law on climate change and the energy transition includes demands of trade unions. The EU intends to pursue a viable Green New Deal which has financial and technical backing and which contains fixed, auditable obligations to reduce emissions (incl. an EU CO2 tax) as well as an EU fund to promote the just transition for the regions most impacted by decarbonisation. Discussions about just transition have also been ongoing in Scotland for quite some time. Since 2018, they have been underscored with a just transition commission and public meetings on climate change. Contrary to the UK, the Scottish government is pursuing a concept of ‘fair work’ including qualification as the heart of its economic strategy and intends to be a global leader in this area by 2025. Local efforts to mobilise funding for climate protection measures are increasing, and trade unions and environmental associations are setting the agenda (Robins et al. 2019, 3). Focused first and foremost on global climate justice, initially environmental and (later) increasingly trade union movements have developed common perspectives on the transition across Europe that do not negatively impact workers and socially disadvantaged groups. The issue was also incorporated into EU declarations and national programmes, such as in Spain and Scotland, as a social counterpoint to energy policy. Although there is no uniform interpretation of just transition, understandings originating from trade unions have emerged since the 1990s (Rosemberg 2013), as well as the understanding of just transition as a fair and equitable
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 225 process towards a post-carbon society, related to basic justice ideas of ethnicity, income, gender, etc. within both developed and developing contexts (McCauley and Heffron 2018, 2). This can be considered a basic perspective shared in many countries, although not all actors agree with it. Ensuring prosperity after the initial transformation (d) Since the end of state socialism in the 1990s, the Eastern European countries have been undergoing radical transformations. Debates surrounding sustainability are seen ambivalently as a second frontier of transformation, while experiences with unemployment, de-industrialisation and the devaluation of qualifications threaten to continue. The terms just transition, green jobs, or ecologically and socially sustainable employment are not included in the 2020 reform programme of the Slovakian government and appear only occasionally in other government documents. Sustainability is usually referred to in the context of public financing, for instance by the EU Just Transition fund. Environmentally relevant professional and continued training measures focus only on strengthening the competencies of the workforce in the public sector (green procurement) and are also poorly funded (Azzellini 2021). The main reference is to adapt to market requirements. Economic growth and environmental destruction are accounted for separately. Ecological measures include promoting electro-mobility through purchasing incentives and announcing programmes to replace old boilers or for energy-efficient building renovations. Concessions for renewable energy projects are auctioned with the goal to achieve expansion targets with larger projects. Sustainable work does not play a role at all. Contrary to the focus of European trade unions on shaping the market, the aim of Polish trade unions is primarily to protect employees against the negative consequences of transformation in the sector, considering the high importance of domestic coal. They argue that a green economy is of a totally different relevance for each country and region. Monetary and social costs of a transition would unacceptably be borne mainly by countries such as Poland. The government focuses primarily on the private sector, with the assumption of ongoing economic growth. Accordingly, programmes and declarations on employment remain vague, and always aim to improve prosperity. Public debate and a movement for an ecologically and socially just transition develop only very slowly and without trade unions. The sometimes empirically overlapping four approaches to work in sustainability discourses exemplify different focal areas although the joint goal remains decarbonisation. The paths to development outline either the same or deviant timelines for relevant official governmental or trade union activities, different concepts of civil society engagement, and different tendencies towards a European or global perspective on social and ecological transformation. The following section discusses the extent to which this affects the question of values and value standards.
VALUES OF SUSTAINABLE WORK AND DEPENDENCIES BETWEEN THEMATISED VALUES It is clear that most European governments align their planned measures for a sustainable ecological transformation, including strategies for related jobs, to the formal framework of the
226 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work EU, in particular to the 2050 goal of a modern, prosperous, competitive, and climate-neutral economy. This also applies to Norway. Sustainability and climate protection have become part of governmental programming. However, the clusters show that work is discussed differently. Climate protection and sustainable development are frequently not associated with the topic of work, despite the fact that green jobs represent the foremost growth area of the labour market. This makes evident two known problem areas for the intersection between work and environmental protection: first, the quantity of new jobs is usually modest, and in some cases, they are defined in an imprecise and objectively questionable manner. Second, there are approaches to qualification for green jobs, but overall, the quality of the work appears fairly low, and in some cases precarious (Azzellini 2021). The values of sustainable work are outlined in the first two clusters under green jobs (similar to the EU programme) as resource-efficient, low-CO2 jobs and associated employment opportunities, but less so as dignified work that promotes development, according to the UNDP (2015) principles. Strategies focused on technology and economic structure are prior, although they do not conceptualise standards for work quality. The transition to the third cluster is, in some cases, a fluid one. Despite many references made to green jobs, there are qualitative differences in the way work is talked about. Without a consensus on how to define climate jobs, dignified work that promotes development, or a just transition in detail, discussions have been driven primarily by environmental movements and civil society, and have excluded trade unions. Governmental programmes are criticised and suggestions for how to design them are developed jointly. In line with Agenda 21, this is evidence of the basic value of social involvement in the course of sustainable development. The following three topics can be differentiated in this context: (1)
Quality of (Paid) Work and Justice
The criticism of green job strategies reflects overarching grievances such as poor, often precarious working conditions, insufficient qualification, and high (youth) unemployment in relevant labour markets. Evidenced to a certain extent in France, with respect to Italy, Spain, and Portugal we can assume that high youth unemployment will advance initiatives and projects focused on sustainable work from civil society: socially sustainable employment, projects, and companies anchored in a specific territorial place are first and foremost among them. This encompasses values of sustainable work, without explicitly referring to the concept. There is an insistence on regional opportunities for dignified work that promotes development, while labour-related migration from these countries, which is an ongoing issue and was intensified by the 2008/9 financial crisis, is problematised. Doing so addresses endogenous development opportunities and both intra- and inter-generational justice in two ways: qualified and secure paid work and access to such work, in particular for young people. (2)
Just Transition as Participation in Shaping Structural Change
The aim of just transition is to link social justice and labour and environmental justice with the ability of all involved to participate in the process. An environmentally friendly transformation of the economy and society should not result in a loss of jobs, negative impacts on working conditions, or on the poor. This is reflected in discussions on, and measures related
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 227 to economic structures, such as funding (NL, Germany, Scotland) the withdrawal from the coal industry without harming the regions affected and their populations. Poland, in contrast, reverses the argument into a long-term continuation of the coal industry (Morena, Krause, and Stevis 2020). In Spain and Scotland, relevant just transition agreements are sealed by political conventions. EU declarations also use the term when addressing social compensation for the energy transformation through replacement jobs. Creating jobs remains in the foreground both in governmental programmes and, above all, for trade unions and for civil society, albeit in climate-sensitive sectors. The ultimate objective according to ATTAC France seems to be a professional reconversion, in which existing jobs are retained and new, above all high-quality, jobs are created. (3)
Demands for a Transformation in Production and Consumption, Including a New Value for Societal Labour
Civil society approaches that aim to change the regime of paid labour and enact a more comprehensive transformation of society are more far-reaching. They evidence a more comprehensive orientation towards the values of sustainable work, even if these are not addressed in an explicit or coherent manner. They focus on fundamental, systematic change. The central question is the intrinsic value of societal labour outside of value creation organised under a capitalistic society. Another topic addressed in this context is how to reverse resource-intensive patterns of production, mobility, and consumption. Work-related values are not restricted to the sphere of paid labour but are also taken up in an expanded perspective on work. This opens up the topic of the meaningfulness of (paid) work, and identifies a nexus between socially sustainable labour relationships and forms of organisation, and work that secures ecological production.
CONCLUSIONS The perspectives of the single clusters – sustainability without any reference to work, green jobs, climate jobs, and just transition and securing prosperity – are founded on (strategic) value orientations that reflect the prosperity typology, among other things:5 in Eastern Europe, jobs are the traditional foundation of a comparably modest type of prosperity, and raw materials, energy, and industrial jobs are of central importance. While the first transformation from a socialist planned economy to a market economy is still ongoing, launching a climate-friendly economy is all the more difficult. Economically weaker countries such as Portugal, follow an opportunity-oriented transformation strategy centrally aligned around EU specifications and documents. The Netherlands, a hybrid in terms of economic power and the claims it makes, does both. They underscore the opportunities for the Dutch economy and formulate an international claim to leadership. Spain and Portugal base their activities below the governmental level on endogenous, in some cases regional perspectives on the circular economy. Participatory claims are significant in this arena. Just as in Scotland, the central role of ‘governance without government’ forms a national political framework that facilitates successful, independent regional policies.
228 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Nordic states secure their strategic decarbonisation programmes by exporting their raw materials. The quantity and quality of employment are not central topics of discussion. Trusting in the force of the market and engaging in social partnership focused on a ‘technical fix’ depoliticise the sustainability discourse, which is currently making somewhat of an about face due to Fridays for Future. Overall, on the official governmental level and in national sustainability strategies, a (critical) reflection on work, including the actors and dynamics involved in value creation or destruction, does not extend beyond the material and energy-related causes of climate change. The social organisation of work, other forms of labour, or value orientations are not addressed, or are addressed only in reference to the SDGs. Technology and its uses, in contrast, play a central role – and therefore legitimate references to its limited job creation potential exist. The UNDP report, SDGs, and EU strategies serve as points of reference in national discourses, in particular, for the civil society actors involved in them. When implementing sustainability, the governmental focus continues to be on innovative technologies for energy and resource-efficient business during the transition to a green economy.6 Below the level of national sustainability strategies and programmes, there are some regional instances, and mainly in civil society and in trade union environments where other labour values are addressed. Broader approaches that overcome the capitalist and anthropocentric definition of work as well as the values that underlie it, however, are much more difficult to discern. Discussions of (single) values of sustainable work depends primarily on the precarious situation of young people, especially, on the labour market, and on the predictable consequences of structural change accelerated through policy in order to protect the climate. Beyond addressing basic values of sustainability (generational and gender justice), there are only demands for the social recognition of unpaid labour and criticism of how different kinds of labour are valorised and socially recognised (in particular, industrial labour, and increasingly also paid work in the service industries), or at most an incidental appreciation for care work, etc. This often entails merely a reference to the SDGs and an emphasis on gender justice in labour. The existing fundamental criticism of the predominant models of work and prosperity and their growth perspectives is as of yet barely relevant for action. Any valorisation of unpaid labour in the sense of recognising or materially funding such labour seems to still be very distant. A comprehensive social and ecological transformation of the work-oriented society and its values remains largely the subject of overlapping debates in academia and civil society, and, in some cases, in trade union discourses and initiatives. The valorisation of work and the values of sustainable work, therefore, are occurring only in relatively enclosed spaces, and in any case as stimuli for future restructuring processes. Thus far, any broader recourse to these does not seem to have any majority political backing, nor to be needed for the valorisation of capital in production policies. Any impulses for discussing individual sustainable labour values come from outside the country-specific individuation from precarious employees and their representatives on the one hand, and, on the other, from environmental associations, civil society, and trade unions in discussions regarding climate-related transformation and securing prosperity. Labour values play different roles: as the means to social stability and as a reference to equal opportunity and distributive justice, and as a reference for basic values in the sustainability discourse (generational and gender justice). Any further discussion or use of the values of sustainable labour does not (yet) seem to extend beyond small niches.
Sustainable work: national perspectives and the valorisation of work in Europe 229
NOTES 1 2 3 4 5
6
Value understood as having a double meaning: a valued or desired good, and a standard used to guide actions and decisions. These example countries can be associated with other clusters under different indicators (see below). In Spain, references are also made to regional cooperatives and small companies, for instance, as well as sustainable agriculture, see cluster C. There is no generally accepted definition of green jobs, but the term commonly refers to paid work that is resource-efficient and low in CO2 emissions as per EU definitions. The size and strength of individual national economies also play an important role in how work is discussed, and not in a manner congruent to the prosperity type. France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany, each make their own claim to leadership with respect to the strategies, mechanisms, technologies, and expertise necessary for a sustainable transformation. The differences between the strategies seem to impact the respective role of labour administration as well, which plays a more marginal role in the debate. In general, the focus is on supporting and implementing programmes focused on ecologically minded professional qualification.
REFERENCES Azzellini, Dario. 2021. ‘Sustainable Work. Country Study of Discourses, Policies, and Actors. An Investigation of Nine European Countries: France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Slovakia’. Working Paper of the Specialist Group on Sociology and Labour Market Policy of the HdBA 1. Mannheim/Schwerin, Germany: University of Applied Labour Science. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ILO – International Labour Organization. 2016. ‘What Is a Green Job?’ ILO (blog). https://www.ilo.org/ global/topics/green-jobs/news/WCMS_220248/lang--en/index.htm. ILO – International Labour Organization. 2019. Work for a Brighter Future – Global Commission on the Future of Work. Geneva: International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-- -dgreports/---cabinet/documents/publication/wcms_662410.pdf. Jochum, Georg, Thomas Barth, Sebastian Brandl, Ana Cardenas Tomazic, Sabine Hofmeister, Beate Littig, Ingo Matuschek, Ulrich Stephan, and Günter Warsewa. 2019. ‘Sustainable Work. The Social-Ecological Transformation of the Working Society. Position Paper of the Working Group ‘Sustainable Work’ of the German Committee Future Earth’. 19/2. Hamburg: German Committee Future Earth. https://www.dkn-future-earth.org/imperia/md/assets/dkn/files/dkn_working_paper _2019_jochum_engl_v2__1.pdf. Littig, Beate. 2017. ‘Good Green Jobs for Whom? A Feminist Critique of the Green Economy’. In Sherilyn Macgregor (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, pp. 318–30. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/ 9781315886572-22/good-green-jobs-beate-littig. McCauley, Darren, and Raphael Heffron. 2018. ‘Just Transition: Integrating Climate, Energy and Environmental Justice’. Energy Policy, 119: 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.014. Morena, Eduardo, Dunja Krause, and Dimitris Stevis (eds.) 2020. Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift towards a Low-Carbon World. London: Pluto Press. Robins, Nick, Andy Gouldson, William Irwin, and Andrew Sudmant. 2019. ‘Investing in a Just Transition in the UK: How Investors Can Integrate Social Impact and Place-Based Financing into Climate Strategies’. UK: Grantham Research Institute at LSE and the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds. Rosemberg, Anabella. 2013. ‘Developing Global Environmental Union Policies through the International Trade Union Confederation’. In Nora Räthzel and David Uzzell (eds), Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, pp. 15–28. London and New York: Routledge.
230 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work UN – United Nations. 2015a. ‘Sustainable Development Goals’. United Nations. 2015. www.un.org/sus tainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. UN – United Nations. 2015b. ‘Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015’. UN. https://www.un.org/ga/ search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E. UNDP – United Nations Development Programme (ed.) 2015. Human Development Report 2015. Work for Human Development. New York: United Nations Development Programme. https://www.undp .org/publications/human-development-report-2015.
RECOMMENDED READING Azzellini, Dario. 2021. ‘Sustainable Work. Country Study of Discourses, Policies, and Actors. An Investigation of Nine European Countries: France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Slovakia’. Working Paper of the Specialist Group on Sociology and Labour Market Policy of the HdBA 1. Mannheim/Schwerin, Germany: University of Applied Labour Science. Morena, Eduardo, Dunja Krause, and Dimitris Stevis (eds.) 2020. Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift towards a Low-Carbon World. London: Pluto Press. Räthzel, Nora, Dimitris Stevis, and David Uzzell (eds.) 2021. The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Section D. Interdisciplinary approaches
18. Understanding the global political economy of work: insights from labor geography Andrew Herod
INTRODUCTION It is a truism that life is not lived on the head of a pin. As economic actors, workers are both embedded in particular places and embroiled in various relationships across space. As a result, when they engage in political action they must often physically move from one place to another, they must seek to make common cause with workers located elsewhere, or they must develop organizations that can help them to survive and prosper within the geographical bounds of the places in which they live. Whatever else they are, then, workers are geographical creatures. Consequently, understanding their behavior requires taking spatial considerations seriously. To use a cooking metaphor, spatiality must be baked into the analysis from the start, not added as icing at the end, after the “important” work of theorizing the social relations within which workers are embroiled has been completed. The spatial cannot be merely an afterthought to explanations but, rather, must be a central element that requires theorizing for, as Doreen Massey (1995 [1984], p. x) has argued, “The geography of a society makes a difference to the way it works.” Understanding the global political economy of work and workers, in other words, necessitates developing a historico-geographical materialism which recognizes that not only do workers make their own histories, if not under the conditions of their own choosing, but that they also make their own geographies, although similarly not under the conditions of their own choosing. It is this recognition that is at the heart of what has come to be known as Labor Geography. Below I provide an overview of the field of Labor Geography. The chapter is organized as follows. I first offer a brief summary of Labor Geography’s emergence some three decades ago as a way in which to locate workers more centrally into explanations of the making of the economic geography of capitalism. The chapter then details some of Labor Geography’s central concerns with regard to conceptualizing workers as active geographical agents and how they engage with capitalism’s unevenly developed geography as an integral aspect of their social existence. Finally, I examine how the production not just of space but, also, of the geographical scales at which social life is lived is crucial to the exercise of political power by workers. I end with a brief conclusion.
LABOR GEOGRAPHY’S ORIGINS As a field, Labor Geography has its origins in the critical political economy tradition within human geography. Although a handful of geographers (e.g., Cooke, 1985) had previously explored questions of working-class life and politics from a spatial perspective, Labor Geography as a self-identified approach to understanding how capitalism functions really 232
Understanding the global political economy of work 233 began to emerge in the early 1990s as a way to incorporate worker agency into understanding the creation of capitalism’s economic geography. From outside the discipline of Geography it was influenced by the writings of, amongst others, the English historian E.P. Thompson, who published the famous book The Making of the English Working Class in 1963. However, it largely developed as a reaction to how workers had been conceived of within the discipline. Two traditions had predominated. The first of these developed in the early 20th century and drew upon neo-classical economics to explain how economies are organized geographically. In such a view, economic landscapes were understood essentially to be simply reflections of relations of supply and demand, with matters of spatiality included pretty much only in terms of the transportation costs required to move a commodity from one place to another. Additionally, this tradition conceived of labor as merely a factor in the locational decision-making calculus of industrialists, as are land, capital, energy availability, and the like. Such an approach implicitly viewed the making of the economic landscape from the perspective of capitalists – as Massey (1973, p. 34) put it, in such an approach “profit is the criterion, wages are simply labour costs” – and workers were not conceived of as having any agency (Herod, 2018). The second approach had been developing since the late 1960s and marked an effort to challenge the dominance of neo-classical economics by Marxifying Geography and spatializing Marx. Specifically, it argued that explaining capitalism’s economic geography – e.g., comprehending why particular activities locate in some places and not others – demands understanding the internal dynamics of capitalism and how capital accumulation requires that landscapes be made in some ways and not in others. This Marxist approach, then, allowed for a much richer understanding of how matters of place and space are actively manifested in the accumulation process. As a way to integrate the concept of the making of economic landscapes with the accumulation needs of capital, David Harvey (1982), one of the leading Marxist geographers of the day, argued that labor, machinery, raw materials, and so forth need to be brought together in specific places in specific ways. He called such configurations of the economic landscape “spatial fixes.” Given that accumulation relies upon the deliberative praxis of arranging the landscape in particular ways and that different economic actors may desire to see this arrangement unfold in different manners, Harvey’s formulation opened the door to an understanding which saw the production of space as an active part of the story of class struggle rather than the economic landscape being viewed simply as the inert stage upon which class relations play out. If accumulation is to occur, he suggested, then structuring the spatial relations of capitalism in particular ways is just as important as is structuring its social ones. Indeed, the two are deeply interconnected as part of what Soja (1980) called a socio-spatial dialectic. Hence, the economic landscape reflects the social relations of production at the time in which it is made (landscapes produced under feudalism look different from those produced under British industrial capitalism or US post-industrial capitalism) but the way in which the landscape is configured also shapes how social relations unfold – to take but one example, mining capitalists operating in remote areas must “open up” the spaces in which they operate, providing housing for the migrant workers upon whom they rely and transportation infrastructure if they are to get the valuable minerals they seek out of the ground and to market. At the same time, the economic landscape can serve as a sink for surplus capital during crises of accumulation. Consequently, paroxysms of speculative building often occur in cities when manufacturing capital can no longer secure profits from the production of commodities and must seek alternative activities in which to invest – Harvey (1978) described this as capital switching from
234 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work investment in what he termed the “primary circuit” (the production process, in which surplus value is initially extracted) to the “secondary circuit” (the built environment, in which capital can be “parked” until more profitable avenues open back up in the primary sector). Although such theorizing represented a significant development in understanding how capitalism’s spatiality is central to how it operates, the focus of these early Marxist efforts was largely upon the actions of capital. As Harvey (1978, p. 124, emphasis added) put it, it is “capital [that] builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own condition at a particular moment in time, only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time.” In many ways, this approach followed that of how labor history had often been written, at least according to Aronowitz (1990, p. 171), who argued that “The history of capitalism has, typically, been written as a series of narratives unified by the themes of accumulation.” These narratives are marked, he suggested, by a focus upon “mercantile and imperialist interests seeking fresh sources of investment; the scientific and technological revolutions that have driven growth; international rivalries over territory and labor supplies and the multitude of conflicts among fractions of capital that take political forms, such as the struggles for power among capital’s personifications or wars.” In the process, “workers enter the theater of history as abstract labor, factors of production, dependent variables in the grand narratives of crisis and renewal.” Hence, whilst early Marxist geographers managed to link the economic landscape’s form to the machinations of the accumulation process in a way in which neo-classical approaches had failed to do, they did not really give life to workers, who were generally seen simply as variable capital rather than as human beings with cultures, histories, political ambitions, and so forth. In response to this state of affairs, in the 1990s a group of economic geographers influenced by Marxist political economy began arguing for a much more worker-centered view of the making of economic landscapes. Specifically, they contended that not only must capital shape the economic landscape in particular ways so as to ensure that accumulation can occur and that capital can reproduce itself, but that workers also have a vested interest in making sure that the geography of capitalism is made in some ways and not others – as a landscape in which they can survive as opposed to one in which they cannot, for instance. The landscape’s configuration, in other words, is central to workers’ abilities to ensure their own self-reproduction, both biologically and socially. These geographers (I was one of them) therefore set about trying to understand how the fact that workers are embedded in place and embroiled in various spatial structures (such as the lines of power that link diverse work sites across the planet to a corporation’s global headquarters) shapes the possibilities of their actions – enabling some and constraining others – but also how they, in turn, contribute to remaking the geography of capitalism through such actions. Finally, they contended that social life is organized at a number of geographical scales (such as the urban, the national, the global, etc.) and that working people therefore also have a vested interest in trying to organize themselves at different spatial resolutions in different contexts – trans-national solidarity campaigns, for instance, represent instances of workers trying to break out of local or national frames of self-organization and to make links across space with workers who may be located on the other side of the planet. Hence was born the field of Labor Geography (for those interested, Herod, 2010 recounts this history in more detail).
Understanding the global political economy of work 235
LABOR GEOGRAPHY AND THINKING SPATIALLY ABOUT WORKERS Although self-described Labor Geographers have explored many matters concerning place, space, scale, and labor over the past three decades or so, in this section I want to focus upon three themes that, I hope, will provide insight into how thinking about workers as geographical actors provides greater insight into understanding the dynamics of capitalism than does ignoring their spatiality. Engaging With Place The first theme that has driven research within Labor Geography is the simple recognition that the types of work done and the types of workers who do it vary significantly across the economic landscape. This means several things for worker praxis. For one, it means that organizing workers must be sensitive to the geographical contexts within which they are found – are workers concentrated together or are they spread across the landscape and what does this mean for the kinds of relationships they may already have developed amongst themselves and how does that affect their proclivity towards, say, unionization? This is important for, as Southall (1988, p. 466) has argued, efforts to develop solidarity between different workplaces are “a process of coming together, of organizing over space.” For another it involves understanding how local working-class practices are shaped by the places within which they occur and how, in turn, they then shape those places. This requires a more sophisticated understanding of place than has heretofore often been the case. Indeed, the term “place” can refer to at least three different aspects of locality (Agnew, 1987): as location (a point on the Earth’s surface); as locale (a physical arena for everyday life); and as a locus of identity (a focus for personal and collective allegiance and obligation). Each of these has different implications for understanding workers’ behavior. Thus, a place’s physical location determines the legal environment within which its inhabitants must operate – what is lawful in one place may not be somewhere else. For its part, as a locale a place serves as a material setting for everyday life, with its boundaries constantly made and remade by its inhabitants’ activities – shifts in their consumption patterns, for instance, will extend or shrink a place’s economic footprint and connections to other places over time, with all sorts of implications for capitalism’s political economy. Finally, working people can have significant loyalty to a locale (geographers call this fidelity “topophilia” – literally, “love of place”), which can greatly affect how they behave. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of place is important for understanding worker behavior because it underscores the fact that places’ characters are shaped by both internal dynamics and their relationships with other places, which may be close or far away in terms either of physical or organizational distance. Consequently, any place is a “continuously fashioned mélange of meanings, values, and relationships that are effected by shared and ongoing social practices [which] construct, sustain, and transform the context in which economic, social, and political life is produced and reproduced on a daily basis and into which new members are socialized” (Hudson, 2001, p. 267). Moreover, because people and institutions develop in unique (though not untheorizable) ways in diverse locations, the social relationships and institutions that arise in them have a significant degree of local “stickiness,” which affects social behavior by embedding actors in place to a greater or lesser degree. As Storper and Walker (1989, p. 157) have argued, the fact that it
236 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work takes time and spatial propinquity for the central institutions of daily life – family, church, clubs, schools, sports teams, union locals, etc. – to take shape [and that, once established,] these outlive individual participants to benefit, and be sustained by, generations of workers [means that there] is a fabric of distinctive, lasting local communities and cultures woven into the landscape of labor [and capital].
The formation of both labor and capital and their subsequent behavior, then, are distinctively shaped by the social and physical make-up of the places which they inhabit as part of an ongoing socio-spatial dialectic – for instance, are workers able to take control of certain neighborhoods and use this control as a base from which to develop powerful institutions through which they can pursue their political agendas, or are they so dispersed across the built environment that developing collectivities from which they can exercise power is much more difficult? How Geography Complicates Class Analysis The second theme with which Labor Geographers have engaged is that of exploring how economic actors’ embeddedness in place has important implications for their behavior. In the case of capital, there is always a tension between the need to fix assets in place so that accumulation can occur (workplaces must be located somewhere) and to be able to move to new locations should accumulation prospects look better elsewhere. Different forms of capital face this tension in different ways – a steel mill may represent several billion dollars’ worth of sunk costs in a particular place, which makes picking up and moving somewhere else a more weighty decision than in the case of, say, a tailoring operation, which may be more footloose because all that must be moved are a few easily portable sewing machines. Workers face similar decisions, as they too must negotiate their own geographical tensions between fixity and mobility. Hence, when there is no work in a particular location they must consider whether to stay there or move somewhere else, which necessitates evaluating all sorts of things – perhaps leaving the places where their ancestors are buried, disengaging from local social and kinship networks within which they are embedded for who knows what somewhere else, their age (do they feel too old to “start again” somewhere else?), family status (are they married or single?), and so forth. At the same time, there may be broader social forces that shape this decision – workers with mortgages may not be keen simply to abandon the equity in their homes whilst workers who rent their accommodations may be more willing to give up their security deposit for breaking their lease, some workers may have their relocation costs paid for them whilst others do not, etc. This spatial conundrum can spawn tensions between allegiances to place and those to class. On the one hand, workers often organize according to what they perceive to be their class interests, making common cause with other workers across space. But, on the other, they frequently engage in practices of defending their particular places within the broader geography of capitalism. Although these spatial concerns have often been represented simply as a form of false consciousness, recognizing how workers can be differentially embedded in place leads to an appreciation that such defense of place is actually a perfectly rational response to their inability and/or unwillingness to move elsewhere. Thus, workers who are less geographically mobile are probably more likely to become involved in boosterist campaigns to promote their communities as locations for mobile capital investment than are those who are more peripatetic and have less invested in the community, either financially or emotionally. Such
Understanding the global political economy of work 237 boosterism represents a defense of place that may be more significant to such workers than is mobilizing along class lines. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that workers may choose to emphasize class interests at some points in time but place interests at others. Hence, Hudson and Sadler (1986) note that when the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher proposed shutting several UK steel mills in the early 1980s, steelworkers across the nation initially developed a class-based campaign to oppose any closures. Once it became obvious that some mills would indeed be closed, however, they changed tactics in an effort to ensure that their mill stayed open and that other communities’ mills were shuttered – that is to say, they replaced a trans-spatial, class-based response with a highly place-based one. The Impacts of Landscapes’ Path Dependence on Worker Behavior Much as Marx (1963, p. 15) recognized that the encumbrances of the past shape the possibilities for workers to make their own futures, such that “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,” Labor Geographers have considered how workers and capitalists must function within landscapes that they themselves did not create but which nevertheless shape the possibilities for their actions. The spatial configurations of the past, then, are always in conversation with the geographical aims of present-day actors, even as the latter seek to make new landscapes appropriate to their current and future needs which will, in the process of being made, erase the hold that older landscapes have on contemporary social life. Landscapes, in other words, have a certain path dependence to them. Hence, much as an oil tanker may take some time to change course once the captain has given the order to do so, there is also a certain historical momentum to landscapes’ evolution which may enable – but may also constrain – workers’ behavioral possibilities. To amend Marx’s famous dictum, the tradition of all the past landscapes weighs like a nightmare on the landscape-making possibilities of the living. Recognizing that landscapes have a certain degree of path dependence means that they must be understood as active elements in conflicts between capital and labor. Rather than serving as simply the stages upon which political praxis unfolds, Labor Geographers have argued that landscapes must be recognized as constitutive of social behavior. This fact has long been understood by planners. Hence, in the 1920s, Soviet urbanists suggested that cities needed to be designed in different ways compared to how they were built under the old Tsarist government if the regime was to be successful in creating the “new Soviet Man/Woman.” The physical structure of the new “Soviet city,” they averred, had to reflect more egalitarian ideals but would also reinforce them, all whilst gradually eliminating any vestiges of pre-revolutionary social and spatial relations (Bater, 1980). The creators of company towns have likewise understood that shaping the landscape in particular ways can be an essential element in controlling workers, whilst trying to overcome the landscape’s spatial constraints can be central elements in workers’ behavior.
WORKERS AND THE MAKING OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL SCALES OF EXISTENCE One additional issue that Labor Geographers have considered important is that of the making of the geographical scales or spatial resolutions at which institutions and groups of people are
238 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work organized. Seeking to construct various scales of self-organization – as when workers seek to form alliances that operate across space – requires engaging with the unevenly developed economic landscape. One example can perhaps serve as illustration. Up until the 1950s, in the US east coast longshoring industry contract negotiations were conducted on a port-by-port basis – dockers in New York negotiated with New York stevedoring companies, dockers in New Orleans negotiated with New Orleans stevedoring companies, and so forth. With the introduction of containerization into the industry in the 1950s, though, things began to change. In particular, shipping companies first introduced containerization into the port of New York, the nation’s busiest east coast port. Containerization threatened to reduce the demand for longshore labor and so, during a series of strikes and contract negotiations, the union representing dockers – the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) – managed to negotiate some restrictions on its use in New York. However, the union’s national leadership quickly realized that doing so might simply encourage shippers to send cargo through other ports lacking such restrictions. Consequently, over the next three decades, the ILA went about trying to rescale collective bargaining from a port-by-port system to a national one (Herod, 1997 provides details). Initially, the ILA pressured the New York Shipping Association (NYSA), an employers’ association based out of New York but whose members controlled about 85 percent of business up and down the east coast, to negotiate on a single basis for ports from Portland, Maine, to Hampton Roads, Virginia with regard to five items (wages, hours of work, length of the contract, and employer contributions to welfare and pension funds). These five would become known as the “master contract.” Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic and Gulf regions dockers also began lobbying for regional master contracts covering multiple ports, with the goal of mimicking the conditions set in the North Atlantic (a process known as “pattern bargaining”). By the time the 1970s rolled around, the ILA had succeeded in securing a legally enforceable master contract covering the whole of the North Atlantic coast. In response, many of the employers in the “outports” beyond New York decided that they wanted to play a greater role in negotiations rather than rely upon the NYSA and so formed a new multi-port association (the Council of North Atlantic Steamship Associations) to bargain with the ILA’s North Atlantic region on issues concerning containerization. Meanwhile, as efforts to develop regional contracts continued in other parts of the east coast, employers began to reorganize there, too – one development was the creation of the South Atlantic Employers’ Negotiating Committee to negotiate on behalf of employers in most ports from North Carolina to Tampa, Florida. In 1977, the ILA finally secured an agreement covering 34 ports from Maine to Texas encompassing matters like wages and a new job security program, the first agreement ever negotiated covering the entire east coast. This represented a significant victory in the union’s efforts to develop a new scale of bargaining in the industry. By developing a coastwide agreement covering ports from Maine to Texas, the ILA had implemented a geographical solution that would prevent shippers from playing dockers in different ports against each other in an effort to keep wages and benefits low. Furthermore, it had forced the employers to change their own structure of organization and to create various multi-port bargaining entities. Through strikes, negotiations, work slowdowns, and a host of other activities, dockers had, in a very real sense, remade the spatial resolution within which power was wielded within the industry, with a shift in focus from port-by-port to national-level bargaining. This, though, was not the end of the story. Given the fact that every port from Virginia to Texas is in a Right to Work state, ILA dockers in several southern ports have long faced considerable competition from non-union
Understanding the global political economy of work 239 dock labor. Consequently, in the mid-1980s, dockers in several West Gulf ports withdrew from the coastwide master agreement negotiated largely on the basis of conditions in New York in favor of a contract that more closely mirrored local conditions and would allow them to compete with lower paid, non-union dockers. Essentially, they determined that negotiating on a local, rather than national, basis was more advantageous to them, even as it challenged the union’s national leaders’ ambitions. What this shows is that sometimes different groups of workers may seek to develop new scales of organizing that are trans-local in nature (that is to say, they seek to move from bargaining that is more locally focused to that which is regional, national, or even global in nature) but that on other occasions they may seek to break out of trans-local arrangements and to focus upon local concerns. This reflects how they seek to engage with the unevenly developed geography of capitalism – in the case of the dockers, the ports of the Gulf handle much smaller amounts of cargo than does New York, with the result that employers there are less able to afford the more generous contract awards made by New York employers, especially given that much of the cargo coming across their piers is handled by cheaper, non-union labor (which is not the case in New York).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS Labor Geography has a rich and broad tradition. Its practitioners have sought to theorize how workers’ geographical situations shape their behavior as they seek to reproduce themselves biologically and socially on both a day-to-day and a generational basis. This has involved focusing upon questions involving how workers can use the resources of place to facilitate their activities but also upon how the ways in which such places are constituted can restrain the possibilities of such activities. It has entailed showing how workers may seek to cross space to make common cause with workers located elsewhere but also how, in so doing, workers must negotiate the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. And it has occasioned exploring how workers seek to make new geographical scales of their own organization and/or try to force those with whom they are in conflict or alliance to remake their own scales of organization, as well as how landscapes’ path dependence both enables and hampers their options for political action. Whatever the specific cases they have investigated, the central theme running through Labor Geographers’ research, then, is that a spatial sensibility is an essential part of understanding worker behavior and, so, the political economy of capitalism. To truly understand how workers behave necessitates recognizing that capitalism is a geographically structured economic system, that it produces landscapes in different ways at different times in different places, and that workers must engage with these landscapes to secure their interests. Workers, then, are fundamentally geographical beings and must be understood as such.
REFERENCES Agnew, J. (1987) Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society. London: Allen and Unwin. Aronowitz, S. (1990) “Writing labor’s history”, Social Text (25–26) (double issue), pp. 171–195. Bater, J.H. (1980) The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality. London: Edward Arnold.
240 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Cooke, P. (1985) “Class practices as regional markers: A contribution to labour geography”, in Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 213–241. Harvey, D. (1978) “The urban process under capitalism: A framework for analysis”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2(1), pp. 101–131. Harvey, D. (1982) The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Herod, A. (1997) “Labor’s spatial praxis and the geography of contract bargaining in the US east coast longshore industry, 1953–89”, Political Geography, 16(2), pp. 145–169. Herod, A. (2010) “Labour geography: where have we been, where should we go?”, in Bergene, A.C., Endresen, S.B., and Knutsen, H.M. (eds.) Missing Links in Labour Geography. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 15–28. Herod, A (2018) Labor. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hudson, R. (2001) Producing Places. New York: Guilford Press. Hudson, R., and Sadler, D. (1986) “Contesting work closures in Western Europe’s old industrial regions: Defending place or betraying class?”, in Scott, A. and Storper, M. (eds) Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism. Boston: Allen and Unwin, pp. 172–194. Marx, K. (1963) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers (first published in 1852; 2004 printing). Massey, D. (1973) “Towards a critique of industrial location theory”, Antipode, 5(3), pp. 33–39. Massey, D. (1995 [1984]) Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and the Geography of Production. London: Macmillan. Soja, E. (1980) “The socio-spatial dialectic”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 70(2), pp. 207–225. Southall, H. (1988) “Towards a geography of unionization: the spatial organization and distribution of early British trade unions”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 13(4), pp. 466–483. Storper, M., and Walker, R. (1989) The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth. New York: Basil Blackwell.
FURTHER READING Castree, N., Coe, N.M., and Ward, K. (eds.) (2004) Spaces of Work: Global Capitalism and Geographies of Labour. London: Sage. Coe, N., and Jordhus-Lier, D. (2011) “Constrained agency? Re-evaluating the geographies of labour”, Progress in Human Geography, 35(2), pp. 211–233. Ellem, B., and Shields, J. (1999) “Rethinking ‘regional industrial relations’: space, place and the social relations of work”, Journal of Industrial Relations, 41(4), pp. 536–560. Herod, A. (ed.) (1998) Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herod, A. (2001) Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism. New York: Guilford Press. Lier, D. (2007) “Places of work, scales of organising: a review of Labour Geography”, Geography Compass, 1(4), pp. 814–833. Martin, R., Sunley, P., and Wills, J. (1996) Union Retreat and the Regions: The Shrinking Landscape of Organised Labour. London: Jessica Kingsley. Mitchell, D. (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peck, J. (1996) Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labor Markets. New York: Guilford Press. Rutherford, T. (2010) “De/re-centering work and class? A review and critique of Labour Geography”, Geography Compass, 4(7), pp. 768–777. Wills, J., and Waterman, P. (eds.) (2001) Place, Space and the New Labour Internationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell.
19. COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States: insights from anthropology Sharryn Kasmir
INTRODUCTION Like all capitalist crises, the one triggered by the global coronavirus pandemic did not wash evenly over people and communities. Instead, it deepened existing inequalities and set in motion new ones. In the United States, long-standing divisions of labor along lines of race, gender, immigration status, and skill were animated, and new ones were called forth. Essential/ inessential; in-person/remote; recognized/unrecognized; protected/unprotected became familiar antimonies. African Americans, indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color were more likely to be frontline workers, and to suffer disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death, yet they were less likely to qualify for unemployment assistance and cash disbursements from individual states and the federal government. Ten weeks into the pandemic, the U.S. population was registering these naked facts when an African American man George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. Forty million were unemployed, 106,000 died from COVID-19, and racial justice protests erupted across the country. The triple crisis—health, economic, and racial—exposed processes of inequality that are typically hidden from view. Labor was named, categorized, valued, and devalued by capital and the state in plain sight. In this chapter, I draw on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork on left political organizing and social change in the city of Reading, Pennsylvania (population 88,000) to reflect on these developments. Reading is a majority Latinx (66 percent) and heavily immigrant city located in the U.S. rust belt. Processes of labor differentiation are being played out there in stark relief and in ways that are consequential for strategy, organizing, and movement building. Two vignettes from my fieldwork are particularly suggestive for this discussion: the first describes protests to demand that immigrants be included in a second federal pandemic relief bill. The second details a debate among labor organizers over the designation ‘essential workers.’ I use insights from the anthropology of labor to interpret these episodes and to capture the quickly evolving context of the trifold crisis. As a discipline, anthropology bends towards explanations of global inequality that feature ‘biopolitics,’ ‘precarity,’ ‘bare life,’ or ‘surplus populations,’ rather than the development of capital and labor at global and local scales. Rooted in political economy and Marxist theory, labor anthropology critiques that dominant disciplinary tendency. With two vignettes as touchstones, I engage a growing body of literature in the anthropology of labor that attends to uneven capital accumulation and puts difference, heterogeneity, and the totality of social relations at the center of class analysis. This is a fruitful starting point for charting on-the-ground politics during the current crisis. 241
242 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
IMMIGRANTS AND PANDEMIC RELIEF The U.S. Senate debated a pandemic relief bill at the end July 2020, when key provisions of the two trillion-dollar CARES Act stimulus were set to expire. Passed four months earlier, the CARES Act doled out billions to corporations but only $1200 (maximum) in cash assistance to taxpayers. Immigrant workers who paid income taxes with an individual tax identification number (used by foreign nationals who are not eligible for social security numbers) were not entitled to those payments. The second relief package looked like it would again marginalize these same people. With their exclusion looming, the immigrants-rights, non-profit organization Make the Road Pennsylvania launched a Facebook campaign to pressure senators to include all workers, regardless of immigration status. Make the Road members made video testimonials to plead the case. One featured a woman who migrated from Mexico to financially distressed Reading, where she raised her children. For more than a decade, she worked in mushroom farms outside the city, and taxes were withdrawn from her paychecks. Mushroom farms were deemed essential and remained in operation during the coronavirus shut down. Workers were expected to report to their jobs during the public health emergency, despite unsafe conditions in the dark, enclosed mushroom facilities. Despite this, neither they nor their children received stimulus checks. The U.S. government response to coronavirus reorganized labor (ineffective, chaotic, and contradictory though it was for safeguarding public health). Shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders issued by states shuttered sectors and workplaces and designated others ‘essential’ (health care, energy, childcare, agriculture and food production, transportation). Like unemployment benefits allocated by the individual states, the $600 per week federal temporary unemployment supplement was reserved for those who earned sufficient income from legally sanctioned employment. Advocates won a meaningful victory by gaining benefits for self-employed, gig, and part-time workers. But people without a social security or individual tax identification number, sub-minimum wage earners, and those in the informal economy did not qualify. Many immigrant households were locked out of both unemployment and cash disbursements. When the Senate failed to produce a new stimulus bill on August 1, the federal unemployment supplement expired. Paycheck protection for small businesses was set to end in one week. Make the Road Pennsylvania again took action. Members from Reading, Allentown, and Philadelphia (three Pennsylvania cities where the group organizes) rallied outside of Republican Senator Patrick Toomey’s house. They called for the extension of federal unemployment, small business assistance, and stimulus checks for all workers. The list of demands reflected the different material circumstances of Make the Road members who have mixed immigration status and whose livelihoods were impacted differently. Some reported to essential jobs; others were furloughed and left without income or state support; some were small business owners. Make the Road protested at the homes of senators in the five states where it has chapters, and its parent organization Center for Popular Democracy coordinated strategy at the national-level.
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States 243
BIOPOLITICS AND BARE LIFE Michel Foucault’s biopolitics seems an apt theoretical intervention for interpreting Make the Road’s protests and for explaining the current conjuncture, when the lives of essential workers are imperiled, and others are condemned to wagelessness. For Foucault ‘biopower’ is exercised through surveillance, counting, and categorizing of bodies and lives. Demography, medicine, imprisonment, and other modes of governmentality, qualify, measure, and appraise populations, and assign social value (Foucault 1990 [1978], 144). Biopower negates some people’s political/legal sovereignty and thereby reduces them to mere biological existence or ‘bare life’; it unequally allocates the general ontological condition of precarity and vulnerability (Agamben 1998; Butler 2004, 2010). Achille Mbembé uses the term ‘necropolitics’ to refer to this control over life and death. He asks, “Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?” (Mbembé 2003, 11). Surely the U.S. state has authored practical conditions that mete out precarity and exposure to death during the coronavirus pandemic. Biopolitics and companion concepts of precarity, bare life, and surplus populations are influential in anthropology. For example, Tania Li surveys life conditions in much of the global south (and she might well add coronavirus-U.S.) and sees that ‘letting die’ is a brutal reality. She argues that ‘surplus people’ who are left to die are marginal to the interests of capital at any scale. Contra Marxist theory, she maintains that surplus populations are not formed in relation to capital accumulation nor to working classes, and therefore class analysis cannot help illuminate their fact of their existence (Li 2009). Biopolitics provides an evocative language for describing the disparity in human suffering. However, to conceptualize bare life or surplus populations without attending to class is to accept the ideological terms of capital and the state. “To speak repeatedly of bare life and superfluous life can lead us to imagine that there really are disposable people, not simply that they are disposable in the eyes of state and market” (Denning 2010, 80). By virtue of their supposed disposability, marginalized populations are never thrown back into the breach, nor do they chart an alternative. The result is problematically apolitical, and it removes laboring people from making history (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 24). How do political possibilities emerge and transform? How do working people undertake political projects to craft their own coherence from the structural violence and chaos that arises from uneven capitalist development? These questions require a research program that features labor and class (Kasmir and Gill 2018, 365).
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF LABOR The anthropology of labor is a recently elaborated field of study. It owes special debt to the groundwork of Marxian anthropologists such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, June Nash, and William Roseberry, and it takes interdisciplinary influences from ethnography, history, geography, and Marxist theory. The anthropology of labor is especially attuned to uneven capitalist development, and to the heterogeneity of global/regional/national working classes. For more than four decades, global neoliberal capitalism has fragmented, disorganized, and disempowered working classes via intertwined processes of austerity, deindustrialization, privatization, and capital flight. At the same time, capital accumulation created billions of newly
244 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work dispossessed people. The focus has been the articulation of these world historical processes as they are made manifest, acted upon, and transformed in concrete settings. On the one hand, we see a broad unmaking of once-powerful working classes; on the other, masses of people are thrown into market dependence (e.g. Carbonella and Kasmir 2015; Gill and Kasmir 2016; Carrier and Kalb 2015; Kalb and Mollona 2018; Kasmir 2020; Kasmir and Carbonella 2014; Kasmir and Gill 2018; Lem 2018; Narotzky 2018, 2020; Smith 2018, 2020). Straight away, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class comes to mind. Thompson traces the experiences and relationships of diverse working people in England from 1780–1832, as they begin to “feel a shared identity of interests amongst themselves and against their rulers and employers” (Thompson 1963, 11). His emphasis is on the making rather than the already accomplished structure of class, whether ‘in-itself’ (via relations of production) or ‘for-itself’ (social life, politics, and consciousness). An oppositional working class (at a national or global scale) is neither a foregone conclusion nor a permanent social fact. Once made, class can be unmade and remade. Thompson’s perspective is instructive during this crisis, yet to make it fully useful for our time, we need to tease out fundamental processes of labor formation that precede class. We can start by glimpsing the London docks in the late 18th century, when dockworkers were not compensated in money but in ‘chips,’ or the scraps and waste of shipbuilding. Chips and takings from trades and workplaces were the medium of exchange along the Thames River, among a network of grocers, barkeeps, pawnbrokers, peddlers, and sex-workers. The money wage was imposed on the docks in the 1790s, first by criminalizing the customary takings and then by physically removing the non-monetary community from the waterfront. The River Thames Police was established to determine who would receive wages and who would not. They literally policed the separation between waged workers and the poor, as well as between the struggles of workers within the wage labor process and those outside it. As a result, social hierarchy developed within the river proletariat, particularly along existing lines of race, gender, and nationality. This prior history was determinant for whose labor counted (artisans, factory workers) and whose did not (peddlers, prostitutes) as the English working class organized and garnered power. But enforcing the boundary between the waged and wageless on the docks in late 18th-century London was not a novel development. Rather, it rehearsed and foretold countless attempts to separate the labors of men and women, slaves and proletarians, and black and white workers (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 11–12; Linebaugh 2003 [1991]). W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered this line of thought on labor and politics. His monumental history Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1998 [1935]) notably begins with the ‘naming of things.’ The first chapter of the volume is titled “The Black Worker,” and Cedric Robinson instructs us to carefully regard Du Bois’ chosen words: Pay close attention to what Du Bois was saying: slavery was the specific historical institution through which the Black worker had been introduced into the modern world system. However, it was not as slaves that one could come to an understanding of the significance that these Black men, women, and children had for American development. It was as labor (Robinson 2000 [1983], 199).
The precise terms—slave, worker, labor—were important to Du Bois because they put slavery in historical relation to U.S. capitalism. By his account and against prevailing thought of the day, slavery was not a vestige of primitive accumulation, nor was it an historical anomaly. Rather, it was foundational for the modern capitalist economy, “beneath its appearance as
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States 245 ‘feudal agrarianism,’ lay the real relation of slavery to modern capitalism” (Robinson 2000 [1983], 200). The exact words also mattered for how Du Bois understood the ‘race problem’ within the U.S. labor and socialist movements in the first decades of the 20th century, when American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions banned black workers from their ranks. These craft unions asserted the ‘labor aristocracy’ of skilled tradesmen and sided with U.S. imperialism to secure material and psychological privilege for white workers (Carbonella and Kasmir 2008; Du Bois 1969 [1920], 1998 [1935]; Roediger 1991). Du Bois feared that American socialists were similarly “ill-equipped to deal with the Black worker, the Black community, and the social relations of Black people” (Robinson 2000 [1983], 199). He used the concept of labor to investigate the concrete relations between black and white workers and to sound a political alarm for U.S. socialists. The reorganization of labor underway during the COVID-19 crisis similarly matters for class relations. State and capital name, differentiate or unify, value and devalue human labor, and on-the-ground actors and organizations respond in ways that shape political outcomes. Labor is “a divided and struggled over social formation” (Mitchell 2005, 92) whose “social protests and quietude, organizations and cultures reflect multiple engagements with capital and the state, as well as and with other workers locally, regionally, and globally” (Carbonella and Kasmir 2014, 7). To better understand the politics of our day, we need a close lens on how labor is identified, categorized, and organized. A second example from my Pennsylvania fieldwork helps deepen the discussion.
ESSENTIAL WORKERS A Pennsylvania coalition convened a virtual panel on workers’ struggles and the COVID-19 crisis in May, 2020. The coalition was formed earlier in the year to defeat Donald Trump and to promote progressive local- and state-level candidates across Pennsylvania’s diverse counties. Pennsylvania helped elect Trump president in 2016, and it was a key battleground state for the 2020 elections. Nine regional chapters represent urban, suburban, and rural places. Some regions have populations who are largely people of color and immigrants of mixed legal status, while others are predominantly white. When the topic of ‘essential workers’ was broached during the event, it sparked a sharp debate between the panelists. A union organizer argued that the government designation ‘essential work’ presented an important opportunity for strategic and nimble labor actions. Strikes and work stoppages in critical sectors such as food and energy or at transport nodes could stall production and distribution and interrupt supply chains. Waves of strikes by essential workers located at pivotal points along supply chains could inflict serious economic damage. The potential of this choke point strategy was tested in early May by wildcat actions at fruit and vegetable warehouses in Yakima County, Washington. Hundreds of workers across multiple businesses struck for hazard pay (an extra $2 per hour) and for safer working conditions in the crowded packing houses. Yakima reported the highest COVID-19 infection rate on the west coast when the wildcat strikes began. The farmworkers’ union Familias Unidas por la Justicia represented the workers and reported that the strikes were led by women and were multiracial and multigenerational (Bacon 2020). The strikes targeted food distribution at a time when the global supply chain proved vulnerable. There were already dangerous short-
246 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ages of personal protection and medical equipment, and there was growing concern that food shortages would soon follow. For example, meat packing plants across the country became COVID-19 hot spots and some shut down as an emergency measure. Fearing meat shortages, Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to order them to reopen. One commentator put a fine point on the threat that Trump aimed to avert, “The supply chain is so tight that when two plants go down—Smithfield in Sioux Falls and Tyson in Waterloo—fully 10% of national pork production in knocked out” (The Guardian, 1 May 2020). U.S. unions have been in decline and on the defensive for decades, and as a result, unions have not been innovative in their tactics or far-reaching in their vision. The union organizer on the virtual panel urged that at this unique time when supply chains were imperiled, a choke hold initiative could seed a union resurgence. The classification of ‘essential labor’ was important because it pinpointed a target for high-impact action, it had the potential to do real harm to individual owners and to the national economy, and it could summon a strategic sector of the working class to action. There was a short time frame, perhaps just weeks he warned, to expand a choke point strategy and win power for organized labor. The second speaker vigorously objected to his proposal. She is the executive director of a national non-profit that advocates for restaurant workers. She refused the label ‘essential’ because it valorized particular kinds of labor, marginalized others, and erased household and community care. She heard essential as a replay of historical gender and race divisions that devalued service work. While vast numbers of restaurant workers lost their jobs during the pandemic, many did not receive unemployment benefits because their $2.83 hourly sub-minimum wage (plus tips) meant they earned too little to qualify. When the 1938 Fair Labors Standards Act enacted federal labor protections, tipped, domestic, and farm work were exempted from minimum wage and overtime pay regulations. Their exclusion was a compromise with southern legislators and agricultural interests, and it brought the cultural legacies of slavery, sharecropping, and black women’s domestic service squarely into the New Deal (Mullings 1986). For the panelist, essential evokes this New Deal segmentation of the U.S. working class into differently recognized, worthy, protected, and imperiled parts. The New Deal in the U.S. was a response to the Great Depression and to mass waves of labor agitation in manufacturing, farming, and transport. The Fair Labor Standards Act passed soon after the Flint sit-down strike established the United Automobiles Workers union (UAW) and in the same year that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) broke with the AFL and rejection the craft-union model in favor of sector-based unions in mines, auto, steel, textiles, etc. that spanned all skill levels. When the 1938 legislation exempted domestic, farm, and service work, it performed the type of boundary work and social control of nascent proletarian solidarity effected by the Thames River police. And as Du Bois predicted, it obscured the essential relationship of the agricultural and service labors of black people, immigrants, and women to the processes of capital and labor accumulation. Left activists in the U.S. increasingly recognize the ways New Deal benefits accrued to white, male privilege. Backers of the Green New Deal resolution, for example, insist that massive federal investment in green jobs, infrastructure, and the care economy must undo those historic injustices as an urgent priority. Black Lives Matter organizers similarly trace connections between New Deal and post-WWII Keynesian redistributive policies (especially with regard to home ownership) and the widening racial wealth gap. The Pennsylvania panelist had this critique in mind when she rejected essential work and the choke hold proposal
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States 247 that relied on that designation. Responding to the needs of displaced restaurant servers, her non-profit solicited donations through a ‘go fund me’ drive. The campaign raised $21 million that was being dispersed through cash payouts. The organization gained 170,000 new contacts as a result of the effort, whom it will mobilize to lobby legislators to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour for all workers.
UNEVENESS, HETEROGENEITY, AND CLASS The speakers’ disagreement over essential workers manifests the uneven terrain of capitalism in the United States, the ways the state acts upon labor, and the varied organizational forms, constituencies, and strategies on the U.S. left. This fragmentation is long standing and it has more recent origins in the broad shift in power from labor to capital effected over decades of neoliberal policy. The resulting heterogeneity of material circumstances and identity often hobbles organizing and solidarity (Smith 2014, 2016). To the point, much scholarship on precarious employment makes the case that ‘the precariat,’ (gig, contract, and temporary workers) is a new class position with interests and identities distinct from and opposed to unionized, stable working classes (e.g. Parry 2020; Standing 2011.) When the panelists debated the designation essential, they disagreed about identity making and about where leverage and power lie. They spoke from distinct institutional bases (organized labor versus non-profit) and they promoted different actors and tactics. Rather than assess this state of affairs only as a liability (though it surely indicates historical disadvantage of the U.S. left) we can benefit from a more open-ended research program that begins with unevenness. More than a century ago, Rosa Luxemburg showed that capital expansion requires a perpetual ‘outside.’ Capital discovers and produces difference within and among social formations, and across space, economic sector, and time (Harvey 2003; Luxemburg 2003 [1913]). Geographers Neil Smith, David Harvey, and Doreen Massey illuminate how the production of space is produced through layered, historical processes of capital investment and disinvestment. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), Cedric Robinson’s account of racial capitalism (2000), and Silvia Federici’s insight that accumulation of labor is “the accumulation of differences” (2004, 63) further declare that unevenness is politically momentous. Bond, Desai, and Ngwane (2013) continue this line of scholarship through their study of South African social movements. The South African economy is extremely differentiated; manufacturing is in decline; finance, construction, and commerce are booming; and large swaths of the country seem peripheral to the interests of domestic and international capital alike. Reflecting these economic circumstances, a wellspring of union strikes and community service protests since the 1990s have remained geographically and politically isolated and failed to cohere as a mass movement. While this contradictory set of social relations is necessarily the starting point for left politics, it cannot be the end. Bond, Desai, and Ngwane search for a left intervention in this uneven economic and social context. They advance Marxist theory and practice that “heightens and encapsulates several otherwise familiar tensions—urban/rural; worker/poor; local/national/global urban/rural; society/nature; gender and so on—and can show, therefore, perhaps more clearly than in other contexts the essential relations among them” (Bond, Desai, and Ngwane 2103, 236).
248 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The notion of ‘essential relations among them’ is good to think with since it encourages critical questions in situations of social change. It invites us to ask: What hidden relations are being exposed? What can be seen, talked about, abstracted, and theorized in this unusual period? What tactics, alliances, organizational forms, and theoretical interventions can be built and imagined in such changing circumstances? Class as an already accomplished structure does not suffice for this inquiry. Rather, we need a holistic, relational, and historical concept of class that conceptualizes people in motion and in changing relationships to capital, the state, and each other. From this perspective, Marxian anthropologist Don Kalb understands working classes in the following way: Our definition allowed for the likelihood that many were in fact precariats, entre-precariats, small entrepreneurs, direct producers, technical managers, lower clerical personnel, shopkeepers, even higher educated ones, teachers, accountants, and of course retired workers. We also assumed that their actual class ‘positions’ may often have been less than well defined, temporary and shifting, rather than fix and well signified, amid the turbulent neoliberal transformations that were going on. Nor was class just about ‘work’ or income. Biographies and whole lives, Marx’s ‘living labor’, including their whole habitats, was what we were aiming at. We were referring in a good Marxian sense to the whole sphere of reproduction of people and households who lacked access to capital or high value property, or highly marketable ‘human capital’, in spatial contexts that too were part of the polarizing logic of capital (Kalb 2021; also Kalb and Mollona 2018).
This approach avoids economic reductionism, appreciates the heterogeneity of experience, and recognizes that members of households engage in multiple livelihood practices. It eschews the misleading dichotomy between production and social reproduction that Marxist feminists strongly reject. It points to the totality of social relations that result as capital expands, exploits, extracts, expropriates, dispossesses, and abandons in different measure across different populations. Relational class also enriches political thinking. It cracks open the connections between oppression, exploitation, dispossession, devaluation, and extraction across populations, space, and time. If orthodox Marxism has focused too narrowly on wage exploitation in production at expense of registering other value processes, we can set a better course in the current moment. If we do not take class to be a fixed structure, and if bare life is not an ontological condition but a historical and political one subject to change, then activism against the state (through legislative pressure by immigrants or tipped servers) and capital (via choke hold job actions) are compatible and mutually reinforcing proposals for a heterogenous class in the making. Different identities, strategies, and organizational forms are both necessary and appropriate. The task is “how to take advantage of the unevenness and particular conjunctural combinations of social relations” (Bond, Desai, and Ngwane 2013, 47). When the U.S. state reorganized labor during the pandemic, essential workers in key sectors were uniquely vulnerable but could wield power through wildcat strikes and unionization. Impoverished and unprotected restaurant workers were summoned through to pressure legislators to extend and raise the minimum wage. Make the Road rallied its diverse immigrant members to demand inclusion in state-issued relief. Their experiences of exclusion, exploitation, exposure, and ‘disposability’ speak to the many, varied ways capital extracts value from laboring populations and to the ways capital investment and abandonment unevenly make places and shape livelihoods. The categorization of labor presently underway during the trifold crisis is meant to naturalize and fetishize categories. We can instead uncover how these
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States 249 classifications enumerate manifold positions vis à vis capital and the state, starting with the state-ordered designation essential and proceeding to the essential relations among them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My fieldwork was supported by ‘Frontlines: Class, Value and Social Transformation in 21st Century Capitalism,’ University of Bergen, Bergen Foundation, and the Government of Norway. A Faculty Research grant from Hofstra University also provided funding.
REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Serving Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bacon, David. May 18, 2020. Hundreds of Apple Workers on Strike in Washington. Labor Notes. https:// www.labornotes.org/2020/05/hundreds-apple-workers-strike-washington, accessed July 21, 2020 Bond, Patrick, Ashwin Desai and Trevor Ngwane. 2013. Uneven and Combined Marxism Within South Africa’s Urban Social Movements. In Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Eds.), Marxism and Social Movements. Chicago: Haymarket, pp. 233–258. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Carbonella, August and Sharryn Kasmir. 2008. Du Bois’s Darkwater and An Anti-Colonial, Internationalist Anthropology. Dialectical Anthropology, 32(1–2): 113–121. Carbonella, August and Sharryn Kasmir. 2014. Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. In Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella (Eds.), Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–29. Carbonella, August and Sharryn Kasmir. 2015. Dispossession, Disorganization and The Anthropology of Labor. In Don Kalb and James Carrier (Eds.), Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 41–53. Carrier, James and Don Kalb (Eds.), 2015. Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice and Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denning, Michael. 2010. Wageless life. New Left Review, 66: 79–97. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1969 [1920]. Of Work and Wealth. In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Schocken, pp. 47–63. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998 [1935]. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Simon and Schuster. Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. Gill, Lesley and Sharryn Kasmir. 2016. History, Politics, Space, Labor: On Unevenness as an Anthropological Concept. Dialectical Anthropology, 40(2): 87–102. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Kalb, Don. 2021. The Neo-Nationalist Ascendency: Further Thoughts on Class, Value, and the Return of the Repressed. Social Anthropology, 29(2). Kalb, Don and Massimiliano Mollona (Eds.), 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Kasmir, Sharryn. 2020. The Anthropology of Labor. In Mark Aldenderfer (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (Eds.), 2014. Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kasmir, Sharryn and Lesley Gill. 2018. No Smooth Surfaces: An Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination. Current Anthropology, 59(4): 355–377.
250 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Lem, Winnie. 2018. The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism. In Pauline G. Barber and Winnie Lem (Eds.), Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: Entangled Mobilities Across Global Spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–206. Li, Tania Murray. 2009. To Make Live or Let Die? Rural Dispossession and the Protection of Surplus Populations. Antipode, 41(S1): 66–93. Linebaugh, Peter. 2003 [1991]. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Verso Books. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003 [1913]. The Accumulation of Capital. London, New York: Routledge. Mbembé, Joseph Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1): 11–40. Mitchell, Don. 2005. Working-Class Geographies: Capital, State and Place. In John Russo and Sherry Linkon (Eds.), New Working Class Studies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mullings, Leith. 1986. Uneven Development: Class, Race and Gender in the United States before 1900. In Eleanor Leacock and Helen Safa (Eds.), Women’s Work and the Division of Labor by Gender. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 41–57. Narotzky, Susana. 2018. Rethinking the Concept of Labour. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24(S1): 29–43 Narotzky, Susana (Ed.). 2020. Grassroots Economies: Living with Austerity in Southern Europe. London: Pluto Press. Parry, Jonathan. 2020. Classes of Labor: Work and Life in an Indian Steel Town. London, New York: Routledge. Robinson, Cedric. 2000 [1983]. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Roediger, David R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso. Smith, Gavin. 2014. Intellectuals and (Counter) Politics. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Smith, Gavin. 2016. Against Social Democratic Angst About Revolution: From Failed Citizens to Critical Praxis. Dialectical Anthropology, 40(3): 221–239. Smith, Gavin. 2018. Reflections on Social Reproduction and the Reproduction of the Labour Force in the Current Conjuncture. In Alberta Andreotti, David Benassi, and Yuri Kazepov (Eds.), Western Capitalism in Transition: Global Processes, Local Challenges. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. 61–76. Smith, Gavin. 2020. The Uneven and Combined Development of The Agrarian Question Then and Now. In Ida Susser and Don Nonini (Eds.), The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge, pp. 153–176. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. The Guardian, May 1, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/trump-meat -processing-executive-order-workers, accessed August 3, 2020. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Vintage.
RECOMMENDED READING Bond, Patrick, Ashwin Desai, and Trevor Ngwane. 2013. Uneven and Combined Marxism Within South Africa’s Urban Social Movements. In Colin Barker, Laurence Cox, John Krinsky, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Eds.), Marxism and Social Movements. Chicago: Haymarket, pp. 233–258. Carbonella, August and Sharryn Kasmir. 2008. Du Bois’s Darkwater and An Anti-Colonial, Internationalist Anthropology. Dialectical Anthropology, 32(1–2): 113–121. Denning, Michael. 2010. Wageless life. New Left Review, 66: 79–97. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1969 [1920]. Of Work and Wealth. In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Schocken, pp. 47–63. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998 [1935]. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Simon and Schuster.
COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers’ struggles in the United States 251 Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Kalb, Don and Massimiliano Mollona (Eds.), 2018. Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York, Oxford: Berghahn. Kasmir, Sharryn. 2020. The Anthropology of Labor. In Mark Aldenderfer (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kasmir, Sharryn and August Carbonella (Eds.), 2014. Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kasmir, Sharryn and Lesley Gill. 2018. No Smooth Surfaces: An Anthropology of Unevenness and Combination. Current Anthropology, 59(4): 355–377. Lem, Winnie. 2018. The Dialectics of Uneven Spatial-Temporal Development: Migrants and Reproduction in Late Capitalism. In Pauline G. Barber and Winnie Lem (Eds.), Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: Entangled Mobilities Across Global Spaces. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 185–206. Mullings, Leith. 1986. Uneven Development: Class, Race and Gender in the United States Before 1900. In Eleanor Leacock and Helen Safa (Eds.), Women’s Work and the Division of Labor by Gender. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, pp. 41–57. Narotzky, Susana. 2018. Rethinking the Concept of Labour. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24(S1): 29–43. Smith, Gavin. 2018. Reflections on Social Reproduction and the Reproduction of the Labour Force in the Current Conjuncture. In Alberta Andreotti, David Benassi, and Yuri Kazepov (Eds.), Western Capitalism in Transition: Global Processes, Local Challenges. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, pp. 61–76. Smith, Gavin. 2020. The Uneven and Combined Development of The Agrarian Question Then and Now. In Ida Susser and Don Nonini (Eds.), The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge, 153–176.
20. Global labour history – its promises and hazards Stefano Bellucci
INTRODUCTION Global labour history is a new historical discipline. This new field of research departs from three methodological stands: first, the abandonment of the working class as a guiding category of the labour movement; secondly, the construction of labour history as a process that does not have boundaries, especially national borders; and thirdly, the continuation with the anti-Eurocentric approach to history. The first methodological instrument in particular is quite crucial for it contrasts with the traditional or classical labour history; a discipline that became heavily conjugated with Marxian views of capitalism. Classical labour history was organic to a revolutionary path of social change and considers labour or the working class – the free wage workers or the proletariat – as the engine of social change. Inversely, global labour history considers the working class as principally or quintessentially “Western”. The proletarian is the male factory worker; while the global workforce is gender neutral and exists also outside the manufacture sector. Global labour history assumes therefore that a narrow understanding of the working class is what determined the inability of the proletariat to produce any real, and meaningful social change globally, including within the Soviet bloc. By doing so, perhaps invertedly, global labour history inaugurates a new trend in labour studies that is post-neoliberal in essence, for it acknowledges that there is no alternative to capitalism. The working-class history becomes the history of a multitude of subaltern workers that cannot be represented nor led by a minoritarian revolutionary vanguard. As a direct consequence of this a marginalisation of the trade unions occurs within global labour history. There is almost an abandonment of formal workers’ organisation as protagonists of historical research. The labour movement therefore becomes hard to define, uncapturable, amorphic and polycentric. After all, who is a worker? (Who is a capitalist?). Global labour history is destined to have a future because it is a discipline that deals with the defeated camp in the struggle of capital versus labour, starting from the acknowledgement of such defeat.
THE ORIGINS OF A NEW FIELD OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Global labour history (GLH) is a subject elaborated by researchers at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam in the 1990s.1 Some claim that its origins date back to the studies on global slavery, revolts in the Caribbean or Indian labour history from the 1960s onwards. But it is the IISH at the epicentre of a global network of institutes and scholars dealing with GLH. This scholarly community quickly grew and contributed to the revival of an otherwise seemingly marginal or marginalised subject: labour history. Indeed, GLH appeared in the late 1990s and beginning of 2000s, at the height of the neoliberal victory, when 252
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 253 working-class history was suffocating under the pressure of post-modernism, and countless studies on the history of all forms of “identitarianism”. Indeed, the 1990s saw a sharp decline in the production of working-class history research. With the Berlin Wall the idea of the working class collapsed. Labour history as the history of the working class became a “losing subject”, hegemonised as it was by Socialist and Marxist historians. Furthermore, a false consciousness spread amongst many scholars and historians and they adopted methodological approaches to the study of history other than the class analysis. Amidst this neoliberal neo-Restoration, what has happened to “real labour” is under everyone’s eyes: increased precarisation, increased exploitation, increased trade unions’ oppression, increased income inequality, increased workplace control and monitoring. In a sense, GLH can be seen as an attempt to resuscitate the cadaver of labour and working-class history in order to put labour at the centre of the study of social relations and the economic order. The relationship of GLH with labour and working-class history is, however, not an easy one; and GLH can be understood indeed as a born-again field of research haunted by its Socialist and Marxian predecessors. GLH combines together global history with labour and social history. The adjective “global” of GLH is intended as enlargement, extension and expansion of space and time. The working class becomes subaltern workers (van der Linden 2008, pp. 32–37). In fact, historically speaking, the working class or the proletariat is relatively recent phenomenon in human history and originated in Europe with the great capitalist and scientific revolution in the mid-second millennium that led to the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. The proletarian working class inhabited the mushrooming factories and workshops of Europe and later on of the world. The novelty of GLH is represented by a redefinition of a “worker”. A worker cannot be identified solely with a proletarian factory worker in industrial districts of the Global North.2 Non- and pre-industrial ways of labour commodification persisted throughout the industrial revolutions and beyond, and continue to exist to this day. Geographically non-capitalist labour relations can be found in industrialised regions as well as in other parts of the world. Workers whose commodified labour takes place within the capitalist mode of production can coexist and produce next and in connection to other subaltern workers, whose labour is exploited according to feudal, pre-capitalist or non-capitalist types of labour relations: tributary labour, servitude, slave labour, household labour, etc. These kinds of labour relations are to be found especially in the so-called Global South, but, to lesser extent, also in the rich world. Hence, the urgency of labour history to open up the doors of historical research to those regions of the world where the industrial revolution occurred indirectly and arrived in its worst possible way; that is the colonial conquest with its tragedies and injustices (Donoghue and Jennings 2015). GLH implies that the labour history of non-capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production are not only connected but they belong to one encompassing labour system. However, “global” does not mean the world. In GLH the local dimension has the same positional value as the global or the international dimension. Actually, macro- and micro-history of labour must coexist in GLH (De Vito and Gerritsen 2018). Marcel van der Linden, the founding figure of GLH, claims it to be and not a theory (De Vito and Gerritsen 2018, p. 11; Lucassen 2006). However, GLH implies inevitably a deep rethinking and redefinition of the concept of capitalism and working class, which has inevitably some theoretical repercussions, the main one being expurgating labour history of Marxist hegemony. The distancing from the Marxist view of history can be already seen in the first
254 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work publication of GLH, a short pamphlet titled Prolegomena for a Global Labor History and co-written with Jan Lucassen (Lucassen 2021; van der Linden and Lucassen 1999). To better understand GLH and its implications for labour history and labour studies more in general, it is necessary to look at its methodologies: who are the workers? How to connect different ways in which labour is historically commodified? Indeed, GLH’s methodologies have important implications for labour studies: the marginalisation of trade unionism; and the rejection of a strict Marxian analysis. This implies a series of problems connected to the GLH discipline, which will be analysed in the concluding remarks.
METHODOLOGY 1: THE SUBJECT OF STUDY OF GLOBAL LABOUR HISTORY Like any historical subject, GLH implies its own methodologies. The methodology of GLH entails a particular understanding of capitalism. Ways in which capitalism is reconceptualised according to the GLH approach can be found here and in Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept, edited by Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden (2016). GLH is not the only subject concerned with labour in a global context, both the World-Systems theory and the Global Commodity Chain analysis are also historical subjects that have labour and capitalism at the core of their analysis. However, the World-Systems approach is interested in the functional division of labour in different parts of the world, centres or cores and peripheries, with peripheries functional to the core. Meanwhile, the Global Commodity Chain analysis is about the spatial division of labour along the production stream of goods and services, which implies a particular attention to the spatial movement of products, capital and workers. Unlike its sisters’ historical disciplines, GLH deems it necessary to focus its attention on labour relations,3 and how (much less so why) these developed and transformed historically in different parts of the world. Global Labour Chain analysis has therefore been proposed by some global labour historians, such as Ulbe Bosma (2013 and 2019). The IISH Taxonomy of Labour Relations, developed by Karin Hofmeester and others (Hofmeester et al. 2015), constitutes the alphabet of the global labour historian, and it is used in order to read and write GLH (Hofmeester and van Nederveen Meerkerk 2017). The taxonomy of labour relations is the result of a long series of meetings that took place amongst labour historians from all over the world. These meetings were coordinated by the IISH. By looking at the taxonomy of labour relations (see Figure 20.1), the non-centrality of wage labour is evident at first glance. This has major implications for the understanding of labour and capitalism from the perspective of GLH. In GLH, the working class is not intended as the proletariat, made of free wage workers. Labour history therefore is not the history of wage workers only and not only that of “free” workers who can choose their employer. GLH departed as a discipline also from the realisation that classical labour history steadily became the history of trade unions and perhaps strikes, whereas trade unions are in fact not central for GLH. If free wage workers are not central to GLH nor are trade unions (see the dedicated section below). In other words, GLH ambitiously proposes to get rid of the existing differences between the history of labour, the history of work and the history of the working class. This unifying effort is intended to include labour history within the history of culture, gender, family, economy and so on.
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 255
Source:
Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500–2000, 2015.
Figure 20.1
Taxonomy of labour relations
Furthermore, GLH implies the following. If the history of free wage labour is only a fraction of labour history, the working class must inevitably encompass all kinds of workers. The working class includes labourers in all types of labour relations, and these are working slaves, servants, household workers, self-employed, etc. What GLH proposes is a radical change of perspective in the conceptualisation of the working class. Actually, it prefers not to use the term at all and to substitute it with subaltern workers or working people. This raises an epistemological debate within the study of labour history, and of course it brings up some crucial questions, such as, for example, the following: to what extent can chattel slaves be considered proletari-
256 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ans? What about the affluent, rich workers or self-employed? Are high wage workers – such as VIP, managers or professionals – members of the working class? GLH calls for an inevitable redefinition of the concept of working class with stern implications for the understanding of societies and their histories. The problem of a redefinition of the working class has massive methodological, and perhaps even theoretical, implications. Defining “the worker” requires some parameters or a scale of values. A value is both material (e.g. money) and ideological (e.g. freedom). Workers can be “classified” based on their monetary cost or returns (wages) or on their ability and freedom to choose an employer. The degree of a worker’s liberty or freedom vis-à-vis the capitalist was one of the first paradoxes of the capitalist society identified by Karl Marx (1976 [1847–1849]). The wage worker is free to choose its employer, but s/he cannot choose not to work for a wage. The slave or serf does not even have the choice to choose her/his employer. Independent or self-employed workers (the petit bourgeoisie) do not have an employer and represent therefore a freer category of workers; freer than the proletariat. This scaling, whether material or ideological, is basically unfitting the Marxian dialectical analysis. Accordingly, it is the dialectics embedded in the social relation that matter when defining a worker, and not merely the qualification of a worker or a group of workers according to quantitative or qualitative values. The subject of study of GLH are the workers, and not the working class. As noted earlier, in GLH every human being is in one way or another a worker, including the affluent and the inactive. The subaltern multitude of workers is not intended primarily in relation to capital (profit) but rather in relation to freedom (see below) or earning (income). In this sense, GLH opens up historical research to many, old and new classifications and quantifications more so than classical labour history, but shifts the perspective from the relationship of work-capital to that of the workers’ multitude alone. As per the capitalists, GLH tries to physically identify or count the capitalists, while Marx and Marxists realised earlier on that to try to identify who are the capitalists (or the workers) is a rather useless exercise as ownership of capital can be so defused as to become undefinable. Capitalism is a social relation and it is not attached to an industry or a sector. Furthermore, if the ownership of capital is undefinable, why try to determine or quantify the capitalist class as an affluent class of non-workers as the taxonomy of labour relations implies? This point still requires necessary further debate amongst labour historians.
METHODOLOGY 2: EUROCENTRISM AND CAPITALISM A global view of history implies a 360-degree view of labour history. Although this seems obvious, for many decades labour history was the history of labour in Europe, the West or the North-Atlantic region (the Global North). GLH implies an opening up of the analytical diaphragm in order to enlarge the view of historical investigation. The hypothesis is that the Global North understanding of labour is precisely Eurocentric, and tends to leave out other forms of labour relations and conditions present in the colonial and post-colonial world, today referred to as the Global South. In Asia, Africa and Latina America, the relationship between wage labour and capital is a much more recent phenomenon than in Europe (Bellucci 2017). Formal wage labour constitutes a small fraction of the working force in many parts of Africa still today. The integration of the colonised world carries with it a new understanding of labour history (Amin and van der
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 257 Linden 1997; Chakrabarty 1989; van Schendel 2006 and 2018). This methodological approach goes well beyond the mere inclusion of marginalised groups, otherwise excluded by labour historians. This redefinition, however, implies a reconceptualisation of capitalism, and this is one of the most controversial and challenging aspects of GLH. For GLH, capitalism is not about wage labour versus capital. This is in contrast not only to what Marx and Marxian labour historians have professed but also many other classical economist and economic historians, not necessarily Marxist. The capitalist mode of production does not dominate over other modes of non-capitalist production such as serfdom, slavery, household, reciprocity, etc. It simply coexists with them. GLH claims that classical labour historians concentrate heavily on free wage workers. Therefore global labour historians see classical labour historians as limiting themselves to the study of an history that pertains and originates in the North Atlantic or the Global North, where free wage labour emerged and was formalised as the prominent kind of labour relation, at least in the last two centuries. Contrary to this, GLH maintains that worldwide and in the long term the capitalist commodification of labour power – labour commodification via the market – is quite an exclusive form of labour relation, which pertains to a minority of workers globally and to a short period of history, the last two or three centuries. In Figure 20.1, other forms of labour relations are depicted which show how labour can be and has been employed: reciprocal labour that occurs in the household, such as kin-production and reproduction labour; tributary labour that is performed for the polity such as some forms of indentured labour, tributary servitude, obligatory labour (convict labour), etc. All forms of unpaid labour fall within the non-capitalist categories. Non-capitalist forms of labour relations can coexist with capitalist labour commodification. GLH proclaims that the histories of workers employed in these forms ought to be part of labour history (Lucassen 2016; Mohapatra 2007). Since the development of capitalism, almost every industry existed with workers employed in different types of labour relations, not all of them capitalist. For example, the construction of railways in South Africa, Kenya, India, North America and Latin America, was possible because of capital investment that served to pay engineers, managers and specialised (unionised) wage workers. But next to it contract and indentured workers existed and sometimes unfree and unpaid workers too. The GLH dictum states that a labour history is hardly possible without taking into account this variety of labour relations employed within a single production chain or industry (Bellucci, Corrêa, Deutsch and Joshi 2014). However, a major methodological problem arises when the labour historian employs inclusivity in her/his own research. How to research and write those histories if in the presence of unwritten sources? How to write GLH and include workers employed in productive (and unproductive) processes by means of oral arrangements or unwritten social rules of bondage? Orality and “traditional” rules of bondage are based on honour not ink; these were forms of engagement and employment of coolies, sharecroppers, time-rate workers, serfs, prostitutes, pawns (child workers), indentured workers, etc. This is not a matter of hierarchising forms of labour relations; it is not a matter of inclusivity or exclusivity of different forms of labour relations. This is a matter of dealing with challenges that GLH poses to historians and to the research field itself. Apart from these challenges, GLH also offers opportunities, such as the inclusion into the category of working class of atypical workers, i.e. workers who do not belong only to one
258 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work form of labour relations. Rossana Barragan explains, for example, how in the mines of Potosì, in Bolivia, slaves and serfs received wages (Barragan 2017). Can we call these workers wage workers or slaves? In 19th-century Brazil, there were slaves who worked in the docks of the Port of Bahia on behalf of their masters for a wage, hence they were called ganhadores (i.e. earners) (Reis 2019). In this way, the owner of the slave was relieved from the duty to provide for slaves. These cases prove the blurriness that can exist between definitions of work and working class. Finally, a methodological critique of classical labour history on the part of GLH is its insistence in producing labour histories that occurred within the national borders where that history took place. Hence, the global expansion of labour history means the rejection of “methodological nationalism” (van der Linden 2008, p. 3 and pp. 6–7; Ribeiro da Silva 2021). Labour history does not only or always coincide with national histories. Too often classical labour historians wrote about the working classes and within its national borders. This is perhaps also the source of Eurocentrism in classical labour history. From E.P. Thompson in the UK to Jürgen Kocka in Germany, from Louis Chevalier in France to Giovanni Bianchi and Alberto Cadioli in Italy, national borders constitute the fence within which to frame labour history (Bianchi and Cadioli 1978; Chevalier 1958; Kocka 1977; Thompson 1977 [1963]). In other cases, industrial districts were the loci of labour history, but these histories still remained stranded within the history of a national working class. GLH offers the opportunity to go beyond the national narrative. Global, however, does not only imply a transnational view, and local and micro-histories are well-fitting GLH, as long as an effort is made to connect the local with a “bigger picture” or “big question” (van Nederveen Meerkerk 2017). The GLH’s struggle to relinquish national positionalities in both historical research and historical debate is perhaps the most widely recognised merit of GLH.
METHODOLOGY 3: FREE, UNFREE AND CAPITALISM Freedom of workers to choose their exploiter is a central element to define the essence of capitalism. Historians, philosophers and economists have always struggled to determine the boundaries that are supposed to exist between free and unfree labour (and life). Many global labour historians have researched and published about slave and forced labour (Brandon, Jones, Jouwe, van Rossum and Tosun 2020; Fall 2011; van Rossum 2020 and 2021). GLH, however, is not interested in drawing an exact boundary between free and unfree labour; it is actually interested in the grey zone or the zone of transition between these two conditions of labour. This is because a sizable portion of workers throughout history and worldwide belong to a combination of more than one labour relation, more or less “free” in nature. Multiple labour relations can persist within the activity of one worker or in an industry or in a society, and GLH is about the synchronicity and diachronicity of these combinations. A clear division cannot be made between free and unfree labour, and these categorisations are widely used in GLH and its studies on the subaltern multitude of labourers (Bellucci and Eckert 2019; Brass and van der Linden 1997). The idea of a coexistence of free with unfree labour, implies a revision of how we understand the concept of “capitalism”. If capitalism has to include modern, technologically advanced urban settings, on the one hand, and rural peripheries, and the traditional and feudal agrarian systems, on the other hand, the meaning of workers as a social class must inevitably be over-
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 259 stretched. As noted earlier, this why in GLH “class” becomes “subaltern” (Atabaki 2007). The history of the subaltern multitude of workers seems to make global labour historians content, for the time being, with the realisation that more than one form of labour commodification can exist within capitalism. Not considering workers as a class implies that GLH as a discipline renounces the dialectical relationship of labour with capital and the idea that one class (the working class) should override the other (capitalist or bourgeois class). Proponents of GLH tend to make the post-modern choice of separating history from the reality they live in. This means that GLH is not the place for militant history. The job of the historian becomes to explain society and not to change it (see the discussion below on the difference with Marxian and progressive labour historians). Capitalism – like globalisation – is for GLH what Peter Linebaugh and Markus Rediker defined as a “many-headed hydra”: a monstrous system headed by different interests and different powers (Linebaugh and Rediker 1992). Each head represents a labour relation. But are all heads the same? The idea of a many-headed hydra is misleading. Indeed, the working class, the slave, the serfs, the capitalists, the aristocrats, etc. are not heads of the same animals. One of them is the head (capital) and the others the arms (workers) of the monster. Failing to understand this is failing to see history as a struggle for power between social forces. Indeed, in GLH, capitalism is not seen as a linear historical process (mode of production) of annihilation of all other forms of labour relations. But did not chattel slavery decline since antiquity? It is true that it persists in some parts of the world but certainly one can hardly deny it has steadily declined since its massive presence from antiquity to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade. The decline of the presence of non-commodified in the production process is the history of capitalism, but GLH fails to see capitalism in these terms. It seems that GLH’s reticence to consider the supremacy of wage labour in capitalist history goes hand in hand with its denial of an avant-garde labour force with the labour movement. This is yet another major difference between classical labour historians who were progressive and tended to be more militant than global labour historians. This is also why, for classical labour historians, the histories of rebellions and workers resistance was and is central to labour history. This is also the case in GLH, where histories of strikes, lookouts, walkouts, boycotts, etc. are certainly present. The enlarged view of the working class or the idea of a subaltern labour multitude allows GLH to include into its analysis a variety of forms of labour resistance, next to that of the factory wage workers in industrialised settings. After all, labour conflict is part of the labour-capital relationship. Can labour history be written without or outside dialectical materialism? A critique of the GLH’s methodology is presented in a series of essays by Jairus Banaji with which the author insists on the centrality of theory in history, and more specifically on historical materialism. This does not mean to apply Marx’s views of history and the economy, especially the idea of the “Asiatic mode of production”, etc. but rather to connect the struggle of research (theory) with the workers struggle (praxis) (Banaji 2010). Labour revolts include slave revolts; hence actions by non-wage workers. This seems, however, something that global labour historians have in common with classical labour historians. The development of a class conscience of exploitation and the stimulus to do something about it, on the part of the exploited workers, is a central matter of labour history. GLH, in its refusal to employ “class” as central to its terminology and methodology, has still to find an alternative definition of “class consciousness” and perhaps of “dialectical materialism”.
260 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
THE MARGINALISATION OF TRADE UNIONS If free wage labour is not central to the analysis of GLH, then also trade unions (or labour unions) lose their centre stage as actors of labour history. The global declining of unions’ power seems to coincide with the marginalisation of trade unions within labour history research. GLH epitomises quite well this marginalisation process, which coincides with a generalised decline of trade unions’ membership. Indeed, it seems that, globally, trade unions’ density is diluting. Strangely enough, union density is a measure widely used to assess union strength. In fact, this is the case despite the fact that numbers (quantity or membership) and efficacy (quality of work or achievement) are not always positively correlated factors. There are countless examples showing how small unions can be rather effective. However, the decline in trade unions’ density or workers’ membership is a reality acknowledged in statistics produced by both the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Trade Unions Confederation (ITUC) (ILO 2021; ITUC 2020). Both organisations published data and accounts in which it clearly transpires how trade unions have enormous challenges ahead of them to regain popularity. On the causes of such decline opinions are diverging. For the ITUC, governments-capital alliance, violations of trade union rights, discriminatory and even persecution of unions’ members are to be blamed. In the Global South, an increase of precarious and informal labour, under the banner of self-employment and flexibility, also affects trade unions density. Unlike trade unions, some scholars maintain that it is the changing social landscape determined by information technology (IT) that is the main reason for unions’ decline. Today’s workers are said to be somehow different than workers in the past, for the economy and production lines have changed dramatically. Technological transformations have resulted in the individualisation of the labour process. The individualisation of tasks means that trade unions find it more difficult to attract and organise such workers who do not perceive themselves as a group (or a class). This is especially true in the Global North, but parts of the Global South are not spared by such phenomena. Both points present valid arguments, but GLH seems to prefer the second viewpoint. Indeed, studies on the GLH of anti-trade unions discrimination are close to none. Trade unions are still extremely important for the labour movement globally and the marginalisation of trade unionism by GLH researchers is quite problematic. The ILO estimates the world’s employed population, aged 15 years and older, at three billion. Almost two billion, or 61.2 per cent, are working informally, mostly in the informal sector of unregistered firms and own-account work (ILO 2018). Of the three billion people in employment, 516 million or 17 per cent are union members. In another ILO calculation, that leaves out the self-employed, family workers and employers, the global union density rate is 27 per cent. In short, ca. one in every ten persons in employment and one in every six employees in a formal employment relationship joins a trade union (ILO 2018). Again, these are important numbers and trade unionist history seems far from over (Corrêa 2021). The neglect of trade unions’ history is more evident if one considers that the IISH, the birthplace of GLH, is home to one of the biggest collections of trade union archival sources worldwide (including the ITUC and its antecedent organisations). Hence, some sort of preconceptual positioning seems to play a role in this (mis)treatment of unions. The problem seems not just that unions show decreasing or low membership numbers globally – how is it possible to determine what is “few” and “many” in this field? – but rather that trade unions
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 261 represent free wage workers with formal employment. So, it seems that the decline of trade unions’ density is not the reason for the neglecting of trade unions. The reason seems to be that trade unions are institutional actors that defend the interests of a particular group of workers. The argument goes that, worldwide, formal free wage labour represents a small fraction of the labour force. Unions cannot be seen as representative of all workers; on the contrary by protecting one group of workers, trade unions inevitably ignore and even damage another group of workers. It seems that global labour historians see trade unions as exclusivist actors in labour history. Hence, trade unions are supposed to be antagonistic figures to the idea of a global approach to the study of labour history. Earlier in this chapter, it was explained how GLH is about transcending the working class and replacing it with the idea of a subaltern multitude of workers. The argument therefore goes that if trade unions represent only a fraction of workers, they become obtuse organisations, mainly preoccupied with bargaining for deals with employers in order to protect the labour standards of their members, blue- and white-collar workers, who are already comparatively better off compared to most workers. The concept of a “labour aristocracy” comes from this very same reasoning (Arrighi 1970; Hinchliffe 1974; Waterman 1975). Trade unions-related political parties, mostly leftist – social-democratic, socialist or communist – collapsed with the downfall of the Soviet Union and the decline of what is known as Keynesism, both alternatives to the savagely exploitative capitalism that began to dominate the globe. Christian parties, also supporters of trade unions, better resisted the shock, but they ceased to unconditionally support Christian unions. The victory of freedom over authoritarianism had its consequences on the world of work with a massive expansion of social inequalities and the decline in the quality of the life of workers. In other words, freedom was paid for by a general decline of real wages and a worsening of labour conditions (ITUC 2020). Unions are now alone. Instead of blaming social democratic parties who fell for the Third Way, global labour historians tend to find unions also responsible for their solitude. This is partly true. Indeed, apart from a few exceptions, trade unions have been uncapable of moving beyond an inward-looking strategy catering for “their” workers, ignoring or even at the expense of others. Throughout history, their agency has been staunchly sectorial and even nationalist. GLH claims that, in the long run, this helped to create a global “labour aristocracy” detached from and even in competition with the global labour masses (Mogalakwe 2008; Moorhouse 1978; Musson 1976; Post 2010; Strauss 2004; Warhurst and Nickson 2007). Other issues of contention between GLH and unions are in the following fields: 1) Trade unions are centralised and centralising organisations tend to be exclusionary. 2) Unions do not fit the GLH’s approach which is centred in the subaltern multitude of labourers. In fact, while unions were somehow able to put forward feminist and youth instances, and managed to achieve major social changes, these mainly occurred in the North-Atlantic world. Unions did not engage in the Third World as much. 3) Finally, trade unions have often clashed with ecologism and environmentalism. These ideologies usually imply an economic reconversion that is quite costly for unionised workers in heavy industries. A critique of the GLH’s critique on unions can also be put forward. The GLH’s marginalisation of unions’ does not do justice to trade unions’ history as principal actors in the modern labour movement. Welfare state measures and labour standards, especially in the North-Atlantic world, are achievements trade unions contributed to realise. If these achievements produced a labour aristocracy, this can hardly be seen as the main problem of workers. Furthermore, it can hardly be proved that high labour standards of some workers were
262 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work achieved at the expense of other workers, as if the capitalists and managers have nothing to do with this. On the contrary, higher standards could serve as goals for workers in the worst conditions. The labour aristocracy argument also presents another danger. It serves the neoliberalist strategy to keep the labour force divided. The contrary has still to be proved as historical research continues to be deficient in this area. GLH lack of research on unions seems more of a principled position than an objective one. Of course, trade unions are complex and multifaceted institutions. They are bureaucratic and sectorial organisations. They tend to be more bargaining than revolutionary in their nature. In this sense, unions can be seen as reformist organisations. However, their actions could mean more than factionalism and sectionalism. They are minority organisations within the global labour force but they could also be seen as vanguard workers’ organisations. This is especially so in the so-called Global South where the labour movement is historically less structured both politically and legally (McQuinn 2022).
CONCLUDING REMARKS: THE END OF WORKING-CLASS HISTORY? The relationship of GLH with classical labour history seems problematic. In reality it is not and the two historical currents can also be seen as complementary to one another. Classical labour history is influenced by Marxian methodology, and it is therefore engaged with changing society. This is why classical labour historians are (or were) very much involved in political struggles, more so than global labour historians. They applied the Marxian eschatology in their own study of history: the past is social injustice, the present is the detonation of social contradictions and the future is social justice. Historical research is at the service of such future. Classical labour history analyses case studies in order to either confirm this linear progression of history or explain why deviations occur. Correcting the past is of course impossible, but the labour movement could nonetheless learn from past mistakes. This is in a nutshell what “engagement” means in classical labour history. GLH’s approach to historical research differs substantially. It is ontological. Global labour historians seem not to be bothered with an explanation of history as ineluctably leading to the victory of the working class. First of all, GLH explains how the working class itself is a problematic and undefinable category. Secondly, labour history cannot be “used” in the class struggle, because research is a science and science is neutral (or ought to remain neutral). In other words, the main goal of historical research is research and not social change. Thirdly, the methodological insistence on the global coexistence of modes of production stretches the subject of study so much that it becomes impossible to rationalise the labour factor according to whatever ideological point of view – liberal, socialist, Marxian, neoliberist, etc. One may ask whether the abandonment of an ideological viewpoint is ideology as well. Perhaps the disconnection of GLH from the labour movement, and trade unions in particular, has something to do with the unwillingness on the part of GLH to engage with ideology. The move from the working class to global labour has allowed, however, the labour historian to enlarge her/his concept of who are the working people. There are now formal wage workers (aristocracy) and the unprivileged (subaltern) workers. The latter actually take precedence in GLH. This game of contra-opposition within the labour force meant that GLH got particularly interested in the study of workers in sectors such as home health, domestic,
Global labour history – its promises and hazards 263 prostitution, prison, etc. The changing focus is after all a global trend. GLH’s interest in the history of informal and illegal (forced and slave) labour, especially in the Global South, also pertains to this change of perspective on labour. There are of course valid reasons for this, above all that of filling the gaps of classical labour history, mainly interested with trade unions and the proletariat, as defined in the socialist tradition. Global labour historians are very much engaged in debates on formal and informal, free and unfree, male and female labour, etc. Important as these dichotomic discussions may be, they inevitably constitute and highlight sources of division within the labour force. This is not a problem per se. However, together with GLH methodological pragmatism and anti-ideologist character, the risk on the part of global labour historians to fall into the post-modern trap is always there. The trap consists of a transformation of historical research on particularistic and self-centred discussions, reflecting more on GLH itself than its role as a field of study. The obsession with the discovery of differences within the labour force as well as that of categorising differences amongst workers is certainly a signal of this direction. The focus is not on social dialectics but on the measurement of various groups of workers and eventually the relationship between them. GLH has the merit to have revived labour history as a discipline, but the “global” of GLH should not phagocytise the histories of the working class, the national struggles and trade unionism. A continuation and not a rupture with classical labour history would certainly benefit the study of the history of labour. After all, even before GLH was born, historical research dealt with workers other than wage labour. In the past, Christian, liberal and socialist scholars studied the history of forced and enslaved labour, especially in the colonised world. A very cited historian, Walter Rodney is only one example of this GLH ante litteram. Marxian and liberal historians, for example, the founders of the Annales, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, in France, also used methodologies not too dissimilar to those used by global labour historians. Marxian scholars studied thoroughly reproductive labour, household labour – the basis of feminist studies and female labour history. GLH therefore has its roots in all these traditions. It is only a matter of constructively recognising this. After all, the future of GLH seems to be a long and flourishing one.
NOTES 1 2
3
The first publication in which the subject was explicitly mentioned was published in 1999 (van der Linden and Lucassen 1999). Global North and Global South are social, historical and geographical categories often associated with global history in general and also GLH. The Global North corresponds to the rich and historically imperialist part of the world, whereas the Global South is the poorer and historically colonised region and people of the world. In this respect, perhaps, one may say that GLH is the correspondent in historical studies to the labour regime analysis in sociology as both disciplines are very much focused on labour relations.
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Global labour history – its promises and hazards 265 Linden, Marcel van der, and Lucassen, Jan (1999) Prolegomena for a Global Labor History. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History. Linebaugh, Peter, and Rediker Marcus (1992) “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century.” In Segal, Daniel, ed. Crossing Cultures Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, pp. 105–141. Lucassen, Jan, ed. (2006) Global Labour History: A State of the Art. Bern: Peter Lang. Lucassen, Jan (2021) The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lucassen Leo (2016) “Working Together: New Directions in Global Labour History.” Journal of Global History 11, no. 1: 66–87. Marx, Karl (1976 [1847–1849]) Wage-Labor and Capital. Value, Price and Profit. New York: International Publishers Company. McQuinn, Mark, ed. (2022) “African Trade Unions.” Global Labour Journal 13, no. 2 (Special Issue). Mogalakwe, Monageng (2008) “The Making of a Foreign ‘Labour Aristocracy’ in Botswana.” Employee Relations 30, no. 4: 422–435. Mohapatra, Prabhu P. (2007) “Eurocentrism, Forced Labour, and Global Migration: A Critical Assessment.” International Review of Social History 52, no. 1: 110–115. Moorhouse, H.F. (1978) “The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy.” Social History 3, no. 1: 61–82. Musson, A.E. (1976) “Class Struggle and the Labour Aristocracy, 1830–60.” Social History 1, no. 3: 335–356. Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise van (2017) “Big Questions and Big Data: The Role of Labour and Labour Relations in Recent Global Economic History.” International Review of Social History 62, no. 1: 95–121. Post, Charles (2010) “Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’.” Historical Materialism 18, no. 4: 3–38. Reis, João José (2019) Ganhadores: a greve negra de 1857 na Bahia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rossum, Matthias van (2020) “Global Slavery, Local Bondage? Rethinking Slaveries as (Im)Mobilizing Regimes from the Case of the Dutch Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago Worlds.” Journal of World History 31, no. 4: 693–727. Rossum, Matthias van (2021) “Slavery and Its Transformations: Prolegomena for a Global and Comparative Research Agenda.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 3: 566–598. Schendel, Willem van (2006) “Stretching Labour Historiography: Pointers from South Asia.” International Review of Social History 51, Supplement: 229–261. Schendel, Willem van (2018) “Beyond Labor History’s Comfort Zone? Labor Regimes in Northeast India, from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century.” In Bosma, Ulbe, and Hofmeester, Karin eds. The Lifework of a Labor Historian: Essays in Honor of Marcel van der Linden. Boston: Brill, pp. 174–207. Silva, Filipa Ribeiro da (2021) “The Profits of the Portuguese-Brazilian Transatlantic Slave Trade: Challenges and Possibilities.” Slavery and Abolition 42, no. 1: 77–104. Strauss, Jonathan (2004) “Engels and the Theory of the Labour Aristocracy.” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal 25: online. Thompson, E.P. (1977 [1963]) The Making of the English Working Class. [1st ed., 6th] repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Warhurst, Chris, and Nickson, Dennis (2007) “A New Labour Aristocracy? Aesthetic Labour and Routine Interactive Service.” Work, Employment and Society 21, no. 4: 785–798. Waterman, Peter (1975), “The ‘Labour Aristocracy’ in Africa: Introduction to a Debate.” Development and Change 6, no. 3: 57–74.
21. How the field of industrial relations remains relevant for understanding the global political economy of work Heather Connolly
INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON A FIELD This chapter explores the particular insights into the global political economy of work afforded by the interdisciplinary approaches familiar in the field of industrial relations. Industrial relations typically takes as its focus the ‘governance of the employment relationship’ (Sisson, 2020) and explores the explanatory potential of the wider context of that relationship in explaining both the nature and form of employment relationships. A particular aspect of industrial relations that is especially relevant in the context of this book is that the employment relationship is not assumed to be the outcome only of individual-level dynamics between an employee and employer. Collective institutions of employment regulation and the role of the state (see Howell, 2021 and Martínez Lucio and MacKenzie, 2017) feature strongly in the field of industrial relations and are often cited as aspects differentiating this analytical approach from the related fields of Human Resource Management (HRM) and employee relations. While the boundaries of these fields are difficult to codify with any definitive statement, it is certainly the case that industrial relations consistently seeks to locate the dynamics of employment relationships within a collective context that extends beyond the employing organisation to institutions such as collective bargaining, labour law, regulatory bodies and labour market policies. From the early 2000s, the field has gone through an almost complete rebrand to become the field of ‘employment relations’.1 This chapter will use the term industrial relations throughout as a nod to the origins of the field, while viewing the scope and content of industrial relations and employment relations as interchangeable. Since the 1980s, the context for studying industrial relations has changed fundamentally, with the greater privileging of the interests and objectives of capital, which have presented new challenges to workers in organising collectively and acting as an effective counterbalance. Trade unions as institutions have lost representativeness worldwide at both political and civil society level, and they have often failed to defend and/or extend protective coverage (Atzeni, 2021). Trade unions have been on the defensive in countries where social and employment protection has been high, and in all countries, unions have struggled to make inroads into new and growing sectors. In spite of this, we have witnessed innovative and continuous attempts at developing and implementing renewal and revitalisation strategies (see Murray, 2017). With the traditional focus on regulation and institutions in the industrial relations field there have been gaps in empirical enquiry and theory development to reflect and understand how shifts in the nature of work – such as increases in outsourcing, temporary agency work and other forms of externalisation of jobs – are shaping employment and affecting the balance of power in employment relations, particularly in the Global South. Other weaknesses in the field 266
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 267 have been its lack of intersectional sensitivity (McBride et al., 2015) on questions of gender (Rubery and Hebson, 2018) and race (Lee and Tapia, 2021). While work has been done to address these gaps (see Alberti and Iannuzzi, 2020; Moore and Taylor, 2021; Tapia et al., 2017) such transitions are by no means complete (Hodder and Martínez Lucio, 2021). However, this chapter demonstrates the continued relevance of the industrial relations field for understanding work and employment. I argue that having collective labour organisations, and the nature (and governance) of the employment relationship – that is multi-level power relations – at the centre of analyses remains pertinent for understanding the political economy of work in both the Global North and South. The field has moved beyond the dominant focus on, not just trade unions, but long-established unions, to include spontaneous issue-based movements and mobilisations as well as the movements that have emerged in the ‘gig economy’. Industrial relations academics have turned to studying these movements as they have emerged, and the balance of research in the field has shifted, largely, in line with the changes in the nature of labour conflicts and worker organising. Underlying these turns in the field we find the added value of industrial relations approaches, that research is empirically based and (often) embedded within and politically aligned to the sites of resistance and ‘communities of struggle’ (Holgate, 2021), which helps us understand and theorise the shifts in relations of power in the political economy of work.2 This chapter starts with a discussion of traditional approaches in industrial relations, before setting up and responding to critiques of the field. I demonstrate the continued relevance of industrial relations through a discussion of, firstly, the contribution of Kelly’s (1998) mobilisation theory and frameworks for understanding the micro social processes of collectivism, and, secondly, the theoretical and empirical developments in comparative industrial relations, particularly in the frameworks for understanding precarious work and solidarity, which reveal new forms of industrial relations.
TRADITIONAL APPROACHES IN THE FIELD AND THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTS The field of industrial relations emerged in the US and became a largely Anglo-American specialism (see Hyman, 1995). In most British universities, the corridors of industrial relations departments were populated by economists, historians, sociologists and lawyers. Each of these highlighted in different ways the influence of factors from their fields on the management of workforces. The classic approach to understand industrial relations posits ‘workplace rules’, the regulation of labour relations or a similar phrased notion as the object of its study (Flanders, 1970). It was common in industrial relations to identify three main actors influencing the employment relationship: workers (both individually and through their collective representative institutions such as trade unions), employers (again – both individually and through collective representation such as employers’ associations) and the state in all its manifestations. Exploring changes in the dynamics between key actors allowed for reflection on how state policies pursued in national and supra-national settings created and reinforced fundamental shifts in power between workers and employers and the rules within which these relationships took place and how they shift. Reflecting its origins in forming policy responses to labour conflicts, academics in the field tended to focus on developing theory ‘in’ rather than a theory ‘of’ industrial relations. The
268 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work best-known effort to develop a general theory ‘of’ industrial relations is John T. Dunlop’s Industrial Relations Systems (1958). Dunlop defined the industrial relations system as an analytical subsystem of industrial societies and located it at the same logical plane as an economic system (Müller-Jentsch, 2004). An industrial relations system at any one time in its development is regarded as comprised of certain actors, certain contexts, an ideology, which binds the industrial relations system together, and a body of rules created to govern the actors at the workplace and work community. The key contribution of the systems approach was to recognise the influence exerted on actors within the workplace by the external context. Thus, for example, political, economic and legal factors conditioned to some extent the nature of processes within workplaces. These processes give rise to rules of different kinds which govern the workplace. Some are substantive, meaning that they set the terms and conditions of employment; others are procedural, meaning that they govern the roles assumed by parties in key circumstances such as the resolution of individual or collective disputes. Two factors emerging from this line of analysis are important for our purposes. First, the accumulation of decisions of this kind shapes social outcomes including income inequality and job quality. Second, these processes are interactive throughout. Workplace rules become embedded, for example, and shape the thinking of actors within workplaces. Equally, their thinking is also likely to be influenced by developments in the social context. Consequently, there is a feedback loop, from outcomes back to actor, which then informs their approach to processes and so on. While Dunlop provided a useful framework and heuristic device for identifying and organising many of the key features of the field (i.e. aspects of the environment, identification of the key actors and the ideology binding them together and a focus on the rules governing employment relations), the framework is criticised for its functionalist, positivist underpinnings, and for underplaying ideology, conflict and change. Differences in industrial relations approaches can neatly be viewed through one of the most important (meta-) theoretical developments in the field, which still resonates today. According to Fox’s ‘frames of reference’ (1966, 1974), industrial relations can be approached through one of three frames of reference – unitary, pluralist or radical – that differ in their perspectives on the nature of employment relations. Frames of references are rooted in two key dimensions: the interests of the parties to the employment relationship and the degree of compatibility of these interests. The key questions are, what are the interests of employers and employees, and are these interests compatible or in conflict? Fox’s frames of reference focus on the employment relationship as the focal point for determining identities that give definition to the actors’ interests and their degree of shared and conflicting interests. Frames of references continue to be used in research and pedagogy as a way of understanding the nature of workplace rules by considering these three perspectives on rules and approaches to industrial relations research and the ways in which actors in employment relations conceive of their interests. The breakdown of clear boundaries defining employer–employee relationships poses empirical and conceptual challenges for frames of reference (Ackers, 2002). Yet, there have been attempts to redress the lack of empirical application of the frames of reference (Kaufman et al., 2021) and additions to the existing frames of reference, for example, radical pluralism. A revision to use critical rather than radical to reflect today’s nomenclature arguably gives the frames continuing and wider resonance (Heery, 2016). Sisson (2020) argues that, rather than talking in terms of the two main ideal-typical industrial relations positions: ‘pluralist’ and ‘radical’, we can distinguish ‘institutionalists’ and
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 269 ‘materialists’ in the field. Institutionalists tend to focus as much on the wider institutions of industrial relations, trade unions, collective bargaining and legal regulation, as much as those found inside the workplace, whereas materialists, starting from Marx’s analysis of capitalism, place the creation of an economic surplus, the coexistence of cooperation and conflict, the indeterminate nature of the exchange relationship, and the asymmetry of power – not the institutions of trade unions, employers’ associations or government agencies – at the centre of studies (Blyton and Turnbull, 2004). Materialist, Marxist and radical perspectives significantly shaped the industrial relations field from the mid-1970s and can be broken down into three schools of thoughts: the political economy of industrial relations, labour process analysis and the French regulation school (see Müller-Jentsch, 2004 for a full discussion). The development of political economy approaches to industrial relations reacted against the dominant functionalist and system approaches. Hyman, in his seminal work Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (1975), argued that ‘order’ and ‘regulation’ were only one side of industrial relations; instability and disorder must be evaluated as of ‘equal significance as “system outcomes”’ (Hyman, 1975: 12). Industrial relations were not to be defined as ‘the study of job regulation’ but rather as ‘the study of processes of control over work relations’ (1975: 12). Hyman’s critique of systems theory also contested the notion of studying ‘industrial relations systems’ as autonomous subsystems and the need to recognise and account for the interconnections between the various levels of national and international capital, state and civil society, and material and ideological relations (Hyman, 1979). Materialists focused on the labour process demonstrate how the ‘structured antagonism’ associated with the employment relationship works in practice. Paul Edwards’ seminal Conflict at Work: A Materialist Analysis of Workplace Relations (1986) developed the concept of ‘structured antagonism’: The theory says that the structured antagonism exists because workers are exploited in a very specific technical sense, namely, that they generate value in the labour process, and some of that value is taken from them…the class of workers has as its primary function of producing value under the authority of others and enjoying only some of the fruits of that value (Edwards, 2014: 12).
In 2018, Edwards revisited his original idea of ‘structured antagonism’ recognising that it was overly focused on the labour process in two senses: not relating the labour process to the wider system of capitalism, and neglecting the creation of value in other places. That said, he argues, we can still say that a ‘structured antagonism’ is at the heart of the labour process and that managing the ‘structured antagonism’ is a distinct issue for capitalists which is more fundamental than other aspects of the mode of production. We find industrial relations scholars across both institutionalist and materialist approaches, and, while the boundaries between the two are not clear-cut, we can identify an underlying division in the field between more institutionalist and more materialist perspectives. It is a recurrent feature of industrial relations since Richard Hyman’s critique of Alan Flanders’ definition of the scope of industrial relations, and is reproduced in the context of late-stage capitalism, where we see the further blurring of boundaries in capital-labour relations and changes in the international division of labour, with patterns in the Global North becoming similar to the Global South.
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GLOBAL LABOUR STUDIES CRITIQUES AND CONTEMPORARY CONTRIBUTIONS IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS The post-war period up until the late 1970s represented a peak in trade union membership and influence in politics and public policy. The focus of industrial relations was on the institutions of trade unions and collective bargaining, which were underpinned by ‘solidaristic’ wage bargaining and encompassing welfare policies. Since the 1980s, in a context of growing individualism and inequality under neoliberal global capitalism, the decline in institutional representations of solidarity revived questions of collective identity and interests in the field. One tendency in the field of industrial relations has been to move away from institution-centred approaches to more process and actor-centred approaches. For global labour scholars this shift in focus and approach in industrial relations has not gone far enough. Nowak (2021) argues that the concepts and general assumptions of industrial relations as a research field are mainly derived from Western Fordism (including Japan and Australia), and its neoliberal successors – without much critical reflection regarding this geographical limitation and how it might impact on the explanatory power of the approach. Supporting this critique, Atzeni (2021) argues that research in industrial relations and labour studies has been historically framed within Western Europe’s post-World War Two social democratic class compromise. According to Nowak (2021) the traditional industrial relations approach is problematic because it rests on three assumptions, focused on a regulation of the workplace via collective bargaining of trade unions with employers. First, trade unions are seen as the main actors on the side of labour in labour conflicts, second, coordinated trade union action is juxtaposed with ‘unorganised’ or spontaneous mobilisations; and, third, the focus is on the workplace as locus of conflict and/or labour mobilisation. The politics of publishing in an increasingly marketised higher education sector might mean these are the main assumptions that are the most visible and seemingly valorised in industrial relations, but I would dispute that these are the dominant assumptions held by industrial relations scholars. In any case, two areas that have been developed in industrial relations are worth discussing as a response to critiques of the field. Mobilisation Theory and the Micro Processes Collective Action A significant contribution, which responds to critiques of the field as being focused on institutions and formal conflict, is Kelly’s mobilisation theory (see Economic and Industrial Democracy special issues in 2018 for a celebration and critique of the work). Kelly integrates industrial relations and social movement theory, by providing a framework for the analysis of micro processes of mobilisations. The key question in Kelly’s work is how individuals are transformed into collective actors willing and able to construct and sustain collective interests and engage in collective action against their employers. The process of moving from having common interests to understanding them as common and acting on them is filled with contingency, and worker solidarity is not an a priori fact, but grows out of the interactive processes among the workers in their confrontation with management (Fantasia, 1988). Mobilisation theories emphasise the socially constructed nature of collective interests and mobilisation and help us to better understand the presence or absence of collective organisation and action. The specific framework of collective interest definition provides a useful set of concepts with which to study the social processes of collectivism.
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 271 Of course, studies on the construction of collective interests are not new to industrial relations. Batstone et al’s (1977, 1978) research on shop-steward organisation in the UK highlights the ways in which activists sought to shape workers’ interests through a protracted process of communication, ‘mobilisation of bias’ and ‘systems of argument’. Studies in industrial relations have also shown that workplace union leadership is an important part of studying collective organisation and participation in the workplace (see Kelly, 1998). Batstone et al’s study remains an important starting point for studies of workplace union organisation, activism and leadership. The study identified types of leaders by assessing their commitment to trade unionism and their role as a delegate or representative in relation to their members. Connolly and Darlington (2012) have built on this work and emphasised the importance of left-wing leadership in processes of collective interest definition and union organisation, a factor which has often been overlooked in studies on worker mobilisation. Kelly’s (1998: 126–9) approach has three advantages over existing approaches in industrial relations. First, instead of starting from the employer’s need for cooperation and to secure work performance, it starts from injustice and exploitation. Second, it does not depend on a simple distinction between individualism and collectivism, but distinguishes interest definition, organisation, mobilisation and so on, treating ‘as problematic what previous industrial relations researchers often took for granted, namely the awareness by workers of a set of common interests opposed to those of the employer’. Third, it helps address key issues such as how employees define interests in particular ways. In spite of the critiques of the approach and the lack of take up in the field (see Gall and Holgate, 2018), mobilisation theory has revived the theoretical potential and wider application of industrial relations as a field with the shift of emphasis from institutions to the micro social processes of worker mobilisation. Focusing on exploitation, conflict, power and collective mobilisation, Kelly’s (1998) approach provides a framework to explain change and long-run trends in the unequal exchange between capital and labour, but it tells us little about the nature and functioning of the institutions and procedures of industrial relations. Comparative Industrial Relations A growth area in the industrial relations field has been cross-national comparative studies, which has encouraged theory development and exposure to different theoretical traditions (Hyman, 1994; Sisson, 2020). Comparative industrial relations has drawn on debates in comparative political economy and institutional theory to understand and compare how national models of capitalism effect work and employment (Doellgast et al., 2018). Much of the comparative literature treats nations as coherent political-economic systems, but industrial relations scholars have made calls for and diversified towards sectoral-level studies (Bechter et al., 2012) and for adopting federal-style comparative projects (Almond and Connolly, 2020) to reflect both the intra- and inter-national similarities and differences. Despite the resilience of collective institutions of labour market regulation in some national contexts (Sweden, Germany and others) these remain outliers in a global context, and have faced significant pressure from global capital. These pressures create and reinforce divisions between (groups of) workers, thereby presenting labour with a challenge of re-imagining and rebuilding solidarities that can reach to build common interests across those divisions (Doellgast et al., 2018). The weakening of worker representation through state-led liberalisation projects in countries like France and Sweden and the increase in employer discretion
272 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work (Baccaro and Howell, 2017) demonstrate the extent of the challenge for industrial relations scholars focused on the collective aspects of the employment relations. Yet, and again in the context of the 2020 COVID-19 health pandemic, we saw different responses from governments and companies and those responses were shaped by the strength of employment regulation and resilience of collective organisations and workers’ movements to protect their lives and working conditions through an unprecedented external shock. While recognising the importance of path-dependency, comparative industrial relations allows us to map and identify potential actor-based strategies and institutions that forward progress in creating the conditions for ‘better work’ (Murray et al., 2020). Industrial relations scholars have also extended our analysis and understanding of employment relations and work in the Global South (Hammer and Ness, 2021). One of the most enduring debates in international comparative industrial relations is whether national patterns of work and employment are converging or whether they are diverging or whether a more complex pattern of convergence and divergence is taking place. Convergence theories assume that there are common pressures across societies to adopt a particular (‘best practice’) employment relations system. Original convergence thesis was developed by Kerr et al. in Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960) where they argue that industrialisation and new technologies create pressures across societies to adopt a certain, American-style industrial relations system. The critique of this argument centred on its technological determinism and that it took an American perspective. More recent comparative research has found that some country differences persist and some even increase ‘converging divergences’ where employment practices are clustered around distinct patterns across and within countries (Katz and Darbishire, 2000). The Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework injected theory into the industrial relations field with its conceptualising of two ideal-typical forms of capitalism (Hall and Soskice, 2001), Liberal market economies (LMEs) (e.g. the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia) and Coordinated market economies (CMEs) (e.g. Germany, Denmark and, arguably, France, Italy, South Korea, Japan). Each of these forms of capitalism include a set of ‘complementary’ institutions that form the basis of a nation’s economic competitiveness. In order to develop, produce and distribute goods and services profitably, firms must effectively coordinate with a wide range of actors, e.g. employees, unions, investors, other firms. Relations between firms and these other actors tend to be competitive or transactional in LMEs and more cooperative or collaborative in CMEs, with potentially important implications for industrial relations. In LMEs, employers develop short-term relationships with workers and relatively hostile stances towards unions, and industrial relations is often characterised by decentralised and individualised determination of pay and working conditions, limited employer investment in worker training and substantial management control. In CMEs, employers develop longer-term relationships with workers and more cooperative relations with unions, and pay and working conditions are often determined through industry-wide bargaining, employers invest more in training, and have a greater allowance for worker and union input into employers’ decisions. The limitations of the model include the considerable differences among the nations commonly grouped within each category, especially among CMEs. Other limitations of the model are that there is not enough variety, the LME/CME distinction fails to capture all of the diversity of market economies, and many nations in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Oceania have distinct characteristics. It is static and determinist, difficult to explain change, downplays the
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 273 role of agency, conflict, power and politics and downplays or ignores international factors. It neglects linkages between nation states and ignores international actors and institutions. In Thelen’s (2014) Varieties of Liberalization, national industrial relations systems have not converged to a single model, but have nevertheless moved in a neoliberal direction. National institutions have channelled globalisation pressures in different ways. In Baccaro and Howell’s (2017) Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation they argue that there has been a ‘common liberalizing tendency’ in industrial relations systems of LMEs and CMEs manifesting in expanded employer discretion over pay determination, work organisation, hiring and firing and employment arrangements. The neoliberal tendency has been driven by the decline of the post-war ‘Fordist’ model of wage-led growth. Baccaro and Howell analyse changes in growth models showing how the Fordist/wage-led growth model has been replaced with other models, profit-led, export-led and debt-led. All of these models are inherently unstable and crisis-ridden because, unlike the Fordist growth model, they lack a well-functioning institutional mechanism ensuring that aggregate demand grows in tandem with aggregate supply. The dismantling of Fordist industrial relations systems through liberalisation has taken different forms in different countries but everywhere has increased economic instability. However, Meardi (2018) challenges the argument of a common neoliberal trajectory, finding minimal evidence of neoliberal convergence, and arguing that there has been resilience in institutions of industrial relations. Other comparative industrial relations research has shown how counter-movements across both the Global North and Global South have the potential to expose the worst effects of neoliberalism and offer alternatives. Coordinated strikes among precarious workers in the ‘gig economy’ have emerged worldwide, organised in and outside of unions, to tackle injustices in precarious sectors. A significant reinvigoration of theorising in industrial relations is the framework for understanding the political, social and institutional power relationships in work and employment from Doellgast et al. (2018). This framework brings together insights from comparative industrial relations combined with actor and agency-centred approaches and represents a dynamic and interactive approach showing how relations reinforce each other and whether they change (or not). The framework identifies two discernible ‘ideal type’ models, each having four interlinked conditions moulding the relative balance of power between employers, workers and their unions. These four conditions refer to ‘institutions’, ‘employer strategies’, ‘union strategies’ and ‘worker identification’. Central to the framework is how representative structures differ and how they interact with welfare policies, labour market conditions and broader social context issues (unemployment, benefits, skills, education, social class and ethnicity, among others). The key issue here is that work-related strategies and practices must be understood in terms of the broader regulatory and socio-economic context. The first model defines a ‘virtuous circle’ of power with stable employment and strong regulations and policies. In this context, ‘institutions’ are inclusive as welfare supports, legislation and collective agreements cover a multitude of (standard and non-standard) working arrangements. Worker solidarity is identified; hence, workers can be motivated to take industrial action and engage in collective cooperation with other workers who may be in more disadvantaged positions than themselves, in terms of their employment contract, pay and working conditions. Thus, inclusive institutions support solidarities and associational union power, which in turn promotes inclusive union representation strategies. Furthermore, when institutions and solidarity are inclusive, employer power is constrained, which may stimulate voice-orientated ‘employer strategies’ that enable greater worker capacity for influence.
274 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The second variation of the model defines a ‘vicious circle’ of power and influence where work is precarious, insecure and unstable. In this context, ‘institutions’ are fragmented and employment protections are weaker. As a result, employers exercise greater power to unilaterally impose exit-orientated ‘strategies’ that push workers out of work, and/or fuel ‘exclusive union strategies’, where unions are pressurised to prioritise the concerns of a select insider-group of members (e.g. core workers) focused on standard employment contracts, while workers under more precarious employment conditions are omitted as an outsider-group. These very selective or exclusive union strategies, when combined with employer attempts to divide the workforce, tend to fragment and weaken the possibilities for more power-based solidarities of ‘worker identification’. For instance, workers may only identify and engage in collective solidarities with colleagues of the same skill level, functional role or ethnic background as themselves. The value of Doellgast et al.’s (2018) framework is that it enables a consideration of micro, meso and macro contexts when analysing power, politics and influence in the workplace, and is a conceptual framework for studying, analysing and comparing patterns in precarious work and forms and relations of solidarity (see Dundon et al., 2020).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS: THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS IN CAPITAL-RELATIONS The field of industrial relations has been in a constant state of transition since the end of the 1970s and has been largely on the defensive, with the marginalisation of research and teaching in the field in business schools. Arguably, traditional industrial relations approaches – where focused on the institutions of collective bargaining and the state, employers and unions as the main actors – can face limits in their capacity to analyse labour conflict in the face of the specific forms of labour regulation in the Global South. Yet, contrary to Nowak’s call stated earlier to abandon the main assumptions of industrial relations (and we can dispute that these are the main assumptions, and not rather a particular external representation of a field that fails to capture the breadth and engagement of the field) a further repositioning of the field could be encouraged. Industrial relations academics have turned to studying and situating changes in work, and the balance of research in the field has, to a great extent, shifted to address weaknesses, such as forms of control and agency in gig work (see, for example, Wood and Lehdonvirta, 2019) and the intersectional experiences of work and non-work (see, for example, O’Hagan, 2018). Research in industrial relations draws and contributes to a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary set of debates and theories. Reemphasis on notions of power, and how power is built, helps reframe the industrial relations field to be more applicable beyond the typical institutional and Global North-centric approaches. The emergence of competing sources of social identities challenges the economic assumptions underlying most (but not all) industrial relations theory, therefore, going beyond the traditional locus of the workplace to recognise the wider notion of ‘deep organising’ (rather than shallow mobilising) requires union activists and staff to see the whole worker with their complex, overlapping and sometimes contradictory interests, concerns and identities (Holgate, 2021: 215). Recognising the changes in identity formation and the significance of civil society and community movements, there has been greater emphasis on the ‘relational, transformational and community-based’ features of collective organisations
How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 275 (ibid: 215). The combined dimensions in industrial relations of a micro-level focus on relations of power and control – from both more institutionalist and materialist perspectives, and, in and beyond the workplace and standard employment relationship – alongside the macro political economy developments in comparative industrial relations, gives us the conceptual tools and empirical steers for understanding the multi-level variations in work in and across countries both in the Global North and South. There is evidence that the crisis presented by COVID-19 may present an opportunity to rebuild some institutions of collective interest representation, and associated negotiation. At the time of writing this chapter in late 2021, the combined impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, problems with global supply chains and labour shortages, alongside the election of a new general secretary in the largest UK union Unite, there has been a turn in the UK to more widespread antagonistic approaches in the labour movement. In the US, evidence suggests workers are feeling more empowered to challenge employers on their working conditions (see also Moody, 2017) and at a global level, we observe an increase in workers’ struggles during the pandemic (Azzellini, 2021).3 The pandemic has also led to a renewed interest in industrial relations from policy makers and more widely. Hodder and Martínez Lucio (2021: 1) argue that: ‘Work (and the lack of it) has been pushed to the centre of government and societal responses to the pandemic either through the plight of “key” (“critical”) workers, those working from home, or those unable to work (e.g., in hospitality and many of the creative industries)’. The discussion in this chapter alongside reflections on the potential for a global revaluation of industrial relations in response to the current crisis illustrates the continued relevance and importance of industrial relations as a legitimate field of study, in terms of both research and policy.
NOTES 1
2
The identity of research and teaching in the field now come under a number of field names including labour studies, employee relations, employment relations and Human Resource Management (HRM) in the English-speaking world. In the non-English speaking world industrial relations is found in diverse disciplines including history, sociology, law and geography (to name a few) and this has meant that the focus of study and approach of industrial relations scholars is diverse and not necessarily conducted under the umbrella of industrial or employment relations. The main discipline where you find industrial relations scholars currently in Britain is HRM. The direct ‘rebadging’ of industrial relations (in Britain) as HRM from the 1990s led to a greater separation between teaching and research issues relating to work and employment, where many industrial relations academics found themselves teaching HRM but researching in the broader area of industrial relations. The attack on the industrial relations discipline intensified after 2008, evidenced in the cancelling of degree programmes and modules in industrial relations. There has been pressure on industrial relations academics to teach mainstream HRM and finding themselves subject to redundancy programmes or threats of being ‘downgraded’ to teaching-only contracts often driven by the drive for publications in ‘starred’ journals from the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list. Critical Labour Studies (CLS) was established in 2003 as a network of academics, researchers and activists, and a set of principles and practices, which related to the co-production of research, public engagement, learning, dissemination and pedagogic innovation. The engagement in political education continues with members of CLS involved in the Ella Baker School of Organising and The Future Learn course and accompanying book Power, Politics and Influence at Work (Dundon et al., 2020) at the University of Manchester. Jane Holgate’s book Arise (2021) represents a call to action for scholars working in industrial relations to engage in political education with those outside the academy. In sum, much of the work of industrial scholars goes under the radar in the neoliberal
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3
academy as universities, academic journals and publishing houses prioritise what sells. This can lead to a (somewhat unfair) critique of the field where work is often undervalued and unrecognised, but scholars continue regardless, because of a deep commitment to confronting the worst effects of neoliberal capitalism in and out of work. Robert Reich ‘Is America experiencing an unofficial general strike?’, The Guardian (13 October 2021) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/13/american-workers-general-strike -robert-reich
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How the field of industrial relations remains relevant 277 Hammer, A., and Ness, I. (2021). Informal and precarious work: Insights from the global south. Journal of Labor and Society, 24(1), 1–15. Heery, E. (2016). Framing Work: Unitary, Pluralist, and Critical Perspectives in the Twenty-first Century. Oxford University Press. Hodder, A., and Martínez Lucio, M. (2021). Pandemics, politics, and the resilience of employment relations research. Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work, 31(4), 430–438. Holgate, J. (2021). Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence. London: Pluto Press. Howell, C. (2021). Rethinking the role of the state in employment relations for a neoliberal era. ILR Review, 74(3), 739–772. Hyman, R. (1975). Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hyman, R. (1979). Theory in industrial relations: towards a materialist analysis. In J. Matthes (Ed.), Sozialer Wandel in Westeuropa: Verhandlungen des 19. Deutschen Soziologentages in Berlin 1979, (pp. 247–270). Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verl. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar -136766 Hyman, R. (1994). Industrial relations in western Europe: an era of ambiguity? Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 33(1), 1–24. Hyman, R. (1995). Industrial relations in Europe: theory and practice. European Journal of Industrial Relations, 1(1), 17–46. Katz, H. C., and Darbishire, O. (2000). Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems (No. 32). Cornell University Press. Kaufman, B. E., Barry, M., and Wilkinson, A. (2021). Using unitarist, pluralist, and radical frames to map the cross-section distribution of employment relations across workplaces: A four-country empirical investigation of patterns and determinants. Journal of Industrial Relations, 63(2), 204–234. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0022185620977578 Kelly, J. (1998). Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge. Kelly, J. (2018). Rethinking industrial relations revisited. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 39(4), 701–709. Kerr, C., Harbison, F., Dunlop, J., and Myers, C. (1960). Industrialism and industrial man, International Labour Review, 82(3), 236–250. Lee, T. L., and Tapia, M. (2021). Confronting race and other social identity erasures: The case for critical industrial relations theory. ILR Review, 74(3), 637–662. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793921992080 Martinez Lucio, M., and MacKenzie, R. (2017). The state and the regulation of work and employment: Theoretical contributions, forgotten lessons and new forms of engagement. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 28(21), 2983–3002. https://doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2017.1363796 McBride, A., Hebson, G., and Holgate, J. (2015). Intersectionality: are we taking enough notice in the field of work and employment relations? Work, Employment and Society, 29(2), 331–341. Meardi, G. (2018). Economic integration and state responses: change in European industrial relations since Maastricht. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56(3), 631–655. Moody, K. (2017). The new terrain of class conflict in the United States. Catalyst, 1(2), 41–74. Moore, S., and Taylor, P. (2021). Class reimagined? Intersectionality and industrial action – the British Airways dispute of 2009–2011. Sociology, 55(3), 582–599. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0038038520973603 Müller-Jentsch, W. (2004). Theoretical approaches to industrial relations. In B. E. Kaufman (Ed.), Theoretical Perspectives on Work and the Employment Relationship, (pp. 1–40). Champaign: Industrial Relations Research Association. Murray, G. (2017). Union renewal: what can we learn from three decades of research? Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23(1), 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258916681723 Murray, G., Levesque, C., Morgan, G. D., and Roby, N. (2020). Disruption and re-regulation in work and employment: From organisational to institutional experimentation. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 26(2), 135–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1024258920919346 Nowak, J. (2021). From industrial relations research to global labour studies: Moving labour research beyond Eurocentrism. Globalizations (published online 29 January 2021) DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2021.1874210
278 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work O’Hagan, C. (2018). Broadening the intersectional path: Revealing organizational practices through ‘Working Mothers’ Narratives about Time. Gender, Work and Organization, 25(5), 443–458. https:// doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12056 Rubery, J., and Hebson, G. (2018). Applying a gender lens to employment relations: Revitalisation, resistance and risks. Journal of Industrial Relations, 60(3), 414–436. Sisson, K. (2020). Introduction: studying employment relations in Employment Relations Matters (revised edition). Available at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/erm/sisson_ermch1subj ectmatter2-9_2020.pdf Tapia, M., Lee, T. L., and Filipovitch, M. (2017). Supra-union and intersectional organizing: An examination of two prominent cases in the low-wage US restaurant industry. Journal of Industrial Relations, 59(4), 487–509. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022185617714817 Thelen, K. A. (2014). Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A., and Lehdonvirta, V. (2019). Platform Labour and Structured Antagonism: Understanding the Origins of Protest in the Gig Economy (March 5, 2019). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn .3357804
PART II INTERSECTIONS
Section A. Intersections of work and mobility
22. Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders Claudia Bernardi
INTRODUCTION In 2018, a catchy video titled “VISA – Cross-border Labour Mobility Agency” made its appearance on the web as the outcome of a EU-funded project called VISA Agency. A soft voice rattles off long-standing problems and immediate solutions: Chronic staff shortage? Gaps in skill offering and demand? Lack of information on the neighbouring labour market? Many questions, difficult answers. VISA – Cross-border Labour Mobility Agency has solutions for you! We operate in Bulgaria and Romania, in the whole region on both sides of the Danube […] Our daily communication with companies in both countries gives us first-hand information. We know the needs of the business, the expectations of companies regarding their future employees and the work conditions they offer.1
This promotional video sums up a number of crucial issues that have always gripped the many actors involved in the world of labor, as well as scholars in their attempts to provide an effective analytical framework to envision the transformations of workers’ mobility across nation- state boundaries. Labor shortage has been the usual claim by entrepreneurs for importing workers from states: far from expressing a truthful scarcity of workforce (Plascencia 2018), this demand has stood up historically as a “long and loud” cry (Cohen 1987), an explicit request for tractable, disposable, racialized, cheap, and removable workers (Bernardi 2018). More notably, the advertising displays the solid effort by sovereign states and supranational institutions, like the European Union, to support and fund employment agencies that perform as intermediaries between employers and employees, and as devices for channeling and managing the workforce. In sum, it embodies the neoliberal ideology that trumpets its commitment to productive efficiency, business success, and the economic benefits of labor mobility to match employers’ requests. A long way from the fictions of free movement and free market, this essay presents the main topics and analytical tools needed for an overarching understanding of transborder labor mobility nowadays. The concepts and processes at play are uncountable, so this short contribution is going to display the various players and drivers of change, so to speak, for assessing further paths of research. This chapter starts with remarks about the transformation of space and its ever-expanding range of related concepts, it continues with a discussion of workers’ mobility and the recent developments in the scholarship, and then it presents a critical perspective through a convergence of established studies that discuss the capture of workers’ movements, the valorization of their mobility, and the coexistence of labor forms in the same mobility regime by considering the pivotal example of guestworkers. The concept of regime both questions the structuring processes of global political economy (McMichael 2009) and entails social conflict as a trigger for transformations in the regime itself (Sciortino 2004). In 280
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 281 other terms, it is a contested and unstable historical-analytical device generated by forces for capturing and exploiting life sources to be depleted in the global political economy, as well as by social forces for remaking the world through constituent practices and resistances.
MAKING SPACE THROUGH AND ACROSS BORDERS Placing active subjects in present day space entails the questioning of a broad set of categories and acknowledgment of positionalities.2 The analysis about the relation of “capital-labor-space” has sprouted prolific perspectives. Conceptual tools like the center-periphery relation of dependency and the international division of labor have been the first springboards for rethinking the spatialization of processes of hierarchization and of power relations within which humans are imbued (Frank 1967; Wallerstein 1974). The rigid geographical demarcation between core and peripheral areas has been overcome by later approaches that envisaged the mixed mobility of free and involuntary workers in the context of a more restricted area: a “regional political economy” as a significant economic unit in which capital combines different forms of labor (Cohen 1987). The spatial dimension becomes even more reduced when the mobility of capital is considered as the main driver for the mobility of labor across national borders and the consequent formation of a transnational space (Sassen 1988). Nonetheless, the lead position of capital was also understood as the promise for the creation of new working classes of cheap and controllable labor in the sites of investments that eroded world divides through novel “spatial fixes” (Harvey 1982; Silver 2003). Marxist geographers and critical theorists, on one side, have analyzed the activities of capital and its ability to define the contemporary economic geography at each scale (Massey 1984); on the other side, there are novel insights about the spatiality of labor and the ways in which workers are knowing protagonists in shaping the economic geographies of the planet and in “fixing” space to their own desired condition.3 But there is not one way of change: as workers may be in competition, they have vested interests in generating paths of mobility, expulsion, or immobilization that remake space in antagonist ways. This may often be the case for foreign workers and national workers, or organized groups of foreign workers of different ethnicities that may compete for the same working place because of the recognition of unions by employers. As an outcome, borders may be reinforced through a novel process of nationalization or may be eroded (Ngai 2004; Bernardi 2020b). The working place is neither singular or fixed once and for all. The production and reproduction of labor takes place at many points: the working place has lost its unity and has disintegrated into many sites globally relocated to produce commodities. The productive processes connect different spatial scales and sites that are all organized and simultaneously coordinated into global chains of production that relocate and expel workers according to markets’ needs.4 Notably, capitalists have historically pursued various strategies, sometimes also supported by states and other political formations, to minimize labor costs and increase control over workers and production. Beverly J. Silver (2014) proposed four strategies or “fixes”, in the wake of the first conceptualization of “spatial fix” by Harvey (1982), that define both capitalists’ actions and can be understood as forces that continuously make and unmake the working class. This approach catches the strategies simultaneously employed by capitalism through the border; not only at the border or in the border zone, but those strategies that tackle and
282 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work capture all the subjects and entities involved in the making of that “vertigo” we call the border. A change in labor need in South-African mines reflects on Botswanian migrant workers. In a similar guise, the reorganization of production by US capitalists along its southern border reflects in central Mexico industry and labor migration. The border is a space of conflagration of various chains of production, networks of migrants, sites of resistance, and movements of workers, among many other processes. Grasping the space of labor is always more challenging. A long list of catchwords has been compiled in the past few decades to define meanings and address transformations of today’s world in relation to space, such as globalization, frontier, archipelagos, among many others. Surely, the term border has been privileged as for its polysemy and richness in meanings, but also for the recent proliferation of bordering processes in the world. Groove, boundary, wall, edge, crossing point, limes, gate are just some of the many shapes the term has been assigned for unraveling its multifaceted functions for territory-making across times (Zanini 1997; Petti 2007; Raffestin 2012). In the past thirty years, the study of borders has developed into one of the most prolific transdisciplinary research fields. Border studies have produced an outstanding constellation of concepts and case studies to frame the fascinating human dilemma of the relation between stasis and movement (Wilson and Hastings 2012). The clash of these two terms and living conditions have developed through many scientific approaches – deterministic, poststructuralist, constructivist, decolonial, etc. – that have identified the prevalent immaterial dimensions of borders (Anzaldúa 1987; Saldívar 1997), as much as their material making (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002). The inherent logics, devices of control, symbolic implications, typologies, and modes of differential inclusion have been under investigation at the global level, as much as the articulation of the political space through borders (Balibar and Williams 2002; Perera 2007). Scholars have also turned the concept into a proper epistemological device that combines both division and connection (Balibar 2002, Iveković 2010). In other terms, the border is a method: “an epistemological viewpoint that allows an acute critical analysis not only of how relations of domination, dispossession, and exploitation are being redefined presently but also of the struggles that take shape around these changing relations” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, p. 18). In this view, borders proliferate beyond their geopolitical site and are made by cultural, linguistic, and social aspects that are often more visible in other places rather than at the physical border. The material and immaterial features of the border are blended through conflicting and converging processes of fragmentation and connection. They are non-marginal devices in regulating access, isolation as the partage of the world (Ibidem). If debates about nation-making processes have broadly analyzed the violence for making the citizens of a nation opposed to foreigners by underlying the violence of inclusion, these critical theories of globalization and capitalism have pointed at the double role of the border both as a device of differential inclusion and as a militarized boundary. Also, this view provided an epistemic viewpoint to analyze the heterogenization of time and space as correlated to the multiplication of living labor (De Genova, Mezzadra, and Pickles 2014; Mezzadra 2015), with particular attention to the split between manual and mental labor operated by capital, as much as the production of political revolutionary subjectivities at the border that tendentially overflow the subsumption mechanisms set by capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). This perspective nurtured mainly the philosophical debate about workers’ constituent role in the redefinition of the geographies of capitalism through the border, while the field of labor migration collided with mobility studies in addressing the movements of any entities on our planet with its many implications.
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 283
THE MANY LABOR RELATIONS Economic modes of production and systems, including capitalism, have historically coexisted with a combination of labor regimes in which a mixture of workers of different statuses is concealed by “a national definition of the boundaries of the political economy” (Cohen 1987, p. 2). The scientific debate around the multiplication of labor flourished in many perspectives about globalization and its temporality, neoliberalism, and world crisis. Most of social science scholarship largely considers the multiplication of labor relations as the very recent outcome of neoliberalism and a post-1973 world asset, while historical accounts tend to adopt concepts circulated in the past three decades – in particular, precarity and flexibility – to rethink historical transformations of labor (De Vito 2017). Theoretical analyses have spread light on the relation between mobility, flight, and labor in the long history of capitalism and globalization (Piore 1979; Moulier Boutang 2002; Silver 2003), as well as about the role of a flexible labor supply in the development of a capital-intensive production apparatus (Sassen 1988). In the past decades, terms such as precarity, flexibility, dequalification, outsourcing, and working-poor, among many others, have become increasingly central to the definition of labor transformations across the world, in particular in the Western context (Standing 2011; Atzeni 2014). These terms belong to various streams of literature that have progressively abandoned the idea of the strategic role of regular wage labor as the standard of labor relations, and have embraced an interdisciplinary approach to understand the complexity of work and workers’ practices (van der Linden 2008). This shift has also employed a de-centered perspective that has led to a broad taxonomy of labor relations related to all areas of the world, employing a non-orthodox Marxist approach (Hofmeester and van der Linden, 2019). As a result, it unveiled the ideology of mass employment and wage labor in Western countries, pointing to the proliferation of “forms” of labor (van der Linden 2008) and to their frictions with capital and states’ politics of workers’ capture, valorization, management, and control. The investigation of migrant work as “one” of the “multiple histories of labor” (Chakrabarty 2000) reveals the simultaneous and continuous use of a flexible, removable, racialized, disposable, and temporary worker, beside and together with the creation of a stable, nationalized, homogeneous subject – the well-known free worker, wage-earner citizen.
WORKERS ON THE MOVE Among the endless plethora of excellent studies on workers’ movements, the most recent investigations on mobility and labor migration history could coalesce and foster vibrating conversations on the topic. Since the rhythm analysis by Henri Lefebvre (1992), the many faces of mobility have been scrutinized in their ever-changing relation: the reasons for moving; the speed of travel and its implications; the rhythm as a relation between mobility and immobility; the movement of the human body in association to the one of capitalism; the establishment of routes as means of hierarchy-making; the same experience of travel from a subjective perspective; the frictions in mobility and their uneven distributions; the balance of power between subjects in shaping mobility (Cresswell 2006). These questions forged the debate on the so-called “mobility turn” of the early 2000s that placed the movement of people within the broader flow of goods, objects, capital, and information (Urry 2002), and investigates “the power of
284 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work discourses, practices and infrastructures of mobility in creating the effects of both movements and stasis” (Sheller 2011, p. 2). Far from the apologetic understandings of free movement (of glamorized élites) by globalization theories, this prismatic approach has also underlined the lack of freedom as mobility is – with varying ways and degrees of intensity – designed, channeled, governed, tracked, controlled, surveilled, and unequal as it is striated and hierarchized through lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, age, caste, dis/ability, among others. In this view, “fixity and moorings” configure and enable mobility itself by operating both in a physical and a cultural sense (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). This approach was sided with by a complementary field of research that investigated the use and employment of the term “regime” by transnational studies scholars. In the “regimes of mobility” we recognize the on-going dynamic between conditions of settlement and those of movement within situations of unequal power, by emphasizing the power relationships that legitimize, or prevent, the mobility and immobilization of people (Glick-Schiller and Salazar 2013). On a parallel and much earlier track, the research on migration has generated a vast amount of brilliant studies with various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. The debate on categorizations and taxonomies of migrations has concerned above all sociologists and political scientists (Castles and Miller 2003) that have stretched and blurred categories by introducing neologism to better describe the reality (Schrover 2019). Various areas of the world have been investigated even if lots of research still has to be developed to counterbalance Western case studies and nationalist/Eurocentric approaches. Also, the imposed legal and social status to mobile humans have reinforced segmentations and multiplied categories – as refugee, economic migrant, postcolonial migrant, illegals (Hoerder 2002) – that are detrimental both to forms of migrants’ mutual organization as to understand concrete regimes of mobility. Beyond the distinction between “types of migrants”, the analysis of the subjective dimension in migratory movements has rearticulated the relation of power between subjects and also migrants’ practices of resistance and activism (Papastergiadis 1999; Papadopolous, Stephenson, and Tsianos 2008). Here a clarification is needed: despite categories and legal limitations to access imposed at the borders, all humans are active and productive, also participating to their and the world’s very reproduction. By considering workers’ movements, we have to be aware of the fictional representation and expropriation of power operating through the distinction between economic migrants and not. The attention to migrant workers has to be placed into this aporia by generally recognizing all humans as living labor. The historical research on labor migration at a global level has analyzed the conceptualization of work, the movements of workers, and the related systems of control across times (van der Linden 2008; Mohapatra and van der Linden 2009; Lucassen and Lucassen 2014). It would be impossible and useless to list and discuss all the existing literature in this field as it has produced an uncountable number of long-term perspectives and also a compendium of case studies at the global level (Hoerder 2002; McKeown 2004; Mohapatra 2007; Lucassen, Lucassen, and Manning 2010). Recent contributions have highlighted some bias in the literature such as the persistence of the outdated push-pull paradigm, the predominant research on movements between Western countries or of male workers (Schrover 2019). Even if these claims are true in some cases, as in countless other fields of humanities and social sciences, many efforts are being devoted to the study of care and feminized labor, as much as of various world regions, and emphasize humans’ subjectivity and workers’ activism. As mobility has always affected and characterized humans, the study of labor migration is
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 285 one of the most promising fields for its possibilities of decolonizing and revising outdated and uneven approaches. Far from being a marginal or supplementary labor force, migration is postulated as a “structural necessity to advanced capitalist countries” (Cohen 1987, p. 31), or more accurately, the work and activity performed by mobile humans has been a constituent part of global capitalism since its outset (Bernardi and Vanhaute, forthcoming). Analyzing the role of migration and migrant work within the political economy has brought to question the very structures that attempt to channel and govern human movements. The attention to systems and regimes of mobility is also developing towards a more comprehensive understanding of migratory chains, networks, systems, regimes, and all forms of labor migration, for instance commuters, guestworkers, undocumented, and contract workers (Schrover 2019). Seasonal farm labor and contract work are peculiar both for their specific characteristics, and for being a means of connection and dependence between states and regions (Sarkar 2017). The temporality of this labor form is gaining increasing attention within the scientific debate about coercion and impoverishment (Rodríguez García and van der Linden 2016). In particular, contract work flourished in many world regions as a later successor of previous forms of forced and indentured labor mobility, and today it involves more females, whereas in some sectors women have been always employed in major numbers (i.e. caregiving and cleaning labor, assemblage industries like maquiladoras and sweatshops). As much as other forms of managed mobility, guestworker programs have gained new attention and opened a promising expansion of the global migration field (Hahamovitch 2003; Cohen 2011), above all for possible comparisons at the global level (Kavakli Birdal 2012). The topicality of managed mobility lies in its continuity from the early 20th century till today, its adoption in many world regions (US-Mexico; Europe; the ex-Soviet Union; South Africa and neighboring countries; Southeast Asia), and its working as a predecessor of present temporary VISA systems and temporary contract work. Furthermore, managed labor mobility is particularly relevant as it allows the envisioning of the proliferation of actors involved in the mobility process, the multiplication of material and immaterial borders across national spaces, the many spatial scales that influence and are created through organized mobility, and the lines of flights established by workers. All these elements concur to shape a regime of labor mobility based on the capture and valorization of mobile workers, and the coexistence of various labor forms within it. Migrant work is not only a labor supply moved between defined sovereign territories or, in other words, the reserve army that reinforces the international division of labor and the structural dependency between states, justified by labor shortage (Plascencia 2016). Within the regime in which migrant workers are captured, the productivity is not solely located in the workplace, but is the very commodification of migrant labor that valorizes workers in their mobility, immobility, and waiting times (Bernardi 2020a).
THE CAPTURE AND VALORIZATION OF LIVING LABOR THROUGH IM/MOBILITY Viewed as a long-standing relation between capital and labor, labor-managed mobility imposes a political assemblage of several devices that show its effectiveness in capturing and valorizing turbulent migrations and transnational connections of workers. In the first place, instead of considering the mobility of labor as an outcome of capital (Sassen 1988), we should
286 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work envisage the autonomy of migrants – in terms of need, desires, social, and political practices – as a preliminary condition for both the attempt of managing workers’ movements as for the mobility of capital. In other terms, rather than considering workers movements and flight just as an effect and reaction to labor coercion and mobility control, we should investigate the function and logics of (in)formal recruitment, debt, deportation, juridical tools, and contract as means for capturing and managing workers’ mobility and their autonomy that precede capital and its mobility. In this guise, labor-managed migration is the planned answer to workers’ unpredictable mobility to maintain in circulation and immobilize a fragmented, racialized, flexible, tractable, non-unionized work force. In this regime, the connections between socio-spatial formations and temporality are expropriated and valorized by capital, states, and various figures of intermediation. Secondly, the capture and valorization of workers do not occur only in the final site of production, or the working place. The capture of life by capital occurs beyond the workplace (Barchiesi 2012) and is extensive to the whole process of mobility since the very imagination of their movement by workers. The representation and discourses perpetrated by various actors – state, capitalists, intermediaries, kinship networks, press, public opinion, social and policy makers, etc. – concur to create a regime of labor that restrains the worker and is based on contract work as reward and debt as means to obtain it. The incorporation of the non-integrated subject into a regime of labor mobility is a massive and elaborated strategy of im/mobilization of workforce and the imposition of an ethic of work. In brief, both the material and immaterial dimensions participate to its constitution and may cause its destabilization. A brief glance into the very process of managed mobility sheds light on the logic and functions. The valorization process not only relies on places as static geopolitical objects, but has also to do with the profitability of mobility itself that turns space into the very battlefield that is continuously recreated by frictions and crossings. Mobile workers do not produce value just in the worksite; quite the contrary, they are already productive when they leave their home and long before the inspections at the border and for an extensive time after the end of the formal potential contract. The same workers’ circulation and immaterial dimension produce value as every step in this cartography of mobility could be a source of value extraction: institutions, officers, representatives, and other legal and non-legal individuals and groups find their way within this complex device. Migrant workers have to pay the costs of transportation from their home to the recruitment center or border gates for the only possibility of a contract. Transportation is a means of profit as much as indebtedness, that expands together with the multiplication of borders and of intermediaries that link routes: tight scheduling, poor conditions, unqualified drivers, and accidents are the norm together with the total disregard of safety measures (Mize and Swords 2011). A wide range of credentials are required to get access to the selection process so that passports, good health and good behavior documents, letters of recommendation, testimonies of specific status, and other certifications become a means of differential inclusion as much as profitability for intermediaries of various kinds. The workers’ expectation and desire are valorized also through counterfeit certificates for admission that are sold in lucrative black markets. Indebtedness is a common outcome of this expectation. Relations established by illegal intermediaries with officials in the recruitment centers and along the paths of mobility always facilitate and speed up the process for workers willing to pay (Bernardi 2020a): it is a network of relations and an infrastructure, both legal and illegal, that is sold to the migrant worker (Bernardi 2020a). In fact, besides counterfeit permits, local officials and government
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 287 members use guestworker programs and intercept migrants’ paths to have their chance to reward their allies, supplement their salaries through bribes, and sell contracts (Snodgrass 2011). Furthermore, unpaid coerced labor may be required in public, informal, or agricultural work as a condition for access to a future, possible, temporary job that becomes a reward to be earned. Also reproduction may be a valuable means of profit through illegal deductions for rooms, board, transportation, work tools, and supplies that are considered a supplementary benefit to be paid for, together with deductions for taxes, pensions, and social benefits when applicable that often are not returned to the migrant worker and from which they will not benefit (Mize and Swords 2011; Miller 2013). In sum, the wide range of credentials, unpaid work, deductions, fees, deposits, debts, bribes, taxes, and uncertain contracts are constitutive components of well-established labor mobility regimes that valorize paths of mobility and the expectations of workers, to incorporate and then circulate the work force into a permanent condition of disposability. Besides the valorization of mobility, novel investigations could explore in depth the valorization of immobility, as the two are constituent and complementary devices that work together within the political economy of capitalism. A complex logistical and bureaucratic machine continuously changes the space involved through the dissemination of recruitment centers and labor pools, borders and migrant routes, points of entry that undocumented migrants open beside the formal paths. In managed labor mobility, the areas around recruitment centers and crossing points become the space of proliferation of informal economies and satellite activities that valorize the waiting time of migrant workers during the process by selling food, accommodation of any kind, transportation (Chàvez 2012). This seemingly dead time becomes also the occasion for selling the acceleration of the process: those able to pay immediately can turn the immobilization into a new step in the process of mobility towards the working place. The discursive apparatus of individual liberty and free movement masks complex forms of coercion and exploitation in working places where the immobilization of migrants is a further device applied by entrepreneurs in order to maximize profits through labor control: the use of guards to patrol working has historically been a common way for controlling the efficiency of workers, while the confiscation of workers’ cars was aimed at limiting their movements and constraining their autonomy. But the immobilization of workers is not only aimed at exploiting labor, but also to impose a form of coercion through non-work. The relation between work and non-work in the process of immobilization of migrants would be worth further investigation to understand the ways in which the need for work that moves migrants to other countries turns to being a form of coercion in non-work, and above all the eventual resistance and reactivation of migrants such as in escapes and the creation of networks of informal/illegal work. Besides complementary practices of mobility and immobility that forge scattered temporalities, labor forms converge and coexist in the same regime and also in the same site of production. Our world is historically dotted with many labor forms that proliferate worldwide, but scarce attention had been given to the coexistence and relation between these forms within the same regime and the same sites of production. Coexistence of labor forms is surely related to the presence in the same place of workers that have different status and rights. This is the easiest form of labor coexistence to grasp as we have uncountable examples of this situation both nowadays and also historically. In the same factory or field, we may encounter foreign and national workers, contract workers and those illegally recruited by employers, permanent or term-based workers, and so forth. These differences segment and hierarchize the workforce that coexists in the same working place, so that workers become competitors and the common
288 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work resulting fragmentation jeopardizes workers’ organization. A rather more complicated mode of coexistence is related to the proliferation of labor forms in the same regime as its edges are blurred, and its continuity and stability have always to be tested. Nonetheless, mobile workers do not pertain to a single place, but their valorization occurs along the routes of mobility as much as the places of immobilization. This perspective allows us to rethink a number of issues as the “places” of workers’ exploitation, the development of capitalism’s remaking, the connected spaces for economic valorization, the potential workers alliances beyond their labor site but within the same regime, and the many actors involved in the regime maintenance and perpetration of logics of im/mobilization of living labor.
CONCLUSION The space of labor resembles a heterogeneous crowd in which workers swiftly change status and condition while they are captured into routes of mobility and are immobilized into newborn sites. From this perspective the concept of regime properly renders the complexity of intertwined processes at play that may be further understood by analyzing the coexistence of labor forms and the valorization of im/mobility by a plethora of actors that renew logics of labor exploitation. The potential of the regime concept allows a consolidation of the shift from typology or taxonomy of labor relations to a broader understanding of work positioned at the crossroads of trajectories of autonomy (flight, escape, resistance) and of the consequent capture through means of coercion, indebtedness, immobilization, unpaid work, and removals. The various regimes that are historically at play concur to forge, structure, and stabilize a political economy of work in which migrant labor plays a constituent role.
NOTES 1
2
3 4
The video was an outcome of the project funded by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Interreg V-A Romania-Bulgaria Programme, minutes 00:00-01:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ocb0Vmcl2o, transcription as original subtitles [accessed on December 10, 2020]. Within the fields of geography and sociology (particularly in France, the UK, and the US) the concept of space has definitely gained dynamicity and turned into an active actor in the functioning of societies, in particular, for the making of capitalist landscapes (Massey 1984; Smith 1984;). The category of space is keen, but also in conflict with the ones of territory and place that are key elements for the understanding of subjectivities; decolonial and feminist studies have provided important insights to the specific positionalities and balance of power between historical actors related to the making of territories and imaginaries (Escobar 2008). Also, scholars have highlighted the multiplication of scales that corresponds to differential positionings of social groups and classes in the power geometries of capitalism (Kelly 1999), and also to the articulation of spatial hierarchies that govern human mobility (Brenner 1998; Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and Macleod 2003; Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2011). See the contribution by Andrew Herod in Chapter 18 of this volume. See the contributions in this volume: Chapter 6, World system, production and labor” by Manuela Boatcă and Chapter 9, “Exploitation and global value chains” by Selwyn, Baglioni, Mezzadri, Pattenden, Miyamura, and Campling.
Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 289
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Capture, coexistence and valorization of workers’ mobility across borders 291 Rodríguez García, M. and M. van der Linden (2016). On Coerced Labor. Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery. Leiden: Brill. Saldívar, J. D. (1997). Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sarkar, M. (2017). “Constrained Labour as Instituted Process. Transnational Contract Work and Circular Migration in Late Capitalism”, European Journal of Sociology, 58(1), 171–204. Sassen, S. (1988). The Mobility of Labor and Capital. A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schrover, M. (2019). “Labour Migration”. In K. Hofmeester and M. van der Linden (eds.), Handbook Global History of Work. Leiden: Brill. Sciortino, G. (2004). “Between Phantoms and Necessary Evils. Some Critical Points in the Study of Irregular Migration to Western Europe”. Imis-Beiträge, 24, 17–44. Sheller, M. (2011). “Cosmopolitanism and mobilities”. In M. Nowicka and M. Rovisco (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Silver, B. J. (2003). Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silver, Beverly (2014). “Theorising the Working Class in Twenty-First Century Global Capitalism”. In M. Atzeni (ed.), Workers and Labour in a Globalised Capitalism Contemporary Themes and Theoretical Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, N. (1984). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Snodgrass, M. (2011). “Patronage and Progress. The Bracero Program from the Perspective of Mexico”. In L. Fink (ed.), Workers Across the Americas. The Transnational Turn in Labor History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 245–246. Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Urry, J. (2002). “Mobility and Proximity”. Sociology, 36(2), 255–274. doi: 10.1177/003803850203600 2002. van der Linden, M. (2008). Workers of the World. Essays Toward a Global Labor History. Leiden: Brill. Van Houtum, H. and T. Van Naerssen (2002). “Bordering, Ordering and Othering”. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 93, 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00189. Wallerstein, I. (1974). “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16(4), 387–415. Wilson, T. M. and D. Hastings (eds.) (2012). A Companion to Border Studies. UK: Blackwell Publishing. Zanini, P. (1997). Significati del confine. I limiti naturali, storici, mentali. Milano: Bruno Mondadori.
FURTHER READING Cohen, R. (1987). The New Helots. Migrants in the International Division of Labor. England: Gower Publishing Company. De Genova, N., S. Mezzadra, and J. Pickles (eds.) (2014). “New Keywords: Migration and Borders”. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.891630 Glick Schiller, N. and N. B. Salazar (2013). “Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe”. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(2), 183–200, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253. Hannam, K., M. Sheller, and J. Urry (2006). “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings”. Mobilities, 1(1), 1–22, DOI: 10.1080/17450100500489189. Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilson (2013). Border as Method, Or, the Multiplication of Labour. Durham: Duke University Press. Silver, B. J. (2003). Forces of Labor. Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau
INTRODUCTION Capitalism, as the foundations of political economy and structuralism point out, is much more than an economic system or a productive model, it is the global system that has governed the world since the 16th century (Wallerstein, 1983). From the first European world-economy to the current neoliberal model, the logic of infinite capital accumulation has shown how it requires a territorial expansion aiming to cover more and more areas of the globe. This process, however, has not been a continuum, but has experienced various historical phases linked to the Kondratiev cycles (Arrighi and Moore, 2001). As the Russian economist pointed out, historical capitalism has functioned by cyclical waves initiated by a process of expansion, followed by a recession that, after producing a depression, tends to reactivate with a new expansive cycle (Korotayev and Grinin, 2012). This movement, which is inevitable given the very configuration of the system, is due both to the depletion of resources and to the exhaustion of the prevailing production models in each cycle. Systemic crises can then only be overcome by developing new production techniques and by expanding the system into more territories. There is no doubt that the global character of the capitalist system is linked to its own nature, a fact that earned it to be called a world-system by Wallerstein (2000) or, if we consider its condition of a model based on the double appropriation of human and extra-human work (the environment), as a world-ecology (Moore, 2003). For the latter, the substitution of the term “system” by “ecology” aims to show that the global condition of capitalism does not define it per se, because its expansion is not only geographical, but it seeks to organize the globe forming a particular ecology oriented to extract surplus value from the whole humanity and the planet’s natural resources. The appropriation of both natures (human and extra-human) in global capitalism is explicitly manifested in its pursuit of the “four cheaps”: raw materials, energy, food and labour. These elements fulfil a basic structural function since their low-cost global reproduction is a necessary condition for expansive cycles, as they are required by every productive scheme (Moore, 2015). When the four cheaps can be reproduced on a systemic scale at low cost, capitalism continues its expansion while, when the productive norm that allowed their appropriation is exhausted, the system enters a recession until new sources or techniques allow their re-appropriation again at low cost. This scheme shows that an important part of global accumulation is based on the exploitation of human labour, whose surplus value feeds the capitalist poles. But in order for global wages to be low, an exploitation of extra-human nature is also required, since it not only provides raw materials, but also food. This, at a systemic level, is as indispensable as the other “cheaps” 292
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture 293 because it is directly linked to the cost of labour, since wages can only be low to the extent that they allow the purchase of the necessary food to reproduce labour (Patel and Moore, 2017). Here, the centrality of the primary sector is clear, being largely responsible for the production of cheap food to nourish the global proletariat. Therefore, each historical phase of accumulation has had its own model of systemic cheap food production (Moore, 2010). Today, as will be shown throughout this chapter, unlike previous capitalist phases, this structural function does not rest on a specific productive model or on a particular technological progress, but depends directly on the exploitation of migrant workers from the global periphery (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016).
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONS AS A GLOBAL RESERVE ARMY Migrating is so much a part of a human being’s nature that this fact explains the expansion of our species throughout the planet (Jones and Mielants, 2011). Humanity has always been in constant movement, however, each displacement, whether individual or massive, has had its own conditions, motivations and drivers. Theorizing about what drives people to migrate from their territories of origin to other destinations is not simple, hence the discipline of migration studies has been producing very diverse analytical frameworks for over half a century (Massey et al., 1998). Understanding migration is complicated because not only do the reasons why people migrate vary from one particular case to another, but the various contexts of origin and destination mark the inherent specificities of each migratory process. What is more decisive when it comes to migration? The individual projects of migrants (what academically has been called “agency”)? Or structural dynamics? This dilemma, known as structure-agency, is central within migration studies (Bakewell, 2010) but also within the discipline of International Relations (Friedman and Starr, 1997). Each school of thought has contributed by adding important analytical elements to this debate, which, however, given the divergences between its postulates has proved to be irresolvable (Zanotti, 2019). Although there is no theoretical consensus on how to understand international migration, some theories have sought to set macro-systemic frames without losing sight of the actors’ agency. In this regard, Abdelmalek Sayad (2004) was a pioneer in the articulation of a “sociology of migration”. He stated that for a true understanding of migration, it was necessary to consider both the socio-political context of origin and destination at the time of migration and the historical relations and hierarchical positioning within the world-system between the two territories. This, together with the voices of the migrants themselves, who bear the symbolic burden of the historical relations between their state of origin and the state of destination, make it possible to give a holistic reasoning of migration dynamics. At the structural level, Sayad (2004) applied the historical-political framework of the world-system by pointing out how migrations are heirs to the development of historical capitalism where core states colonized those located in the current global periphery. The colonizing process, an indispensable part of capitalist expansion (De Souza, 1986), subjected a majority of the planet to the service of the world-system’s core, generating a subalternity between colonizers and colonized that later became a reality of dependency that still rules the world (Polo Blanco, 2016). Colonialism, however, not only imposed hierarchical relations between countries, it was also a way of governing the populations of the periphery, who were
294 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work inferiorized, silenced and defined as subalterns by elements such as their language or skin colour (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Migrants currently working in the core are the formerly colonized, and are therefore heirs to the unequal construction of the world-system that impoverished their areas of origin, converted into suppliers of raw materials and constant capital to the core. The peripheral position within the global economy and the subordinate position within the international division of labour of these states converts their populations into potential migrants whose expectations of obtaining an income or even a job (in view of the high unemployment rates in their places of origin) often require them to undertake migration (Sayad, 2004). The world-system’s approach shows how the structure conditioning migration goes beyond logics like income differentials between regions or the encounter between supply and demand in a global labour market, as suggested by push-pull models (Avallone, 2018). Migrations are heirs to historical capitalism and continue to be perpetuated by the unequal distribution of global wealth. In neoliberal capitalism, migrations fulfil an essential function: providing cheap labour for the productive needs of the core (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016). As previously mentioned, cheap labour is essential for the expansion of accumulation cycles (Moore, 2015) and, above all, it is required in a systemic way in pillars of the capitalist economy such as agriculture or care, on which the rest of the sectors structurally depend (Patel and Moore, 2017). As core societies have become more tertiarized and the processes of accumulation have offered work opportunities in higher-paying sectors to a larger stratum of the population, the need for labour in lower-paying sectors has become more acute. The solution has been to employ migrants from the periphery, who have become a reserve army whose large volume offers a constantly available workforce. Migratory policies are thus set to manage the entrance of foreigners: borders are closed to those who are not considered “useful”, that is, those who do not come with a specific permit to carry out a particular job and for those having permission, they must renew it every few years, verifying the “validity” of the migrant for the destination society (Raimondi, 2016). “Migratory utilitarianism” (Morice, 2001) thus governs entry policies defining who is part of the reserve army, that is, who “serves” the economy, and rejecting those not labelled as “useful”. This, moreover, guarantees a control over this labour force, disciplining it, because if workers do not accept and abide by the offered conditions, then they will be deported. This condition, together with the low wages of the “migrantized” sectors, intrinsically links migrations to exploitation. Capitalism and migrations are thus closely linked from a historical and structural point of view (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2017) although the motivations, projects and aspirations of migrants are the other fundamental part that explains every migratory process (Lacomba and Moraes, 2020). However, as these vary according to each explored context, it will be explored later for the specific case of agriculture. Anyway, it is worth pointing out, as meant by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), that the fact of being a global reserve army utilitarianly managed by the global chains according to productive needs, does not imply that migrants are a passive or an automatically available labour force. Each context, as well as the aggregation of individual projects, explains who migrates and why.
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture 295
GLOBAL AGRICULTURE From its origins, the link between capitalism and the agricultural sector has been structural. As Wallerstein (1974) pointed out, the shift from feudalism to the incipient capitalist world-economy between the 15th and 16th centuries was based on a systemic appropriation of surplus value from the primary sector, which went from being organized on the basis of taxes or rents to, through land privatization, becoming commodified and competing globally. This first movement, which was fundamental for understanding the articulation of the subsequent world-system, was not isolated, since, despite the fact that the main sources of surplus value later came from industry, in the historical cycle of British accumulation in the 18th century (Arrighi and Moore, 2001) or from financialization, in the neoliberal period (Tabb, 2010), agriculture has always occupied a central space in the reactivation of the Kondratiev cycles. The socially dominant perception of agricultural work as archaic is not based on reality, since sectors such as the Californian one (Olmstead and Rhode, 2004), for example, present a clear industrialization using modern technologies with a productive process well embedded in global chains. But, in addition, agricultural transformation has historically been the driving force behind each new cycle of accumulation, pointing to the close link between the primary sector and modernity (Moore, 2015). This linkage has to do with the fundamental function that the sector fulfils within the global capitalist scheme: the production of cheap food. As pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, each new cycle of capitalist accumulation has required a systemic appropriation and reproduction of the “four cheaps”: food, labour, energy and raw materials (Moore, 2015). If the structural function of the last three is relatively evident, since all three constitute basic inputs to all commodity production and, therefore, the extent of the surplus value generated by each process will depend on their cost, the function of the first one requires a somewhat deeper analysis. Food is indispensable for the system as it is for the reproduction of human life: if human beings do not have access to food they do not survive and therefore they do not exist as a reserve army. This association, which seems obvious, is key to understanding the historical reproduction of the cycles of accumulation, since the price of wages depends on the price of food. In other words, if wages are so low that they do not allow purchasing the necessary food for labour force’s reproduction, then there are three alternatives: death, an increase in the price of labour or revolts. The latter, very common throughout history (Bohstedt, 2014), like the other two points are not desirable for a system that needs stability. As stated by Moore (2010: 397) the chief determinant of the minimum wage threshold for any working-class household is the price of food and, therefore, the price of food is, on a systemwide basis, the chief determinant of value, qua abstract social labour. Food is (…) “cheap” to the extent that it reduces the “value” of commodified labour power, and augments capital’s capacity to “extract surplus value”.
This means that food has to be cheap, otherwise the price of labour will be either more expensive or will create distortions that in the end will prevent the expansion of accumulation. Therefore, each new historical phase of capitalism has been accompanied by an agrarian revolution structured around what McMichael (2009) has called “food regimes”, that is, the prevailing agricultural production model and the particular geopolitical configurations that make it possible to provide cheap food to the system.
296 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work At this point, one might ask what is the systemic strategy that neoliberalism has adopted to guarantee the supply of cheap food to the core of the world-ecology. If in the 18th and 19th centuries the strategy was to colonize the global periphery and constitute monocultures worked largely by slave labour, in neoliberalism the great strategy was the “Green Revolution”. Driven by the Rockefeller Foundation, this project sought, through the application of biotechnologies (such as modified seeds or the application of agrochemicals), to generate a new leap in global food production that would end hunger. It is not necessary to point out that it failed in that objective, as it did not generate a massive and global overproduction of food to feed the planet and reduce its costs (Patel, 2013). The effects of this failure can be seen in the FAO’s food price index (Kalkuhl et al., 2016) which shows how the cost of food has not stopped growing globally, mainly since 2003. However, the relatively cheap nature of food in the core of the world-ecology, which, as Moore (2010) points out, is where it must really be maintained if the system is not to fail, points to the fact that certain systemic strategies would be enabling to maintain its production at low cost, while waiting for new agricultural revolutions. As will be shown in the next section, this strategy has involved the massive exploitation of migrant workers in the agricultural enclaves of the core.
MIGRATIONS AND AGRICULTURE In the image and likeness of what happened in California, from the middle of the 20th century to the present, a large part of the agricultural production of the global core has undergone a process of transformation from the traditional family/peasant production model to an industrial one. The industrialization of agriculture is understood as the process of passing from “petty commodity production to capitalist production, with a shift to wage labour, increasing capital investment, and intensified competition leading to rapid agglomeration of enterprises” (FitzSimmons, 1986: 336). This concentration has also been spatial because the territories where this model was adopted, when incorporated into large global export-oriented chains, were articulated as “global agricultural enclaves” characterized by covering in one place the entire production process, from harvesting to processing and packaging (Moraes et al., 2012). The production of fruits and vegetables in these agricultural enclaves is massive, turning the countryside into a large factory governed by Fordist production logics that require huge amounts of labour (Caruso, 2016). This last aspect is fundamental because it causes a major problem, since having an autochthonous reserve army is increasingly hard as natives tend to be more reluctant to do agricultural work because it is strenuous (López-Sala, 2016), and, in addition, has to be badly paid in order to keep food at a low price. Agricultural capital’s resolution to this equation was then to look to the global periphery, which had become a worldwide pool of workers available to do low-cost agricultural work. The first major initiative to provide foreign labour for industrial agriculture in the core was the Bracero programme, launched between the United States and Mexico in 1942, so workers from the latter country could work in the Californian crops (Mandeel, 2014). This programme was followed by similar initiatives in countries such as Canada, France, Spain, Japan or Australia, whose volume of foreign farmworkers has steadily increased in recent decades (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2020). The idea of temporary migration programmes in agriculture is very simple: they are political initiatives, usually bilateral (between the state of origin and the state
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture 297 of destination), which temporarily authorize the displacement of quotas of workers. These programmes are usually rigid in terms of the rights they grant to their participants (whose return to the origin is mandatory) and flexible for the employers (who decide how many workers come and for how long). Global agricultural enclaves thus articulate an international mobility of labour, characterized by pendular or circular migrations which involve the annual movement of thousands of workers from the periphery to the core (Moraes et al., 2012). It should be noted, however, that this is not the only existing model for providing workers to these enclaves. The fact that a state has not designed this type of programme does not mean that it does not have other methods for obtaining this type of labour, as is the case in Italy, where it has not been necessary to establish a programme given the constant flows of irregular migrants (Avallone, 2017). At the economic level, migrants have supplied the labour force that industrial agricultural companies require, but at the systemic level, above all, they have been allowed to maintain cheap food production in the absence of new agricultural revolutions (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016). The relevance of this systemic function lies not only in the fact that, through their work, migrants have made it possible to sustain one of the fundamental pillars of accumulation processes, but that, for the most part, the labour relations of migrants in the core’s agriculture are based on their exploitation (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016). Certainly, each agricultural labour market has its own logic, varying the degree of exploitation according to the specific agreements between the actors that govern the political and social order of the enclaves. The case of Southern Italy (Colloca and Corrado, 2013) or the Manolada region in Greece (Papadopoulos and Fratsea, 2017) perhaps represent the extremes of hyper-exploitation due to the prevalence of informal conditions that result in low wages, unpaid overtime or, in some cases, even conditions of semi-slavery. But in all the enclaves, despite varying mechanisms, to a greater or lesser extent, exploitation is a central logic. In the cases of the Pacific, i.e. Japan, New Zealand and Australia, covered by a supposed legality, agricultural employers use working-holidaymakers to import a cheap labour force to which they can pay the wages of trainees (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2020). On the other side, in cases where temporary migration programmes are in place, such as Canada, the United States or some enclaves in Spain and France, there is an extensive academic production that has pointed out how circular mobility forces workers to be docile, since their re-employment in the following season depends on it, which has given rise to a wide variety of situations of exploitation (Vosko, 2016). There is a strong convergence in the literature on migrations and agriculture indicating that an important part of the agro-food production of the global core is kept cheap thanks to the massive extraction of surplus value from migrant labour (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016). In other words, an important part of the current cycle of accumulation – the systemic production of cheap food – rests largely on the exploitation of workers from the global periphery. Although this reality is a fact, it should be noted that this structure has not been established and maintained without migrants’ struggles. As Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) point out, the literature on global chains tends to reflect the oppressive configuration of the various contexts where they are established by assuming that the labour force they exploit is passively available. The denial of the subjectivity and agency of migrant workers themselves is a problem that has permeated migration studies since their inception (Avallone and Molinero-Gerbeau, 2021).
298 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The income differential between regions of origin and destination may explain a part of the decision to migrate, but once in destination, conditions of exploitation do not remain unnoticed by the migrants. The suffering and resilience of these workers is well known (Sayad, 2004) but too often the literature has overlooked the fact that their relationship with exploitative conditions has been based not only on acceptance and resistance but also on struggle. Cases of strikes and demonstrations have taken place in agricultural enclaves throughout the core, starting with the famous protests led by César Chávez in California in 1965 (later replicated by other movements) (Brimner, 2014) and followed by so many others, for example, in various Mediterranean states (Corrado et al., 2017). These struggles have generally had the dual effect of introducing the conditions of migrant farmworkers into the public debate on the one hand, and achieving certain improvements in the working and living conditions of these workers on the other. It is important, in any case, not to romanticise them, because on some occasions, unfortunately, they have had negative effects on the workers themselves. In Southern Italy, for example, there have been cases of police repression and even of workers being murdered (Avallone, 2017), while in others, such as Huelva (Spain), employers promoted the creation of the temporary migration programme precisely following a series of protests, in order to reduce the workers’ negotiating capacity and to have a docile workforce that could not “hinder” production. In any case, workers’ agency is not limited to the dichotomy between resilience and collective action since each worker may have their own forms of resistance and may have planned their own vital objectives to be achieved through their employment in agriculture. A previous study (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2018) noted how Bolivian workers in Argentina resiliently accept exploitative conditions in order to save enough to be able to free themselves from wage labour and become self-employed. This process, known as “the Bolivian ladder” (Benencia, 1997) has led these migrants to climb up the chain abandoning their subordinate role to progressively occupy its different links. Today, this group of migrants is one of the most influential actors in the Argentine agricultural sector, to the extent that they can decide on structural elements such as market prices. On the other hand, the same study compared the Argentinean case with that of the Moroccan workers in Piana del Sele (Southern Italy) whose subordinate status has not changed over time. In this case, too, migrants’ own autonomous projects explained why workers continued to arrive to the sector and why those who were already inserted in it did not escape. The reality is that, in order to have an indefinite residence permit, which allows them to move freely within the European Union, workers must have an employment contract for at least five years in a row. Thus, despite being aware of their exploitative situation, these workers accepted it as part of a vital project where working in agriculture is only a means of later trying to live and work where they dreamed. In short, these cases demonstrate that without understanding worker’s agency, the articulation of modern agricultural enclaves cannot be acknowledged in its entirety. This also reflects the fact that, although exploitation defines modern labour relations in agriculture, workers are never passive, since they not only fight and resist it, but in certain cases the supposed acquiescence to the prevailing conditions is not an exercise of submissiveness, but can be part of a long-term personal strategy.
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture 299
CONCLUSIONS As we have seen throughout this chapter, the agricultural sector plays a central role within the processes of capitalist accumulation as it is responsible for providing systemic cheap food, which is necessary to keep labour cheap (Moore, 2010). In the contemporary era, in the absence of agricultural revolutions leading to a new wave of overproduction of food, its cheap systemic production has been possible thanks to the employment of migrant workers from the periphery (Molinero-Gerbeau and Avallone, 2016). These workers, who are increasingly present in most agricultural enclaves in the core (Molinero-Gerbeau, 2020), have not only constituted a reserve army for a sector that has great difficulties in finding a stable labour force (Moraes et al., 2012), but, by being hugely exploited, the massive extraction of their surplus value has kept food prices relatively low in the core. Having become a structural element of global agricultural production, migrant workers do not play a passive role in this macro-architecture, but have demonstrated, by standing up and resisting, that the exploitation to which they are subjected is not viable in the long term (Brimner, 2014; Corrado et al., 2017). These facts show that global chains are also spaces of conflict whose appropriation of cheap labour from the periphery to produce cheap food in the core is based on a weak and, therefore, temporary strategy. In the midst of the systemic crisis of neoliberalism (Moore, 2015), migrants have prevented a deeper crunch but conflicts will increase while the system will continue depending on their exploitation, showing whether this is sustainable in the long term or whether, on the contrary, only another, perhaps less aggressive, model is possible.
REFERENCES Arrighi, Giovanni, and Jason W. Moore (2001), ‘Capitalist Development in World-Historical Perspective’, in Robert Albritton, Makoto Itoh, Richard Westra, and Alan Zuege (eds.), Phases of Capitalist Development. Booms, Crises and Globalizations, New York, USA: Palgrave, pp. 56–75. Avallone, Gennaro (2017), Sfruttamento e resistenze. Migrazioni e agricoltura in Europa, Italia, Piana del Sele, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte. Avallone, Gennaro (2018), ‘Las migraciones entre autonomía y relaciones de fuerza’, in Gennaro Avallone and Enrique Santamaría (eds.), Abdelmalek Sayad: una lectura crítica, Madrid, Spain: Dado Ediciones, pp. 59–74. Avallone, Gennaro, and Yoan Molinero-Gerbeau (2021), ‘Liberar las migraciones: la contribución de Abdelmalek Sayad a una epistemología migrantes-céntrica’, Migraciones Internacionales, 12. Bakewell, Oliver (2010), ‘Some Reflections on Structure and Agency in Migration Theory’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(10), 1689–1708. Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguos Identities, New York, USA: Verso. Benencia, Roberto (1997), ‘De peones a patrones quinteros. Movilidad social de familias bolivianas en la periferia bonaerense’, Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, 12(35), 63–192. Bohstedt, John (2014), ‘Food Riots and the Politics of Provisions in World History’, IDS Working Papers, 444, 1–31. Brimner, Larry D. (2014), Strike! The Farm Workers’ Fight for Their Rights: The Farm Workers’ Fight for Their Rights. Westminster, UK: Calkins Creek. Caruso, Francesco (2016), ‘Fragole amare: lo sfruttamento del bracciantato migrante nella provincia di Huelva’, in FLAI-CGIL (ed.), Agromafie e Caporalato – Terzo Rapporto, Rome, Italy: Ediesse, pp. 265–280.
300 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Colloca, Carlo, and Alessandra Corrado (2013), La globalizzazione delle campagne. Migranti e società rurali nel Sud Italia, Milano, Italy: FrancoAngelli. Corrado, Alessandra, Carlos De Castro, and Domenico Perrotta (2017), Migration and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. De Souza, Anthony R. (1986), ‘To Have and Have Not: Colonialism and Core-Periphery Relations’, American Geographical Society’s Focus, Fall, 14–19. FitzSimmons, Margaret (1986), ‘The New Industrial Agriculture: The Regional Integration of Specialty Crop Production’, Economic Geography, 62(4), 334–353. Friedman, Gil, and Harvey Starr (1997), Agency, Structure and International Politics: From Ontology to Empirical Inquiry, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Jones, Terry-Ann, and Eric Mielants (2011), Mass Migration in the World-System: Past, Present and Future, Boulder, USA: Paradigm Publishers. Kalkuhl, Matthias, Joachim Von Braun, and Maximo Torero (2016), ‘Volatile and Extreme Food Prices, Food Security, and Policy: An Overview’, in Matthias Kalkuhl, Joachim Von Braun, and Maximo Torero (eds.), Food Price Volatility and Its Implications for Food Security and Policy, Berlin, Germany: Springer, pp. 3–34. Korotayev, Andrey, and Leonid Grinin (2012), ‘Kondratieff Waves in the World System Perspective’, in Leonid Grinin, Tessaleno Devezas, and Andrey Korotayev (eds.), Kondratieff Waves: Dimensions and Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Volgograd, Russia: ‘Uchitel’ Publishing House, pp. 23–64. Lacomba, Joan, and Natalia Moraes (2020), ‘La activación de la inmigración. Capacidades y agencia de los migrantes’, Migraciones, 48, 1–20. López-Sala, Ana. (2016), ‘Induced Circularity for Selective Workers. The Case of Seasonal Labor Mobility Schemes in the Spanish Agriculture’, Arbor, 192(777), 1–12. Mandeel, Elizabeth W. (2014), ‘The Bracero Program 1942-1964’, American International Journal of Contemporary Research, 4(1), 171–184. Massey, Douglas S., Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, and Adela Pellegrino (1998), Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press Oxford. McMichael, Philip (2009), ‘A food Regime Genealogy’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 36(1), 139–169. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson (2013), Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Durham and London, UK: Duke University Press. Molinero-Gerbeau, Yoan (2017), ‘Mass Migrations across the World-System’s History’. E-International Relations. Retrieved from https://www.e-ir.info/2017/08/01/mass-migrations-across-the-world -systems-history/ Molinero-Gerbeau, Yoan (2018), ‘Ejerciendo agencia en las cadenas agrícolas globales. Del modelo boliviano en la agricultura argentina a la situación de los migrantes marroquíes en la agricultura de la Piana del Sele (Salerno, Italia)’, Theomai. Estudios Críticos Sobre Sociedad y Desarrollo, 38, 68–90. Molinero-Gerbeau, Yoan (2020), ‘La creciente dependencia de mano de obra migrante para tareas agrícolas en el centro global. Una perspectiva comparada’, Estudios Geográficos, 81(288). Molinero Gerbeau, Yoan, and Gennaro Avallone (2016), ‘Producing Cheap Food and Labour: Migrations and Agriculture in the Capitalistic World-Ecology’, Social Change Review, 14(2), 121–148. Moore, Jason W. (2003), ‘Capitalism as World-Ecology: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History’, Organization and Environment, 16(4), 431–458. Moore, Jason W. (2010), ‘The End of the Road? Agricultural Revolutions in the Capitalist World-Ecology 1450–2010’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 10(3), 389–413. Moore, Jason W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, New York, USA: Verso. Moraes, Natalia, Elena Gadea, Andrés Pedreño and Carlos De Castro (2012), ‘Enclaves globales agrícolas y migraciones de trabajo: convergencias globales y regulaciones transnacionales’, Política y Sociedad, 49(1), 13–34. Morice, Alain (2001), ‘“Choisis, contrôlés, placés” – renouveau de l’utilitarisme migratoire’, Vacarme, 14, 56–60.
Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture 301 Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W. Rhode (2004), ‘The Evolution of California Agriculture, 1850-2000’, in Jerome B. Siebert (ed.), California Agriculture: Dimensions and Issues, Berkeley, USA: University of California Press, pp. 1–28. Papadopoulos, Apostolos G., and Loukia Maria Fratsea (2017), ‘Migrant Labour and Intensive Agricultural Production in Greece. The Case of the Manolada Strawberry Industry’, in Alessandra Corrado, Carlos De Castro, and Domenico Perrotta (eds.), Migration and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, Abingdon, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, pp. 128–144. Patel, Raj (2013), ‘The Long Green Revolution’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40(1), 1–63. Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet, Oakland, USA: University of California Press. Polo Blanco, Jorge (2016), ‘Teoría de la dependencia y colonialidad del poder. Dos ángulos de una misma dominación’, Revista San Gregorio, 11, 7–17. Raimondi, Fabio (2016), Migranti e stato. Saggio su Abdelmalek Sayad, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte. Sayad, Abdelmalek (2004), The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Tabb, William K. (2010), ‘Financialization in the Contemporary Social Structure of Accumulation’, in Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich, and David Kotz (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the 21st Century, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–167. Vosko, Leah F. (2016), ‘Blacklisting as a Modality of Deportability: Mexico’s Response to Circular Migrant Agricultural Workers’ Pursuit of Collective Bargaining Rights in British Columbia, Canada’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(8), 1371–1387. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974), The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York, USA and London, UK: Academic Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1983), Historical Capitalism, Thetford, USA: Verso. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2000), The Essential Wallerstein, New York, USA: The New Press. Zanotti, Laura (2019), Ontological Entanglements, Agency and Ethics in International Relations Exploring the Crossroads, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.
FURTHER READING Avallone, Gennaro (2017), Sfruttamento e resistenze. Migrazioni e agricoltura in Europa, Italia, Piana del Sele, Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte. Colloca, Carlo, and Alessandra Corrado (2013), La globalizzazione delle campagne. Migranti e società rurali nel Sud Italia, Milano, Italy: FrancoAngelli. Corrado, Alessandra, Carlos De Castro and Domenico Perrotta (2017), Migration and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Gertel, Jörg and Sarah Ruth Sippel (2014), Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture: The Social Costs of Eating Fresh, London, UK: Routledge. Molinero-Gerbeau, Yoan and Gennaro Avallone (2016), ‘Producing Cheap Food and Labour: Migrations and Agriculture in the Capitalistic World-Ecology’, Social Change Review, 14(2), 121–148. Moore, Jason W. (2015), Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, New York, USA: Verso. Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore (2017), A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet, Oakland, USA: University of California Press. Rye, Johan Fredrik, and Sam Scott (2018), ‘International Labour Migration and Food Production in Rural Europe: A Review of the Evidence’, Sociologia Ruralis, 58(4), 928–952. Rye, Johan Fredrik and Karen O’Reilly (2020), International Labour Migration to Europe’s Rural Regions, London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1983), Historical Capitalism, Thetford, USA: Verso.
24. Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside: precarious lives between violence and agency Monica Massari
INTRODUCTION: LABOUR, MOBILITY AND EXPLOITATION IN GLOBAL AGRICULTURE The last several decades have witnessed a large increase in the forms of exploitation and unfree and coerced labour experienced by workers in the global North, alongside a further aggravation of highly exploitative forms of domination and control over precarious working classes in the global South. According to the latest data available, more than 27 million people in the world are trapped in a condition of forced labour,1 a large majority of whom are exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction and agriculture (ILO 2017; 2022). Although Asia and the Pacific region has the highest share of victims of forced labour exploitation (64 per cent), Africa (23 per cent), Europe and Central Asia (9 per cent) follow – before other regions such as the Americas (5 per cent) and the Arab States (1 per cent) (ILO 2017, p. 27). This complex and dynamic phenomenon thus takes place within and between the wealthier and poorer regions of the world. In particular, some economic sectors such as agriculture, construction, garment work, light manufacturing, accommodation and food services, and domestic and care work draw heavily on unfree and coerced labour, mostly provided by racialized temporary migrant workers from the global South (Gordon 2019). According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 12 per cent of work in agriculture globally falls within the legal definition of forced labour (ILO 2017, p. 33) and undocumented migrants, given their limited knowledge of local conditions and bargaining power, are more often subjected to unfreedom and coercion. Their immigration status, however, as well as their denied citizenship, intersect with the global capitalist political economy and the changing dynamics of production, which actually shape their forms of exploitation. During the past thirty years, the profound restructuring of agricultural production and food chains, the lack of appropriate and fair-trade policies and widespread underpaid employment conditions for unskilled work have had a strong impact on worker exploitation in farming activities. The global demand for cheap food production has increased the demand for cheap labour, given especially the temporary and precarious nature of agricultural labour and the progressive rural exodus of local populations. Externally sourced salaried work has increasingly substituted family labour, while the mostly local workforce of the past has been replaced by temporary migrants, asylum seekers and irregular migrants (Corrado 2018a; Nori and Farinella 2020). In this regard, the case of Italy is emblematic. This country belongs to the so-called Mediterranean model of migration: traditionally associated with emigration, since the late 1980s it has turned into a country of transit and, ultimately, a destination in its own right. The changes seen in global production processes have had a strong impact on Italian agri-food 302
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside 303 supply chains, where the constant supply of a cheap labour force has become a structural productive factor (Molinero Gerbeau and Avallone 2016). Here, the transition to a post-Fordist and neoliberal model of production has led to an increased informalization of work, ethnicization of the labour market, clandestinization – due to increasingly restrictive migration policies – and further racialization of the people involved. Moreover, as this chapter emphasizes, the already highly exploitative system has been often exacerbated by the illegal gang-master system, known as caporalato, whose presence is historically rooted in Southern Italy and which still plays a crucial role in intermediation and coordination (Corrado 2018a). Informal and illegal employment and recruitment agents, responsible for the payment, working and lodging conditions of the workforce, usually adopt a modus operandi based on abuse and violence – both physical and psychological – accompanied by threats and blackmailing practices. Their presence has been facilitated by the economic and cultural backwardness of part of the Italian agricultural system, but the crucial role played by these actors must also be considered within a wider framework. The latter is characterized by the lack or insufficient institutional regulation of the sector, the absence of a fair system of intermediation between work supply and demand, and the deficiencies of a migration policy that, while imposing very strict limits to the entry of foreign workers into the country, has gradually eroded the right to asylum and dismantled previous hosting and protection measures. As a result, the risks of exploitation in this sector have increased, especially for asylum seekers excluded from the reception system and left in a sort of limbo, as well as workers’ vulnerability and isolation, as shown by the living conditions experienced by migrants in ghettos, i.e. shantytowns far from urban centres, where they suffer social marginalization and stigmatization. Paradoxically, however, these places are also among the few where migrant workers can experience some forms of solidarity and self-help support (Pugliese 2013). This is where they come into contact with the services provided by NGOs, cooperatives and trade unions and engage, both individually and collectively, in forms of resistance and activism against the exploitation and violence which actually represent an essential part of the current global capitalist political economy.
POISONED FRUITS: MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE AGRICULTURAL LABOUR MARKETS Geopolitical and geoeconomic processes related to the wider post-Fordist restructuring of global capitalism – as discussed in this volume – have contributed to a radical transformation of rural spaces and their social and economic relations (Gertel and Sippel 2014). The re-organization of the agricultural productive system in a direction aimed at meeting global capitalism’s interests and processes has been facilitated by the growing ability to exploit a reserve army mostly composed of migrants and other mobile workers who currently represent a large portion of the agricultural labour force, especially on the European shores of the Mediterranean (Corrado, De Castro and Perrotta 2017; Nori and Farinella 2020). Here, the decline and ageing of rural populations, together with the counter-effects of the global mechanism of agri-food supply chains – which have concretely incentivized companies to pay lower wages and offer greater informality and flexibility to an extremely precarious and seasonal workforce – have helped make agriculture less attractive to the local populations (Nori and Farinella 2020). Price competition, for example, which pushes farmers towards significant cuts in production costs, has strongly shaped this labour market which is dramatically affected
304 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work by high rates of illegality and offers, in turn, non-visibility and informality to migrant workers excluded from other forms of economic and social integration due to their irregular status (Pugliese 2013). Moreover, countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy often suffer from a lack of policies aimed at countering the pressure applied by farmers and increasing surveillance of criminal practices and exploitative situations (Nori and Farinella 2020). Thus, the Fordist production rationale, which largely relies on the extraction of surplus value from migrant labour, here shows its most dramatic effects. In Italy, the agricultural sector presents high diversity in terms of farm structures and production, with the Northern part of the country characterized by intensive production systems and large land-holdings, while in the South small-scale farms make up the majority. In both cases, however, farmers have been dealing with an increase in intensive agriculture, a growing subalternity to major distribution chains and the establishment of large buying centres which tend to impose very low prices (OHCHR 2020, p. 9). The possibility to hire – and often exploit – cheap and flexible labour through an immigrant workforce represents a crucial factor which has enabled farmers and enterprises to remain alive and productive (Nori and Farinella 2020, p. 40). In Italian agriculture, it is estimated that there are currently between 400,000 and 500,000 migrant workers (FLAI CGIL 2018; OHCHR 2020, p. 9), although those who are regularly employed come to around 342,000 (CREA 2020, p. 36). The percentage of migrants out of total employment in agriculture has steadily increased since the early 1990s, and has roughly tripled in the last decade due to the economic crisis which drove many migrants away from other sectors and brought them to find refuge in agriculture (CREA 2020, p. 37). Moreover, the adoption in 2018 of the so-called “Salvini Decree”, which abolished humanitarian protection and further stressed an approach towards migration in terms of security and public safety, led to a significant increase in the number of undocumented migrants (Corsi 2019) – currently estimated at around 680,000, i.e. twice as many as only few years ago (OHCHR 2020) – and illegalized asylum seekers, excluded from the reception system and abandoned to themselves (Omizzolo 2020, p. 45). Hence, according to the latest data available, the already considerable rate of informal and precarious work found in the Italian agriculture sector – where labour is largely physical and unskilled – is particularly high among migrants, who are obliged to accept informal employment relationships or receive non-union pay rates, regardless of their legal status. Furthermore, this situation has dramatically worsened since the explosion of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown measures introduced in March 2020. Since then, there has been an estimated 10–20 per cent growth in the number of migrants exploited in farming activities, due to a further deterioration of working and living conditions in rural areas. Currently, one out of two workers in the Italian countryside is irregular (Omizzolo 2020, pp. 44–45). Although exploitation practices involve a large portion of agricultural workers, regardless of sex, age and nationality, they are particularly severe for migrant workers and even worse for those who are undocumented, as stressed by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food during her visit to Italy in January 2020 (OHCHR 2020, p. 7). Especially during the harvest season and at times when there is a peak in the demand for agri-food products – as occurred during the Covid-19 lockdown – the maximum number of hours of work per day significantly increases, while minimum wage is often not respected, leaving especially irregular migrant workers “unprotected and unable to report any abuse” (OHCHR 2020, p. 7). Farm labourers usually work for 8–12 hours – with peaks of even 15 hours per day – for a daily wage coming
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside 305 to between 20 and 35 euros (FLAI CGIL 2018; MEDU 2020). In some cases, they even receive piecework pay, which corresponds to three to four euros for a 375 kilogram box of fruit or vegetables (Omizzolo 2020, p. 45). The lack of a regulatory role played by institutions and the isolation in which workers are confined, however, lead not only undocumented migrants but also European citizens – mostly coming from Romania, Poland and Bulgaria – to fall into this trap (Leogrande 2016). The latest official data available indicate that Romanians, Indians, Albanians and Moroccans are the largest groups of foreign agricultural workers in Italy, followed by Poles and Bulgarians (Corrado 2018a, p. 9). After the 2007 European enlargement process, EU mobile citizens have significantly replaced African migrants in several areas of the country, given the nature of their migratory project which is temporary by definition and so they are more inclined to accept unfair and exploitative working conditions. Migrants from Eastern Europe and the Balkans often adopt strategies of circular mobility between different production areas – and across internal EU borders – where they move according to seasonal peaks for labour (Nori and Farinella 2020, p. 48). Moreover, their irregular recruitment is less dangerous for employers, who do not risk being charged with the offence of facilitation and exploitation of irregular migration (Palumbo 2016, p. 19). Since 2018, the combined effects of the “Salvini Decree” and the Covid-19 pandemic, however, may have had a negative impact on the increased hierarchization and clandestinization of a job market already affected by ethnic as well as gender specialization. The increased number of rejected asylum requests and migrants losing their legal status have offered employers a labour force more vulnerable to exploitation (Dines 2022). Moreover, inequalities based on gender overlap with other forms of discrimination which particularly affect women working in this sector, especially in Southern Italy where the number of EU women employed in farms is significant (Corrado 2018a; Peano 2017; Piro 2021). Although more consistent data on migrant women workers in rural areas are needed, information available indicates that their salary is usually 20–30 per cent lower than men (Omizzolo 2020, p. 45), while their vulnerability is very much affected by the condition of isolation, segregation and dependency in which they live. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Romanian women employed in the Sicilian horticultural sector, for example, not only face conditions of forced and bonded labour, but also “sexual violence, threats against themselves and their children and violations of reproductive and sexual rights” (UNGA 2018, p. 11). Especially women with family responsibilities are most exposed to abuse and blackmailing because the presence of their children in the place where they work and live forces them to accept abuse in order to prevent further threats to their children’s safety (Palumbo and Sciurba 2018, pp. 25–26). Finally, the exploitation of migrant women within this market is also evident in other forms of sexual-labour extraction, such as cases where, especially in ghettos and encampments flourishing in rural zones, women are employed as sexual workers, waitresses and cooks providing services to male seasonal workers, as well as gang-masters and employers (Peano 2017).
RURAL VIOLENCE AND EXPLOITATION PRACTICES: THE CAPORALATO SYSTEM As seen above, the Italian agricultural production model, due to the wide prevalence of informal and irregular practices aimed at appropriating labour at a low cost in order to sustain cheap
306 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work food production, displays a highly exploitative rationale. Labour, mostly provided by global periphery migrants but also by European and native workers, actually represents a crucial productive element whose control allows producers to maintain their production stable and to survive in a market heavily affected by malpractice and even criminal interests. Although this system is well-rooted, especially considering the history of Southern economic and cultural backwardness,2 nowadays it perfectly fits post-Fordist modes of production and the changing dynamics of the global political economy and geographies of production. Hence, the full inclusion of Italian agriculture within the globalized flow of goods, capitals, information and people has actually been facilitated by a sort of delocalization in loco promoted by owners and producers who, by drastically cutting the cost of labour, manage to meet the goal of productiveness at the expense of workers’ rights, safety and, in some cases, even life. The subaltern integration and sometimes intense exploitation of migrants in this sector have been also facilitated by the lack of forms of institutional mediation between supply and demand and the fragmentation of regulatory frameworks. This has allowed historical forms of labour intermediation, in decline during the 1970s and 1980s, to come back to the fore (Dines 2018). Reference is made here to a complex intermediation and management system – largely irregular and most often illegal – where a wide range of actors play fundamental roles. One of the most well-known is the caporalato system, i.e. gang-mastering, which consists in informal labour contracting agents who not only oversee the recruitment of workers, but also control the cost and timing of their work and often provide them with transportation and housing. These are all areas in which migrants may face high costs and risks, since the use of violent methods which has traditionally affected manpower intermediation in the countryside, especially in the South, is further exacerbated by criminal interests often linked to forms of entrepreneurial organized crime which find a source of illegal income in the agri-food sector (Corrado 2011; Colloca and Corrado 2013; Pugliese 2013; Perrotta 2014; FLAI-CGIL 2018). According to the data available, currently about 25 per cent of Italian farms rely on gang-masters for manpower intermediation (FLAI-CGIL 2018). Gang-masters or caporali show the main features of the mediators between landowners and day labourers in the past, even though they are mostly migrants themselves and, in many cases, former workers who establish variable and ambivalent relations with their national and ethnic-based networks (Perrotta and Sacchetto 2014). While caporalato is an illegal intermediation system widespread in Southern Italy’s agriculture since the beginning of the 20th century, until the 1970s it was characterized by the fact that both caporali and farmworkers were mostly part of the same community, sometimes even the same village. This meant some limits on the worst forms of exploitation, since they were subjected to specific social constraints which usually deterred from the use of extreme forms of abuse and violence (Leogrande 2016, pp. 66–68). Nowadays, the new caporali – mostly foreigners – do not necessarily share the same community and social background. Although they often speak the same language of their workers, they are strangers to each other: their relationship is not destined to last – even through different generations as it was in the past – but is just finalized to the maximization of profit at any cost (Leogrande 2016, p. 69). Case studies concerning the Punjabi Sikh community near Rome (Omizzolo and Sodano 2015), Macedonian and Bulgarian workers in the vineyards in Piedmont (Donatiello and Moiso 2017) or migrants working in the vineyards of Southern Tuscany (Oliveri 2015) confirm that the phenomenon goes far beyond the south of Italy. In the 220 Italian agricultural districts monitored by the Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto in its latest report, there seem to be around 15,000 caporali spread across the country, having different socio-demographic
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside 307 characteristics and profiles. They range from the so-called “foreman gang-masters” to “violent gang-masters” and “criminal or Mafia gang-masters” depending on their methods, modus operandi, structure of action and conditions of autonomy vs. exploitation granted to their clients (FLAI-CGIL 2018). In 2016, a new law considering caporalato a form of severe labour exploitation was approved by Parliament, but it is still not fully and effectively enforced (OHCHR 2020). Moreover, poor working conditions can be found in sectors where other forms of apparently legal intermediation are carried out by temporary staffing agencies, service agencies and cooperatives who regularly ignore social security obligations, minimum legal wages and laws regarding working hours (Dines 2018; Nori and Farinella 2020). The emphasis put by media reports on the unacceptable standards of working and living conditions suffered by workers employed in this sector, however, has not yet led to a wider critical discussion of the position and role of these labourers within the agri-food supply chain, nor of the complicity of a legal and policy framework that actually enables illegal and/or irregular practices at the expense of migrants’ rights. Thus, the image of migrants as pure slaves, victims of violence and human rights abuses tends to overshadow the underlying political agency, to absolve the state of its responsibilities and to conceal the industrial and global dimension of an economic sector structurally affected by grey (i.e. between legal and illegal) practices.
GHETTOS, SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE As mentioned above, although various laws and measures have been approved during the last few years in order to curb the illegal system behind the agri-food chain and improve the condition of the people involved, some of the most outrageous abuses have never disappeared nor become less conspicuous (MEDU 2020). The lack of inclusive policies towards migrant workers and the ongoing representation of seasonal migrant workers in terms of a long-lasting emergency have facilitated their segregation into slums, tent cities, informal ghettos and self-built shantytowns mostly located in rural areas isolated from urban centres. This has not only exacerbated their already appalling living conditions, but has also undermined their possibility to integrate into local societies and generated racialized conflicts and tensions with local populations. Thus, as stressed by Corrado, since the late 1980s there has always been an “ambiguous coexistence of economic demand for migrant labour in the fields and social hostility to their presence in the streets” (2018a, p. 24). In this regard, one of the first tragic events occurred in 1989 when Jerry Masslo, a South-African asylum seeker working as a tomato harvester in the area of Villa Literno, near Naples, was killed by a group of four young men who wanted to rob him and other migrant workers living in the same abandoned shed. This murder – which occurred after several intolerant attacks and racist raids against migrants living in the area – became a symbol of the inhuman conditions suffered by agricultural migrant workers, especially in Southern Italy. Moreover, it led, a few weeks later, to the first national anti-racist demonstration and the adoption of the first immigration law in 1990 (Colucci 2018). Several tensions and racialized conflicts with local populations, as well as numerous migrant mobilitations and strikes, protesting against their lack of access to rights and justice, followed in coming years, such as in Castel Volturno in 2008, Rosarno in 2010, Nardò in 2011, Foggia in 2016 and many others. One of the latest occurred in May 2020, against the temporary legalization measures brought in by the government during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to secure manpower, only for few months,
308 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work in specific sectors. Over these decades, however, the number of migrant workers in the Italian agricultural system has steadily grown while their working and living conditions have not significantly changed. Just as reported by the NGO Medecines Sans Frontieres in one of the first inquiries on the health and living conditions of migrant workers in Italian agriculture almost twenty years ago (2005), seasonal labourers still mostly reside in ghettos consisting of large agglomerations of tent-barracks, in remote and abandoned farmhouses or in reception centres where the boundaries between inside and outside are very porous (Campesi 2014). Beside housing promiscuity and a lack of essential services such as water, electricity and heating, in these places migrants often experience conditions of social and spatial segregation, violence, power dynamics related to racial stratification and marginalization, which further exacerbate their exclusion, discrimination and psycho-physical health. These places, however, have also been spaces of resistance and mobilization. Thanks to the grass-root work and projects carried out by NGOs, activists, cooperatives and unions, promoted by both migrants and local people, ghettos and shantytowns have become sites of socialization, mutual aid, political subjectivation and agency (Brigate di Solidarietà Attiva et al. 2012). Here, a wide range of solidarity networks and grass-root groups and unions have emerged, as well as initiatives aimed at launching quality certification methods. The latter reflect increased attention towards the exploitative conditions suffered by labourers and the responsibilities of large retail chains, transparent supply chains and ethical agriculture projects (Corrado 2018a; Iocco et al. 2018). These alternative experiences, which concretely bring together the needs of small farmers and migrant workers’ needs for a just income and fair working conditions – and which are also given greater attention by consumers – are based on forms of mutualism which aim at rebuilding the economic and political power of actors heavily marginalized by a global production model based on the subordination of the working conditions and wages of the people involved in the production of food at a very low cost price (Molinero Gerbeau and Avallone 2016; Iocco et al. 2018). Although it goes beyond the aims of this chapter to assess the actual strength and sustainability of all these initiatives, they clearly challenge recurrent images of migrant workers as passive subjects and show the multiple forms of collective action and resistance in which they are involved. The fight against labour exploitation and the promotion of ethical and ecological forms of agriculture now overlap with the fight for fair salaries, regular job contracts, permanent residence permits and decent working and living conditions (Corrado 2018b).
CONCLUDING REMARKS The analysis of the Italian case suggests that the wider process of restructuring global agricultural production and agri-food chains, which began in the 1990s, has had a strong impact on the growing ethnicization, hierarchization and racialization of the labour force employed in agriculture. Here, as in other Mediterranean countries, the availability of an increasing number of mobile EU citizens, asylum seekers, temporary and irregular migrants has been accompanied by a reprehensible lack of appropriate policies aimed at protecting farmers and producers from unfair price competition, cuts in production costs and increasing demand for cheap food production. Italy’s highly informal and exploitative agricultural sector, however, has been further exacerbated by the presence of an illegal and often criminal gang-master system, known as caporalato. This system is partially different from the one in place until
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside 309 the second post-war period, since it operates outside that set of even unjust social norms that traditionally ruled and governed the old agrarian world – preventing and/or limiting extreme acts of violence to occur – and is just oriented to the maximization of profit through the most intense forms of exploitation. The new caporali, however, often co-nationals of their workers, still strongly influence both the functioning of the market and the lives of the people involved. In some cases, the situations in which both male and female labourers work recall the miserable conditions suffered by wage-workers, proletarians and labourers in the late nineteenth century: they usually work long hours for less than minimum wage and reside in ghettos with intolerable living conditions and an extremely high amount of both social and physical violence. Over the past few years, several cases have been recorded of agricultural workers who have died as result of their work, out of exhaustion and intense manual labour, or in fires that have occurred in the shantytowns and encampments, or even killed by gang-masters and other violent entrepreneurs involved in this market or during racist assaults. However, the rhetorical framework used in public discourse – that often depicts these workers as poor victims or slaves lacking any agency and driven by desperation, and gang-masters as the only ones responsible for all this – runs the risk of providing a very incomplete picture. Here, reference goes to the crucial role played by macro-phenomena affecting both the global and the local food production chains mentioned above, as well as the increasingly restrictive migration policies that have blocked regular channels of migration and consequently increased the exploitation of precarious and undocumented migrant workers without alternative legal work options. Hence, institutional responsibilities in intensifying the exploitative nature of the market as well as the invisibilization and clandestinization of the men and women employed have been often ignored. Finally, stereotypes surrounding the depiction of migrant agricultural workers as slaves fail to capture the crucial subjective component inherent to any migration project – where migrants always tend to make calculated choices – and risk depoliticizing their struggle for rights. This shows that although the exploitative nature of the agricultural market has been largely invisible to consumers and citizens, and the social costs for society as a whole ignored, the recognition of workers and migrants’ rights actually represents a crucial precondition for constructing more equal production and consumption practices.
NOTES 1 2
According to the ILO, “[…] a forced labour situation is determined by the nature of the relationship between a person and an “employer” and not by the type of activity performed, […], nor by its legality or illegality under national law” (ILO 2017, p. 16). As noted by Leogrande, it should not be overshadowed that the South, often depicted as downtrodden, has also been a place with a strong tradition of rebellion and workers’ struggles during the early decades of the twentieth century (Leogrande 2016).
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310 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Colloca, Carlo and Corrado, Alessandra (eds.) (2013), La globalizzazione delle campagne, Milano: Franco Angeli. Colucci, Michele (2018), Storia dell’immigrazione straniera in Italia. Dal 1945 ai giorni nostri, Roma: Carocci. Corrado, Alessandra (2011), ‘Clandestini in the Orange Towns: Migrations and Racisms in Calabria’s Agriculture’, Race/Ethnicity Multidisciplinary Global Contexts, 4 (2), 191–201. Corrado, Alessandra (ed.) (2018a), Is Italian Agriculture a ‘Pull Factor’ for Irregular Migration and If So, Why? Open Society European Policy Institute, Policy Brief, December. Corrado, Alessandra (2018b), ‘Colonialità e decolonialità nell’agricoltura mediterranea: lavoro, migrazioni e contadini’, Revista THEOMAI/THEOMAI Journal. Estudios críticos sobre Sociedad y Desarrollo/Critical Studies about Society and Development, 38, 246–260. Corrado, Alessandra, de Castro, Carlos and Perrotta, Domenico (eds.) (2017), Migration and Agriculture. Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area, London and New York: Routledge. Corsi, Cecilia (2019), Evaluating the ‘Salvini Decree’: Doubts of Constitutional Legitimacy, Florence: Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. CREA, Zumpano, Catia (ed.) (2020), Migrazioni, agricoltura e ruralità. Politiche e percorsi per lo sviluppo dei territori, Roma: Rete Rurale Nazionale. Dines, Nick (2018), ‘Humanitarian Reason and the Representation and Management of Migrant Agricultural Labour’, Revista THEOMAI/THEOMAI Journal. Estudios críticos sobre Sociedad y Desarrollo/Critical Studies about Society and Development, 38, 37–53. Dines, Nick (2022), ‘After Entry: Humanitarian Exploitation and Migrant Labour in the Fields of Southern Italy’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 41 (1), 74–91. Donatiello, Davide and Moiso, Valentina (2017), ‘Titolari e riservisti. L’inclusione differenziale di lavoratori immigrati nella viticultura del Sud Piemonte’, Meridiana, 89, 185–210. FLAI-CGIL (2018), Agromafie e caporalato, IV Rapporto, a cura dell’Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto, Rome: FLAI-CGIL. Gertel, Jörg and Sippel, Sarah Ruth (eds.) (2014), Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture. The Social Costs of Eating Fresh, London and New York: Routledge. Gordon, Todd (2019), ‘Capitalism, Neoliberalism and Unfree Labour’, Critical Sociology, 45 (6), 921–939. International Labour Organisation-ILO (2017), Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage, Geneva: ILO. International Labour Organization-ILO (2022), Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage, Geneva: ILO. Iocco, Giulio, Lo Cascio, Martina, Perrotta, Domenico (2018), Agriculture and Migration in Rural Southern Italy in the 2010s: New Populisms and a New Rural Mutualism, Conference Paper No. 77, ERPI 2018 International Conference Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World, 17–18 March. Leogrande, Alessandro (2016 [2008]), Uomini e caporali. Viaggio tra i nuovi schiavi nelle campagne del Sud, Milano: Feltrinelli. Medici per i Diritti Umani-MEDU (2020), La pandemia a Rosarno. Emergenza sanitaria e sfruttamento endemico, VII Rapporto sulle condizioni di vita e di lavoro dei braccianti stranieri nella Piana di Gioia Tauro, Rome: MEDU. Medici Senza Frontiere-Missione Italia (2005), I frutti dell’ipocrisia, March. Molinero Gerbeau, Yoan and Avallone, Gennaro (2016), ‘Producing Cheap Food and Labour: Migrations and Agriculture in the Capitalistic World-Ecology’, Social Change Review, 14 (2), 121–148. Nori, Michele and Farinella, Domenica (2020), Migration, Agriculture and Rural Development, IMISCOE Short Reader, Cham: Springer. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights-OHCHR (2020), Statement by Ms. Itilal Elver, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, on her visit to Italy, 21–31 January 2020, January, Rome. Oliveri, Federico (2015), ‘Giuridificare ed esternalizzare lo sfruttamento. Il caso dei lavoratori immigrati nella vitivinicoltura senese’, in Rigo, Enrica (ed.), Leggi, migranti e caporali. Prospettive critiche e di ricerca sullo sfruttamento del lavoro in agricoltura, Pisa: Pacini, 47–67. Omizzolo, Marco (2020), ‘Bracciantato e caporalato in Italia al tempo del Covid-19’, in Medici per i Diritti Umani-MEDU, La pandemia a Rosarno. Emergenza sanitaria e sfruttamento endemico, VII
Migrant work exploitation and resistance in the Italian countryside 311 Rapporto sulle condizioni di vita e di lavoro dei braccianti stranieri nella Piana di Gioia Tauro, Rome: MEDU, 44–46. Omizzolo, Marco and Sodano, Pina (2015), ‘L’assimilazionismo e i lavoratori immigrati nell’agricoltura italiana. La comunità punjabi in provincia di Latina’, Cambio, V (10), 55–66. Palumbo, Letizia (2016), Trafficking and Labour Exploitation in Domestic Work and the Agricultural Sector in Italy, Research Project Report, San Domenico di Fiesole: EUI. Palumbo, Letizia and Sciurba, Alessandra (2018), The Vulnerability to Exploitation of Women Migrant Workers in Agriculture in the EU: the Need for a Human Rights and Gender Based Approach, Brussels: European Union, Policy Department for Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs. Peano, Irene (2017), ‘Global Care-Commodity Chains: Labour Re/Production and Agribusiness in the District of Foggia, South-Eastern Italy’, Sociologia del lavoro, 146, 24–39. Perrotta, Domenico (2014), ‘Vecchi e nuovi mediatori. Storia, geografia ed etnografia del caporalato in agricoltura’, Meridiana, 79, 193–220. Perrotta, Domenico and Sacchetto, Devi (2014), ‘Migrant Farmworkers in Southern Italy: Forms of Mobility and Resistance’, Workers of the World: International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts, 1 (5), 75–98. Piro, Valeria (2021), Migrant Farmworkers in ‘Plastic Factories’. Investigation Work-Life Struggles, Cham: Palgrave. Pugliese, Enrico (ed.) (2013), Immigrazione e diritti violati. I lavoratori immigrati nell’agricoltura del Mezzogiorno, Rome: Ediesse. United Nations General Assembly-UNGA (2018), Report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Including its Causes and Consequences, 10 July.
READING LIST Corrado, Alessandra (ed.) (2018a), Is Italian Agriculture a ‘Pull Factor’ for Irregular Migration and If So, Why? Open Society European Policy Institute, Policy Brief, December. Palumbo, Letizia and Sciurba, Alessandra (2018), The Vulnerability to Exploitation of Women Migrant Workers in Agriculture in the EU: the Need for a Human Rights and Gender Based Approach, Brussels: European Union, Policy Department for Citizen’s Rights and Constitutional Affairs.
SUGGESTED VIDEOS Il sangue verde, Documentary by Andrea Segre [Italy, 2010, 57’], available at: http://www.zalab.org/ projects/il-sangue-verde/ The Invisibles: Inhumane Conditions of Italy’s Migrant Farmworkers, Documentary by Diana Ferrero and Carola Mamberto [Italy, 2020, 9.33’], available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b2qx7utFlo
25. Extractive humanitarianism: unpaid labour and participatory detention in refugees’ governmentality Martina Tazzioli
INTRODUCTION The movements of illegalised migrants and asylum seekers are highly obstructed, controlled and contained by European member states. Yet, at the same time, migration governmentality has progressively turned into a prominent source of economic profit for both states and private actors. Over the last two decades the humanitarian business of governing and controlling refugees and asylum seekers has also grown exponentially. However, as this chapter suggests, a critical analysis of refugee economies involves expanding and reframing value beyond direct profit and investigating labour activities beyond waged work. This entails exploring the multiple forms of unpaid labour that asylum seekers are requested to do. Such a focus on unpaid and hidden labour sheds light on a key element of refugee humanitarianism, that consists in its extractive processes. In fact, this chapter argues, refugee humanitarianism is increasingly grounded on extractive dynamics, which mainly concern data extraction and knowledge extraction and which depend on refugees’ unpaid labour. Which unpaid labour do asylum seekers perform? And to what extent do they become a source of value extraction? The chapter engages with these questions by advancing the expression of “extractive humanitarianism” to designate the central role played by data extraction and knowledge extraction operations in refugee governmentality and the unpaid labour activities that refugees are requested to perform. Relatedly, extractive humanitarianism points to the incorporation of refugees into their own governmentality and control. The analytics of extraction, I suggest, enables grasping key practices of unpaid labour and forms of value production in refugee humanitarianism. In fact, following Mezzadra and Neilson, extractive operations are at stake “not only when the operations of capital plunder the materiality of the earth and biosphere, but also when they encounter and draw upon forms and practices of human cooperation and sociality that are external to them” (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019: 188). In order to unfold this argument, I engage with cashless economies in refugee governmentality and with the transformation of asylum seekers into forced techno-users, with a specific focus on the Greek context. Indeed, Greece is the first European country where the EU implemented a Cash Assistance Programme for asylum seekers in 2016, and over the last five years it has been a key site where EU restrictive migration policies have been tested. The chapter intervenes in debates about forced migration and at the same time expands the reach of a political economy of (unpaid) work, by advancing a twofold argument. It suggests that cashless economies and data extraction processes enable two specific labour activities which are key to the governing of refugees. First, refugees as forced techno-users are a source of value extraction. They perform unpaid labour, as long as they produce data through their 312
Extractive humanitarianism 313 transactions and through the use of digital technologies which are key for the datafication of their mobility (Dal Maso et al., 2019). At the same time, refugees are also requested to perform “free” labour activities by providing feedback concerning their use of technologies and debit cards: in so doing, they are co-opted in a sort of “participatory detention” mechanism, as long as they are a source of knowledge extraction then used for improving the politics of refugee containment. Second, humanitarian actors do engage in hidden labour activities by populating databases, keeping them up to date and maintaining the digital infrastructures of data circulation (Chun, 2016). In fact, an analysis of the incorporation of digital technologies in refugee governmentality enables highlighting modes of value production and unpaid laboring processes predicated upon knowledge and data extraction. In order to develop the argument on extractive humanitarianism and on its related political economy of work, I build on research fieldwork and semi-structured interviews I conducted in Greece between 2017 and 2020 and on the analysis of official texts released by international agencies and state authorities.
LABOUR AND VALUE IN THE REFUGEE INDUSTRY In migration literature, scholars have investigated the exploitation of migrant labour force – and the blackmailing that illegalised migrants face. Claudia Aradau invites us to problematise the notion of trafficking in light of illegalised migrant workers “who find themselves forced into exploitative working conditions”, even if they are not tricked by anyone (Aradau, 2008: 23). Illegalised migrant workers are widely employed in the construction sector (Andrijasevic and Sacchetto, 2017), in agriculture (Gambino, 2017) and in the hospitality sector. More recently, authors have foregrounded the key role played by migrants in supply chains and logistics (Altenried et al., 2018; Cuppini et al., 2015; Krifors, 2021). Deborah Cowen’s book The Deadly Life of Logistics (2014) has paved the ground for analyses on migration and logistics, and it brought together analyses about the restructuring of capitalism in light of the “logistical turn” and reflections on migrant labour. Migration studies scholars and geographers have explored the production of value and the labour economy at play in migration governance, by looking at the profit made by private actors as part of the growing “migration industry” (Andersson, 2014; Castron et al., 2018). The migrant detention business has incessantly proliferated across the globe over the last two decades, in particular in the US and in Europe, as scholars contributing to the carceral geography literature have remarked (Hiemstra and Conlon, 2016; Martin, 2020). Scholars who work on refugee humanitarianism have studied the refugees’ economies by looking at how class-related factors influence refugee encampment policies and, relatedly, refugees’ labour market (Turner, 2015). Recently, they started to explore how the humanitarian business is grounded on hierarchies between locally recruited labour and international NGOs officers. As Elisa Pascucci noted, “locally recruited labour as essential for our understanding of ‘actually existing’ humanitarianism” (Pascucci, 2019: 3; see also Spathopoulou et al., 2021). Notably, the feminist scholar Silvia Federici has foregrounded women’s unpaid labour as a key component of contemporary capitalist economy: “the unwaged condition of housework”, she argued “has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it” (Federici, 1975). Building on Federici’s work and on social reproduction theorists, feminist political
314 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work economists have put at the core of their research agenda women’s unwaged labour. As part of that, they have foregrounded the gendered bias of the internationalisation of labour economy, showing how migrant women are the object both of commodification and exploitation mechanisms: as Alessandra Mezzadri contended, “when it comes to women, commodification and exploitation are co-constitutive of the experience of labour (and class) subordination” (Mezzadri, 2016: 1881). Indeed, migrant women are involved in social reproduction activities which are unwaged, and at the same time their salary is affected by wage differentials (Pun, 2007). Focusing on Argentina, Veronica Gago has drawn attention to the fundamental blurring of informal labour and wage labour and to the central role played by migrant women workers (Gago, 2017). Bridging these two streams of literature – migration scholarship and feminist political economy – this chapter suggests to broaden and conceptualise labour beyond the direct economic profit extracted from migrants and the exploitation of migrant labour force. More precisely, it investigates the modes of unpaid labour and hidden labour which are at play in refugee humanitarianism. Relatedly, the chapter draws attention to the processes of value extraction that are unfolded in the governing of refugees, with a specific focus on the increasing incorporation of digital and financial tools in refugee camps. Indeed, the use of technologies by humanitarian and security actors as well as by asylum seekers have given rise to circuits of data sharing and, as I will show later, it requires an incessant labour of maintenance of the digital infrastructures. Putting in dialogue feminist scholarship on unpaid labour (Federici, 2010) with literature on migrant labour economy is particularly helpful for coming to grips with extractive humanitarianism. Moreover, it shows the benefits of expanding the purchase of the political economy analyses of work beyond their traditional boundaries.
DATA EXTRACTION Literature on the migration industry has illustrated how the body of the migrants become a source of profit – as long as migrants are held in captivity in detention centres (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sorensen, 2013), and how securitisation processes are backed up by private actors that are subcontracted border enforcement operations by the states. But is value extraction in refugee governmentality limited to direct profit-driven activities? What about the “data craving” (Lemberg-Pedersen and Haioty, 2020) at play among humanitarian actors and states; i.e. processes of data collection and data sharing in refugee camps? Bringing together analyses on financialisation and on the exploitation of migrants’ labour power, Brett Neilson has advanced that the migrant’s “body has also emerged as a ‘global currency’” (Neilson, 2018: 388), which crosses borders and that at the same time is “crossed by and constitutive of territorial relations” (378). So, what is the value generated in refugees’ economies? In fact, an analysis of the economy of refugee governmentality at the level of the daily operations conducted in camps, shows the eminent extractive character of humanitarianism. More precisely, an insight into the use of digital technologies by refugees as well as by humanitarian actors, enables grasping in detail the multiple modes of extraction enacted in camps. In 2016, the European Commission launched in Greece the Cash Assistance Programme1 for asylum seekers, conceiving it as a financial-humanitarian response to the so-called “refugee crisis”. The programme is the first one implemented by the EU in a European country
Extractive humanitarianism 315 and it consists of monthly financial support given to asylum seekers which is uploaded on Mastercard prepaid cards. The programme is managed by the UNHCR with the support of two Greek NGOs (Caritas and the International Federation of the Red Cross). The financial provider involved in the project is Prepaid Financial Services (PFS) that is based in London. In fact, the Cash Assistance Programme sheds light on the key role of financial actors in refugee governmentality and on the forms of value production connected to it (Coddington et al., 2020; Tazzioli, 2019). Importantly, refugees’ cashless economy in Greece is situated in a context where asylum seekers have been recently turned into forced techno-users. Indeed, together with the prepaid cards, asylum seekers are expected to navigate the asylum system through a series of compulsory apps and technologies: since 2016, in order to book an appointment with the Greek Asylum Service, migrants who are on the mainland need to call through Skype during specific time slots; WhatsApp is used by some international agencies and NGOs to send updates to asylum seekers; and these latter are requested to use Viber to communicate with the UNHCR if they have problems with their prepaid cards. Digital technologies and the use of databases in refugee camps and the use of data have been widely tackled in critical security studies scholarship which has analysed the insidious effects of control that these exercises and the processes of securitisation are part of (Hoffmann, 2017; Jacobsen, 2015). Nevertheless, little has been said about labour and modes of exploitation that sustain the datafication of refugees’ mobility. Which value is extracted from refugees as card users? And which refugees’ labour is at stake as part of these extractive activities? As Azadeh Akbari has contended, data is not automatically translated into value, as “there is no value in piles of raw data”, and value should not be conflated with price as such (Akbari, 2020: 412). Every time asylum seekers use the UNHCR prepaid card in a shop, their transaction and location are tracked by the financial provider, PFS. The digital traceability of asylum seekers as card beneficiaries depends in fact on their use of the prepaid card – and PFS can find out in real time where and how they use it. Asylum seekers as card beneficiaries are subject to a twofold data-extraction process. First, their biometric data and personal data are collected by the Greek authorities and the European agency Frontex during the identification procedure, soon after landing. Secondly, they are registered by the UNHCR in the Cash Assistance Programme and the data is inserted into the UNHCR database, proGres. Simultaneously, some data of asylum seekers as card beneficiaries is also stored in the PFS database2 which is fully independent from the UNHCR’s: there, asylum seekers are recorded as a sort of para-consumer, whose credit score could not be actually checked in the future, since every prepaid card is associated to a unique UNHCR financial wallet. However, the potential traceability of asylum seekers via their financial transactions does not mean that they are all constantly tracked on an individual basis. As UNHCR officers told me “in reality we have no interest in monitoring refugees’ individual transactions, nor in constantly detecting where they are moving to”. In this light, there is a difference between the deployment of technology in this case and in the case of labour control. Rather, the data collected from PFS is used by the UNHCR for producing statistics about refugees’ population behaviours. In fact, through biometric technologies, such as fingerprinting and iris scan, it’s the body of the migrant which becomes the source of data extraction (Browne, 2015), the use of financial and digital tools in camps shed light on the datafication of refugees’ conducts. In fact, as Ruha Benjamin observed, surveillance and biometric systems “treat people like a surface” of racialised extractive activities (Benjamin, 2019: 128). Together with that, I add, refugees are also objects of data extraction activities as techno-users and con-
316 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work sumers – that is, they are a source of extractive operations that target their conducts. How are these figures and statistics produced? It is worth noticing that asylum seekers tend to take cash from ATM machines, in order to avoid being tracked; therefore, data extraction activities from refugees’ transactions is minimal and needs to be supplemented with knowledge extraction operations that require the active participation of the asylum seekers.
KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION AND UNPAID LABOUR Up to now I have shown that refugees are a source of data extraction activities, and that these activities do not just concern the body and the biometric traces, but also their conducts, acts and mobility. Extractive humanitarianism is also grounded in knowledge extraction operations (Marazzi, 2011).3 But what does knowledge extraction mean? And are asylum seekers directly involved in it? In fact, knowledge extraction requires a proactive participation on the part of refugees, as long as extraction in this case means that information is provided by refugees themselves. Actually, migrants are subject to knowledge extraction activities at different stages of their journeys. For instance, soon after disembarking in Europe, migrants who come by the sea are interviewed by the officers of the European agency Frontex: the migrants are asked questions about their journey and their logistics of crossing, such as the smuggling networks they used, how much they paid and which route they went through. Ultimately, Frontex’s activities rely widely on extractive dynamics and parasitic knowledge production: indeed, the information extracted from the migrants is key for crafting Frontex’s risk analyses.4 Migrants are also often interpellated by the officers of the European Asylum Office (EASO) before or soon after they claim asylum. Extractive processes and parasitic knowledge production are in fact the modes through which international agencies and state actors spy on, monitor and analyse migrants’ trajectories and routes, conducts and their “economy of journey”. In Greek hotspots and refugee camps, asylum seekers are not simply turned into passive techno-users, from whom data is extracted. Rather, they are also requested to participate in their own governmentality and confinement, by providing feedback to the UNHCR and humanitarian actors about their use of the prepaid cards and of other digital technologies and the troubles they might be having with them. Such knowledge extraction mainly takes place in the frame of what the UNHCR calls “post-distribution monitoring activities”. These consist of questionnaires prepared by the UNHCR that are given to the beneficiaries of the prepaid card, who are then asked to provide feedback about their experience with the card – what they used it for, and any problems they might have encountered. Phone calls are made by sampling and selecting a few asylum seekers per month. It is also a way for the UNHCR to check that those people are still in Greece. Thus, asylum seekers as forced techno-users are interpellated and asked to actively contribute to refugee humanitarianism by performing unpaid labour. Knowledge extraction activities require asylum seekers to perform some labour that it is neither remunerated nor recognised as labour. I suggest that it is important to foreground the unpaid labour performed by the asylum seekers, and that is rather labelled by humanitarian actors as “volunteer participation”. In fact, even if asylum seekers are not obliged to take part in the UNHCR’s post-distribution monitoring activities, they are in a very vulnerable position, since they do not know what might happen if they refuse to be involved. In addition to that, humanitarian actors and international agencies rely on the fact that asylum seekers might feel proud to be interpellated as customers and
Extractive humanitarianism 317 techno-users. Far from being a sporadic activity, asylum seekers as techno-users are constantly addressed and asked to participate in their own governmentality by producing knowledge about their own conducts and their use of cards and technology. In this light, one could argue that their labour is not only unpaid, but also partially “unfree” (Waite et al., 2015). More broadly, asylum seekers are increasingly targeted and interpellated by humanitarian actors as well as by state authorities as techno-users who are expected to interact with them through apps and, in so doing, by populating digital platforms. They are both asked to provide feedback about their own experience, and to use apps for accessing humanitarian services or for getting updates. For instance, Viber is now used by the Greek authorities and humanitarian agencies for keeping in touch with asylum seekers – especially since a fire destroyed the hotspot of Lesvos in September 2020.5 In this respect, I suggest that future research agendas should investigate how not only humanitarian actors but also high-tech corporations such as Microsoft and WhatsApp rely on refugees’ unpaid labour – which contributes to populate those databases with different kinds of information and data. In fact, even when asylum seekers are not asked to provide feedback about their experience as techno-users, their communication with state authorities and humanitarian actors is often mediated by apps, such as Viber.6 Overall, the unpaid labour that asylum seekers perform encloses them within the system of participatory detention: that is, they are requested to participate in their own governmentality and to perform unpaid – possibly unfree – labour to improve the mechanisms of humanitarian containment.
UPDATING TO MAKE DATA CIRCULATE NGOs, practitioners and humanitarian actors are fully part of the migration industry. In some places, like the islands of Lampedusa in Italy or Lesvos in Greece, the presence of migrants constitutes one of the main sources of income. The activities that humanitarian actors are expected to perform in refugee camps are not limited to managing, controlling and supporting asylum seekers in different manners. In fact, they are also requested to keep databases up to date; that is to feed and maintain the digital infrastructures of refugee humanitarianism. This labour activity that humanitarian actors and international agencies such as the UNHCR are involved in on a daily basis remains quite invisible and overshadowed by the apparent smooth data-sharing operations. In fact, the recursive labour for “updating to remain the same” (Chun, 2016) is nowadays at the core of refugee humanitarianism. If on the one hand we should caution against linear narratives that gesture towards a technological turn in humanitarianism7 on the other it is important to highlight the increasing centrality played by digital technologies in identifying and keeping track of migrants and refugees. In fact, the “circuits of financial-humanitarianism” (Tazzioli, 2019), formed by multiple operations of data extraction and data circulation are far from being flawless. Rather, they are characterised by repeated glitches and, importantly, require a huge amount of work in order to maintain the interoperability among databases. While scholars have widely investigated the functioning of digital infrastructures and the effects of control these might generate, the invisible labour activities which are necessary for making data circulate and for keeping databases up to date are quite under-theorised. In fact, in this case we cannot speak of unpaid labour8 but, rather, of what Moritz Altenried has defined “hidden labour” (Altenried, 2020). This latter is at the core of critical analyses of digital platforms, digital labour and the radical transforma-
318 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work tions that have occurred in the labour economy as a result (Berg et al., 2018; Graham et al., 2017). Instead, questions of digital labour in refugee humanitarianism remain fundamentally marginalised. The Cash Assistance Programme in Greece that I described above is not an exception: on the contrary, the registration and monthly verification of the asylum seekers in the programme is based on incessant activities by the UNHCR, in collaboration with the two partner NGOs, in order to make it function. As a UNHCR officer stressed to me, every time we do the monthly registration we need to verify [an] asylum seeker’s eligibility, double check their data in the central system, and upload the new information on it through an i-Pad. However, often there are data and information we are not able to double cross-check digitally and that, thus, we need to verify manually. Then, the day after we need to transcribe all data from the I-Pad into proGres, the UNHCR’s central database.9
Therefore, the labour maintenance of databases and digital infrastructures is by no means utterly digital: rather, it consists of a mix of digital and non-digital data cross-checks, as well as manual updating operations. With the outbreak of Covid-19, a few operations of the Cash Assistance Programme have been switched to being remote – such as releasing a new prepaid card. However, far from marking a turn towards fully digital humanitarianism, the pandemic has meant even more hidden labour for humanitarian actors. As UNHCR officers stressed to me Covid-19 has not led to any technological innovation on the ground; rather, we still struggle with the monthly verification procedure as it is very hard to keep track of all card beneficiaries, as the number has increased and they are dispersed everywhere. Most of the times we just used words of mouth for communicating with the asylum seekers, as we realise that they constantly change phone number.10
Every year, as humanitarian actors involved in the Cash Assistance Programme point out, digital infrastructures become more and more cumbersome to manage and update correctly. The increasing amount of data stored in the UNHCR database, proGres, does in fact increase the possibilities of error and failures (Glouftsios, 2020). Therefore, the hidden labour requested to maintain digital infrastructures and populate databases has become a crucial component of humanitarian actors’ daily activity, in continuity with the hidden labour of digital economy (Gregg and Andrijasevic, 2019).
CONCLUSION Introducing the term “wageless life”, Michael Denning has insisted on the centrality of unwaged labour in our societies and criticised notions such as “wasted life” or “bare life” which associate some individuals (such as migrants) with garbage and in reinforcing the image that they are not a source of capitalisation (Denning, 2010). Denning’s point is particularly helpful for disentangling refugees’ protracted strandedness and their difficulty to be employed as waged workers from the idea that they are unexploited surplus life. In fact, asylum seekers who are confined in Greece and wait indefinitely, most of them without being integrated in the job market, are at the same time a source of capitalisation for international agencies as well as for state authorities: in fact, they are involved in unpaid labour activities and are a source of data and knowledge extraction. That is, refugees might be “subjects with value” even if
Extractive humanitarianism 319 destitute on a legal and material level, as Coddington, Conlon and Martin aptly observed (Coddington et al., 2020: 10). Refugee humanitarianism is increasingly sustained and informed by extractive operations: data extraction and knowledge extraction are at the basis of the unpaid labour performed by refugees and the hidden labour that humanitarian actors engage in. To be clear, the expression “extractive humanitarianism” does not designate a radical shift in refugee governmentality, as if knowledge and data extraction was not at stake before: rather, it refers to a significant restructuring of the political technologies through which refugees are controlled and managed (Aradau, Tazzioli, 2020). The unpaid labour that refugees perform and the incessant extraction of data and knowledge from them highlight that value is generated beyond direct profit-making activities and that governmentality is increasingly exercised through an active incorporation of the governed subjects. Indeed, as I stated above, refugees are involved in their own governmentality and are asked to contribute to forms of participatory detention. Refugees, this chapter has shown, are often turned into forced techno-users who are subject to passive data extraction and who, at the same time, are interpellated about their own experience or asked to interact via digital platforms (knowledge extraction). Such an insight enables reformulating analyses about the exploitation of migrants and refugees from the standpoint of unpaid labour. Extractive humanitarianism is an analytical lens for coming to grips with value production and labour exploitation in refugees’ governmentality in their most parasitic and insidious “participatory” forms. Yet, this analytical lens is not narrowed to refugees. Rather, it enables connecting extractive processes through unpaid labour in refugee humanitarianism with other extractive operations that similarly require individuals’ active participation in their own containment and exploitation. In fact, as Silvia Federici compellingly highlighted, the centrality of unpaid labour had been disclosed through women’s struggles (Federici, 2010); a focus on refugees’ unpaid labour could be the opportunity to reinvigorate that debate and trace transversal political connections.
NOTES 1 2 3
4 5 6 7
See https://www.refugee.info/greece/cash-assistance-in-greece--greece/the-cash-program/ ?language=en The PFS database stores minimal information about the card beneficiaries – such as full name, phone number and asylum card number. I draw the notion of “knowledge extraction” from political economists like Christian Marazzi who have foregrounded the centrality of knowledge and communication in processes of accumulation (Marazzi, 2011). In fact, speaking of extraction enables putting at the core the related modes of (often invisible) exploitation and unpaid labour at play in these processes. Yet, unlike post-workerist literature, I don’t assume here a shift towards immaterial labour: rather, I look at how value extraction and labour are played out in refugee governmentality not only through direct profit-making activities but also by capitalising on extractive operations, some of which include refugees’ direct participation and unpaid labour. See https://frontex.europa.eu/publications/?category=riskanalysis See https://migration.gov.gr/en/viber-community/ Even if Viber and WhatsApp are officially encrypted apps, it is unclear how they might keep records of the chats and conversations among refugees. The expression “techno-humanitarianism” (Morozov, 2012) has been adopted by scholars for designating the widespread use of digital technologies in refugee humanitarianism and for highlighting the multiple transformations that this has generated in the economy of humanitarianism as such.
320 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 8
Since the laborious updating and cross-checking activities performed by humanitarian actors and international agencies are included in their wages. 9 Interview with UNHCR officer, Lesvos, July 25, 2019. 10 Interview with UNHCR officer, Lesvos, August 24, 2020.
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FURTHER READING Aitken, R. (2017). “All data is credit data”: constituting the unbanked. Competition & Change, 21(4), 274–300. Coddington, K. (2019). The slow violence of life without cash: borders, state restrictions, and exclusion in the UK and Australia. Geographical Review, 109(4), 527–543. Mezzadra, S., and Neilson, B. (2013). Extraction, logistics, finance: global crisis and the politics of operations. Radical Philosophy, 178, 8–18.
Section B. Intersections of digital and analogue work
26. Problems in protections for working data subjects: becoming strangers to ourselves Phoebe V Moore
INTRODUCTION Data has become a very valuable asset within the global political economy, and its capacity to define ‘subjects’ and to help management to define subjects is built into the epistemology of technological integration processes which begin to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and other products into workplaces.1 An increasing number of human resources and other workplace/space decision-making systems have begun to include AI-systems, where semi-automation of cognitive tasks associated with worker selection and talent management is underway at worrying rates (IFOW, 2020: 6). The seeming final frontier within these spaces are systems that are called ‘AI’ which become seemingly agential with decision-making power that rivals or ‘wins’ against human competence. Natural persons, who are humans, are identifiable ‘data subjects’ as labelled within data privacy law e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Technically, we have more rights to access and control data about ourselves than ever before, based on this now-live European Union-wide Regulation. Updating the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and the 1998 Data Protection Act, the GDPR: […] significantly changes data protection law in Europe, strengthening the rights of individuals and increasing the obligations on organisations. (Irish Data Protection Commission, 2019, italics added by current author)
Increasing the rights and protections of individuals and putting more obligation onto organisations sounds wonderful and the idea that there can be better data and privacy protections for workers is altogether progressive. However, the use of the term ‘subject’ in policy implies several things. Firstly, that subject is somehow a homogeneous category that can be represented as such; secondly, and perhaps more philosophically than policy can really acknowledge, that a subject can be known, at all. Thirdly, data policy largely omits the recognition of a key point about humanity, that we operate based on social relations. Indeed, data collection is a social relation. Judith Butler is clear that subject formation means finding autonomy of the self, and ‘giving an account of oneself’ is one of the most important nodes in a process of subjectivation or freedom of the self and selves (Kim, 2011). Where this is absented, vulnerabilities are exacerbated. Today, what is now known as ‘algorithmic management’ (Rani and Furrer, 2021; Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Woodcock, 2021) takes on what Evans and Kitchin speak about as a ‘modulation’ approach, involving subject prescriptions and ‘subjectification’2 made with insufficient accountability, which may eviscerate or at least put an obstacle in the way of emancipatory ‘subjectivation’3 (Evans and Kitchin, 2018) for the worker subject category – who is, despite these new levels of abstraction, by no means liberated within working relationships today. 323
324 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The increase in the uptake of algorithmic management and platform digitalisation at work globally is leading to ultimately the empowerment of an ideal type, the supposed ‘algorithmic boss’ (Adams-Prassl, 2019; Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022), where numeration is expected to at least complement management and improve decision-making and leadership in many areas of the world, leading to a global political economy. Given what I am arguing here, we should revisit what is at stake for adequate protections for data subject workers, when our data is used by external entities to profile us, in ways that are often completely outside of our control and where profiling is commonplace for advertising agencies, public bodies, banks and our employers and clients. As data is increasingly hoovered up by the powerful market dominators in so many areas of life, this question is becoming increasingly difficult to ask, much less to answer. Bloom writes that the owners of data own the future, but he reminds us that this is not an ideologically neutral historical point and currently we are embedded in a global capitalist model for social relations (2019: 2). While technology’s predictive capacities may technically surpass humans’, because of the political economy within which social relations exist, predictions are not automatically objective – nor are they necessarily correct. Building on these arguments, I want to look at the problems in constructing and relying on social protections for workers, by querying the depiction of the data subject in the policies that should protect workers, highlighting the scarcity of engagement with conceptualisations of the complexity of the subject, and the failure that presenting a subject as though it could be positioned homogeneously at all, reflects. With that in mind, this piece intends to unravel a series of considerations for the data subject to demonstrate why current data protection policy does not sufficiently protect all subjects identically by way of the failure to sufficiently delineate subject types and because of the failure to recognise that all social relations are not equal. Then, I assess theorisation of the subject from a cross-disciplinary perspective, arguing that the contemporary uptake in worker profiling differs from previous forms where a ‘boss’ could be known. While the GDPR is written with a human focus, the AI Act draft now under consideration removes this category and focusses on providers (companies producing AI products) and users (companies buying and applying AI products). AI systems at work do more than collect workers’ data, however. They may require workers to work directly with machines or against machines, depending on the company. They may work entirely independently in a semi-automation scenario where chatbots do some of the work and replace tasks that a worker once did. A worker is a complex entity/identity. Workers derive significant meaning from work, after all, and risk losing their (our) sense of subjectivity, our world positioning, as work is stolen from them (us), by AI. Worryingly, though the AI Act puts increased obligations on providers and users, the recognition of the precise actor who will be most impacted by technological integration into work is largely overlooked, and thus social relations and human machine interaction dimensions are assumed to have protection on the basis of a range of risk judgements or based on other regulations that are intended to cover specifics such as risks for workers that AI systems may introduce. While AI is classified with levels of risk in the AI Act, there is no conceptualisation of specifically how humans face risk because of the systems, nor how specific decision-making AI systems in fact, themselves, depict risky subjects. Overall, in this piece, I ask, what happens to/with worker subjectivities and worker agency when data is used to formulate and portray specific profiles and portrayals of ourselves, a process Althusser talked about as ‘interpellation’. Who do we ‘become’ when the choices to derive our ‘selves’ diminish? The pursuit of datafication (Kennedy et al., 2015; Van Dijck
Problems in protections for working data subjects 325 2014) and data-based profiling of the human subject only occurs between humans in everyday circumstances (Couldry and Powell, 2014) and perhaps that is a key feature which sets us apart from other species. Importantly, who will have the right to what Deleuze and Guattari talk about as ‘enunciation’ (Kelly, 2018), or the right to formulate a subjectivity and agential self? Will data regulation provide adequate worker protections which can enable not just basic rights but even agency formation and subjectivation?
THE DATA SUBJECT IN POLICY A person whose data is being gathered and used to make decisions and create profiles about them, is instantly the subject of a social relation, and subject to decisions and inferences made based on the data collected about them. Because the data subject concept is expected to refer to all identity capacities for all (European) humans in all roles and characteristics that natural persons embody and adopt, the debates about the emancipatory potentials of data sharing and ownership made possible by new regulations must be counterweighted with new formulations for questions of privacy and data protection of datified selves, where recursively, the precise act of collecting and using data about natural persons profiles us into specific categories which may or may not cohere with an individual’s understanding of their perception of a self. This is probably because (a) the ‘self’ is not an inherent category, (b) each human self is constituted of many selves within one body, sometimes even simultaneously (e.g., see ‘prosumer’, Fuchs, 2011 and following sections) and (c) overall, the questions of becoming, agency or other notions of emancipation of the self, cannot be fully dealt with, when using this limiting, but far from neutral, policy category. The data subject was originally termed as such within the 1995 Data Protection Directive, then the Data Protection Act 1998 and now, the GDPR. These Directives, Act and Regulation have been formulated to deal with how new technologies on the market designed to collect new data in all sorts of ways should be implemented; and formulated requirements around this as applied to all ‘data subjects’. The data subject can be a consumer, a citizen, a criminal, a black person, a gay person, a religious person, a worker and so on. There is no separate definition of the data subject made available even within the Definitions section of the GDPR, but in Article 4, the definition of ‘personal data’ helps, where the term ‘data subject’ appears within parentheses after the phrase ‘natural person’: ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person. (GDPR, 2020, Art. 4)
The Cornell Legal Information Institute’s definitions for a ‘natural person’ is: A living human being. Legal systems can attach rights and duties to natural persons without their express consent. (Cornell, 2022a)
This can be contrasted with an ‘artificial person’, who is:
326 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work An entity established by law and given at least some legal rights and duties of a human being. Corporations are the most common types of artificial persons. (Cornell, 2022b)
An overview of related policy and existing academic literature and surrounding debates shows that much of the delineation between different classifications of ‘subjects’ are mostly inferred rather than made explicit, outside of the areas of defined protected characteristics. The conjoining feature of data subjects is simply that we are natural persons, or ‘living human beings’ and that rights and duties can be ascribed ‘without their express consent’. This is significant for two reasons. Firstly, human/computer interaction and AI research would not have begun, nor would it currently exist, if we did not possess the capacity to define ourselves as ‘living human beings’ and therefore to differentiate ourselves e.g., from machines and corporations. There have been extensive discussions regarding whether machines should be attributed with electronic personalities or legal personhood (see Avila Negri, 2021 and Special Issue edited by Gunkel et al., 2022). In 2017, the European Parliament made recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics to consider giving sophisticated autonomous machines such a label (electronic personality). The proposal was responded to with an Open Letter in 2018, signed by over 150 experts in the area, who strongly refute the idea that robots should be granted legal personhood. Then, the AI Act draft does not mention this at all. So, it does not appear that machines will be attributed with personhood any time soon. Secondly, the concept of consent is used to distinguish part of the relationship between a legal system and a living human being, whereby the latter’s attributed rights and responsibilities can be given without a subject’s consent. The absence of consent has quite different connotations depending on which subject category is in the frame for consideration as I discuss below. Indeed, data subjects have far more relationships with far more other subjects than with the data protection officer (DPO) alone (Abraha, 2022), lending far more complexity to any notion or likelihood of consent. The Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC provided the first binding international instrument designed to protect people’s privacy where organisations collect and process personal data; and to regulate personal data flows across borders. Its advancement of privacy law owes a lot to the OECD’s Privacy Principles, which are part of the OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data. The OECD’s projects apply more globally than European policies and these Guidelines were developed in the 1970s and were fully introduced in the 1980s. The OECD Privacy Principles were incorporated into the 1985 Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data, which are closely linked to the European Commission Data Protection Directive 95/46/ EC (Custers and Ursic, 2018: 330). The Guidelines do not contain a specific definition of the data subject, but Part One, General Definitions indicates: For the purposes of these Guidelines: […] b) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual (data subject). (OECD, 1980)
So here, the data subject is an ‘identifiable individual’, rather than what followed in the GDPR, which calls the data subject a natural person as discussed above, which in essence collapses identification with subjectivity. A ‘Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016’ was introduced to deal with the protection of data subjects regarding processing of personal data, and on the free movement of such data. This was becoming increasingly relevant
Problems in protections for working data subjects 327 partly because of the immense amount of data being shared on social media platforms and other lucrative arenas as well as the acceleration of global labour markets. Emerging case law such as Bărbulescu v. Romania, a case that started in 2007 where personal communications data was used to terminate the employment of a sales worker, who had used a work messenger service for private conversations. That, and because of other legal cases around that time, made it clear that data and privacy protection law was not fit for purpose. The above-mentioned Regulation had been introduced to protect natural persons regarding the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, and on the free movement of such data, which had been linked to the repeal of Council Framework Decision 2008/977/JHA and the repeal of Directive 95/46/EC, but while these initiatives helped to allow data sharing to identify criminal behaviour, these repeals and updates were evidently not enough to positively protect workers and other citizens. In that context, the introduction of the GDPR came about. In 2016, the EU adopted the GDPR. Member States were given two years (2016–2018) to work to ensure that it was fully implementable into local regulation and in 2018 as of May, the GDPR was recognised as law across the EU. With horizontal effect, states were/are required to integrate the Regulation into local policy. As such, national legislation in the European Economic Area (EEA) must ensure adherence to the GDPR and all other actors in countries hoping to do business with European companies are also liable. The protections that can be applied for workers emerging from the GDPR are significant, nonetheless, and improve the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC significantly. An improvement on the Directive is the emphasis placed on the importance of data minimisation, where a Data Controller (usually the company or other organisation collecting data) should only gather data that is specifically necessary to carry out the intended goal – which must sit within the criteria for lawfulness, and can be used to negotiate over the purposes for the use of technologies for workplace monitoring. Further to this, the Data Collector must demonstrate proportionality when setting out to gather data, meaning a company should demonstrate the balance between the needs and intentions of the organisation, and the rights of workers. Article 6 of the GDPR sets out the criteria for ‘Lawfulness of Processing’, indicating that data collection, processing and use is lawful ‘only if and to the extent that at least one of the following applies’ (GDPR, 2020, Art. 6): 1. the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes; 2. processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the data subject is party or in order to take steps at the request of the data subject prior to entering into a contract; 3. processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the Controller is subject; 4. processing is necessary in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person; 5. processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the Controller; 6. processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the Controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
328 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work In other words, a Data Controller must carefully consider whether at least one of these criteria can be defended as a legal reason for data collection and use. One or more criteria must be defensible and should be communicated to data subjects clearly in all cases where data processing is carried out. Clearly, any consideration of worker/employer transparency is complicated by the variable dynamics, organisational history and other aspects of specific work environments, but there are clear possibilities for advancement for data subjects’ rights, nonetheless. While the GDPR significantly advances previous law, where, fortunately the identification of a ‘natural person’ and their experiences is made explicit (far more than within the AI Act, as we will see), much of the ‘what is at stake’ question is left to the readers’ interpretation in data law as to who exactly the natural person is, in each case. Purtova argues that there are many problems still with ‘identification’ in data law such as the GDPR, where data collection is used to create ‘identifiability’, but so far, there is not much discussion or recognition of what happens once the natural person is ‘identified’ (Purtova, 2021). Of course, policy must be written in a way that allows a malleable subject category that can apply to as many cases as possible. However, phenomenologically and in our everyday and every night lives, what makes us human at all, is in fact, that we experience social relations, and that we can ‘be’ more than one subject at once. Althusser described a ‘theoretical theatre’ (1970) wherein a theorised person such as a policeman, calls out to another person on the street: ‘hey, you there!’, at which point the said person who is hailed, is considered a possible suspect immediately, whether or not they have done anything wrong. This process becomes an interpellation of individuals as subjects, whereby someone’s subjectivity is narrowed down to a specific identification, which Althusser talks about as features of ideological processes rather than as accidental. Using data to make decisions about individuals has similar implications if occurring within the workplace, because of the power relations between e.g., a manager and a worker. This can be compared to the notion of a police officer and a civilian. A police officer has state-sanctioned violence in her/his job description. A manager holds power over a worker’s basic access to sustenance and livelihood. Collecting and using data about a worker holds distinct possibilities for interpellation. GDPR: Consent ‘Consent’ is the first identified criteria for defence of lawfulness of data collection, but it is hard to imagine authentic consent in an employment relationship. Consent is defined as follows: When a person voluntarily and wilfully agrees to undertake an action that another person suggests. The consenting person must possess sufficient mental capacity. (Cornell, 2022c)
Even within these definitions it becomes clear that at a fundamental level, it is tricky to say that all subjects are identical or that all data subjects’ relationships with other data subjects are identical. Indeed, ‘choice’ to use a product, based on data provided by consumers; and ‘consent’ for data collection in an employment relationship; are not identical transactions nor dialogic experiences containing identical capacity for ‘voluntary’ and ‘wilful’ actions on both sides. The synthesis of specific actions cannot be held in equal measure depending on subjects. This matters, because e.g., the first criteria for lawfulness within the GDPR is indeed, ‘consent’ and
Problems in protections for working data subjects 329 while there are loopholes and Data Controllers are able to select other criteria of lawfulness for data collection, a consumer’s capacity to consent may be easily blurred with the idea of ‘choice’, and their possession or agency in that social relation with a company, and a workers’ capacity for choice to do work or not4 are epistemologically antagonistic. Trzaskowski argues that there are imbalances of power in ‘business-to-consumer’ relationships too, but even so, workers are less likely to have freedom to choose to consent or not (2021: 68). This legal scholar argues that consent is ‘not problematic’ when: a. the consent is properly informed; b. the user can withdraw consent to the processing of personal data; c. the user is properly informed about the right to withdraw consent. (Trzaskowski, 2021: 69) Consent, however, requires a line of communication to exist first and for a data subject to have consciously made a decision which is genuine and informed. In all interviews with workers for my European Parliament report (Moore, 2020), no worker was given information about what data would be collected about them, why the data would be collected nor how it would be used. While the sample was relatively small, it reflects the endemic lack of dialogue between workers and bosses around use of data. Perhaps what is necessary is to explore the provocation Antonio Gramsci set before us at the beginning of the last century, with his thesis on ‘coercion plus consent’, whereby people are unaware of their own exploitation but have made some gesture of consent all the same (Gramsci, 1971). The epistemological set of supposed choices between affective joy or sadness whether at work or in the supermarket, are not, ultimately, endogenous categories. Frédéric Lordon notes that the worker/employer consent relationship can never embrace a co-linearisation of relationships which would be expected for workers to embrace the full dream or promise of e.g., the product they are selling. Subjection, ‘even when it is happy, consists fundamentally in locking employees in a restricted domain of enjoyment’ (Lordon, 2014: 107). Worker data subjects only exist within a relationship of dependence due to material needs and in a social form where reproductive labour is performed by necessity and without recognition. Lordon writes about consent in the working environment discussing Spinoza’s and Baranski’s theses on the sovereign subject and affect. Consent relies on an ‘exogenous requisite’ for producing what appears to be ‘endogenous motivation’, where management leads data subjects into a position where ‘they think that they are not led… but living after their own mind’, and according to their free decision, where the ‘institutions of capture’ are enlisted. Joyful affects may be operationalised, a seeming love for a workplace, and so on (Lordon, 2014: 98). However, consent is a relation that is set against a background of violence, a ‘backdrop of threat’ where seemingly passionate servitude depletes agency within what Hayles (2017) speaks of as the unconscious. In these ways, it is difficult to understand how a data subject can be expected to provide consent, at all.
WORKING (RISKY) DATA SUBJECTS Most people are not fully aware of how profitable their own data is, nor how necessary it is, for digitalised markets and workplaces/spaces to operate. It might not even be possible to be fully aware of the sheer amount of data being collected about you at any point in the day – e.g., how many times a CCTV camera catches your face; how much data Apple has captured from your ‘health’ app sitting in the background of all your movements; how many times you have
330 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work looked at a website to decide whether or not to book a venue for an event; there may even be items of data you don’t realise have been inadvertently ‘collected’, such as your voice in the background of a recorded voice message someone else is recording in an open office context. Even when people are somewhat literate on data, we, without knowing, not only surrender data to market and management hierarchy, but also surrender personal (political) agency, even subject to the ‘encoding of human agency’ (Introna, 2011), not just because it is nigh impossible to know about all data being gathered, making it very difficult to protest all of it; but also because there is very little incentive outside of the regulation discussed above, for companies to be transparent and to somehow share that information with you. This is perhaps because the more you know, then the more power to make decisions you have i.e., to opt out, to refuse, or to refuse to give, or to withdraw, consent, after it has been given. Given the invisibility surrounding accountability which so many algorithmic management processes retain, it is not even clear to whom or to what one is consenting. For these reasons, there is a significant consent deficit within the data accumulation regime. Indeed, the use of data to make decisions about workplace requirements for behaviour and practices can be shaped without full human, or at least, without workers’ input, at all. The depiction of which subjectivities are considered acceptable in neoliberal contemporary lives is hardly obscured, but selves are likewise meant to emerge by way of numeration and processes of profiling and datification. The expectation is that the natural person must be nothing other than a docile, but also productive, body and identities are destined for magical symbiosis. I have already argued extensively that there are other forces making decisions about which kinds of subjectivities are permissible in the contemporary workplace, i.e., subjectivities that pose the least risk to employers and businesses, and now, using policy terminology of the ‘data subject’, I argue that we are facing a new digitalised era of workplace data subjectification where such subjectivities can be strangers to ourselves. Being a Risky Data Subject The worker data subject is in danger of being defined and labelled externally to autonomous selves via a range of forces, namely through human resource management channels which serve to create individualised profiles, where subjectivities are narrowly permitted for identification in ways that allow management to identify risky subjects. ‘Worker’ as a category itself, is not universally definable, given the variation in contract types (i.e., employee; self-employed; agency worker; zero-hours contracted; independent contractor including the bogus self-employed; etc.), however, work in capitalism is couched in a set of social relations that do not mirror those experienced when one is acting as a ‘consumer’ and ‘citizen’. All types of data subjects are technologically monitored (Bloom, 2019); all subjects experience data theft as a ‘technological form of alienation’ (Andrew and Baker, 2021: 574), where data is endemically ‘ripped from [our] lives’ (Zuboff, 2019: 377). I want to argue that the relational and material experiences and the sheer possibility of a priori agency across categories of subjects, even workers who work with different kinds of contracts, is not identical. Agency to speak out against algorithmic decision-making likewise is not identical across categories either. Power relations between managers and employees and workers are, as indicated, very different from the relationship between a consumer and a corporation, or a citizen and the state. The depiction of the risky subject may not be known to the subject at all, such as in the case of CV rating systems, where someone’s terminology on an application is not correct, or
Problems in protections for working data subjects 331 someone’s loan is not approved. Sometimes a data subject is told they are risky, sometimes by notification such as in the case of taxi driver deactivation mentioned below. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the dangers of delineation of subjects via what they call a ‘linguistic machine’, where the parameters for people achieving understanding of themselves are reliant on already defined grammars. This can result in a paradox of anxiety, given the supposed liberatory potentials the ‘project’ gives us (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and the supposed self-fulfilment that companies that advocate for self-management at work seem to offer. A process of becoming a ‘true’ self was probably already unavailable within any workplace, given the already existing unequal power relations between workers and bosses. Instead, information accumulation results in newly enhanced surveillance regimes, where data is used to define and delineate subjects in ways that workers increasingly have no say in. There is a considerable binary in perception for contrast between machines on one side and humans on the other, otherwise we could not describe ‘automation’ as it is commonly understood to occur i.e., one job is replaced by one machine. Indeed, rather than consideration for what data collection does to the concept of the self, formation of the self and right to the self, research on the human experience of data collection and our rights has mostly looked at consumer rights and more formulaic questions relating to privacy. Consumer subjects have the right to not see specific violating images on social media; the right to a certain level of protection against cyberbullying; the right to not be hacked. But workers face a completely different set of needs for protection because the power relation within social relations of production is entirely different. Workers’ data is collected and utilised by companies to decide who we ‘are’, to decide whether we are talented, to check on our progress, productivity, sick leave, whether we met targets or not. These methods as well as other surveillance protocols allow interpellation of our profiles to aid decisions about us, about the level of risk we as workers pose to the company, often without our participation, or knowledge and in ways that Althusser (1970) could only have imagined. A good example for how power relations between workers and bosses in the algorithmic employment relationship is seen in the context of a platform for taxi workers being deactivated, a situation whereby their device is switched off for numerical reasons such as if they do not take enough passengers or their customer ratings have reduced (Woodcock, 2021). The problem with this algorithmic decision is that it eliminates qualitative dimensions of human decision-making, where a taxi driver may decide not to pick up a passenger for all sorts of reasons. They may decide to take a break due to being overly tired, to eat a meal or to otherwise carry out human activities of necessity. The platform has no judgement capabilities around reasons for breaks, even where occupational safety and health is at risk, i.e., if a worker does not rest during a 12-hour period of driving. A passenger may give a taxi driver a bad rating simply because they could not find the driver in a busy street or when, in fact, the passenger’s behaviour was not ideal, where someone intends to deflect responsibility. Again, a rating system can only be presented seemingly objectively where the taxi driver data subject, therefore, is defined based solely on such datasets. In that light, an algorithm may allow management to perceive a taxi driver to be a ‘risky’ driver somehow and ultimately may deactivate him or her for a period, or forever. In this way, data takes on a life of its own. The use of data for objective decision-making was not, originally, seen to pose any kind of risk, where ‘numbers don’t lie’, and the data may even now not be seen as possessing a subject position in and of itself. Even data itself appears to operate as a kind of subject. But the GDPR’s algorithmic management component attempts to dampen this kind of decision-making and in
332 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the spring of 2021, Case C/13/696010/HA ZA 21-81 in the Netherlands led to the successful re-hiring of two taxi drivers who, the court decided, had been fired by algorithm. While technology is perceived to hold risk within the AI Act, the conception and judgement of what precisely constitutes ‘risky’ behaviour and ‘risky’ work environments does not emerge with such precise categorisation. Worker extremes of all kinds can apparently pose a threat, or create a negative risk, for employers. The struggle between capital and labour oscillates around these perceived risks, where the risks that work and work expectations for workers is often far less considered than their risks of behaviour or actions taken by their counterparts, or their employers. Parameters are defined for what is ‘too much’ to be considered permissible for worker behaviour or expectations of workers without worker participation are not balanced with the consideration of what is ‘too much’ in terms of employer surveillance and increasingly minute judgement of work itself. In these contexts, the possibilities for discrimination and unconscious bias are enormously exacerbated, but give some kind of credibility for data collection, processing and usage in workplaces where collection becomes increasingly possible as workers work from home using IT systems. On the other hand, we, as consumer data subjects, are aware that the large corporations, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM), use our data constantly, where our profiles are laden with targeting based on data accumulation. We probably do not feel entirely exploited because we can use services such as social media platforms in exchange for mass personal data collection. However, the advantage of the trade-off between data sacrifice and the use of ‘free’ services in the digitalised world is less and less clear to people (Véliz, 2020: 157). Further to the increasing discomfort with what may feel like hostile data acquisition, datafied subjects are not equal nor identical in reasons nor social and economic positions in data affordance. A Stranger To Ourselves I do not accept, like Nietzsche’s arguments in the Will to Power, that the subject contains a being in itself. Rather, data-based subjectification solidifies already-existing alienation and abstraction of labour power via numeration and quantification and limits agency for subject formation and subjectivation. If alienation exists and is possible, then we must assume and presuppose some kind of subject. The Nietzschean intervention is that the subject is a temporary formation within the flux of force, maybe like the flux of data creates the subject as a temporary granular formation which tomorrow can be and will be different. Indeed, datafication is a permanent process, constantly actualising by tracking, tracing and controlling the subject, but within a cybernetic loop, producing a subjectivity that must also be self-recuperated. So, even where there can be datafication and profiling, without any acknowledgement of specific differences in power relations between various subject types, processes can weaken any capacity for bargaining for even basic rights, exogenously obtained, and secured. Thomas Metzinger, a German neuroethics philosopher, describes core consciousness as that which creates a mental model of itself, which he calls the ‘Phenomenal Self-Model’ (PSM) (Metzinger, 2003), which simultaneously holds a model of relations with others, called the ‘Phenomenal Model of the Intentionality Relation’ (PMIR). ‘Self’ in and of itself has never existed, Metzinger claims. But that does not mean that we do not have experiences of having a self, or being a self via, roughly, the experience of both PSM and PMIR. Consciousness relies on memory as well as the capability to predict the future or to anticipate future memories. N.
Problems in protections for working data subjects 333 Katherine Hayles, a feminist philosopher, intervenes in neuroscience debates from a largely new materialist lens with a rigorous discussion of nonconscious cognitions, indicating where this emerges in both human and non-human environments. Hayles writes that Damasio (2012) discusses the autobiographical self, which as Nelson (2003) indicates, is ‘reinforced through the verbal monologue that plays in our heads as we go about our daily business; that monologue, in turn, is associated with the emergence of a self-awareness of itself as a self’ (Hayles, 2017: 9–10). Technical cognition, or the level of supposed consciousness achieved by machines via machine learning and pattern recognition, is usually compared with the human ‘operations of consciousness’, because machines are seen to perform better than humans at specific tasks that apparently can be translated into cognition and consciousness. I agree with Hayles’ scepticism of technical cognition but am still reticent about the claims that consciousness is the main thing that separates the human from other life forms. Indeed, the anthropocentric projection puts us in the prime position holder or possessor of consciousness, despite signs of animal and other cognitions which the cyberneticians posit. For me, the most important point in critiquing current data regulation is that, rather than allow for sufficient protection and privacy, there are significant emerging obstructions already to becoming human, to enunciation, to affective subjectivation. Ideally, my praxis in identifying the weaknesses in current policy can help us formulate alternatives for the emergence of sustainable subjects, where we may be in a position to ‘enact a vision of the subject that encompasses changes at the in-depth structures’ (Braidotti, 2014: 181), identifying collective intelligence and collective emancipations. The idea of the data subject begins well enough because there appears to be a chance to put the focus on people and protections for basic social justice; rather than a focus on machines, technological development, improvements of systems or organisational processes, as is often seen in law. However, when we begin to interrogate or problematise the ways that a data subject will experience aspects of their relations in the world, where, for example, a consumer has very different personal stakes than both a worker and a citizen, we realise that human data and privacy protections such as the GDPR do not go far enough. That being said, I do not have an immediate solution for how to rewrite regulation to accommodate modalities of data subjects. The latest trend in technology legislation, such as seen in the AI Act draft, is to outline judgements of perceived risks, as discussed in the previous section. Historically, people are the agents of risk, where a trade unionist might be risky, and there may be signs that a worker is becoming increasingly active in political work. Where judgements of risk are now being placed on technology directly, risk does not seem to be placed on users of the technology where the user is the company, at least as defined within the current AI Act draft. Data subjects: subject to
Table 26.1
Loss of livelihood Psycho-social
Exploitation
Depersonalisation
Algorithmic management
violence Consumer Worker
no
no
no
no
no
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
Source: Author.
334 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
Table 26.2
Data subjects: subject within Access to data
Voice
Dignity
Right to personality
Social security
Consumer
yes
yes/no
yes
yes
n/a
Worker
?
?
?
?
?
Source: Author.
Table 26.3
Data subjects: subjects of Surveillance
Possibility for consent Discrimination
Hierarchies
Consumer
x
x
x
x
Worker
?
?
?
?
Source: Author.
There are distinctions and protections made for workers within the GDPR and the AI Act as I have outlined, but they are consistently weak. Indeed, worker protection tends to be left up to hiring institutions and organisations and their respective worker representative groups, such as trade unions which have variable strengths in various countries. As indicated in the Tables, workers are ‘subject to’ (Table 26.1) the risk of the loss of livelihood, psycho-social violence, exploitation and depersonalisation resulting from algorithmic management; where the context for these limitations mean we see that subjects exist ‘within’ (Table 26.2) environments where they do not necessarily have access to data, where their voice, dignity, right to personality and access to benefits such as social security, upon which decent work relies, is never secure. Adding to this, worker data subjects are subjects of surveillance, where consent is probably simply not possible, and where discrimination and hierarchy are ongoing (Table 26.3). So again, these differentials mean that privacy and data protection regulation today cannot fully be applicable for all data subjects, given the severe limitations.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Sceptics have already warned that the GDPR and the AI Act proposals do not go far enough to protect people. Digital intermediaries’ use of data using a mixture of both legal and illegal activity is common and is very hard to trace. Patterns of collection can create stress for data subjects, rather than just one-off tipping points, which do not reflect the way real life operates. Veale and Zuiderveen Borgesius (2021) argue that the AI Act does little to improve on existing consumer, data, privacy and technology laws, particularly with regard to protections for data subjects (who as I have stressed, are not named as such in the Act). While the rights of the data subject enjoyed attention (albeit quite briefly for workers) within previous legislation such as the GDPR, this subsequently went missing. Of course, AI-augmented technology is perceived to hold levels of risk within the AI Act, as mentioned, but the conception and judgement of what precisely constitutes ‘risky’ implementation is not altogether clear. There is no discussion of ‘risky’ work environments, nor how management or even workers’ activities might be considered as risky. Working data subjects are the most vulnerable (amongst non-clarified characteristics outside those which are protected), they are still least protected in this emerging
Problems in protections for working data subjects 335 draft legislation. As mentioned above, while there are some inroads for protections of the data subject in the GDPR, there is already not enough finessing in recognising the differences between the various subject parameters. The working data subject is not adequately protected with regards to data collection and usage. Whenever limits are imposed on human subject-formation, there are real dangers of social damage, and thus, the application or use of data to identify subjects and the resulting processes of data ‘subjection’ and ‘subjectification’ requires investigation, urgently, as new policies are being authored to manage new technological interventions into organisations, such as AI. Perhaps we should speak not of a ‘data subject’ but of the datafied subject, where power relations surrounding new subjectifications may mean we become strangers to ourselves, where people’s subjection, as described by Foucault in his later works (1982), is such that the only subjective identity we are permitted (such as the ‘employable’ subject I have discussed (Moore, 2010)), is that which is codified and collapsed, where others have more power to depict our supposed true selves than we have, even in cases where the subjected cannot depict who that ‘other’, is. This article has argued that there is a cognitive distortion, if not cognitive error, in attempts so far to regulate privacy and data protection as it applies to workplaces and workers, in part due to the rise of the sphere of algorithmic management and human resources analytics, because of a homogenising nature in depicting the ‘data subject’. Research that finds AI and algorithms to be discriminatory is now well known (Ajunwa, 2020; Köchling and Wehner, 2020; Williams et al., 2018). Black box processes lead to unclear outcomes of algorithmic processes, where even the algorithm’s designer may not understand how the results have come about (Ajunwa, 2020; Pasquale, 2016). However, while the delineations in protected characteristics5 which are protected in the GDPR are necessary and correct, they are not enough. There is insufficient delineation beyond protected characteristics to capture what is at stake for workers in new digitalised work relationships and conditions. Other laws will have to be applied to provide better protections for workers. While not perfect, German labour law not only allows for co-determination but also protects the right to personality (Moore, 2020). The problem is not that existing data protection and privacy policy does not provide any protection for anyone nor protections of specific characteristics, but that a one size fits all category for a human cannot, and will not, protect workers from the looming potential degradation and destruction of the employment relationship in several important ways, given workers are subject to, subjects of and subjects within quite different pressures and power relationships than consumers as well as other types of subjectivities. To come to some conclusions, and in parallel with the lines of argumentation that algorithms can result in discriminatory solutions (O’Neil, 2016, 2020) in order to resolve some of these issues, in fact, more discriminatory parameters within current data protection, privacy and AI regulation would be quite useful, which could help to provide better protections for specific types of a data subject, with better granularity, with better considerations for how policy might impact specific categories of people or categories within people, given a worker, a consumer and a citizen simultaneously house the same body. Policy and policymakers must ‘back up’ and stop allowing the technological tail to wag the dog, where assumptions about technology and even an ascription of subject status to data itself of risk, often works to define policy, rather than the other way around. Further to this, there are other laws that must be used to protect workers that go beyond privacy and data protection such as in labour law (Moore, 2020).
336 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work This piece has first assessed the limitations of the concept of the data subject as presented within recent regulations including the GDPR and the AI Act. Then, I have laid out some ways to think about subjectivity, where subjection is the dominant model for human relations today, where the conflation of more than one subject positionality into one regulatory concept is evident. While there are very good arguments indicating that human data ownership will enhance agency (Powell, 2021; Pybus et al., 2015), my argument has so far been that the subject in capitalism is not liberated sufficiently to find complete emancipation or even protections in the current data and privacy regimes provided by policy. The act of identifying a data subject within regulation could have a positive effect, i.e., to allow regulators, authorities and technology users and providers, a way to think about who, exactly, is to/should be protected and how, but as it stands, there is far too little discrimination across subjects. Lazzarato makes some insightful comments around capitalism which he talks about as a ‘war machine’, where legal and institutional apparatuses are built in ways that consolidate existing power structures and relations via governing the ‘divisions of sex, race, and class, guarantors of the enslavements and subjugations implied by these divisions’ (2021: 166). This important autonomist goes on to note that ‘subjectivities choose, make decisions, but these decisions and these choices are meant to establish or re-establish the functioning of the machine’ (Ibid.). Lazzarato (2021) points out that the paradox of elite-defined subject definition becomes evidenced during a crisis, when a closing of multiplicities constitutes an explicit attack on subjectivation and emancipation. While the current piece has not been written during a period of economic crisis as such, the apparatus has already been set and is designed precisely in this manner, a strategy of obstruction and a war of position. To conclude, I would like to note that alongside the failure of sufficient nuance in a data subject positioning to identify how workers’ struggles differ from consumers’ struggles, there is also insufficient attention placed on workers’ potential roles in decision-making for all data integration into workplaces. Organisations have written data codes of conduct such as the International Labour Organization in 1997 (ILO, 1997), which was an early intervention outlining how data should and should not be used/gathered/processed and so on, with an appropriate emphasis on workers. These important ILO principles should be updated to reflect the advancements in technological surveillance in workplaces and societies. Co-determination is another important route. Information about personal and privacy protections relating to how data is gathered, processed, used and stored, should be disseminated by DPOs, whose roles are to some extent, discussed within the GDPR, but whose responsibilities should be better defined, so that explicit integration with worker representative communities could be made possible (Moore, 2020). Data construction of subjects, and our subjection via profiling in people analytics and human resources processes must be problematised and the question specifically asked: what happens to our subjectivities within the line of communication, whether with a DPO or with a company’s platform interface? What happens when data is used to formulate and portray specific profiles and portrayals of data subjects via profiling and other means and when the social relation dimension of the employment relationship is absented? Is this a process of subject, or rather, object formation? Is this a process of control, where workers have depleted agency, where rather than machine risk, profiling and other data usage is designed to identify risky subjects? Who are we ‘becoming’? Are we seeing data becoming a subject in itself, where we have begun to even interpellate data with decision-making qualities? As we experience continued precarity of working conditions and struggles for basic rights at work,
Problems in protections for working data subjects 337 the question of emancipation depletion is very real and increasingly vital. Who now has the right to ‘enunciation’, or the right to formulate the self, the right to subjectivity and in that context, agency? This paper has attempted to demonstrate the ontological and epistemological problems with the very concept of the ‘data subject’, which itself makes it difficult to see how its use in data and privacy policy can ever lead to full protections for people, as we become strangers to ourselves.
NOTES 1
2 3 4 5
These days, the concept of the place for work is contestable not least in the current working from home movement driven by Covid-19 and its antecedents, where the increased expectation for exogenously provided environments has diminished at least in knowledge and office work. Perhaps ‘workspace’ is a better term, given this, which I have argued elsewhere (Moore, 2020). Daniel Dennett, in the 1990s referred to ‘workspace’ philosophically which future research could consider, where he speaks of a workspace as a plane for consciousness where past, present and future form the working memory (1992: 139–170 as cited in Hayles, 2017: 42). Subjectification is a Deleuzian concept, where subjects are prescribed characteristics exogenously (see Deleuze, 1995). Subjectivation is primarily a Foucauldian concept, involving the discovery of agency and empowerment against an aggressor. Note Herman Melville’s parable where the worker, Bartleby the Scrivener, states ‘I would prefer not to’. Protected data includes personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs; trade-union membership; genetic data, biometric data processed solely to identify a human being; health-related data; and data concerning a person’s sex life or sexual orientation.
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27. Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence Baruch Gottlieb
INTRODUCTION Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to augment automation and provide unprecedented levels of productivity. This development is predicted to be accompanied by mass-unemployment, and the automated world of leisure foreseen by Adam Smith and J. M. Keynes. However, productivity rates are down or stagnant in all G7 countries (Roberts, 2018) and unemployment is largely unaffected (Autor, 2015). What has happened instead is progressive deskilling and precaritization (Moore, 2019) of the workforce. Rather than invest in the latest information technologies to improve quality and increase productivity, capitalists invest mainly in the kind of Taylorist profit maximization AI which drives down wages and intensifies labour. Rather than unemployment we see augmemployment (augmented employment), work increasingly entangled with and inextricably from networked computational infrastructure, leading to increased dependencies from small business toward big tech companies, in effect creating vertically integrated monopolies, who determine the parameters of automation and labour relations enclosed thereby.
AI IS NOT A GAME CHANGER IF THE GAME IS CAPITALISM AI is an assembly of computer routines called “programs”. Computers are industrially-produced mechanical objects which run programs. The particularity of AI programs is that they are intended to acquire data from outside the computer and convene this data to desired patterns. AI can work only with the data which enters the computer. In other words, phenomena in the world must be converted into electronic charges in the computer architecture, in chip memory and processors. How this conversion takes place determines the entirety of the usefulness of any AI analysis which subsequently takes place. Stated otherwise, AI does not interpret the world, it can only interpret that which has been converted into computable data. The first critical juncture to understand AI and its effect on labour is at the moment of data acquisition. Computer functionality is nearly impervious to the world. Computers only require electrical current to operate. Where that current comes from and how it is produced is orthogonal to its purpose which is to perform meaningful functions for humans. The provision of electricity for computers cannot be a question addressed to computers, since they will always answer yes. Additionally, since computers’ only concern is for power, and this is always provided in as far as they are operative, they have no other cares and cannot prioritize information according to what appears more or less propitious for their thriving in contrast to every living thing on the planet. Computers need to be told what is important. Machine learning (ML) is precisely the repeated ingraining of priority patterns of importance. 340
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence 341 Since computers cannot know what is “important”, humans are required to employ them for any tasks which are meaningful to humans. Computer “vision”, which is simply the processing of grids of arbitrary information related to what humans experience through their optical apparatus, needs to be augmented by what is called human “super-vision”. “Supervized learning” is the term used for the task also known as data labelling or tagging, where semantic indicators are attached to digital objects. The semantic interpretation of data, recognized as a pivotal challenge to the usefulness of the internet by Tim Berners Lee already in 1999, is today interpreted as the major restraint on the revolutionary promise of AI (Bughin, et al., 2017: 33). Data labelling, otherwise known as data annotation, is a high growth industry in the lower wage developing countries such as India, Indonesia and in sub-Saharan Africa. The entire AI-augmented platform economy, no matter where the start-ups and their engineering teams are located rely on tagged, labelled, annotated data produced by the data labelling industry. Employment in this industry is the epitome of precarious gig work. Labellers are constantly monitored as part and parcel of their payment scheme, as they are paid based on their performance. As with most of the platform economy, data labelling operates in a regulatory grey-zone where labour protections and rights are superseded by algorithmic management and working 48-hour shifts is not uncommon because there is never any certainty that workers will have a job from one task to the next. For both data regulation and cultural localization reasons, a non-trivial part of the platformized data annotation jobs is located in the global north. In those countries, micro-work is primarily undertaken by groups already disproportionately affected by part-time and contingent employment (notably women) (Casilli et al., 2019), and platforms deploy strategies to go around local labour law and avoid having to formally employ their workers, further reducing labour costs. Platforms' clients also rely on between-workers competition allowed by the technical design of the task attribution process to further diminish labour costs: Even the badly paid projects, which I actively avoid, will be done by someone else. Some pensioner, or an unemployed, who only does it to pass the time, even if it’s paid terribly. The clients know that, and they profit from it. Sometimes, it really looks like exploitation. (…) We’re an underpaid little workforce. (French data worker, unpublished interview; see also Cornet et al., 2020)
Numerous studies have warned about the mental and general health damage incurred by people employed in high-precarity short-term platform employment (Amazonians United, 2020). This is the new frontier of capitalist extraction; under the guise of innovation and healthy competition, labour protections are ignored and, much as Marx observed 170 years ago at the beginning of the industrial age, workers are pushed to their physical limits with full responsibility for any health issues which may accrue. This trend is only accelerating. To further diminish labour cost, platforms are enrolling increasingly precarious populations, increasing the downward pressure on wages and working conditions: The socio-demographic characteristics of the couriers have changed a lot since 4/5 years ago. We’re going toward an increase in precariousness. (…) Platforms are attracting the most precarious populations. Uber is leading off-track recruitment in the ghettos [sic]. They put down a table, two chairs, a few bags, and they sign people up . (…) [Plus] there’s the growing issue of app account subletting to undocumented migrants, who have basically no rights. There’s a huge fall in working conditions and pay rate. (French delivery worker; unpublished interview; Cornet, 2020)
342 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work As usual, the brunt of this untenable condition has been born by women; as Federici (2017) has noted, intensification of precaritization has led to massive upsurge in domestic abuse and violence toward women.
SYSTEMIC DISCIPLINARY PARALLELS IN HARDWARE, SOFTWARE AND LABOUR AI may seem forbiddingly complex, and it is tempting to think of the data flowing through them as immaterial information. However complex they appear, they are based on simple mechanical principles which operate on the subatomic scale. This text for instance: if it currently appears on a screen, itself composed of mechanical devices displaying pixels reproducing the text. It has to live on a storage device, and was downloaded from the internet which is an assembly of computers in a network. Each one of those instruments can and should be understood as both a physical device employing rules of physics to perform as intended, and as the product of industrial processes materialized in the form taken by the devices. Every functional element of digital affordance,1 from the display surface to the integrated circuits where the data circulates, is based on simple mechanical principles and, being all products of human industry, are entirely knowable. We can decompose each element of the chain and ground it in physical reality. On the macro level, computers and sensors whereby data is captured and processed have to be manufactured in traditional industrial settings, involving various workers in complex interaction chains, operating in very different settings. Similarly, information is physically stored on devices, utilizing the chemical properties of the various minerals of which the computational functionality is constructed on the chip level. Digital data itself as electronic charges in the metal of the IC is thus operationally always material. Without the materiality of the chip there is no data (Gottlieb, 2018). Crawford and Joler, describing the production chain of Amazon’s Echo device, note for instance that AI “becomes a complex structure of supply chains within supply chains, a zooming fractal of tens of thousands of suppliers, millions of kilometres of shipped materials and hundreds of thousands of workers included within the process even before the product is assembled on the line” (Crawford and Joler, 2018). The affordances of today’s ubiquitous networked computation involves operations, orchestrations of human-augmented and “autonomous” mechanical processes, which are both too large and too small for conventional human epistemology. The manufacture and operation of the hardware affordance is forbiddingly complex and spans the whole globe, while the materiality of data is infinitesimal. For this reason, public discourse, even that taking place among technicians and engineers abounds in metaphors, which serve to bring the imperceptible down to human scale. As philosopher Vilém Flusser (2002) warned, however, these metaphoric bridges over epistemic gaps occlude the difficulty behind convenience. Although the technology is based on entirely knowable physical principles, there is general uncertainty concerning the principles ensuring the convenient utility users expect from their devices. The epistemic gap thus opens out on democratic and ethical deficits. Technically and materially, AI/ML automation presents no significant additional challenge to those mentioned above. The epistemic status of the hardware and its functioning are the same, as is the epistemic status of the data produced and processed. The public presentation of AI/ML as being a technical wonder, impossible to understand even by the engineers and
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence 343 technicians who design it, is disingenuous and dangerously serves to derail and discourage public oversight. Just as the hardware functionality is knowable down to the tiniest transistor, so is every programmatic operation in the AI/ML. Even in the case where the computer generates its own subroutines, the instructions, restraints and formal procedures, for example in so-called “unsupervized learning”, are all defined by the programmers. The choices made by the programmers are also materially informed, the physical availability of computer processing resources, or the financial resources to acquire these, for example, will influence how the ML will be set up to accomplish any task. Ultimately, everything involved in producing and reproducing AI systems is perfectly knowable because it is material. And because it is knowable, we can, in principle, have radical ethical purview over it. Digital materialism allows us to demystify technologies and their applications and make these available for ethical evaluation and subject to political regulation in the common interest. Understanding the materiality of digital data (Gottlieb, 2018), and formulating and evaluating political implications is a first step, but how do we put such insights into action? Once we come to understand fundamental concerns related to big data or AI, we face an agential and political deficit. For instance, computers are the result of incredibly complex, strongly regimented industrial processes, mobilizing actors with various interests in diverse parts of the globalized production chain. Lithium miners in Africa or South America, very probably will not have the same interests as engineers and designers in the global north, or as factory workers in Asia. To ensure that the final product works according to specification, very strict social control and discipline must be applied throughout the whole production chain. Over the past few years, more attention has been focussed on working conditions in the electronics production chains. For instance, the Foxconn fabrication plants in China (Tam, 2010), or the mineral extraction sites in Congo (Frankel, 2016; Gottlieb, 2014) impose extreme discipline on labour. This discipline in the production chain is a counterpart to the material discipline undergirding the reliable functioning of the hardware which is produced. The metals in a central processing unit (CPU) (of any computer) are not the ores dug up at the mine. In order for these to behave according to specification, undesired materials must be removed until the metal is over 99 per cent purity. Only under these conditions will the chemical structure of the metals in the CPU behave reliably. The computer is a concatenation of materials processed and conditioned to perform under conditions of extreme discipline. If there were any freedom in the CPU, it would not work. All software, services, AI, ML, anything running on a computer, requires a rigorous and extensive regime of socially necessary discipline extending throughout the electronics production chain from the mine head to chip fabrication to component assembly. This discipline produces any augmentation, positive externalities and network effects afforded in the use of these instruments.
AI ETHICS IS BUSINESS ETHICS As AI has begun to be implemented in more and more products and automated services embedded in everyday life, there has been a growing outcry for ethical oversight. However, so far, no satisfactory approach has been established to address concerns. Mark Zuckerberg epitomized this problem at the congress hearings, when he claimed the only solution to the distribution of misinformation and hate incitement on Facebook was “more and better AI” (Baker, 2020). AI ethics subsequently sprung up as an academic cottage industry. Governments disbursed mil-
344 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work lions of dollars to fund research which has only had one significant result, deflecting concern about AI ethics, with high-profile campaigns placing much responsibility on developers. Similar to the problem of injecting philosophical sophistication into the practice of advanced sciences with ethical implication, such as genetics research nanoscience and bioscience (Rabinow and Bennet, 2012), practitioners are often left with “ethical checklists” to fill out daily, which are compiled and used as proof that an ethical regime is being instantiated where the future is being designed. Moreover, the commercial imperative which overdetermines algorithmic production doesn’t depend on engineers, but is inscribed in a global capitalist framework. Engineers and scientists must do their jobs or face unemployment. As such, the responsibilization of AI engineers and developers cannot be considered as a major solution to solve the issue of “ethical” AI. Besides responsibilizing developers to act more ethically, AI ethics tends toward another tactic of dubious effectiveness: tweaking the dataset. Tweaking the dataset is an attempt to alter the deleterious effects of AI by filtering out elements in the dataset which may reinforce undesirable bias in the results. Data ingested to produce ML models comes from the world, with all its problems. ML, like any technology, is neutral in the sense that it cannot by itself address injustice in the world. Its usefulness is also its deleteriousness since it is only useful to inform actions in the world in as far as the data it processes accurately represents the world. The tendency that ML will reproduce any injustice in the world is part of its analytical virtue. The attempt to address socially deleterious effects of AI/ML implementation by tweaking the dataset only serves to make the results useless. This kind of fudging the figures to produce desirable results of computation is condemned by Edwards Deming as “tampering” (1994). Understanding that AI/ML can only generate meaningful analyses from real-world data, the only manner which can be sure to reproduce more ethical AI is to alleviate injustice in the society which provides the data into the ML process. A fairer society cannot be retro-engineered by algorithmically erasing unfairness from analytical results. The only sure way to ensure ethical AI is to attend to systemic material injustice in the society which reproduces the datasets fed into the AI/ML. By mitigating unfairness in society itself, any improved condition will be usefully propagated through the application of AI/ML. As such all AI is ethical AI, not only as far as it accurately provides indications of any endemic injustice which can be attended to politically, but also as it monitors progress toward desirable social outcomes. For the business sector, AI is simply another instrument employed to meet stakeholders’ and shareholders’ expectations. Concerns about AI ethics in business are thus concerns about business ethics.
AI AS CAPITAL Another urgent ethical question regarding AI in the context of this publication lies in its relationship with labour. We already briefly introduced the conditions under which workers at various points of the production chain operate. But there is also a need to address the persistent discourse about the relationship between automation through AI and job destruction, or rather disruption (Frey and Osborne, 2017; Rifkin, 1995). Machines, technical devices and AI systems by themselves don’t create new value, as new value is only generated through human labour. According to classical theory (Gordon, 1959) all value in the product of machines is an expression of the human labour recorded in the machine, reanimated through a motive force, made available through utilities or infrastructure
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence 345 which are themselves products of human labour. According to well-studied capitalist principles (Roberts, 2015), automation in the workplace will never be implemented, and therefore developed, when human labour generates more profit. Any technological improvement to any productive activity will only provide marginal advantage to early adopters; once the technology becomes pervasive, and all competitors have the same technology, the advantage evaporates and the competition intensifies over dwindling competitive advantage. Meanwhile, regular profits from worker surplus value will have been automated away. For this reason, production under capitalism will never take advantage of the latest technology to make production more efficient, or to improve quality. This is confirmed by stagnant (Cashman, 2017) or declining (Ernst et al., 2018: 7) productivity levels in the G7 over the past 10 to 40 years despite the widespread adoption of computational management and the explosion of the IT industry. Former City of London banker Michael Roberts analyses that capitalist firms today prefer profitability to productivity and thus do not invest in innovation and technology which can improve productivity. The insights that data-driven analytics and AI can provide will not be implemented if these endanger profitability: Under capitalism, until profitability is restored sufficiently, and debt reduced (and both work together), the productivity benefits of the new “disruptive technologies” (as the jargon goes) of robots, AI, “big data” 3D printing etc. will not deliver a sustained revival in productivity growth and thus real GDP. (Roberts, 2015)
Therefore, since automation creates no new value or profits, capital will never bring about full automation. And indeed, there have been no noticeable trends of mass technologically caused unemployment (Autor, 2015). Trends, however, do point to deep changes in the structure of the labour market, partly due to the industry-wide implementation of AI. There is evidence of a weak growth in employment rates in the US, and a stagnation in Europe since the 2008 economic crisis. In the global south, unemployment is rising mainly due to an increase in the labour force combined with weak job creation (ILO, 2017). In both the global north and the global south, vulnerable employment, associated with weaker social protections remains extremely high, accounting for 42 per cent of total employment in 2017 (ILO, 2017). In Europe part-time employment is on the rise, and temporary employment is either on the rise or stabilized at very high rates (respectively 20.5 per cent and 14.3 per cent of the total jobs share in 2017) (ILO, 2017). This dynamic is concomitant with the growth of the “atypical and contingent job market” in the global north. A wide variation of jobs fall under this definition, but all are characterized by an implicit precarity (for instance, the term can be used to refer to short-term contracts, temp jobs, self-entrepreneurship and micro-tasks). For Katz and Krueger (2019), contingent work grew from 10.1 per cent of all employment in February 2005 in the United States to 15.8 per cent at the end of 2015. The growth shows no signs of slowing. The two authors hold that the entire net growth in jobs in the US for 2015 is attributable to contingent work. An important part of this increase in contingent work can actually be linked to the emergence of online labour platforms, allowing clients to recruit workers through technical devices, such as an app or a website. In a recent report, the International Labor Organization notes that the number of geolocalization-based labour platforms (delivery and taxi companies) has multiplied by five worldwide between 2010 and 2020. In the same interval, the number of online platforms offering remote work has been multiplied by three (ILO, 2020). The exact number of
346 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work people working on those platforms can be hard to estimate, due partly to the fact that platforms themselves tend to overestimate their number of active users in their communications for marketing reasons, and partly because it is hard to accurately track the timeshare workers chose to spend on each platform (Tubaro et al., 2020). The ILO (2020) still estimates this number to be growing, increasingly faster since March 2020 and the start of the COVID–19 pandemic.
AUGMEMPLOYMENT As profitability depends on either depressing wages or extending the amount of work required for the wage, AI, by apprehending work process patterns, provides a vector of increased profitability through deskilling. Rather than replacing jobs, jobs are increasingly tied to AI affordances. The human provides critical functionality where automation cannot determine where or when to provide this functionality effectively; for this, the human work is completely dependent on the AI. Rather than replacing labour, AI is augmenting labour so that the labourer can be deskilled, and any particular labourer rendered expendable to the maximum extent. Platform workers are managed in accordance with the Taylorist doctrine of a scientific optimization of labour. Workers are interchangeable, undertaking short, specialized tasks, in an optimizable and easily quantifiable workflow (Moorkens, 2020). ML algorithms thus depend on a precarious, platformized workforce to collect, annotate and verify datasets subsequently rolled out as products by AI companies (Gray and Suri, 2019; Tubaro et al., 2020). Rather than a means to achieve full labour automation, AI is used as a way to invisibilize, deskill and fragment human labour, through increasingly distant production outsourcing chains, embedded in technical devices. Data acquisition procedures allow this employment to be recorded with the necessary granularity to be partially played back as automation. AI can take numerous recordings of a similar activity, derive patterns from this and replicate the activity with a wider tolerance. AI can also record human interaction with another object and develop patterns where the AI can simulate a human interaction with that object. In this way, AI systems can identify patterns of behaviour from work processes from trained workers which can be played back to automate certain aspects of this work. As has been widely observed, this industry 4.0 implementation of cybernetics is hyper-Taylorism. Whereas scientific management consultants observed, recorded and tabulated worker performance with pen and paper, AI systems measure worker performance with arrays of sensors and input devices. The purpose has not changed, measure what can be measured, systematize what can be systematized, transforming into fixed capital what had previously been provided by the worker. As such, AI, like the assembly line before it, involves the primitive accumulation of workers’ knowledge and ingenuity. The employment can be deskilled, opened to a broader range of workers who can underbid each other in competition for ephemeral employment. Below the API, workers with their data are insignificant, and only meaningfully employed in aggregate. Appropriation of worker value happens in multiple dimensions and data intelligence is aggregated among the major players in the industry. ML as a service is dominated by the same major players in computation and network services: Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud AI and IBM Watson. ML models are the new capital, software infrastructure, which is rendering most of the workforce proletarian in a new dimension. Expelled from the
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence 347 enclosed commons and required to sell their labour power to the capitalist for subsistence, capital is encroaching into every aspect of social reproduction, on or off the job through their monopolization of ML datasets, trained models and, thereby, all services based on these. The border between labour and leisure seems to be fading because the same automated services are increasingly employed in both. Workers are not only augmented at work but at leisure as well, at their own expense. The effects of algorithmic management are not exclusively related to the emergence of new kinds of jobs (digital labour), but are also becoming pervasive in “traditional jobs” (Gandini, 2020; Posada, 2020). Work digitization, datafication and the growing use of technical apparatus to quantify workers’ productivity are transforming every category of the labour market. As stated above, algorithms are the result of complex, socio-technical production chains. Given the power imbalance characterizing this production chain, we can argue that labour management by AI systems actually reproduce and normalize under a “scientific veneer” existing inequalities in power distribution. Deskilling weakens worker protections and drives a wedge between workers above and below the application programming interface (API) (Kosner, 2015). As Kleiner puts it: The technologies that are employed in deskilled production are of course themselves produced, and their design involves increasingly complex engineering that employs highly-skilled workers. Skilled labour is not so much replaced, but rather displaced. Moved away from the direct production of consumer goods to the indirect production of capital goods. This also has a depoliticizing effect. The bargaining power of the masses of deskilled labour is greatly reduced since they are more replaceable. (2016)
This “computational normative power”, as Pasquinelli (2019) calls it, represents yet another hindrance to workers’ self-organization in collectives, preventing them from participating in the negotiation by enclosing both working conditions and the production process itself. If the algorithm represents the top down, scientifically justifiable, optimal extraction of productivity from workers, how is collective bargaining for processes surrounding production justified? Automation and technological progress, rather than causing unemployment, radically disrupt the labour market and generate new, more profitable forms of precarity. In this sense, AI is becoming more and more effective at detecting the capacity of people that could be employed for marginal surplus value extraction, and assigning them micro-tasks, expanding the platform economy to encompass ever more of social production within and without convention categories of labour.
CONCLUSIONS Marianna Mazzucato’s research is well known. She says that capital doesn’t innovate through the privatized IT sector, but it extracts shareholder value from innovations generated by public spending over many years (Mazzucato, 2013). This is also the case with AI. Besides the innovation in computers, sensors and networked functionality attributed to the public sector by Mazzucato, the US subsidizes 25 per cent of AI research with public spending today, approximately $100B in 2019 alone, according to the conservative Konrad Adenauer foundation (Groth et al., 2019). As recounted above, this innovation is not used to increase productivity but to disrupt employment to extract maximal profitability from labour, lowering wages,
348 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work deskilling, intensifying worker performance through surveillance and quantification regimes, routing around worker protections, dissolving workers’ rights and benefits and shifting the increased care burden onto unpaid carework, especially women and undocumented workers (Gottlieb, 2014). AI pushes more labour “below the API”, where hyper-Taylorist ML systems extract maximal surplus value through increasing performance requirements for the wage. AI innovates in elaborating new dimensions of value extraction from socially necessary activities. Through sophisticated AI management technologies, companies can employ concatenated and interlocking value extraction models. First and foremost, competition for deskilled semi-automated jobs is globalized, restrained only by persistent differences in language use and cultural signification. AI firms act as normal capitalists pushing down wages for AI piece work and act as rentiers acquiring IP assets from “intelligence” derived from the performance of the piece work. They also acquire massive user datasets which are sold as commodities to the major trained-AI-model providers, the hyper-rentiers which sit atop the AI-industrial complex, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, etc. This is the multi-dimensional extraction enabled by AI and its enclosure. As the working population is immizerated by intensified exploitation and since capital does not invest in technologies which increase productivity, the problem arises of who will buy the products to complete the “cycle of capital” M – C – M'. Besides rentier “nickel and diming” of workers, who must use AI-enabled devices to function in social reproduction, not to mention in waged labour, the public sector is also a major purchaser; under the auspices of “leaner government” and “government as a service”, but importantly also as a military AI contractor and purchaser of AI systems for police and the carceral system. Since companies developing AI get tax breaks to “spur innovation”, this public subsidy for AI is also to be seen as a deduction of worker purchasing power through taxation. The worker pays for AI development which intensifies extraction of value from workers around the world. Concurrently, social reproduction is always being further opened up as a new “natural resource” to be enclosed in IP-capital extraction models inaccessible to and weaponized against workers and operating 24/7. The labour market is being radically disrupted and reorganized through the increasing adoption of AI. There is no evidence, however, that AI and automation will, under prevailing business conditions, lead to either widespread unemployment or even productivity growth under capitalism. Rather, AI is used primarily as another tool in the arsenal of business to increase profits by driving down wages. Productivity gains are wanting since capital does not invest in the latest production technologies if this may threaten profitability. As a result, we have a stagnant economy where deskilling and precaritization are the primary domains of innovation. The social impacts in this application of AI are considerable. In the case of the platform gig economy there have been numerous studies raising the alarm about added stress and ensuing adverse mental and general health effects (Freni-Sterrantino and Salerno, 2021). Federici (2017) has also reported on massive increases in domestic abuse and violence toward women due to precaritization. Governments must make accommodation especially to help those who get lost in the shuffle. A technology policy which envisages addressing ethical concerns associated with AI and automation through interventions on the level of code or engineering of these systems is designed to be ineffective. Those who are concerned with the social transformations brought forth by increasing implementation of AI will be far more effective militating for better social conditions at large, which will find their way into the data corpus, and thereby are replicated
Intensification of labour value extraction under artificial intelligence 349 through automation and data-driven cybernetics like AI. Major tech industry leaders’ promotion of “better and less biased AI”, only means more AI regardless of whether it is really ethically employed or not. Trying to solve the issue with a narrow focus on technical solutions is not effective action toward an “ethical AI” whether above or below the API. Only under a fairer social and economic regime where technological development is directed to improve the conditions of everyone, will AI finally be emancipated toward effectively improving the material conditions of the generality.
NOTE 1
Affordance here is defined as the action possibilities readily available to an actor. Affordances suggest how an object may be interacted with, integrating the physical properties and design of an object and the actor’s past experiences and pre-notions.
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28. Class composition in the digitalised gig economy Jamie Woodcock
INTRODUCTION Gig work has existed long before there were digital platforms. From piece work outside the factory, to work on the docks, through a wide range of informal types of work, the most common experience of work is through precarious relationships. Digital technology has neither created precarious work, nor has it introduced the idea of work as piecemeal. Capital, by its nature, seeks to exploit labour power, employing workers in ways that suit its interests wherever possible. The introduction of digital technology has not “disrupted” (to use the common parlance of platforms) the relationship between capital and labour. Instead, like previous forms of technology used at work, it is developed, integrated, and used within existing social relations. While technology may change the way we work, it does not, of its own volition, change the relationships at work. Instead, technology is influenced by relationships of power: the kind of platforms that emerge under capitalism are shaped by the existing conditions. As the introduction of platforms changes working conditions, this builds upon existing relationships of power and exploitation. The clearest examples of this can be found in the gig economy. Although the term lacks precision or clear boundaries, broadly it can refer to forms of work that have been or are becoming precarious and broken down into temporary relationships. For example, private transportation has long been a precarious form of work, with the model of taxis having long experimented with non-employment models for workers. Uber has become the go-to example of the platformisation of work in the gig economy, but food delivery, cleaning, care, and increasingly more examples of work are becoming reorganised in this way. The majority of these activities existed before platforms and those currently being transformed tend to be the kinds of work that can be easily broken down into discrete parts. The implication of these changes goes far beyond just the workers now logging onto platforms, as the successes of these experiments become applied into increasingly diverse parts of the economy. New digital technologies have laid the basis for a new class composition. This chapter examines the ways in which platforms are being used by capital to transform the technical composition of work in the gig economy. This involves changing the labour process, forms of control and supervision, employment relationships, and so on. In the process, this has brought increasing numbers of workers into new conditions of work, shaping how workers are responding. In part, platforms and digital technologies have also shifted the social composition of gig workers, particularly through new forms of mass communication. This has facilitated new forms of political composition – that is forms of resistance and struggle – through which workers are reshaping platform work by contesting capital (Fear, 2018). The current state of 351
352 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the literature is considered, particularly relating to platforms, before the chapter concludes with some suggestions of further areas of research and ten key recommended readings.
UNDERSTANDING PLATFORMS The gig economy is a diverse category, given it includes any kind of work that is organised in a piecemeal or temporary way. Conceptually, it could include informal workers earning cash-in-hand all the way up to highly paid consultants working on short-term contracts. However, a key aspect that brings together an important section of this work are those types of work that are being reorganised with platforms. There is substantial overlap between the gig economy and the platform economy, but by focusing on platforms in this chapter, there are sections of the gig economy (both at the high- and low-paid ends) that are excluded from the discussion. While this misses a substantial part of the picture, it is also focusing on areas of particular strategic importance for capital. The success – or indeed failure – of these experiments of platforms will affect workers far beyond the individual platform, both within the gig economy and much more broadly. Nick Srnicek (2017: 48) has argued that platforms are: a new type of firm; they are characterized by providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups, by displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects, by employing cross-subsidization to draw in different user groups, and by having designed a core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities.
This new organisational form is built upon the technological affordances of platforms, with a scale that would not have been easily achievable without the digital technology underpinning it. However, focusing only on technology misses key dynamics that have shaped the emergence of platforms in the gig economy. As I have argued elsewhere (Woodcock and Graham, 2019: 19), there ‘are a complex and interconnected set of preconditions that shape how the gig economy emerges in practice’. The nine preconditions cover factors relating to technology, society, and political economy (or indeed a combination of each) and are as follows (Woodcock and Graham, 2019: 20): platform infrastructure (technology), digital legibility of work (technology), mass connectivity and cheap technology (technology and social), consumer attitudes and preferences (social), gendered and racialized relationships of work (social), desire for flexibility for/from workers (social and political economy), state regulation (political economy), worker power (political economy), and globalization and outsourcing (political economy and technology).
A much more complex picture therefore begins to emerge of the factors that contribute to the growth of the gig economy. While some of these are clearly technological (platform infrastructure, digital legibility of work, mass connectivity, and cheap technology), a range of important social factors and dimensions of political economy have deeply shaped the emergence of the digitalised gig economy. In particular, the dynamics of worker power and state regulation provide a specific context from which platforms emerge in a national region. This form of work therefore must be understood within the broader scope of neoliberal reform and increasing precariousness of work.
Class composition in the digitalised gig economy 353 From this context, it is then necessary to interrogate what is meant by a platform. As Marc Steinberg (2019: 1) argues: platforms are everywhere. As digital objects we have social media platforms … chat apps are platforms … e-commerce platforms … streaming platforms … and smartphones. As places we have bookstores as platforms, storefronts as platforms. We have educational platforms, political platforms, business platforms. As we have gone from the era of platform shows as a distinct genre of footwear to platform everything. And this list does not even scratch the list of what is called a platform, or what is retroactively redescribed as one. The greatest success of platform within our language ecosystem is to have become something of a universal translation device. Almost anything can become a platform, if one merely calls it such.
There are two examples that Steinberg (2019: 1, 2) uses that provide a helpful backdrop to the discussion of platforms. First, that as Moazed and Johnson (2016: 17) have put it, ‘platforms are eating our world’. They are changing much more than just work, but increasingly altering more and more aspects of life too – both on the surface and underneath it. Second, that the use of “Pingtai” or “flat platform/stage” in Chinese can also be revealing. We can think of a platform in computational terms: as the software “thing” upon which other “things” run. However, as Tarleton Gillespie (2010: 360) warned, ‘we do not have a sufficiently precise language’ for unpicking the effects of platforms and ‘the discourse of the “platform” works against us developing such precision, offering as it does a comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness’. Thus, the use of Pingtai as a stage provides a helpful reminder of platforms as a site of different actors, entering from both the left and the right, in favour of capital or workers, with differing interests, dialogues, and even perhaps fight scenes. The lack of precision, or indeed the opaqueness, in relation to platforms has become a common theme in the literature. For example, Frank Pasquale (2015) argues that platforms operate as a ‘black box’, a ‘system whose workings are mysterious’. However, if the current operation of platforms might be deliberately obscured, they emerge out of a particular context. The Silicon Valley provided the backdrop to the development of contemporary platforms, driven by what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) previously identified as the ‘Californian Ideology’ of deregulated markets – confirmed by Liu’s (2020) recent critique of Silicon Valley. While there have been platforms of varying kinds beforehand, what is of particular interest here is the emergence of the platform as an organisation. As mentioned earlier, Srnicek’s (2017) analysis provides an important framework for making sense of platforms. This new organisational form is understood as another response to the economic crises from the 1970s, seeking out new ways to restore profitability by shifting the balance from labour to capital. As Srnicek (2017: 6) argued, this intensified after the 2008 financial crisis as the platform became ‘a new business model, capable of extracting and controlling immense amounts of data’. The core of this business model is the claim that the ‘interface is where the profit is’ (Goodwin, 2015). For example, as Goodwin observed: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
In this sense, the platform is shell-like, with the ‘bare extractive minimum – control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained’ (Srnicek, 2017: 76).
354 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work This idea of becoming an interface or intermediary involves a strong emphasis on the role of digital technology. In part, it also involves a particular dream of automation. This builds upon an increasing number of commentators claiming that much work is going to be automated in the near future. For example, Frey and Osborne (2017) argued that 47 per cent of employment in the US is at high risk of automation in the next twenty years. Much of this is focused on production (which has already seen high levels of automation), transport, and logistics (which will be the focus of discussion of platforms below), as well as administrative and service work. Similar levels of around half of all work being automated were claimed by a McKinsey Global Institute (2017) study, albeit with large differences by countries. This variance is also confirmed by Nedelkoska and Quintini (2018), although they estimated a far lower risk of automation: only 14 per cent. Thus, as will be further discussed below, this possibility of automating work is a longer-term goal for many of these platforms. Or rather, the goal is to become the interface between customers and these automated and often algorithmically driven offerings. There are two issues here: first, automation of this kind developed out of already existing economic and power relations (O’Neil, 2017; Noble, 2018; Eubanks, 2019). The kinds of solutions that emerge out of an environment that is already hostile to workers will only serve to make conditions even more so when workers are seen as being completely replaceable in the near future. Second, that this is used as part of the justification for not treating workers engaged on platforms as workers. The widespread use of self-employment statuses is a significant step forward in the longer-term processes of deregulation and neoliberal reform.
NEW TECHNICAL COMPOSITION OF WORK The changing organisation of work that platforms have facilitated has involved building on longer histories of outsourcing (Woodcock and Graham, 2019), as well as the quantification of work (Moore, 2019) and gamification (Woodcock and Johnson, 2018). The new use of technology has meant that there has been a focus of research attention on the role of algorithms in platform work (see: Lee et al., 2015; Rosenblat and Stark, 2016; Scholz, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018), mirroring a rise in interest in algorithms across society (Pasquale, 2015; Schneier, 2015; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Kitchin, 2017; O’Neil, 2017; Turow, 2017; Eubanks, 2019). Clearly, algorithms play an important role in platform work. They have been used by capital as a technology of surveillance and control, displacing human managers to some extent. This allows for platforms to scale quickly and broadly, both within specific areas and across the world. For some commentators, the use of algorithmic management has much broader implications, for example, undermining worker agency, solidarity, and the possibility of taking action (Veen et al., 2019; Mahnkopf, 2020). These surface readings can result in reproducing the power relations of platforms – becoming part of the attempt to undermine workers in these new conditions. Similarly, this can be found with the issue of employment status. Most platforms use a form of self-employment or independent contractor status to engage workers – claiming that they are, in fact, not workers. However, as has been clearly argued elsewhere, people working on platforms are workers (Aloisi, 2016; De Stefano, 2019; De Stefano and Aloisi, 2019). It is worth returning to Marx (1867: 644) to clarify the relationships involved in platforms: capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value … If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he
Class composition in the digitalised gig economy 355 works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.
Platform workers may be involved in three-sided markets, delivering food or customers, cleaning houses, or tagging images online. The specifics of the activity may differ, but when capital has been laid out through a platform to extract surplus value, platform workers are being engaged as workers. Some have commented that the need for an Uber driver to have access to a car to work on the app has changed the underlying relations. However, as Cant (2019: 67) reminds us: Instead of representing any underlying shift in the deep rhythms of capitalism, platform capitalism is just a change in its surface arrangement. It is important to understand there shifts in composition, but that doesn’t entail rewriting the rulebook. The situation facing platform workers it the same as the situation facing the cleaner who has to bring their own spray, the chef who has to bring their own knife, or the carpenter who supplies their own tools. They don’t profit off the exploitation of their own labour – they are forced to buy stuff in order to work … We didn’t own capital – instead we were forced to include tools used in the production process in our “means of subsistence” – the stuff we buy with our wages to reproduce ourselves and our labour-power.
Work still plays a central role within this relationship. Regardless of the complexity of the algorithm, workers are being engaged in the labour process. Workers drive the vehicles, deliver the food, clean the houses, and categorise the data. Self-employment status has been used to try and deflect attention (particularly legal) from this fact, but this is being challenged in more and more jurisdictions. Even in the case of the automation of delivery or transport, large numbers of online workers are engaged to create the datasets upon which self-driving algorithms are being trained – albeit hidden away as a form of ‘digital black box labor’ (Scholz, 2015). There is an emerging field of literature that specifically examines the experiences of workers in this new context (for example: Waters and Woodcock, 2017; Fear, 2018; Briziarelli, 2019; Cant, 2019; Gent, 2019; Leonardi et al., 2019; Cant and Mogno, 2020; Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). By examining the technical composition of platform work, it is possible to draw attention to the key dynamics underway. First, platform capitalism has sought to introduce a series of changes to the technical composition of different activities to both intensify work and immiserate workers. Drawing on the longer imperatives of outsourcing and the reduction of labour costs (Woodcock, 2017), platforms provide a way to circumvent existing labour regulations and strip away payment for any unproductive moments. A significant part of this gambit has been the attempt to shift both costs and responsibilities from capital onto labour. One success of this model has been the posing of these changes as offering “flexibility” to workers – something sought by increasing numbers of workers. As I have argued with Callum Cant elsewhere (Cant and Woodcock, 2019): What has taken place is a huge attempted decomposition of workers by capital. Taking Uber as an example, drivers who may have previously worked for a local taxi company now find themselves as bogus self-employees engaging with a multinational platform. Along with many other workers drawn onto the platform due to the promise of flexibility – or lack of employment options elsewhere – they are now part of a workforce that is estimated to be around three million. As Uber has sought greater amounts of venture capital, it has also savagely driven down wages and tested and refined new forms of algorithmic management. Unlike the diverse and disconnected taxi companies, this decomposition has also created shared conditions among many workers logging onto the Uber app. These have
356 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work forged new international connections through which tactics and strategies are being shared, laying the basis for a powerful new recomposition of platform workers.
SHIFTING CLASS COMPOSITION Platforms and digital technology have not only been applied to transform the technical composition of work. As noted above, this technical recomposition has laid the basis for a new political composition of workers. An important part of this is making sense of how workers use (and misuse) technology in both the workplace and beyond. Platforms view workers as a temporary inconvenience, soon to be removed by automation, attempting to push them into the background through the use of technology. For example, during the customer interaction with delivery platforms, the worker is only briefly encountered, handing over the food. They are replaced by some sort of digital representation, hidden behind the smartphone screen. However, while the customer may only briefly encounter the worker, and the platform claim they are not even employed, workers find opportunities to meet between deliveries. The importance of physical space and geography to the labour process of deliveries mean that workers cluster around particularly waiting points. In the UK, the largely migrant workforce then interacts with each other in similar ways to outside of work: starting WhatsApp groups to cheaply and easily stay in touch with each other (Waters and Woodcock, 2017). The widespread use of smartphones – given the requirement of having one to working on many platforms – therefore puts workers into new forms of mass communication with each other. Across many platforms, “flexibility” is promised as a key reason for workers to sign up. This promise quickly turns out not to be the case in practice for many workers, with an experience of low pay and long hours becoming increasingly common. However, unlike previous forms of work, these workers are brought into contact with increasingly large numbers of co-workers – both nearby and transnationally. It is worth noting here that this search for flexibility is coming from workers – as well as being pushed by platforms. In part, this can be read as a rejection of many existing forms of work that demand strict time discipline or supervision at work (Woodcock, 2020a), as well as a lack of other formal work opportunities – particularly in the global south (Woodcock and Graham, 2019) There is therefore a pressing need to push back against the conception of flexibility coming from platforms. Some claim that this is a difficult thing to do. As Jason Moyer-Lee (2017), the general secretary of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, has argued: ‘flexibility that works for the worker is a marvellous thing. What we do say is that these companies need to abide by the law. Just because some of their workers have flexible work arrangements, that doesn’t mean you can deny them basic rights’. These dynamics of social compositions – migrant workforces and access to communication technology – have facilitated waves of collective action. As I have noted elsewhere (Cant and Woodcock, 2019): One thing is clear for now: we need to stop talking about resistance as emerging in platform work! Resistance is clearly already happening, from Deliveroo riders in London, Uber drivers in Bangalore, to Meituan workers in Guangzhou. A working class recomposition is rapidly under way. The key question now is understanding what forms of struggle can be successful beyond the short term and how these can be generalised more widely by the working class, both logging off platforms and breaking away from capitalism more broadly.
Class composition in the digitalised gig economy 357
CONCLUSIONS The transformations of the digitalised gig economy are not a finished story. Over the last few years, these dynamics have begun to unfold in forms of work that are particularly susceptible to being reorganised in this way. For example, food delivery or transport involve discrete tasks that can be easily tracked and measured. These kinds of platforms have quickly grown into a global phenomenon. As discussed before, these transformations have laid the basis for new forms of resistance and struggle. The framework of class composition provides a powerful way to comprehend these changes, first in the technical composition of the work and how it is organised by capital, then examining the shifting social and political composition of workers engaged on these platforms. The aim of this approach is not only explanatory, instead seeking to understand the viewpoint of workers who are engaged in struggle over their work. An important question is what role research can play in the support of these workers’ struggles (Englert et al., 2020; Woodcock, 2020b). While this remains an open question too, there are two important areas of future research that can help to make sense of these struggles – and therefore could also help to inform interventions to support worker activity. First, what are the directions and implications of the struggles of platform workers that are currently underway? There have been waves of transnational strikes of delivery drivers and coordinated strikes by private-hire drivers, showing that these platform workers are particularly strike prone. However, there remains questions about the ways in which this action can deliver victories in the medium- and long-term. Similarly, it is not yet clear how this action could translate into sustainable organisation, whether within existing trade unions or new formations. This has the potential to refresh debates about organising more widely than within this sector too (Woodcock, 2019). Second, this technical recomposition is likely to be attempted in other sectors. As Callum Cant (2019) has argued, platform work acts as a laboratory for capital. It has provided an example to test and experiment with new technology. The success or failure of what is happening in the digitalised gig economy therefore has an implication for beyond this sector. Emerging attempts to introduce aspects of platforms need to be understood – as well as considering how the lessons of worker resistance can be applied beyond the gig economy. Across both potential areas of future research there needs to be a concerted attempt to platform the voices of workers in the gig economy. There has been much emphasis so far on the technology, the role of algorithms, and data. An important corrective to this is to understand how these things are used within the labour process by labour and capital, returning to an analysis of technology and work that is rooted in an understanding of economic and social relations.
REFERENCES Aloisi, A. (2016) ‘Commoditized Workers. Case Study Research on Labor Law Issues Arising From a Set of “On-Demand/Gig Economy” Platforms.’ Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 37(3): 653–690. Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1996) ‘The Californian Ideology.’ Science as Culture, 6(1): 44–72. Briziarelli, M. (2019) ‘Spatial Politics in the Digital Realm: The Logistics/Precarity Dialectics and Deliveroo’s Tertiary Space Struggles.’ Cultural Studies, 33(5): 823–840. Cant, C. (2019) Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy. Cambridge: Polity.
358 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Cant, C., and Mogno, C. (2020) ‘Platform Workers of the World, Unite! The Emergence of the Transnational Federation of Couriers.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly, 119(2): 401–411. Cant, C., and Woodcock, J. (2019) ‘The End of the Beginning.’ Notes from Below. Retrieved from: https://notesfrombelow.org/article/end-beginning. Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017) We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: NYU Press. De Stefano, V. (2019) ‘“Negotiating the Algorithm”: Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Labour Protection.’ Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal, 41(1). De Stefano, V., and Aloisi, A. (2019) ‘Fundamental labour rights, platform work and protection of non-standard workers.’ In Janice R. Bellace and Beryl ter Haar (eds.), Labour, Business and Human Rights Law, pp. 359–379. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Englert, S., Woodcock, J., and Cant, C. (2020) ‘Digital Workerism: Technology, Platforms, and the Circulation of Workers’ Struggles,’ tripleC, 18(1): 132–145. Eubanks, V. (2019) Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Fear, C. (2018) ‘“Without Our Brain and Muscle Not a Single Wheel Can Turn”: The IWW Couriers Network.’ Notes from Below. Retrieved from: https://notesfrombelow.org/article/without-our-brain -and-muscle. Frey, C. B., and Osborne, M. A. (2017) ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?’ Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 114: 254–80. Gent, C. (2019) The Politics of Algorithmic Management: Class Composition and Everyday Struggle in Distribution Work. Coventry: University of Warwick. Gillespie, T. (2010) ‘The Politics of Platforms.’ New Media and Society 12(3): 347–364. Goodwin, T. (2015) The Battle Is for the Customer Interface. TechCrunch, 3 March. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-theage-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer -interface/ Kitchin, R. (2017) ‘Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms.’ Information, Communication & Society, 20(1): 14–29. Lee, M. K., Kusbit, D., Metsky, E., and Dabbish, L. (2015) ‘Working with machines: the impact of algorithmic, data-driven management on human workers.’ In Bo Begole, Jinwoo Kim, Kori Inkpen, and Woontack Wood (eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM SIGCHI Conference. New York: ACM Press. Leonardi, D., Murgia, A., Briziarelli, M., and Armano, E. (2019) ‘The ambivalence of logistical connectivity: a co-research with Foodora Riders.’ Work Organ. Labour Global, 13: 155–171. Liu, W. (2020) Abolish Silicon Valley. London: Repeater. Mahnkopf, B. (2020) ‘The Future of Work in the Era of “Digital Capitalism”.’ Socialist Register, 56. Marx, K. (1867) [1977] Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books. McKinsey Global Institute (2017) Where Machines Could Replace Humans and Where They Can’t (Yet). London: McKinsey Global Institute. Moazed, A., and Johnson, N. L. (2016) Modern Monopolies: What it Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy. New York: St Martin’s. Moore, P. V. (2019) The Quantified Self in Precarity: Work, Technology and What Counts. London: Routledge. Moyer-Lee, J. (2017) ‘What everyone assumes about rights in the gig economy is wrong.’ The Guardian, March 22. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/22/rights-gig -economy-self-employed-worker. Nedelkoska, L., and Quintini, G. (2018) Automation, skills use and training. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 202. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/employment/ automation-skills-use-and-training_ 2e2f4eea-en Noble, S. U. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press. O’Neil, C. (2017) Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. London: Penguin. Pasquale, F. (2015) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Class composition in the digitalised gig economy 359 Rosenblat, A. (2018) Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Oakland: University of California Press. Rosenblat, A., and Stark, L. (2016) ‘Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.’ International Journal of Communication, 10: 3758–3784. Schneier, B. (2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Scholz, T. (2015) ‘Think outside the boss.’ Public Seminar, April 5. Retrieved from: http://www .publicseminar.org/2015/04/think-outsidethe-boss. Scholz, T. (2017) Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Steinberg, M. (2019) The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press. Tassinari, A., and Maccarrone, V. (2020) ‘Riders on the Storm: Workplace Solidarity among Gig Economy Couriers in Italy and the UK.’ Work, Employment and Society, 34(1): 35–54. Turow, J. (2017) The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power. New Haven, CN, Yale University Press. Veen, A., Barratt, T., and Goods, C. (2019) ‘Platform-Capital’s “App-etite” for Control: A Labour Process Analysis of Food-Delivery Work in Australia.’ Work, Employment and Society, 34(3): 388–406. Waters, F., and Woodcock, J. (2017) ‘Far From Seamless: a Workers’ Inquiry at Deliveroo.’ Viewpoint Magazine. Retrieved from: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/09/20/far-seamless-workers -inquiry-deliveroo. Woodcock, J. (2017) Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres. London: Pluto. Woodcock, J. (2019) Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Woodcock, J. (2020a) ‘Reflecting on a Call Centre Workers’ Inquiry: Contradictions, Tensions, and the Role of the Researcher,’ Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa/The Italian Journal of Ethnography and Qualitative Research, 13(1): 103–118. Woodcock, J. (2020b) ‘The Algorithmic Panopticon at Deliveroo: Measurement, Precarity, and the Illusion of Control’, Ephemera, 20(3): 67–95. Woodcock, J., and Graham, M. (2019) The Gig Economy: a Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Woodcock, J., and Johnson, M. R. (2018) ‘Gamification: What it is, and how to fight it’, The Sociological Review, 66(3): 542–558.
KEY READING Cant, C. (2019) Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Dyer-Witheford, N. (2015) Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto. Gray, M. L., and Siddarth S. (2019) Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Liu, W. (2020) Abolish Silicon Valley. London: Repeater. Pasquale, F. (2015) The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosenblat, Alex. (2018) Uberland: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Oakland: University of California Press. Scholz, T. (2017) Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Slee, T. (2015) What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. London: OR Books. Srnicek, N. (2017) Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Woodcock, J., and Graham, M. (2019) The Gig Economy: a Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity.
29. Resistance and struggle in the gig economy Vincenzo Maccarrone, Lorenzo Cini and Arianna Tassinari
INTRODUCTION The last decade has seen the rise of the ‘gig economy’, a form of work organisation centred on the intermediation and the management of labour via online platforms. The gig economy is another ‘new’ type of precarious and non-standard labour, which is today characterising an increasing number of employment relations globally as “uncertain, unpredictable and risky from the point of view of the worker” (Kalleberg, 2009: 2). As the ‘gig economy’ has grown in size and relevance, gig workers across the world have increasingly organised conflict and resistance to defend their interests and advance their demands. Notably, this has happened in an environment which is arguably hostile to workers’ collective organisation, characterised by a high degree of individualisation and structural turnover and low employment protection legislation as well as by pervasive algorithmic management practices (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). However, gig economy workers have been able to fight this trend by collectively taking action through diverse organisational forms and practices, which have varied across sectors, types of platforms and localities. In the chapter, we provide a theoretical framework to understand both how collective action emerges also within such a precarious world of work and why it takes very different forms of organising across the globe. By reviewing the burgeoning international literature on labour conflict and organisation in the gig and precarious economy, we show how various agential and contextual factors, especially those related to the political and social context of mobilisation, combine with contradictions arising from precarious labour processes to produce collective organisation and conflict. More specifically, the chapter aims to investigate the main triggers behind gig workers’ increasing mobilisation drive and the obstacles they face as well as the heterogeneous organising practices they employ. In the next pages, we first analyse the labour process in the gig economy, showing how it maintains some contradictory features which might lead to the emergence of worker solidarity. Second, we provide a theoretical framework to explain how collective action can thrive even within the ‘brave new world’ of the gig economy, as well as to make sense of the diversity of workers’ organising practices, going beyond a focus on institutional features of national labour relations. Then, drawing from the burgeoning literature on labour conflict and organisation in the gig and precarious economy, we apply this framework as a heuristic device to explain concrete cases of workers’ mobilisation and collective action. The final section concludes and discusses some avenues for further research.
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UNDERSTANDING RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE IN THE GIG ECONOMY The Gig Economy Labour Process and its Contradictions To make sense of why gig workers have been able to mobilise even in an environment hostile to the emergence of workers’ solidarity and collective action, one has to start from the inherent contradictions within the capitalist labour process (Atzeni, 2010). Whereas the term ‘gig economy’ covers a wide range of activities, from on-site to online activities, from high-end to lower-end services, one can identify some common features of the labour process. While some of these features can impinge negatively on workers’ willingness to take actions, others, in turn, can provide the basis for the emergence of workers’ solidarity (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020). First, within the gig economy the point of production is decentralised, and the work activity individualised. In the case of the gig economy the point of production is thus the platform which allocates ‘gigs’ to workers: “platforms act as the milieu within which the capital–labour relation is enacted upon workers (…) the platform represents the place whereby the social processes of production are put under logics of managerialization and work organization within a single, clearly delimited environment” (Gandini, 2019: 1045). This is coupled with an individualisation of employment relations, as companies usually seek to hire workers as independent contractors. For most ‘location-based’ platforms, this is a bogus classification which conceals a de facto subordinated employment relationship, while remote gig workers more often tend to identify as freelancers as opposed to employees (Wood et al., 2021). Second, despite the decentralisation of the point of production, platforms are able to maintain a high degree of control over workers, through pervasive algorithmic management practices and ‘gamification’ techniques (Gandini, 2019). Indeed, platforms can, to various extents, monitor and control workers’ performance, for instance, employing users’ feedback or productivity data to rank workers in order to receive further ‘gigs’. Both these aspects can act as a deterrent to workers’ mobilisation. The decentralisation of the point of production and the individualisation of work activity can obstacle the emergence of the feeling of a shared condition among workers, i.e. a sense of embryonic solidarity which is the precondition for the emergence of forms of active solidarity and collective action (Atzeni, 2010). This can be even more the case for remote gig workers who generally identify as self-employed (Wood et al., 2021) and who experience even higher atomisation and geographical dispersion. At the same time, the labour process within both the location-based and the remote gig economy also presents some inherent contradictions which can instead trigger the emergence of antagonism and worker solidarity (cf. Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020; Joyce and Stuart, 2021). The first is inherent in the process of valorisation adopted by gig economy companies, which aims to minimise labour costs through ever-decreasing or fluctuating rates of remuneration and pervasive insecurity and uncertainty over working time. These practices can lead to shared perceptions of injustice and act as a powerful trigger of antagonism among gig workers. The second relates to the specific ‘socio-technical structures’ of managerial control (cf. Anwar and Graham, 2019) in-built in platforms’ design, such as algorithmic management and untransparent rating mechanisms. Although these practices vary in their detailed operation depending on platforms’ architecture (cf. Lei, 2021), generally they can lead workers to
362 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work experience asymmetric information vis-a-vis the platforms’ processes, perceived opacity in managerial control and exposure to clients’ arbitrary behaviours – all factors that can intensify perceptions of subordination and hence breed antagonism (Wood et al., 2019; Lei, 2021; Wood et al., 2021). The common contradictions internal to the gig economy labour process can help to account for the widespread emergence of processes of resistance and antagonism among gig workers, which have become increasingly manifest – although by no means universal – in many segments of the gig economy. Recent research (cf. Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020) has documented the social mechanisms connecting these emergent antagonisms to the consolidation of solidarity and collective action among gig workers. However, the concrete forms of gig workers’ mobilisation and the organisational shape that they have taken have been heterogeneous across platforms and geographical contexts. To some extent, the diversity is linked to features of the labour process itself: because of the higher spatial dispersion and the augmented atomisation that they experience, one can expect that the forms of collective action which emerge among ‘online’ gig workers to be less visible and developed than in the case of ‘onsite’ gig workers (Wood et al., 2021). However, even among location-based gig workers, there is considerable diversity in terms of organisational forms chosen. While in some contexts gig workers have organised through traditional trade unions, in others they have been supported by ‘new’ industrial relations (IR) actors such as grassroots trade unions, social movements or have directly opted for self-organisation (Joyce and Stuart, 2021; Vandaele, 2021). To understand this diversity, it is therefore necessary to look outside the labour process, to the political, social and organisational context within which gig workers are embedded (Cini et al., 2021). Looking Beyond the Labour Process: The Political and Social Context of Mobilisation The IR literature has traditionally emphasised the role of trade unions and of the workplace in setting in motion processes of worker mobilisation (Frege and Kelly, 2004). This literature has highlighted how unions’ capabilities, logics of action and ideological orientations shape differently their capacity to engage effectively with precarious workers and integrate them in their constituencies; as well as drawing attention to how features of the IR institutional and legal framework make it more or less easy for precarious workers to organise within established channels of voice and collective workers’ representation. However, such union-centric and institutionalist perspectives tend to devote little attention to alternative forms of organisation and to the capacity of workers themselves to play a central role in such processes (Mathers et al., 2018; Atzeni, 2021). This is evident in the gig economy, where, in many instances, workers have staged collective action outside or in parallel to existing unions. Therefore, to understand the diversity of these mobilisations we need to draw upon other strands of research, both from the field of critical IR and social movement studies, which can be helpful to analyse how broader socio-political contextual and agential factors have shaped the mobilisation practices and organisational forms of gig economy workers. Building on the approach developed in Cini et al. (2021), we argue that two sets of factors are relevant to understand the mobilisation dynamics of gig economy workers: the capabilities and repertoires of action of labour actors and the broader community and the related political tradition of militant organising (cf Nowak, 2021). As for the first factor, while the contradictions inherent in the labour process lay the foundations for the emergence of antagonism among gig workers, it is the channelling of these dispositions into collective organisational
Resistance and struggle in the gig economy 363 forms that allows for sustained processes of mobilisation to emerge. The emergence of such forms and their diversity across contexts can be partly understood considering the differing capabilities, skills and repertoires of actions that the various labour and social movement actors supporting gig workers are able to mobilise and deploy to intervene effectively in the emerging, lowly institutionalised context of the gig economy. These capabilities refer to the capacities of labour actors to: (a) interpret the specificities of gig work and deploy strategies of organising and disruption suitable to the context of different labour platforms; (b) understand the specific characteristics – in composition, vulnerabilities, attitudes – of the gig workforce and deploy demands and intervention strategies reflective of, or responsive to, these characteristics; (c) build relationships of trust and confidence with the constituencies of gig workers. For instance, one aspect identified by Cini et al. (2021) is the prior expertise of labour actors in organising precarious workers in similar sectoral contexts to that of the gig economy. This can encompass prior experience of organising workers in sectors similar to gig work either in terms of location (e.g. urban service work), or in terms of workforce composition (e.g. sectors with a high presence of migrant workers and of workforce segmentation in the case of location-based gig work; or with a high presence of self-employed professionals with specific notions of autonomy and collective identity, as in the case of online freelancers). Such prior expertise can help labour actors to adapt their strategies, demands and discourses to the features of the gig economy context and of its workforce. The relative absence of labour actors with prior experiences of organising ‘crowdworkers’ solely online might explain why the collective mobilisation of this segment of the gig economy has lagged compared to the location-based gig economy. Moreover, the role played by the organisational culture of labour organisations may matter. For instance, ‘new’ labour actors such as grassroots unions usually operate following primarily a logic of membership rather than a logic of influence (cf. Vandaele, 2021). The ‘logic of membership’ implies, inter alia, placing emphasis on workers’ direct participation and democratic control. This emphasis might make ‘alternative’ labour organisations more responsive to gig workers’ specific attitudes – occasionally distrustful of established unions. Having prior experience of operating outside of or at the margins of established, institutional channels of IR also lead grassroots labour actors to be generally more willing and experienced than established unions to employ disruptive, conflictual and innovative tactics of contention – such as wildcat strikes, public-facing creative campaigns, public protests. This results both from their specific logic of action and from their ideological orientation and organisational fluidity, that allow for easier experimentation with diverse action repertoires. These features may make such actors more capable of intervening in a sector still characterised by low institutionalisation and lack of established channels of voice, such as the gig economy. The institutional and legal system, however, mediates the capabilities necessary to intervene effectively in the gig economy. Indeed, in the few contexts where gig workers enjoy or come to obtain classification as employees or obtain access to and coverage from institutionalised channels of workers’ voice, such as works councils, traditional unions might be equally, if not better, equipped to intervene effectively in organising gig workers taking advantage of established institutions (cf. Vandaele, 2021). It is also possible that ‘established’ labour actors might over time learn and adapt their tactics of action in the gig economy so as to mimic those of grassroots unions. The second factor which we identify as relevant to explain the heterogeneity in workers’ organising practices is the broader community in which workers are embedded and the
364 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work related political tradition of militant organising. Workers’ productive activities are embedded in relations of reproduction and into patterns of consumption, and this plays a role for their collective organisation. In the social movement literature, the communities where movement participants live are considered as relevant resources for their mobilisation capacities (della Porta and Diani, 2020). Yet, in the labour literature the relevance of these communities for workers’ struggles has been only sporadically highlighted (cf. Nowak, 2021). This trend is beginning to be reversed today in the growing literature on gig and precarious workers’ mobilisations. Alberti and Però (2018), for instance, have identified the presence of strong, supportive, ethnic communities as important sources for the organisational practices of precarious migrant workers employed in the low-paid service sector in London. Other studies have emphasised how the intervention of political activists and solidarity groups operating outside the framework of organised labour have facilitated the organisation of mobilisation processes in the wider logistics sector in Italy (Cini and Goldmann, 2021). As the gig economy sector is still only moderately institutionalised in terms of IR, this feature may amplify the influence of the wider social context on mobilisation dynamics, giving greater relevance to the role of the broader community in accounting for mobilisation practices. Relatedly, the political tradition of militant organising of the localities where gig workers are embedded (cf. Nowak, 2021) is also relevant. This can shape both the opportunity to activate solidaristic relationships that can support gig workers’ mobilisation; as well as the organisational attitudes, resources and expertise that gig workers themselves can draw on. Such legacies of militant organising are not confined to a specific workplace or to a delimited physical space but need to be understood as being developed within a broader social context and lasting across time and space. An extended definition of political tradition, conceived as a militant organisational culture associated with a broader social (or even virtual) place, seems to be particularly suited to understand gig workers’ mobilisation dynamics and their diversity, as most gig workers exhibit only loose networks of cooperation and do not share a physically delimited workplace. To sum up, integrating IR scholarship on gig workers’ organising with insights from the social movement literature seems particularly helpful to make sense of the variation of organisational practices of gig workers globally. This integrated approach offers two advantages for the analysis of their mobilisations: first, it provides a more agential, worker-based and not union-centred, interpretation; second, it emphasises the importance of the socio-cultural context of mobilisation, beyond the workplace and the institutional landscape, in which the relation between workers and their surrounding socio-political environment is central (Cini et al., 2021).
LABOUR RESISTANCE AND COLLECTIVE ACTION WITHIN THE GLOBAL GIG ECONOMY Despite the obstacles to the emergence of solidarity posed by the pervasive individualisation of the labour process and the various forms of ‘techno-normative’ control within the gig economy (Gandini, 2019), over the last few years forms of collective organisation and action among platform workers have become increasingly common. In fact, researchers contributing to the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest found more than 300 instances of labour unrest in the gig economy (comprising strikes, demonstrations, legal and online actions) taking place between 2015 and 2019 (Joyce et al., 2020). This shows that, whereas some features
Resistance and struggle in the gig economy 365 of the labour process operate against the emergence of worker solidarity, others can act as a trigger of collective action. A first trigger arises from the process of valorisation adopted by the platforms, which aims at minimising costs. The first variable over which platforms pursue this object is pay. One common strategy adopted by companies in the gig economy is indeed the use of piecework rather than hourly pay, which shifts the enterprise risk onto the workers. But whereas companies can use pay as a control device of workers, for instance, in the case of pricing systems which ensure an adequate supply of labour in certain areas at a certain time, pay issues can also become a significant trigger of worker resistance. Indeed, some of the first mobilisations of gig workers in Europe – involving food delivery couriers and ride-hailing drivers – have been driven by unilateral changes in the companies’ pay strategy, which led to a reduced or a more fluctuating wage for gig workers. On a more aggregate level, analysing data from the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest, Joyce et al. (2020) find that the first cause of labour disputes in the gig economy were pay issues. These authors also highlight that the most visible forms of collective action took place within the location-based gig economy, involving, in particular, workers in food delivery, courier work and transportation (ibid.). This is not surprising: the even higher geographical dispersal and atomisation that characterise workers in the fully online gig economy makes the emergence of collective action harder. Indeed, research across different countries and platforms has highlighted how the physical compresence of workers (for instance, in the designated waiting points in the case of food delivery or in parking slots in the case of ride-hailing) has been key for the creation and reinforcement of linkages of solidarity among workers, which has then led to collective action (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020).Yet, even in the online gig economy forms of active worker solidarity emerged. For instance, workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk increasingly made use of the client reputation system ‘Turkopticon’ to rate employers in terms of fairness, responsiveness and generosity of pay (Irani and Silberman, 2013). Also in the case of online gig workers, antagonism and resistance often arose from the issue of pay. Social media networking spaces such as Facebook groups or forums play an important role in enabling workers to develop awareness of their shared grievances. These embryonic ‘communities of coping’ (Korczynski, 2003) are also increasingly common among workers involved in higher-end service work within the platform economy, who use forums and social media to share their experiences and expertise on platforms and with clients and even for trying to maintain informal price norms (Wood et al., 2019). Whereas these forms of worker solidarity are less visible than overt collective action – and therefore also harder to capture by protest data (Joyce et al., 2020) – they remain, nonetheless, an example of the fact that solidarity can emerge even in a hostile environment. The valorisation process adopted by the platforms tends to have a downward impact also on working conditions and regulation of employment more generally, which in turn can become another area of contention and resistance. In fact, working conditions and employment status figure respectively as the second and third causes for disputes in the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest (Joyce et al., 2020). Indeed, in various instances hazardous working conditions and concerns over personal safety have been prime triggers for the first mobilisations of many gig workers. The first strike of food couriers in November 2017 in Bologna (Italy) took place when snowy weather made completing deliveries a dangerous task. Delivery workers all over the world are also exposed to other risks to their personal safety, such as theft and attacks. Riders in Dublin (Ireland) started to collectively organise after many of them were subject to attacks and harassment while doing their job. In Indonesia, app-based transport workers
366 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work organised through community associations to defend themselves ‘from the threat of physical violence by conventional transport providers’ (Ford and Honan, 2019: 538). Concerns over personal safety were also a highly topical issue for delivery workers worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic, as logistics was considered among those ‘essential’ activities which continued to take place, even under dangerous conditions both in terms of health risks and in terms of personal security from theft, robbery or violence (cf. Gutiérrez Crocco and Atzeni, 2021). Workers then mobilised to defend their health and safety, for instance, to obtain access to proper personal protective equipment and guarantees over sick pay. In terms of employment status, companies within the gig economy generally (though not exclusively) seek to hire workers as independent contractors rather than subordinate workers. This allows employers to reduce expenses, as contractors have no right to sick or holiday pay, or to the payment of a minimum wage. But contestation over their employment status has been also a driver of workers’ mobilisation, especially across the global North, where existing legal institutions still provide significant gains in terms of employment protections for employees rather than self-employed (Joyce et al., 2020). Combining strategically mobilisation and legal challenges, gig workers have been able to obtain significant gains in terms of employment rights across several European countries, pushing the issue high on the political agenda both at the national and the EU level. Another contradiction within the gig economy labour process, which in turn can be conducive to antagonism and worker resistance, relates to the algorithmic management practices adopted by platforms. As Joyce and Stuart (2021: 166) argue, ‘platform methods do not simply impose control; they are also key drivers of platform worker resistance’. Indeed, whereas issues related to algorithmic management seem less salient as a cause of protest if compared to pay and working conditions in general (Joyce et al., 2020), workers’ contestation can also arise from the perceived arbitrariness of opaque managerial practices. For instance, in her research on labour unrest within the food delivery sector in China, Lei (2021) finds that platforms’ use of algorithmic management practices, rather than relying on traditional supervisory methods, make the emergence of worker solidarity more likely, because workers perceive this modality of control as more arbitrary and despotic. Fighting against algorithmic management does not necessarily entail forms of overt collective action but might instead lead workers to try manipulating or training the algorithm to their advantage. In research on ride-hailing in China, Chen (2018) highlights how drivers make use of bot apps to obtain more advantageous rides or to reject ride requests without incurring punishment by the platform. As in the example of crowdworkers collectively gaming the algorithm (Joyce and Stuart, 2021), such practices can be socialised among workers, representing a form of resistance which is not necessarily captured by protest data (Joyce et al., 2020). Nevertheless, if used only by a handful of workers, these apps can end up fostering further competition and division among colleagues. Beyond contradictions within the labour process, context also matters in shaping dynamics of collective action within the gig economy. Factors such as the socio-political environment in which workers are embedded, the broader regime of state labour regulation and the composition of the labour force can all be facilitators or inhibitors of collective action. For instance, the role of community ties among migrant workers has been highlighted as a facilitator for the emergence of the first mobilisation of food couriers in London, whereas in Italy the presence of social centres which offered their spaces to riders in trouble played an important role in facilitating collective action (Cini et al., 2021). Conversely, research has shown that tight migratory regimes make the emergence of collective action less likely, as this makes migrant
Resistance and struggle in the gig economy 367 workers more wary of taking action for fear of losing their job and hence the possibility of remaining in the country (Veen et al., 2020). Contextual factors are also important to explain the great heterogeneity of organisational forms exhibited by gig workers’ struggles, to which we now turn.
VARIATION IN RESISTANCE AND STRUGGLE Although protests and collective actions in the gig economy have emerged worldwide, resistance has exhibited a great degree of heterogeneity in terms of the organisational structures chosen by workers. Workers have not only been organising through established trade unions, but they have also mobilised with grassroots and community unions, or they have chosen to self-represent themselves through worker-led collectives. Indeed, data from the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest shows that, overall, established trade unions have organised only around 40 per cent of the protests (Joyce et al., 2020). Whereas similar features of the labour process can account for the common emergence of worker collective resistance worldwide, they cannot explain this divergence in organisation methods. How can one account for the variation of gig workers’ mobilisation practices globally? The first aspect which emerges from the data of the Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest is a major difference in organising forms between the global North and the global South. The data by Joyce et al. (2020) indicates that in the global North, where labour relations are more institutionalised and where gig economy sectors are more integrated in the existing system of IR, the role of traditional labour actors, such as trade union confederations, has been more prominent. On the contrary, where the IR context appears as less institutionalised, such as in the global South, other labour actors, such as grassroots and community unions, have played a more important role (cf. Joyce et al., 2020). Spontaneous organisations of app-based transport drivers in Indonesia are one of the most-cited examples of the important role of community unions for gig workers’ organising in the global South (Ford and Honan, 2019). Yet, even within countries in the global South with more institutionalised IR systems and established unions with the right to conduct sectoral collective bargaining, such as Argentina, autonomous collectives and new workers’ associations have, however, also played an important role (Gutiérrez Crocco and Atzeni, 2021). Whereas the aggregate data on protest shows a clear geographical distinction in organising forms between macro-regions (Joyce et al., 2020), one can observe considerable heterogeneity also within macro-regions in the forms of organisation pursued by platform workers. The case of food delivery couriers, who have globally been one of the most combative segments of the gig economy workforce, is illustrative in this respect. In some Western-European countries with still relatively strong IR systems, such as Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, longstanding union confederations have been playing a central role in organising food delivery workers (Vandaele, 2021). In some of these countries, unions have been able to cooperate with, or even integrate within their ranks, workers who initially mobilised through self-organised collectives. Thus, to some extent, institutional and legal features of national IR do matter in shaping organisational patterns (Jesnes et al., 2021). Leveraging on their institutional power resources, established unions in the
368 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Nordic countries relied mostly on a ‘logic of influence’ approach, promoting litigation to allow workers to gain employee status and thus access to collective bargaining (Vandaele, 2021). Yet, in other European countries grassroots unions have taken the lead in organising gig workers. This has not only been the case in countries characterised by weakened IR institutions, such as the UK – where rank-and-file unions such as the Industrial Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) and the International Workers of the World (IWW) have been at the forefront of couriers’ struggle (Tassinari and Maccarrone, 2020) – but also in countries with a stronger IR framework, such as Germany, where riders in Berlin have organised with the grassroots union Freie Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter Union (FAU) (Vandaele, 2021). Even in Sweden, the anarcho-syndicalist Örestad LS-IWA has been active in organising gig workers (ibid.). In Italy, worker self-organisation has instead characterised the first instances of mobilisation of riders in Turin, Bologna and Milan. Similarly, in France, couriers in Paris have organised under the banner of Collectif Livreurs Autonomes de Paris (CLAP), and in Spain with the network Riders X Derechos. That said, in some of these countries, established trade unions have started to ‘catch-up’ – for instance, in Italy, where traditional union confederations have managed to both recruit and organise riders in some cities and to forge alliances with workers’ collectives (Vandaele, 2021). This variety in organisational forms – which at times is manifest within the same country – cannot therefore be explained only by different institutional features of national IR systems (cf. Gutiérrez Crocco and Atzeni, 2021). In line with the framework presented above, we argue that this diversity can be explained by looking also at the capabilities of the various labour actors present in the struggle and at the characteristics of the broader socio-political context within which gig workers are embedded. For instance, in comparative research on the British and Italian cases (Cini et al., 2021), we tried to understand why in the first wave of mobilisation of food delivery couriers (2016–2018), workers in the UK organised through grassroots unions such as the IWGB and IWW, whereas they initially opted for self-organisation in Italy. The analysis highlighted how rank-and-file unions in Britain were more equipped than their Italian counterparts with relevant expertise gained from previous organising experience of precarious workers in the urban service sector, which helped them to quickly establish a relationship with food couriers when the first strike started in London in the summer of 2016. Conversely, in Italy the broader socio-political context in which gig workers were embedded, in particular the political tradition of militant organising (Nowak, 2021), played a role in enhancing worker self-organisation. Indeed, precarious workers’ self-organisation had already emerged in the country throughout the 2000s, where workers across various sectors organised under the banner of ‘San Precario’ (a fictional saint for the precariat). In addition, workers could leverage on the material support provided by the ‘social movement infrastructures’ (e.g. collectives, social spaces, associations, etc.) embedded in their context of mobilisation. This equipped gig workers with expertise, capabilities and resources to sustain their mobilisation without relying on other more formal organisations. These brief examples show how, beyond the institutional features of national IR systems, labour actors’ capabilities and the broader socio-political context in which workers are embedded play an important role in shaping organisational forms within the gig economy. While research on gig workers’ mobilisation is expanding rapidly (e.g. Joyce et al., 2020; Jesnes et al., 2021; Vandaele, 2021), this theoretical framework could be fruitfully applied to
Resistance and struggle in the gig economy 369 other cases, both within the food delivery sector – which is by far the most combative segment within the gig economy – but also to other sectors within the gig economy.
CONCLUSION Throughout this chapter, we sought to make sense of worker resistance and organising within the gig economy. We started by providing a theoretical framework to account for the emergence of collective action even in the unfavourable structural conditions of the gig economy. We argued that the labour process within the gig economy presents some contradictions, arising from the process of valorisation adopted by platforms and from control through algorithmic management, which might be conducive to the emergence of worker solidarity and collective action. We then proposed some theoretical arguments to account for the heterogeneity in organising practices adopted by gig workers, proposing a bottom-up approach to workers’ organising integrating IR scholarship with insights from social movement studies, which looks at labour actors’ capabilities and the socio-political context in which they are embedded as relevant explanatory variables. This framework was then applied to the growing evidence on collective action in the gig economy. We showed how similar features of the gig economy labour process did indeed provide the triggers for the emergence of worker solidarity across the gig economy. Although some features of the location-based gig economy make the emergence of collective action easier, as shown by aggregate protest data, we also provided examples of existing linkages of solidarity between ‘crowdworkers’. We then turned to the organisational heterogeneity of gig workers’ mobilisation, showing how they opted to organise through established trade unions, but also grassroots and community unions as well as worker-led collectives. We provided examples showing that, whereas the difference in institutional features of IR systems can account for some of this heterogeneity, one also needs to look at labour actors’ capabilities and the relevant socio-political context to make sense of this diversity. Whereas we focused primarily on the food delivery industry, which has thus far exhibited the highest degree of collective action, future research will shed new light on the process of formation and development of worker solidarity across geographical areas and different sectors within the gig economy.
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30. Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace Saori Shibata
INTRODUCTION Covid-19 is advancing already existing processes of automation in sectors across the global economy (NOS 2020; Song 2020). Machines and robots are pandemic proof (Frey 2020). Many jobs can be done remotely, meaning that coronavirus is likely to encourage employers further to replace jobs with automation. While the virus does not discriminate, automation and digital technologies can exacerbate social cleavages and cause unrest in the long-term (Frey 2020), with lockdown already having disproportionately affected lower-waged workers (McKinsey 2020). The impact of automation is also likely to lead to further economic insecurity for many workers. In this context, we need to evaluate the impact of automation upon jobs and current ways of working. This chapter introduces these debates on the relationship between automation and jobs, and highlights the unexpected outcomes that automation has had upon work, and especially the way in which it has resulted in deskilling and the diminishing of workers’ autonomy.
AUTOMATION AND JOBS The contemporary global economy is facing a striking transformation, including what is often termed robotics, artificial intelligence and automation technologies (RAIA). The speed of technological innovation has accelerated to the extent that some estimate it has been doubling every decade (Bhaumik 2018: 345). This growth in RAIA has the potential to fundamentally change production, consumption and employment relations (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, Frey 2019; Frey and Osborne 2013; Ford 2015; Schwab 2016). The World Economic Forum reports that nearly 50 per cent of companies surveyed expect that automation will lead to a reduction in their full-time workforce by 2022, while 38 per cent of companies aim to reallocate employees to new roles (World Economic Forum 2018:18, 22–23). This, the World Economic Forum (WEF) claims, will lead to more than a quarter of companies creating new roles in their companies, meaning job losses will not be as significant as earlier predicted by Frey and Osborne (2013). As such the WEF urges companies to reskill or upskill their employees, seeking a move from automation to augmentation, in which governments likewise provide public investment to stimulate job creation. Some view automation as expanding into every sector of the economy and as primarily threatening lower-wage jobs. Ford (2015), for instance, expects low-income earners (who make up the vast majority of new positions generated in recent years in both the US and UK) to face job losses (p.10). Frey and Osborne claim that 47 per cent of jobs in the US will be replaced/replaceable by robots and automation in a decade or two (2013). The Nomura and 371
372 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Oxford Martin School study similarly estimates that 49 per cent of Japan’s workforce is at risk (Citi 2016: 59). The risk that RAIA will result in unemployment, low pay and insecure employment is especially great for so-called low-skilled workers. Despite these concerns, business consultants and business executives have tended to view automation as a ‘must’, with little choice over whether or not it is introduced or expanded. Those firms that do not engage in automation will lose out to global competition (Roose 2019). Adopting Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, some believe that technologies will actually create more jobs, and more value with less input, citing the way that high-tech jobs have ‘multiplier effects’ (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; Manyika et al. 2013). In their The Second Machine Age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014) acknowledge that technologies reduce demand for previously important types of labour, as well as contributing to a decline in the wage share and thereby creating both winners and losers. This is despite the fact that technologies can create more wealth with less work if someone can produce the same outcome with less time and less effort (2014: 132, 144–46). Robots have obvious advantages over human workers: they can work all day every day without sleep or breaks, without demanding healthcare or adding to the payroll tax burden (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014: 30). Some view technology as rational, autonomous and independent of all human activities (Ellul 1967, cited in Smith 1994: 30–31). Others argue that new technologies can replace class conflict and capitalism with a robot-labour-based political economy, thus enabling human beings to pursue creative labour (Walsh and Sculos 2018). While techno-optimists emphasise the significance of technology in driving economic change and improving productivity and human quality of life; techno-sceptics consider technology to be likely to lead to detrimental change in the work-life balance, to heighten inequality, create more precarious employment patterns and generate an increase in surveillance. Optimists lament the fact that investment in technologies and automation has been slow (Moody 2018: 20–25; O’Donovan 2019; Dyer-Witheford et al. 2019: 3–8). Critics, on the other hand, highlight profit-making (rather than human well-being) as the motive underpinning automation (Wood 2020: 67, 175–5; Moody 2018). For Moody, techno-optimists such as Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) and Ford (2015), are technological determinists who wrongly downplay the problems associated with automation, especially heightened class conflict (2018: 20–25). As this debate highlights, decisions over automation are not value-neutral: ‘they invariably favour the interests of some over the interests of others’ (Smith 1994: 32). Thus, despite ongoing pressures upon businesses to automate, the question of whether to automate and how to distribute the associated gains remains a value judgement (Roose 2019). Automation leads to a polarisation between different types of jobs. As techno-sceptics have consistently pointed out, technologies and the knowledge economy have resulted in a thinning out of middle-income jobs, while upper- and lower-income jobs have both increased (Noam 2018: 328, 380; O’Donovan 2019: 12; Waverman 2018: 446; Webster and Ivanov 2019: 5). This has led to a polarisation in which opportunities have increased for professionals and high-skilled and cognitive workers, and greater numbers of low-paid/low-skilled work; but with declining job opportunities in the middle range of the labour market (Noam 2018: 383; Waverman 2018: 446). Elderly workers in particular lose out from this polarisation, as high-end jobs become too difficult to access and low-skilled jobs tend to be physically too demanding (Noam 2018: 384). New technologies therefore create inequality among occupational classes and between generations (Eubanks 2018; Noam 2018: 387).
Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace 373 The potential benefits of automation – improved labour productivity and efficiency, and reduced work – are therefore overshadowed by the serious concerns associated with it. Automation does not straightforwardly enrich the majority of workers. Automation leads to (unexpected) negative outcomes. It is to these negative outcomes, and their impact on the digital economy, that we now turn.
AUTOMATION AND DESKILLING Mishra et al. (2019) define deskilling as ‘the notion that the quality, range and depth of professional knowledge necessary to perform a job is systematically degraded through an intervention, with the result that only a subset of tasks needs to be performed by workers, who do not need to have the same level of skills as before the intervention’ (2019: 2). As such, the association between technology and deskilling is not a recent phenomenon. This connection had already become evident under Fordism, which sought to eliminate all unnecessary motions from the mass-production line (Zuboff 1985: 6–7). In this sense, automation in the digital era continues this attempt to break up tasks into less complicated fragmented components. This process deprives workers of their skills. Further, automation narrows the scope of an employee’s work as well as their ability to see the entire process of production. Drawing on Braverman, Mishra et al. argue that workers lose sight of how different parts of the work process fit together or fit in the overall production process (2019: 3–4). Automation therefore devalues workers’ skills, leaving workers with draining and unappealing jobs. Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) fail to consider this process, through which technologies reinforce capitalist social relations as well as the importance of power relations for the direction and outcome of digital technologies (Irani 2015). For instance, human workers have to conduct fragmented tasks including checking, clarifying and filtering data, testing the algorithms and overseeing the process of machine learning (Irani 2015). Moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI) work has become mundane, requiring the practices of collecting data and managing datasets, designing algorithms and altering codes (Pettersen 2018: 2–3). Similarly, Japanese restaurants have introduced new machines and wearable devices, leading to workers becoming more dependent on technology to calculate, estimate and predict customers’ behaviours, resulting in a loss of workplace autonomy for chefs and serving staff (Shibata 2019). While automation creates high-skilled and creative cognitive jobs, for the majority it creates low-skilled and low-wage jobs. Low-skilled workers not only face deskilling and mundane work but also encounter heightened competition as a result of robotisation and AI and the way in which this contributes to a lowering of wages. Webster and Ivanov (2019) show how automation forces humans to compete with machines (2019: 7). This involves a downward pressure on low-skilled jobs, while knowledge-based jobs or jobs which require specialisations remain visible despite automation (Degryse 2016: 50–51; Webster and Ivanov 2019: 8). However, high-skill work, which used to be only possible for humans to perform, is also increasingly being replaced by advanced technologies and machines, thereby threatening more jobs and contributing to the anxiety faced by workers (Mishra et al. 2019: 7, 8). Automation benefits corporate elites while displacing and deskilling employees and reducing workers’ welfare. Sharif and Huang report, based on their interviews with factory workers in China, that even when automation did not result in job losses, it nevertheless saw workers
374 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work moved into different roles where they ended up doing low-skilled work (2018: 13). This also contributed to a weakening of the bargaining power of skilled veteran workers who were more vocal in demanding social insurance and pay rises (2018: 18). Taylorism and Fordism contributed to the deskilling of human labour by breaking down the process of manufacturing works and creating repetitive tasks. In the digital era, new technologies have had a similar effect, rationalising service jobs into repetitive and isolated tasks and spreading the trend of deskilling to the wider service sectors. This represents a means by which managers increase control over workers (Mishra et al. 2019: 4–6). The process of deskilling has therefore contributed to the subordination of workers to new technologies, reducing the autonomy of workers in both the service and manufacturing sectors.
REDUCING AUTONOMY While some techno-optimists advocate the capacity of advanced technologies to create new opportunities for workers (Ford 2015; Ross 2016; Srnicek and Williams 2015), these are arguably outweighed by concerns over the potential for automation and advanced technologies to curtail workers’ autonomy. Increased surveillance in the physical workplace or in the digital working environment reduces workers’ autonomy (Moore 2018; Shibata 2020; Zuboff 2019). Likewise, the increased power of metrics and newly created or more accurate knowledge of business operations by advanced technologies ensure that firms have more control over workers’ behaviour (Beer 2016; Zuboff 1985). Metrics and Machines, and Their Control Over Workers and Their Bodies New technologies have the potential to curtail workers’ autonomy due to the way that they prioritise certain data, metrics and information. This has the effect of making certain types of behaviour more visible and valued than others, leading to an increase in the importance of certain phenomena while others are rendered marginal (Beer 2016: 173). This resonates with what Zuboff calls ‘informating’. Technology not only automates production but also creates new information that did not exist before (Zuboff 1985: 8). Examples include data, videos, metrics and digital numbers, all of which can be used for tracking and analysis. This informating capacity enables managers and employers to acquire new information that contributes to both production processes and the increase in surveillance of workers and consequently a decline in their autonomy in the workplace (Zuboff 1985: 8). Measurement, metrics and information bring about a greater capacity for managers to control workers, but in doing so they also increase the governance of workers as well as their emotions and bodies. It is not only data but also new management systems supported by new technologies that can reduce workers’ autonomy by monitoring their behaviours and movements. Moore explains that from the early twentieth century, we live under the Agile Management System. Under this system, workers are required to be agile and adaptable to continuously changing work, and technologies have become the means by which this agility is to be achieved (2018: 58–59). This management system upheld by surveillance technologies monitors work and controls affective labour (pp. 29, 141). Under the surveillance capitalism, the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to improve work and life, but nevertheless acts to reduce choice, decision and power (Zuboff 2019: 278; Korinek 2019).
Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace 375 To give some examples of the power of new technologies and information: some firms adopt health check monitors to improve employees’ health and wellness but control employees. Software giant SAP offered its staff the opportunity to buy a subsidised Fitbit tracker, which is a wearable device to monitor health. One of the aims of this wearable device is to encourage employees to increase competition with their colleagues in terms of their health and wellness. However, this tracking system can be a source of stress in itself by blurring the line between work and leisure and ensuring employees are always ‘on-switch’ (Bradshaw 2016). Further, a number of Japanese chain restaurants have installed video-recording devices in order to help managers monitor workers, their efficiency and movement. Managers can use this new knowledge (informating capacity) to provide consistent customer service while depriving workers of autonomy. Digital technologies therefore monitor and intensify ways of working, in which human labour has become increasingly subordinated to technologies. Another example is Amazon, which has significantly increased the speed of delivery and product availability, but in a way that continuously challenges workers to increase their work speed. Irani (2015) reports how Amazon’s algorithms take incoming orders and instruct workers in the warehouse in a way that workers have to follow digital orders, gather items into carts and meet travel times. Warehouse workers tend also to be temporary workers who can be flexibly fired if they do not keep up with the pace. Similarly, workers at call centres in ticket agents and in logistics work are all also under digital surveillance (Irani 2015). Unstructured Work and its Impact on Workers’ Autonomy Gig work has become an increasingly common form of work. This also acts to reduce workers’ autonomy due to the fragmented nature of the tasks involved. Workers are virtually scattered and systematically placed to compete with one another, while traditional working relationships do not exist in digital platforms (Valenduc and Vendramin 2016: 41). For instance, one of the best-known digital platforms, Mechanical Turk (MTurk), mediates between online gig workers and contractors, requiring gig workers to perform tasks. Gig workers tend, as a result, to become socially disconnected from the entire line of work and lose the capacity to control their work. At the same time, they are required to be permanently capable and available as they are compared through the online platform in terms of their availability, efficiency and performance. Unstructured work and its power to diminish workers’ autonomy therefore generates precarity and endangers workers’ well-being. Workers who take up fragmented tasks, work with low wages, part-time, temp or gig workers all tend to face a vicious cycle of poverty. Such workers are likely to face low satisfaction and high stress. Mishra et al. insightfully show how these workers have an unpredictable work schedule, which is enabled by automation and new technologies. They have less control over their unpredictable schedule and therefore less capacity to make other life and family arrangements. They tend also to face low self-esteem in comparison to other established ‘career’ workers (Mishra, et al. 2019: 6). Walsh and Sculos (2018), drawing on Marx and Engels, argue that workers have been continuously enslaved by machines, and that mechanisation endangers employment and workers’ livelihoods (p.103). In this sense, new technologies have the potential to harm workers’ work-life balance. New technologies also generate flexibility for customers and clients, while at the same time disrupting workers’ schedules and their own time management. Electronic monitoring introduced in the care service sector, for instance, has made real-time data visible to employers and is used
376 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work to track missed, late and over-running visits (Moore and Hayes 2018: 107). In this instance, care workers are punished and not compensated if they are late due to travel difficulties or the unexpected demand from their clients. They face a blurred line between paid and unpaid work as electronic monitoring systems delineate productive and unproductive labour time for the purposes of pay (Moore and Hayes 2018: 112). The sum of all of this is that workers are coerced into becoming more readily and flexibly available to employers. People Analytics and Intensified Monitoring of Human Behaviour Big Data may benefit employers but it also creates intense monitoring of human labour. Firms such as Google have begun to use Big Data to manage their employees at work. This strategy is termed ‘people analytics’, a term originally used to analyse customers and clients and select ‘good’ employees, as well as collecting social data on employees to facilitate good ‘teamwork’ (Sharp 2018: 64). In the case of one call centre, based on people analytics, worker efficiency was shown to increase as a result of inter-office collaboration during lunch breaks. This led to the conclusion that all workers should take breaks at the same time, resulting in the increased speed of handling calls and saving the company money (Griswold 2014, cited in Sharp 2018: 65). People analytics can therefore enable a new stage in workplace rationalisation, in which metrics continuously govern employees’ behaviour in the workplace. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff (2019) similarly argues that the IoT creates a great convenience to our work, but it also takes away our choice, decision and power. They decide on behalf of us by optimising outcomes and operation. Zuboff further points out the diminishing level of user’s self-control and behaviour modification, which may emerge under the digital age (2019: 294). Wearable devices, digital screens and metrics provide information on the highly optimised way of working, on which workers become increasingly dependent while losing their power over decision-making, creativity and control over their mind and body. Technology itself may be neutral, but the way in which it is adopted under capitalist social relations creates a new form of exploitation. As Moore (2018) shows, technology itself does not create the conditions of precarity, but the use of data and the invisibilisation of power relations have intensified management and worker control (2018: 130). Likewise, computer software enables restaurant service ‘to predict hourly customer demand and delivery schedules with precision, encouraging employers to create “just-in-time” schedules in which workers are called in or sent home on short notice’ (Degryse 2016: 44). Restaurant businesses, in their pursuit for the increase in productivity and efficiency through automation, exacerbate pressure upon employees. For instance, the Japanese sushi chain, Kurazushi, has a data input system at the entrance of restaurants which increases the efficiency of chefs and waitresses, but at the same time requires workers to be ever-increasingly alert (Shibata 2019). New technologies thus have the potential to strictly control the way we work and to reduce our autonomy. Mechanisms such as real-time evaluation of worker performance have the capacity to increase pressure on workers.
Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace 377
CONCLUSION Digital technologies may simplify work tasks and may even help the ageing workforce. At the same time, however, automation strips away workers’ skills and curtails human autonomy. This generates low wages while increasing the level of workplace surveillance. The emergence of new technologies and automation creates a significant disruption in labour markets, rendering production processes more capital intensive (Sachs et al. 2018: 163–164). Digitization may, therefore, be productive but it also produces precarious workers. Workers, who do not have high cognitive skills and who benefit from the knowledge economy, do not enjoy so-called post-work (Srnicek and Williams 2015) nor post-capitalism (Mason 2015). As robots set higher standards in terms of efficiency, labour productivity and agility, human labour is bound to be compared with these standards, leading to downward pressure on wages and more stressful work. As such, automation brings about (unexpected) negative consequences. The Covid-19 crisis is expected to further advance these processes. As Frey warns, automated jobs are of low pay, and automation will increase anxiety among low-skilled workers (Frey 2020). Automation leads to deskilling and reduced autonomy. Employers may benefit from automation, but for workers, the negative consequences outweigh any benefits.
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Deskilling and diminishing workers’ autonomy in the digital workplace 379 Valenduc, G. and Vendramin, P. (2016). ‘Work in the Digital Economy: Sorting the Old from the New’, Working Paper 2016.03, etui. Walsh, S. N. and Sculos, B. W. (2018). ‘Repressive Robots and the Radical Possibilities of Emancipated Automation’. In Kiggins, Ryan (Ed.), The Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for Prosperity and Peace in the Automated 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Chapter 6. Waverman, L. (2018). Digitized Labor: The Impact of Internet on Employment. London: Palgrave Macmillan, Chapter 1. Webster, C., and Ivanov, S. (2019). ‘Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Evolving Nature of Work’. In George, B., and Paul, J. (Eds.), Business Transformation in Data Driven Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, A. J. (2020). Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace. Ithaca: ILR Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press. World Economic Forum (2018). The Future of Jobs Report. Centre for the New Economy and Society. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2018.pdf Zuboff, S. (1985). ‘Automate/Informate: The Two Faces of Intelligent Technology’, Organizational Dynamics, 14(2), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(85)90033-6 *Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.
31. Exploring the economics of the gig economy: legal arbitrage and employment law Jeremias Adams-Prassl1
INTRODUCTION Much ink has been spilled, including by the present author, in analysing the platform economy—its economics, legality, and broader societal impacts, from the environment through to social protection. Despite enthusiastic early predictions of gig work becoming the new normal or standard work arrangement, however, the size of the gig economy has remained stubbornly consistent at relatively small levels, ranging from 1 to 3 per cent of most OECD labour markets.2 At the same time, the gig economy continues to be a focal point in policy discussions surrounding the future of work: at times, it appears that platform work is the only serious contender other than technological unemployment in dystopian visions of how technology is shaping the workplace of tomorrow (Frey and Osborne, 2013, 38–42). In this contribution, I return to some thoughts about the political economy of gig work. On-demand economy platforms’ business model is universally based on near-instant recourse to a large pool of on-demand workers: the ‘crowd’, looking for their next ‘gig’. The gig economy’s promise to deliver speedy services at low cost is premised on the availability of a large supply of workers who can easily be matched with consumer demand. Behind the language of gigs, tasks, and rides sits a much more sophisticated business model: the digital intermediation of work. At first glance, platforms are but a small cog in the gig economy, pairing consumers looking for a particular service with a suitable entrepreneur willing to complete the task. Algorithms take into account a wide range of relevant factors, from the quality of previous work and current availability to geographic location, and optimise the quality of each match—before charging a small fee for the service. Upon closer inspection, however, platforms’ role goes far beyond mere match-making. Instead, they offer digital work intermediation: in order to deliver tightly curated products and services to customers, gig economy operators actively shape the entire transaction through close control over their workers. Whilst elements of work in the on-demand economy might not look like traditional ‘9-to-5’ jobs with a single employer, the reality of work is often a far cry from the freedom and independence of genuine entrepreneurship. As a result, the services offered to consumers are considerably more than a simple one-off match, from quality monitoring to payment facilitation. Discussion is structured as follows. In exploring the economics of the gig economy, I first explore different potential value drivers: matching and intermediation, regulatory arbitrage, recourse to vast amounts of venture capital funding, as well as network effects and monopoly power. Discussion then revisits the business model in light of increasing employment (re-) classification, accepted by courts across the world, exploring the impacts for the gig economy’s business model. The only way to enjoy the potential upsides of work in the gig economy 380
Exploring the economics of the gig economy 381 without exposing ourselves to the problems of precarity, I suggest, lies in the consistent application and careful adaptation of employment law. As the gig economy’s business model is quickly coming to workplaces across the socio-economic spectrum, it is more important than ever to ensure that new start-ups and well-established enterprises alike can compete, innovate, and flourish on a level playing field.
THE ECONOMICS OF THE GIG ECONOMY How do the gig economy’s economics work? Delving into the numbers, we quickly discover a number of possible explanations: some argue that the gig economy creates value through platforms’ faster matching of consumer demand and worker supply, relying on clever algorithms and sophisticated rating systems to grasp otherwise wasted business opportunities. Another school of thought is more critical, suggesting that regulatory arbitrage and negative externalities are at the core of most platforms’ valuations. A.
Matching and Intermediation
The dominant story behind the gig economy’s commercial success is one of platforms’ vastly superior matching opportunities, unlocking and creating surplus value in the economy. Platforms then reap a small percentage of this added value through their fees. There is undoubtedly a core of truth to this: faster matches greatly improve the functioning of product and service markets. Economics Nobel Laureate Christopher Pissarides was amongst the first to formalise this model in the employment context: imagine a labour market in which some firms are looking for workers in one city, and individuals are looking for jobs in another. It will be hard for either party to find out about the other, leaving jobs unfilled and workers unemployed. These ‘search frictions’ are wasteful, and leave everyone worse off.3 Through technological innovation from location tracking and user ratings to sophisticated algorithms which match consumers and workers, whether purely online or in the real world, platforms have drastically reduced this friction: using Amazon’s MTurk, an economist in Australia can quickly find a student in the United States to help them organise data in a large spreadsheet. Even better, matching isn’t the only market friction removed by the platform: in an open-market transaction with an independent entrepreneur, consumers would have to spend significant amounts of time and effort to find out information about the service provider’s background and experience, control the quality of the work, and negotiate prices. This is the real value of digital labour intermediation: gig economy operators also provide information about how reliable a worker is, take care of invoicing and payments, and provide a (digital) infrastructure on which the entire exchange can take place. With transaction cost so drastically reduced, the narrative continues, the traditional firm as described by Ronald Coase becomes obsolete: we move into a hybrid world between markets and hierarchies. According to Coase’s theory of the firm, companies exist because the control exercised by an entrepreneur-coordinator over their workforce and other factors of production is much cheaper than the cost involved in going out to the market and haggling over each individual transaction (Coase, 1937, 386). Once an app has taken all the hassle out of such transactions, on the other hand, Coase’s entrepreneur will no longer need to strike long-term
382 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work bargains with workers, let alone invest in assets: they can replace their workforce with an external crowd, ready to complete individual tasks as and when required. Better matching and lower transaction cost undoubtedly unlock value: the economist finishes their job more quickly, the student earns some extra income—and Amazon charges a few US cents as commission for its matching and intermediation service. So far, so good: the internet is used to facilitate transactions between strangers which could otherwise not have taken place. That story, however, fails to answer a fundamental question: why are sharing economy platforms worth so much? How can start-up businesses that simply rely on matching supply and demand via the internet quickly be valued in the millions or billions and lay claim to an economic revolution? Digital matching services, online market places, and classified sites such as Craigslist and Gumtree have after all been around for nearly two decades—and are valued at much lower prices. B.
Regulatory Arbitrage
Professor Julia Tomassetti is highly critical of the suggestion that platforms’ primary value creation is achieved through better matching and lower transaction cost: What happens when we actually subject the Uber narrative to scrutiny under Coasian theory? It does not hold up. From the Coasian perspective, Uber does not write the epitaph of the firm (Tomassetti, 2016, 1).
Platforms, she convincingly argues, speak the language of markets—but they operate like old-fashioned employers, relying on technology to exercise tight control over their workforce. Tomassetti does not deny that gig economy platforms have a dramatically lowered transaction cost in comparison with established competitors. Lowering transaction cost alone, however, cannot account for platforms’ phenomenal valuations and claims to disruptive innovation: there is, despite all claims to the contrary, little that is genuinely novel insofar as platforms’ production processes are concerned. Uber follows the basic lines of a traditional taxi firm, TaskRabbit those of a labour outsourcing agency. The key to understanding the business model, she points out, is a different one: platforms are but the latest example of ‘postindustrial corporations’. They seek ‘to maximize profit, but not necessarily through productive enterprise. Rather, [they] may create shareholder value by other means, like asset manipulation, speculative activity, and, most pertinent here, regulatory arbitrage’ (Tomassetti, 2016, 1). What does that mean? Victor Fleischer’s seminal work defines regulatory arbitrage as ‘the manipulation of the structure of a deal to take advantage of a gap between the economic substance of a transaction and its regulatory treatment’. Firms, in other words, may try to structure their business so as to hide what is actually going on from regulators and evade the law. His first example of a ‘pervasive’ arbitrage technique? ‘[F]iring employees and re-hiring them as independent contractors to avoid employment regulation’ (Fleischer, 2010, 227–230).4 In that sense, then, employment law, or rather the evasion of employment law, is at the core of the gig economy business model. Recourse to large pools of on-demand workers is ‘the economic substance’ of platforms’ transactions. Employing a large workforce creates responsibilities—which impose cost on people-intensive business models. In return for the benefits of control over their workforce, employment regulation places a financial burden on employers: from social security contributions, minimum wage laws, and sick leave, to
Exploring the economics of the gig economy 383 health and safety regulations and union bargaining. Stable employment relationships are also associated with indirect cost, as the risk of fluctuations in demand cannot be off-loaded onto individual workers: a bus company’s drivers ply their routes and receive wages regardless of whether passengers are aboard or not.5 Regulatory arbitrage in the gig economy takes many forms: think about ride-sharing platforms’ insistence that taxi regulation does not apply to their business, for example. Portraying workers as independent entrepreneurs and refuting their employment status, on the other hand, is a consistent theme throughout: shareholder value is created by denying workers their legally mandated rights. Independent contractor classification allows platforms to offer services without having to pay for their cost. Responsibility for assets, remuneration, insurance, and tax, as well as the risks of fluctuating demand, are devolved to individual micro-entrepreneurs. The potentially enormous gains from this financial arbitrage are at the core of gig economy business models. In the words of Uber’s financial advisors, ‘adverse determinations in these matters may subject it to additional compensation expenses or taxes in certain jurisdictions, which could have a material adverse effect on its ability to operate its business’ (Verhage, 2016).6 Regulatory arbitrage also leads to negative externalities: the social cost of platforms’ activities are higher than their private cost. Think, for example, of a number of ride-sharing cars roaming the streets whilst looking for the next passenger. We have already seen that platforms usually try to have as many workers as possible available at any given time. This is enticing to consumers, who can quickly catch a ride in whichever car is closest; the drivers, on the other hand, suffer precisely because supply is designed to far outstrip demand. The platforms’ algorithms have trapped workers in a low-productivity environment in order to fulfil orders as quickly as possible—ignoring the costs incurred by the other drivers looking for a job: from the cost of their time and petrol to the environmental implications of having a large number of cars polluting away. Classic economic theory spells out the implications. If a service provider doesn’t have to bear the full range of costs created by their product or service, they will end up offering too much of it. The platform always wins, even if individual workers—and indeed society at large—lose out. C.
Cash Burn
On the basis of what we have seen so far, gig economy shareholders should be able to rejoice, and reap considerable profits: growing demand can be met without capital investment or other downside risks. In reality, however, most operators have been sustaining high losses: according to transportation industry analyst Hubert Horan, ‘in the year ending September 2015, Uber had GAAP losses of $2 billion on revenue $1.4 billion, a negative 143% profit margin. … 2016 GAAP losses would easily exceed $3 billion’ (Horan, 2017, 1–8). Numbers are less extreme for other platforms, but the underlying struggle for profitability is the same: TaskRabbit, for example, had long aimed to turn a profit by the end of 2016—and promptly ‘backed away from that claim’ when the time came, whilst continuing to insist that it would ‘get there soon’ (Brustein, 2016; Newcomer, 2017). Horan suggests that venture capital funded subsidies are a major factor behind these losses: Uber passengers were paying only 41% of the actual cost of their trips; Uber was using these massive subsidies to undercut the fares and provide more capacity than the competitors who had to cover
384 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 100% of their costs out of passenger fares. Many other tech startups lost money as they pursued growth and market share, but losses of this magnitude are unprecedented (Smith, 2016a).7
As gig economy platforms become mature market players, mounting losses raise a difficult question: will they ever be profitable? Or has regulatory arbitrage camouflaged a different model altogether, leading to a misallocation of capital? The Financial Times’ Izabella Kaminska was amongst the first to raise these concerns as part of her long-running investigation of Uber’s financials: If Uber is cheap it is not because it has out innovated the incumbent cab market, which at the end of the day has access to exactly the same ride-hailing technology. To the contrary, it’s because investors have failed to recognise that the source of its greatest innovations is and always has been cheap money. Indeed, from egregious undercutting tactics based on promotional giveaways to turning a blind eye to exploitative labour practices thanks to the cheap funding of aggressive lobbying campaigns aimed at changing legal frameworks or the reckless flooding of the market with huge amounts of spare capacity, none of it would be possible without access to cheap financing (Kaminska, 2016).
If Kaminska is correct, we are still left with one final question: assuming the rapid growth of gig economy platforms has really been fuelled by little more than a combination of regulatory arbitrage and cheap venture capital money, why are savvy investors competing to invest? What is behind their willingness to burn unprecedented amounts of cash? D.
Network Effects and Monopoly Power
It is common for start-up businesses to lose money early on, of course: not least by subsidising products in order to gain market share. This is particular important in industries where investors hope to harness so-called network effects: all users of a particular service gain if additional consumers adopt it (Farrell and Klemperer, 2007, 1967–1974). Think about the growth of a ride-sharing platform in a new city, for example: if a large number of consumers are using a particular app to hail taxis, it will become more attractive for drivers to sign up. A large available pool of drivers in turn will make it easier and cheaper for consumers to find their next ride, further increasing the incentives for new drivers to join—and so on. It is unsurprising that gig economy platforms will often try to kickstart this process by investing significant amounts of cash in subsidies for drivers as well as passengers. Hubert Horan, however, is sceptical that this is the entire story: cash burn, he suggests, is not merely about harnessing network effects—but a step in platforms’ quest for monopoly power. Focusing once more on Uber as the most pointed example, he explains the links: … most critically, the staggering $13 billion in cash its investors provided is consistent with the magnitude of funding required to subsidize the many years of predatory competition required to drive out more efficient incumbents. Uber’s investors did not put $13 billion into the company because they thought they could vanquish those incumbents under “level playing field” market conditions; those billions were designed to replace “level playing field” competition with a hopeless battle between small scale incumbents with no access to capital struggling to cover their bare bone costs and a behemoth company funded by Silicon Valley billionaires willing to subsidize years of multi-billion dollar losses. Given Uber’s growth to date, investor expectations that monopoly rents justifies the current level of subsidies and financial risks appears quite plausible (Smith, 2016b).8
Exploring the economics of the gig economy 385 This account stands in stark contrast with the idea that the rise of gig economy platforms will lead to increased competition, with lower prices and higher quality as the result: in the expensive pursuit of network effects, some platforms’ goal may well be to smother competition, rather than encourage it. Individual operators will always vary in the extent to which their business model combines the factors thus set out. Whichever way we approach the question, however, the underlying economics don’t appear to stack up: a quandary to which we return in the final section. Faster matching, digital work intermediation, and assorted rating algorithms have the potential to create much economic benefit. Regulatory arbitrage, externalities, and lacking profitability despite considerable cash burn, on the other hand, should give us all pause for thought.
REVISITING THE BUSINESS MODEL Against this background, the final question to explore is the consequence of employment (re-)classification: as courts across the world are increasingly agreeing with challenges to gig economy ‘independent contractor’ status, what will be the implications for the gig economy business model? On a fundamental level, the problems often identified with gig economy work—for workers, consumers, taxpayers, and markets—are all driven by a single, closely related issue. By presenting themselves as mere match-makers rather than powerful service providers and intermediaries, platforms can shift much of their business risk and cost onto their stakeholders. Regulatory arbitrage, externalities, and asset misallocation: all skew the playing field in favour of platforms, and impose cost on everyone else. Employment law has a unique potential to level the playing field. If we want platforms to bear the cost of their operations, we have to ensure that they obey the rules like any other business. Given the centrality of a large, on-demand workforce to the gig business model, employment law has a key role to play: it is the prime ‘vehicle for channelling and redistributing social and economic risks, through the imposition on employers of obligations of revenue collection, and compensation for interruption to earnings’ (Deakin and Wilkinson, 2005, 15).9 Cambridge Professors Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson refer to this as the ‘risk function’ of employment law: in return for the employer’s control over their workers, the risks and cost of economic insecurity are channelled so as to impose obligations on the party with superior resources (109). Put differently, a properly regulated labour market where platforms exercising a high degree of control over every aspect of service delivery are held responsible as employers will ensure that gig economy operators do not just reap the benefits of the economic activity—they will also have to ‘assume responsibility for social and economic risks arising from the employment relationship’ (Deakin and Wilkinson, 2005, 86–87). Viewed thus, the importance of employment law goes beyond regulating the immediate relationship between workers and their employers. As Professor Alain Supiot of the Collège de France explains: [u]nder the model of the welfare state, the work relationship became the site on which a fundamental trade-off between economic dependence and social protection took place. While it was of course the case that the employee was subjected to the power of another, it was understood that, in return, there was a guarantee of the basic conditions for participation in society (2001, cited in Deakin and Wilkinson, 2005, 14).
386 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Deakin and Wilkinson go as far as characterising the state as an ‘implicit third party’ in employment relationships. Individual workers are rarely in a good position to hedge against economic risk: investors can easily minimise their exposure to risk by diversifying their bets and splitting their money across different assets; it is rather hard to do the same with jobs. Workers are unable to protect themselves through portfolio diversification: their entire (human capital) stake will usually be concentrated in a single employer (Markowitz, 1991). Employment law steps into the breach, ‘channelling the risks of economic insecurity throughout the workforce as a whole through the social insurance system, and using social security contributions and income taxation to support the public provision of welfare services’ (Deakin and Wilkinson, 2005, 16). Some might object at this point that employment law is too complicated a mechanism for (risk) redistribution: wouldn’t it be easer to let platforms operate freely, and then tax their profits to provide workers with state benefits instead? Platforms would still be forced to bear the cost of their business activities, but could continue with independent contractor classification. Even if we were to ignore the practical problems with this approach (remember the difficulties with tax collection chronicled earlier), however, it turns out that employment law appears to be much the most efficient way of ensuring that employers internalise the cost of their business activities. Harvard University’s Larry Summers was amongst the first to explore this question, weighing up direct government provision (tax and redistribute) and mandated employer benefits. His conclusion? Placing responsibility for worker protection, from social security to unfair dismissal law, on employers offered ‘substantial efficiency gains to accomplishing social objectives in ways other than government taxation’. Making firms bear these burdens, he noted, was not only the best way of combating externalities: it also afforded workers more choice, and was ‘likely to involve fewer distortions of economic activity’ (Summers, 1989, 177–181).10 This focus on employment should not be taken as a suggestion that other areas, such as notably consumer law and tax law, don’t have an important subsidiary role to play in regulating the on-demand economy: Calo and Rosenblat, for example, suggest that consumer protection law’s ‘long emphasis on information and power asymmetry’ might be well-suited to tackle many of the challenges facing both consumers and workers in the gig economy; Oei and Ring have developed promising short- and long-term models for tax enforcement (Calo and Rosenblat, 2017, 40; Oei and Ring, 2015, 989–1056). It is furthermore not the role of employment law to stop investors from investing as they see fit: equal competition in which each business bears its cost also ensures that financial markets do not misallocate assets away from genuinely productive and innovative entrepreneurs. The first and fundamental step, however, must be the recognition that where platforms sell work, they should be treated as employers.
TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE PLATFORM ECONOMY One final objection should be addressed in concluding: who will pay the price of this rebalancing? First and foremost, the investors and shareholders behind platforms designed and valued on the basis of existing regulatory arbitrage. Restoring platforms’ responsibility will undoubtedly cause disruption in the short term: platform employers will have to face the full cost of their activities, from equipment and consumables to wages and insurance premiums.
Exploring the economics of the gig economy 387 The price of certain services will rise, and some business models might turn out to be unsustainable altogether. Insofar as avoidance of basic labour standards has been key to many platforms’ business models, compliance will affect their profitability—and thus valuations. Investors lured by promises of multi-billion-dollar opportunities might see the value of their shares plummet. That said, the negative consequences of proper employment classification are often deliberately overstated. Take US platform HomeJoy, which ceased operations in 2015, supposedly as result of a worker misclassification suit brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Professor Miriam Cherry is rightly suspicious: The rhetoric that Homejoy failed because its workers sued for minimum wage and overtime protections failed to establish a key element: causality. While labor unrest is certainly not good for business, it is not clear that paying workers minimum wage was the cause of Homejoy’s bankruptcy filings. In fact, Homejoy’s business model was in financial trouble before the company’s legal troubles began … As such, it would be overblown to conclude from only this one isolated example that paying workers minimum wage would mean the immediate bankruptcy of the on demand economy (Cherry, 2015, 577).
The potential collapse of individual platforms should thus not necessarily alarm us. Some operators would strongly disagree with this conclusion, pointing to the many positive externalities of their services: Uber has repeatedly argued, for example, that its service significantly decreases the number of drunk driving arrests (Chris, 2014). These claims, however, are heavily contested: when Professors Noli Brazil and David Kirk scrutinised the platform’s drunk driver claims they found that ‘deployment of Uber services in a given metropolitan county had no association with the number of subsequent traffic fatalities, whether measured in aggregate or specific to drunk-driving fatalities or fatalities during weekends and holidays’ (Brazil and Kirk, 2016, 192).11
CONCLUSION As President Franklin D Roosevelt once noted, it seems ‘plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue’ (Roosevelt, 1933).12 Despite much doublespeak to the contrary, the application and enforcement of employment law in the gig economy is not a question of enforcing burdensome rules to thwart innovation. Businesses can only compete on a level playing field if existing employment laws are equally applied and consistently enforced. If anything, the insolvency of platforms which cannot sustain their activities once they have to bear the true cost of their services will benefit others in the long run, as resources are reallocated to more efficient businesses. The demise of rogue operators opens up space and consumer demand for new start-ups: Schumpeter’s creative destruction at work. Bringing gig economy work back into the scope of employment law will turn out to benefit everyone: workers, consumers, taxpayers—and even markets at large. Employment classification cuts off rogue operators’ regulatory arbitrage opportunities, and will force platforms to enter into genuine competition on matching and product quality. This is the key to a level economic and social playing field: ‘the argument for [employment law protection] is, in the
388 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work final analysis, an argument in favour of an integrative mechanism … which makes it possible for a market economy and a social state to co-exist’ (Deakin and Wilkinson, 2005, 109). Ensuring the full application of employment law is crucial if we want to make the gig economy work for all. Nothing in this analysis suggests that we should shut platforms down: improved matching and its associated algorithms have the definite potential to add value to our economy, create job opportunities, and give us all access to better products and services. For the industry to operate for everyone’s benefit, however, we need to ensure that platforms can no longer arbitrage around existing rules, and have to bear the cost of their business model: employment law can guarantee equal (and equitable) conditions for all.
NOTES 1
Professor of Law and Deputy Director of the Institute for European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford. Twitter: @JeremiasPrassl E-mail: jeremias.adams-prassl@law.ox.ac.uk Postal address: Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU, UK. A full exploration of the ideas drawn on in this chapter can be found in the book Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy (OUP 2018). 2 See e.g. Farrell and Greig (2016), Paychecks, paydays, and the online platform economy: Big data on income volatility (JPMorgan Chase Institute); CIPD (2017). 3 For an overview, see Pissarides (2011). His Nobel lecture is also available at https://www .nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2010/pissarides-lecture.pdf; archived at https://perma.cc/U64H-QRP7. 4 Not all commentators agree with the terminology, even though the phenomenon itself is generally accepted. Oei and Ring, for example, characterise platforms’ decision to classify themselves as mere intermediaries, and their ‘affirmative adoption of independent contractor classification’ as examples of ‘tax opportunism’, rather than regulatory arbitrage, whilst acknowledging that the overlap between those categories can be significant: ‘In some cases, it may be questionable whether the transapction should be viewed as arbitrage (i.e., one that has been deliberately structured, in a manner that incurs some transaction costs, to secure larger regulatory benefits) or opportunism (i.e., taking advantage of an existing gap in the law available due to inherent features of the new sharing model)’ (Oei and Ring, 2016; Pollman and Jordan, 2017). 5 Questions about the true cost of the gig economy platform model do not stop there. Individual contractor classification doesn’t just shift many business costs to individual workers: it increases them. Daniel Hemel of Chicago University has highlighted the cost of this ‘unpooling’: employment law bundles risks (from health and longevity to disability and productivity) from a large group of workers, which makes insurance cheap. As risk is devolved to individual workers, the price of individual insurance inevitably rises. See Daniel Hemel, ‘Pooling and Unpooling in the Uber Economy’ (2017) University of Chicago Legal Forum. 6 The list of currently avoided cost is impressive: ‘Among other things, such a determination could entitle certain drivers using the Company’s platform to the reimbursement of certain expenses, lead to the potential unionization of drivers, impose tax withholding and reporting obligations on the Company, entitle drivers using the Company’s platform to the benefit of wage-and-hour laws, impose applicable leaves of absence requirements, medical insurance, workers compensation insurance, ERISA and similar pension fund obligations and restrictions on the Company.’ 7 Horan’s detailed numbers are now available in a published article: see Horan, ‘The Growth of Uber’ (n 38). Other reports highlight narrowing losses and continuing strong growth. In August 2017, Dan Primack reported that ‘Uber’s global ride-share business was margin positive last quarter, which is a flip from Q1’ (Primack, 2017). 8 Monopoly concerns have been raised by a number of commentators, see e.g. Pasquale (2016) for concerns that first-mover advantages and luck might thus be entrenched (and sources quoted there); though not everyone agrees: Meyer (2016).
Exploring the economics of the gig economy 389 Strictly speaking, their model is focused on the role of the contract of employment in British employment law; the underlying analysis, however, can easily be extrapolated to most developed employment law systems around the world. 10 Compare, in favour of redistribution Kaplow and Shavell (1994). 11 PolitiFact Texas rated Uber’s claims in Austin as ‘mostly true’, noting that ‘different timeframes for making statistical comparisons suggest a range of results—even, in one slice, more DWI collisions than before. It’s worth repeating that Uber is referring to correlations between ride-sharing’s availability and collisions, not necessarily causation’ (Gardner-Selby, 2015). 12 Roosevelt consistently argued in favour of basic labour standards (see Tritch, 2014). 9
REFERENCES Brazil, N. and Kirk, D.S. (2016). Uber and Metropolitan Traffic Fatalities in the United States. American Journal of Epidemiology 184, 192–198. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww062 Brustein, J. (2016). TaskRabbit’s Stalled Revolution. Bloomberg.com. Calo, R. and Rosenblat, A. (2017). The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power. Columbia Law Review 117, 1623. Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (2017). To Gig or Not to Gig? Stories from the Modern Economy (Survey Report 2017) 4. Cherry, M.A. (2015). Beyond Misclassification: The Digital Transformation of Work. Comp. Labor Law Policy Journal 37, 577. Chris (2014). DUI Rates Decline in Uber Cities. Uber Blog. URL https://www.uber.com/blog/chicago/ dui-rates-decline-in-uber-cities/ (accessed 12.8.22). Coase, R.H. (1937). The Nature of the Firm. Economica 4, 386–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335 .1937.tb00002.x Deakin, S.F. and Wilkinson, F. (2005). The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution. Oxford University Press. Farrell, D. and Greig, F. (2016). Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy: Big Data on Income Volatility. JPMorgan Chase Institute. Farrell, J. and Klemperer, P. (2007). Coordination and Lock-In: Competition with Switching Costs and Network Effects, in Armstrong, M., and Porter, R. (Eds.), Handbook of Industrial Organization. Elsevier, pp. 1967–2072. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1573-448X(06)03031-7 Fleischer, V. (2010). Regulatory Arbitrage. Texas Law Review 89, 227. Frey, C.B. and Osborne, M. (2013). The Future of Employment (Working Paper). Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Oxford. Gardner-Selby, W. (2015). ‘Uber says drunk-driving crashes down in Austin since advent of ride-sharing services’ Politifact (16 December 2015) https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2015/dec/16/ uber/uber-says-drunk-driving-crashes-down-austin-advent/; archived at https://perma.cc/4X3U-ZEP6 Hemel, D. (2017). Pooling and Unpooling in the Uber Economy. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Horan, H. (2017). Will the Growth of Uber Increase Economic Welfare. Transportation Law Journal 44, 33. Kaminska, I. (2016). Mythbusting Uber’s valuation. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/ 51780f95-97f2-3e5d-b7d1-a63190bfe5d8 Kaplow, L. and Shavell, S. (1994). Why the Legal System is Less Efficient than the Income Tax in Redistributing Income The Journal of Legal Studies 23, 667. Portfolio Selection. J. Finance 7, 77–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/2975974 Markowitz, H.M. (1991). Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments. Wiley. Meyer, J. (2016). Uber Is Not (And Will Never Be) A Monopoly. Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/ jaredmeyer/2016/02/15/uber-guardian-not-monopoly-ridesharing/#2f4e6c377932; archived at https:// perma.cc/3DL6-638C Newcomer, E. (2017). Uber, Lifting Financial Veil, Says Sales Growth Outpaces Losses. Bloomberg. com. Oei, S.-Y. and Ring, D.M. (2015). Can Sharing Be Taxed? Washington University Law Review 93, 989.
390 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Oei, S.-Y. and Ring, D.M. (2016). Can Sharing Be Taxed? Washington University Law Review 93, 1027, 1042, 1051. Pasquale, F. (2016). Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism, Yale Law and Policy Review 35. Pissarides, C. (2011). Equilibrium in the Labor Market with Search Frictions. American Economic Review 101, 1092–1105. Pollman, E. and Jordan, M.B., (2017). Regulatory Entrepreneurship. Southern California Law Review 90, 383. Prassl, J. (2018). Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy. Oxford Univeristy Press. Primack, D. (2017). Exclusive: Inside Uber’s Financials. Axios (23 August 2017) https://www.axios .com/exclusive-uber-financials-2475912645.html; archived at https://perma.cc/7EN9-XUXK. Roosevelt, F.D (1933). Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum – Our Documents [WWW Document]. Our Doc. Natl. Ind. Recovery Act. URL http:// docs .fdrlibrary .marist .edu/ odnirast.html (accessed 12.8.22). Smith, Y. (2016a). Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part One – Understanding Uber’s Bleak Operating Economics. Naked Capital. URL https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver -part-one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html (accessed 12.8.22). Smith, Y. (2016b). Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Four – Understanding That Unregulated Monopoly Was Always Uber’s Central Objective. Naked Capital. URL https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/ can-uber-ever-deliver-part-four-understanding-that-unregulated-monopoly-was-always-ubers-central -objective.html (accessed 12.8.22). Summers, L. (1989). Some Simple Economics of Mandated Benefits. American Economic Review 79, 177–183. Tomassetti, J. (2016). Does Uber Redefine the Firm: The Postindustrial Corporation and Advanced Information Technology. Hofstra Labor Employment Law Journal 34, 1. Tritch, T. (2014). ‘FDR Makes the Case for the Minimum Wage’ The New York Times (New York City, 7 March 2014). http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/f-d-r-makes-the-case-for-the -minimum-wage/; archived at https://perma.cc/6WPQ-DYWU Verhage, J. (2016). Here’s What Morgan Stanley Is Telling Its Wealthiest Clients About Uber. Bloomberg.com.
Section C. Intersections of work and life
32. Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work Ursula Apitzsch
INTRODUCTION Care work can be defined as the social embedding of production – as care for others and for the self – and an important form of societal production: the production of biological and societal life itself. This definition implicitly contains a critique of the Marxist concept of reproduction. Marx did not investigate the organization (biological or sexual) of reproduction itself. Birth, family arrangements and so on were seen as part of the means by which society produced ‘labour-power’; the future labourers needed for the organization of commodity production to take place (Hearn 1987: 36). Feminist struggles for the recognition of care as productive work (e.g., Federici 2004) have gone hand in hand with the worldwide consequences of the “gender revolution” (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002: 3), with fewer and fewer families living according to the male breadwinner model, and large numbers of women entering the labour market. In this process of change of ‘gender orders’, housework and family work, care and welfare are being redistributed on a global scale, principally albeit not only between women (Apitzsch 2010). Female migrants from poor countries satisfy the growing demand for care work in countries of the global North (Ehrenreich and Hochschild ibid.). Personal services are bought and sold on the “backstage of the global market” (Hochschild 2010: 23), largely free from any political structures or state regulation. As this happens the commodification of human capacities and needs, turning them into goods to be exchanged, becomes more and more pronounced. In rich countries, the process of outsourcing care also includes the phenomenon of transnational surrogacy, made possible by new artificial reproductive technologies (ART) (Apitzsch 2018). The right to one’s ‘own’ biological child is seen by many couples and individuals as an important feature of a fulfilled life. Those who can afford it can pay gestational mothers to carry a child to full term for them. Many reproductive clinics all over the world can legally offer human reproduction in the strict biological sense; that is the ‘manufacture’ of a child. The child becomes the “ultimate commodity” (Hochschild 2010), available on a global ‘free’ market. As Arlie Hochschild argues, this process is no longer as depicted in the unsettling visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). It does not involve state or terrorist violence; rather, it is the outcome of supposedly freely negotiated agreements between sellers and buyers in a global ‘free’ market where subjects’ actions are considered voluntary (Hochschild 2013). The woman ‘renting’ her womb supposedly ‘profits’ in the form of the possibility of reproducing her own life and that of the members of her family, and generates a new kind of production in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, “gestational surrogacy is a practice in which someone enters a paid contract to gestate an embryo and deliver an infant for one or more commissioning (also called ‘intended’) parents” (Vora 2019: 42). 392
Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work 393 In transnational commercial surrogacy contracts, “the intended parent then becomes the commissioning parent, a type of profit-based patient. … The clinic provides a portal for the transition of surrogates into the global service economy and, ironically, their transition into an industrialized labour force” (Vora 2019: 44). Clinics may implant in gestational surrogates other women’s egg cells (ova) fertilized by the sperm of future fathers in a Petri dish; so that there is no genetic relationship between gestational mother and child. The surrogates must also relinquish any right to have a say on what happens to surplus foetuses in advance; they are not allowed to keep these even if they want to. Surplus foetuses are surgically ‘reduced’ and destroyed (Pande 2010). The idea is to prevent any strong attachment to the child on the part of the surrogate mother. The women are supposed to see themselves not as mothers but as ‘carriers’, a kind of ‘packing’ containing a valuable commodity. All risks – also the risk of her own life or the life of the baby – remain on the side of the surrogate. She will get paid only if she hands the living baby over to the contract partners who ordered the child. The ‘chain of delivery’ characterizing surrogacy is complex and risky; and catastrophic events like an earthquake, a war or a pandemic may involve significant risks for the surrogate and child. This chapter reflects on some of the categories deployed to analyse the phenomenon of transnational surrogacy with a focus on the discussion of global outsourcing of care in times of ART. In particular, it reflects on the possibilities and limitations of considering gestational motherhood as a form of care work to be regulated as such. On the one hand, as a form of ‘productive’ work surrogacy is undoubtedly bodily and psychologically invasive. It is dangerous (even to the extent of losing one’s life), depleting and it involves forms of every day bodily control by the contracting fertility agency and the contracting future parents. On the other hand, given this strict control of the life of the surrogates with the argument of biological, medical and contractual necessities, it is difficult to argue that labour law could provide grounds for a regulatory framework, as Armstrong (2022) discusses and wants to develop, because she sees a market for commercial surrogacy especially in Britain. She herself admits “the non-consideration of surrogacy by labour lawyers” until today (Armstrong 2022: 170), and she reflects on some of the reasons for this fact. Drawing on the “Sex Work Is Work” movement for inspiration – like Armstrong does – may mean to adopt the regulatory models for sex work in the countries with the most permissive legislation (like, for example, Germany). Those models indeed regard sex work as normal work in so far as it is legal work and subject for taxation. However, it is not regulated as dependent work under labour law, but as entrepreneurship in the form of self-employment. The state does not regulate the relations between the sex worker and the client, but just asks for the fulfilment of professional hygienic rules. The state also does not regulate the relations between the sex worker and the owner of the houses where sex work may be performed (e.g., as a working contract), but just as an economic renting contract where the client has to pay and the landlord has to fulfil certain security demands. “What would be likely to prove problematic, however, would be the idea that the surrogates must be subject to the control of the intended parents” (Armstrong 2022: 186). For example, the consequences for the surrogate “could manifest in one of two ways: being denied the right to unilaterally decide to abort, or being forced to undergo an abortion against their wishes” (Armstrong 2022: 188). Finally, “there is real concern that this would illegitimately blur the line between labour and forced servitude” (ibid.). All parties in this complex debate accept that, at present, surrogacy is highly exploitative. Today, surrogacy and egg-cell extraction are being regulated in most democracies (but not the USA), including India, the European Union and the UK, as donations, analogous to
394 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work organ donation (Waldby and Cooper 2008). This means relatively little compensation for the donors of egg cells (between about 200 and 1000 Euros) and often large profits for the private clinics and biotech industries (Waldby and Mitchell 2006; Steinbrook 2006; Cooper 2008). In the EU, commercial surrogacy is banned, while non-commercial gestational motherhood is allowed in most European countries (Factsheet Reproduktionstechnologien (2022)). Germany did not sign the European convention on non-commercial surrogacy because of the German “Embryonenschutzgesetz” from 1990, a law that protects the human embryo from technological interventions such as the selection of female eggs according to genetic, racial or gender characteristics, regularly used in ARTs. Thus, in Germany not only surrogacy but also egg-cell donation is not legally possible. In many states of the USA, gestational motherhood for heterosexual and non-heterosexual couples or individuals is allowed. There are few regulations for egg-cell transfer. Racialized and normative selections (possibly referring to colour, beauty, health and IQ level of the donor as well as the gender of the embryo) are possible and decisive for the prize of the egg-cell transfer. The price of surrogacy is relatively high in comparison with Eastern European countries with high technological standards like, for instance, Ukraine. In the USA, price varies between 100 000–180 000 USD, whereas in Ukraine the cost is 10 per cent of that (Factsheet 2022). Therefore, until the 2022 invasion, Ukraine was the preferred destination for European people who wish to have a child by gestational motherhood. Before turning to the question of which categories provide the most appropriate way of capturing the phenomenon of surrogacy, some concrete recent examples of the phenomenon will be presented.
THE SITUATION OF SURROGATES IN TIMES OF POLICY CHANGES, NATURAL DISASTERS, PANDEMICS AND WAR Research on commercial surrogate motherhood has shown how carrying children to full term is organized as a production process in accordance with the market – as a contradictory process that on the one side exploits bodily, emotional, social and cultural resources but on the other side is seen as the liberal classic ‘win-win’ deal: surrogate mothers receive the money they need, and the clients get the baby they want. This deal conceals further beneficiaries, such as the clinic, the government – to the extent that profits are subject to tax – and other intermediaries involved in the trade (Pande 2010). Trading in babies is internationally outlawed. However, this has not stopped the commercialization of pregnancy. All over the world, procreation is increasingly being uncoupled from parenthood (Corradi 2021) and turned into a commercial technology. According to estimates by non-governmental organizations, the global trade in carrying other people’s embryos to full term was, in 2015, worth 6 billion USD annually (Baumann-Hölzle 2015). It is estimated that in 2030, the fertility market will reach an amount of about 48 billion USD per year (Factsheet 2022). Until recently, the worldwide centre of the transnational surrogacy industry had been India (Pande 2014), until a conservative government changed the law in 2016 (Nadimpally et al. 2016). Until then, the surrogacy market in India had an estimated turnover of 2.34 billion USD annually. In India, commercial surrogates were not allowed to carry children to full term for non-heterosexual couples. In order to carry children for them, Indian surrogates often travelled to Nepal. After the devastating earthquake hitting Nepal on 28 April 2015, many new-born
Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work 395 babies from surrogates were evacuated by plane to Israel because Nepal was a favoured destination for Israelis who wanted to have children through gestational surrogacy. Emergency plans included bringing pregnant Nepalese surrogate mothers to Israel, so that they could give birth to children as Israeli citizens (Günther 2015). In Israel, surrogate motherhood has been legally possible since 2014, but only for heterosexual couples. Non-heterosexual couples and individuals often turned to Nepal, due to its more permissive legal regulations. Notably, while excluding given categories of people from access to surrogacy, Israeli legislation is more liberal than the European one, as children from surrogate mothers can always be legally brought to Israel, even if resulting from forms of surrogacy deemed illegal (cf. Apitzsch 2016). After the 2016 ban in India, only Indian citizens may access surrogacy, and this must be non-commercial. It can be ‘altruistic’, for instance, if the gestational mother is a member of the close familial environment. This change has opened the way to other coercive practices. In her 2014 book, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India, Amrita Pande makes the case in favour of regulation of surrogates’ work as legal productive work, as surrogacy in illegal circumstances may expose women to multiple dangers. Big agencies with their medical and technological apparatus might still find ways to enact surrogacy, yet under illegal, dangerous and economically worse conditions for the surrogates. For instance, big agencies may amplify paternalistic power structures leading young women to be forced into surrogacy by members of their family or community, without any financial remuneration. In this false form of ‘altruistic’ – and coercive – surrogacy, only agencies and mediating family members would get paid. Therefore, banning surrogacy in the context of a great imbalance of power may merely disadvantage poor women, who would not have access any longer to commercial gestational motherhood as a source of income (Pande 2014; Narimpally et al. 2016) nor the possibility to at least reclaim the fruit of bodily commodification (Rudrappa 2015). Wichterich interprets this development as a special dynamic of “care extractivism”: “reproductive entrepreneurs went underground, women were driven into illegality, mobile arrangements and even greater vulnerability … . Agencies and clinics set up branches in Cambodia, but when a few months later Cambodia announced its own ban, they moved on to Laos” (Wichterich 2022: 20). After a number of bans were implemented in Asia, Ukraine became the global centre of surrogacy, competing with California, where surrogacy is also legal but far pricier. It is estimated that more than one quarter of all gestational arrangements worldwide are taking place in Ukraine (Factsheet 2022). During COVID-induced lockdowns, journalists reported that babies could not be handed over to the future parents. Provisional care services for them were installed in hotels, and only through the emotional surplus work of caring women were these babies able to survive. This situation became more dramatic with the war of Russia against Ukraine. Ukrainian women could not remain with their families in secure areas but had to travel through fighting areas to give birth to the children in clinics placed in Kiev, and afterwards they had to travel to the border to hand the babies over to the future parents (Davydov 2022). When this was not possible, babies were stored in bunkers – often a large number of them with a few nannies who had refused evacuation for the sake and health of the new-borns (see e.g., ARTE 2022). Despite all this, Ukrainian agencies like BioTexCom (2022) continued their internet publicity (especially directed at a German-speaking public) for their surrogacy services and assured that they would not be interrupted by the war. The surrogates continued their gestational motherhood under the duress of war; an additional risk for these “entrepreneurs of their body” (Wichterich 2022). The recognition of the marginalized, subaltern role
396 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of surrogates vis-à-vis the internationally operating fertility agencies appropriating their biological reproductive labour shape different positions by scholars and feminist movements in relation to surrogacy.
CONCEPTS OF SURROGACY Surrogacy as Productive Labour A rising pool of feminist scholars advocates surrogacy as productive labour. The conceptualization of surrogacy as productive labour may be framed by the concept of Clinical Labour (Waldby and Cooper 2008) because ARTs are continuously transforming women’s bodies into “open access flesh” (Corradi 2021: 158). Yet, the question arises of what happens to these reproductive forms of social life when they continuously take place under conditions of the capitalist production of goods. Karl Polanyi spoke about “fictitious commodities”. It is particularly interesting that Polanyi considers such an intervention in existing life-worlds in Europe’s history to be possible from the historical moment when the practices of colonialism are reimported into Europe. According to him human beings could only be treated as a commodity by way of the disastrous connection between previous compulsion and, following this, seemingly ‘free’ labour that has been squeezed out of a destroyed and not any more socially embedded way of existence (Polanyi (1944) 2001: 172). In her book Fortunes of Feminism, Nancy Fraser goes back to Polanyi’s idea of the fictionality of commodity forms and argues that it is central to feminist critique, precisely because Polanyi’s concept of the embeddedness of living work places the significance of social reproduction at the centre of the argument. Fraser nevertheless criticizes Polanyi, because in her view his strong emphasis on the catastrophic social effects of disembedding obscures, or even presents in a more favourable light, those forms of injustice that are not market-based (Fraser 2013: 229f.). Fraser argues that in the process of emancipation access to wages has meant liberation from traditional authorities for thousands of feminists, peasants and slaves. The idea and realization of turning surrogacy into female (self-) employment has, for years, been greatly pushed forward by big fertility agencies. Powerful economic actors (running clinics, laboratories, mobility and immigration services) emerged worldwide as ‘employers’ or ‘contract partners’ in the field of commodified care work and surrogacy and made publicity for this activity as a form of women’s emancipation. In India, there were “as many as 3,000 operating clinics in late 2015 when transnational surrogacy arrangements were banned by the Indian government” (Vora 2019: 42). Indeed, seen through the lens of the capitalist surrogacy clinic, the global commodification of human reproduction is over-determined by a hegemonial system of the distribution of richness and poverty so that it is systematically connected with migration processes (Apitzsch 2010) and the ongoing destruction of life-worlds, citizenship rights, personal integrity and the possibility to live with one’s own families. Kalindi Vora makes it clear that this hegemonial system in the case of India is an outcome of the colonial history and post-colonial neoliberal politics: The history of India’s rule as a colony to be exploited for labour and resources left behind social and economic infrastructure that continues to affect the hyper-availability of racialized and gendered bodies. The emergence of women in working and lower middle-class India as gestational surrogates
Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work 397 fits into a pattern where advances in biotechnology make the bodies and body parts of workers more sellable and mobile than their labour … . The structural adjustment policies to liberalize India’s economy in the early 1990s contributed to the conditions under which women cannot find sufficient work other than by finding some way to make their value travel to meet capital when labour migration is not financially possible; here through transnational surrogacy (Vora 2019: 43).
Surrogates may take on gestational surrogacy because they already have their own children, and it is for the good of these children that they must distance themselves from the surrogacy babies they carry, whom will be left in the care of others (Marwah 2014). As highlighted by both Pande and Vora, in Indian ‘fertility clinics’ surrogate mothers had to leave their partners and children to complete the pregnancy in a hospital-like environment. At the Manushi clinic in northwestern India, where Vora conducted ethnographic research on transnational surrogacy arrangements between 2008 and 2015: surrogates were strongly encouraged to move into residence hostels after the first trimester of pregnancy. Here, they would eat a regulated diet, receive regular preventative medical exams in line with the Euro-American standards of prenatal care, and participate in sanctioned activities which the clinic described as preserving them from manual and other paid work, as well as household work for their own families (Vora 2019: 42).
Indeed, Indian surrogates were exposed to many forms of reproductive violence. Yet, this did not end with the ban, as the latter led instead to coercive processes. Surrogacy as Emotional Labour Surrogacy is an intense bodily as well as emotional labour. Vora, based on her empirical findings argues that the surrogates had developed their own theories of what surrogacy was and that it had a meaning different from a job. “There was instead an emphasis on a feeling that carrying a child for a couple that could not otherwise have a child was something so extraordinary that it was almost a divine act; this aspect of the arrangement was more important than money as a motivation” (Vora 2019: 42). It is important to acknowledge that this self-built ideology of the women represents for Vora not an extra-economic factor, but that it is for her the central factor that makes the work of the surrogates possible and thus economically valuable. “These meanings … [are] a condition of possibility for commercial surrogacy” (Vora ibid.). Thus, she sees in the case of surrogacy a moral economy at work that makes it possible to transfer the economic value of this emotional labour into the global market: that “surrogates … see their work as above and beyond what can be represented by a labour contract, which imposes a regime of property and privacy where many surrogates expect ongoing social relations and reciprocity” (Vora 2019: 45). Also Radrappa found in her studies that the surrogates interpreted pregnancy as a revitalizing life event (Rudrappa 2015). The Critique of the Increasing Impact of the Fertility Industry on the Ways of Human Reproduction Despite the different viewpoints on surrogacy and its relation to productive work, feminist scholars mostly agree on the dangerous ways in which the industry is organized. Clinics and biotechnological agencies appropriate the main financial gains from the process of surrogacy. They not only set financial compensations; they decide who has access to the most advanced
398 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work fertility technologies; what forms of surrogacy may be regarded as commercial and what as ‘altruistic’. Their practices shape the rise of hotspots of fertility tourism, like in the case of Spain or Greece, and lead to the establishment of transnational and national egg-cell markets. Their target employees are poor unemployed young women in poor regions who generally do this ‘clinical work’ at low prices. Even in rich economies like the USA, as illustrated by Waldby and Cooper (2008), it is often poor women and migrants who engage in surrogacy, as a form of precarious highly exploitative labour. In a context where bans have not proven successful so far, but rather reorganized the geography of surrogacy markets transnationally, feminist positions on regulation differ substantially worldwide. For instance, if Waldby and Cooper are against bans, given the possible impact on the coercive nature of the industry and the possible rise in criminal markets, several feminist groups in the European Union support regulation as a form of ‘strategic intervention’ (Schultz 2015: 118) to counter aggressive lobbying by the fertility industry.
CONCLUSION: FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP, FEMINIST MOVEMENTS AND GESTATIONAL SURROGACY In summary, one can distinguish three main theoretical positions in the scholarly discussion on surrogacy based on focus of interest and research: focus on the market and surrogacy work; focus on the working/living conditions of the surrogate and possible modes of resistance; focus on the fertility industry and its power. If Armstrong (2022) centres the market in the surrogacy debate, exposing the limitations of contemporary British legislation, Vora (2019) and Pande (2019; 2014) place surrogates at the centre of their empirically grounded research. They understand surrogacy in the context of colonial and post-colonial relations and of being embedded into a far wider web of precarious labour relations and unemployment. Vora also reflects on the possibilities for resistance opened to surrogates. She builds on the black feminist tradition and the work of Angela Davis (1998), and analyses the complexity of surrogates’ own understanding of surrogacy and resistance against alienation. Cooper (2008), Cooper and Waldby (2015) and Schultz (2015), instead, put the agency and the policy of the powerful fertility industries at the centre of their critique. They stress the power of these industries and how they work almost independently of state regulations; how they manage to act transnationally even in context of conflict and war, and shape criteria of classification that subdivide surrogacy into commercial and ‘altruistic’ or set the differences between ‘payment’ and ‘financial compensation’, all in ways that reproduce the subordination and marginality of surrogates. It is based on this critique of fertility clinics, that Schultz, for instance, from the group ‘Kitchen Politics’ (in the tradition of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School) asks for regulation. While some of these positions may seem impossible to reconcile, it is imperative that feminist movements find ways forward to fight against rampant processes of commodification and exploitation of the body.
Surrogacy as commodified transnational care work 399
REFERENCES Apitzsch, Ursula (2010), ‘Care, Migration, and the Gender Order’ in Apitzsch, Ursula and Marianne Schmidbaur (eds) Care und Migration. Die Ent-Sorgung menschlicher Reproduktionsarbeit in der globalen Peripherie, Opladen/Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich, pp. 113–126. Apitzsch, Ursula (2016), ‘Die Ent-Sorgung (Outsourcing) von Care entlang von Geschlechter- und Armutsgrenzen: der Fall der transnationalen Leihmutterschaft’. Feministische Studien 2/2016, pp. 341–350. Apitzsch, Ursula (2018), ‘La Maternità surrogata transnazionale’, Dignità, Libertà, Ragione Bioetica, A cura di Emilia D’Antuono, Milano: Mimesis Edizioni, pp. 297–307. Apitzsch, Ursula and Marianne Schmidbaur (eds) (2010), Care und Migration. Die Ent-Sorgung menschlicher Reproduktionsarbeit in der globalen Peripherie, Opladen/Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich. Armstrong, Sylvie (2022), ‘Labour is Labour: What Surrogates Can Learn from the Sex Work Is Work Movement’, Journal of Law and Society, 49 (1), March 2022, 170–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols .12350 ARTE (2022), ‘Geboren im Krieg. Ein Wunschkind aus Kiew’, ARTE documentation on May 30. Baumann-Hölzle, Ruth (2015), Interview for the Swiss Ethics Council, HNA 2015/05/19. BioTexCom (2022), accessed on 29 June 2022 at https://leihmutter-schaft.de/konferenz-fuer-eizellspende -und-leihmutterschaft-behandlungen/ Cooper, Melinda (2008), Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cooper, Melinda and Catherine Waldby (2015), ‘Interview: Arbeitsbegriffe und Politik der Arbeit. Nachfragen von Kitchen Politics an Melinda Cooper und Catherine Waldby’, in Kitchen Politics (eds.) Sie nennen es Leben, wir nennen es Arbeit. Biotechnologie, Reproduktion und Familie im 21. Jahrhundert, Münster: edition assemblage, pp. 78–107. Corradi, Consuelo (2021), ‘Motherhood and the Contradictions of Feminism: Appraising Claims Towards Emancipation in the Perspective of Surrogacy’, Current Sociology Monograph, 69 (2), 158–175. Davis, Angela Y. (1998), ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’, in Joy James (ed.) The Angela Y. Davis Reader, London: Blackwell, pp. 111–129. Davydov, Alexander (2022), ‘Ungeboren im Krieg’ (Unborn in the War), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 20, 2022, p. 6. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Hochschild (eds) (2002), Global Woman. Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Metropolitan Books. Factsheet Reproduktionstechnologien (2022), https://www.gwi-boell.de/sites/default/files/importedFiles/ 2022/05/04/Factsheet-Reproduktionstechnologien.pdf Federici, Silvia (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Oakland, CA: Autonomedia. Fraser, Nancy (2013), Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, London/Brooklyn: Verso. Günther, Inge (2015), Neugeborene von Leihmüttern. Babys aus Nepal nach Israel geflogen, Stuttgarter Zeitung 28 April. Hearn, Jeff (1987), The Gender of oppression: Men, Masculinity, and the Critique of Marxism 1, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Hochschild, Arlie (2010), ‘The Back Stage of a Global Free Market: Nannies and Surrogates’, in Ursula Apitzsch and Marianne Schmidbaur (eds) Care und Migration. Die Ent-Sorgung menschlicher Reproduktionsarbeit entlang von Geschlechter- und Armutsgrenzen, Opladen, Farmington Hills, MI: Barbara Budrich, pp. 23–39. Hochschild, Arlie (2013), ‘The Surrogate’s Womb’, in So, How’s the Family? And Other Essays, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 165–179. Kitchen Politics (eds) Sie nennen es Leben, wir nennen es Arbeit. Biotechnologie, Reproduktion und Familie im 21. Jahrhundert, Münster: edition assemblage, pp.107–127. Marwah, Vrinda (2014), ‘How Surrogacy is Challenging and Changing our Feminisms’, in Sarojini N. Nadimpally and Vrinda Marwah (eds) Reconfiguring Reproduction, New Delhi: Zubaan, pp. 266–305.
400 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Nadimpally, Sarojini, Sneha Banerjee and Deepa Venkatachalam (2016), Commercial Surrogacy: A Contested Terrain in the Realm of Rights and Justice, Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, New Delhi. Pande, Amrita (2010), ‘Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker’, Signs, 35 (4), 969–992. Pande, Amrita (2014), Wombs in Labor. Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India, New York: Columbia University Press. Polanyi, Karl (1944), The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press (reprinted in 2001). Rudrappa, Sharmila (2015), Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India, New York and London: New York University Press. Schultz, Susanne (2015), ‘Kinderwunsch-Ökonomie und Kinderwunsch-Verstaatlichung’, in Kitchen Politics (eds.) Sie nennen es Leben, wir nennen es Arbeit. Biotechnologie, Reproduktion und Familie im 21. Jahrhundert, Münster: edition assemblage, pp. 107–127. Steinbrook, Robert (2006), ‘Egg Donation and Human Embryonic Stem-Cell Research’, New England Journal of Medicine, 354 (4), 324–326. Vora, Kalinda (2019), ‘After the Housewife: Surrogacy, Labour and Human Reproduction’, Radical Philosophy, 204, Spring 2019, 42–46. Waldby, Catherine and Melinda Cooper (2008), ‘The Biopolitics of Reproduction. Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women’s Clinical Labour’, Australian Feminist Studies, 23, 57–73. Waldby, Catherine and Robert Mitchell (2006), Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wichterich, C. (2022), ‘Care Extractivism and the Reconfiguration of Social Reproduction in Post-Fordist Economies’, in International Center for Development and Decent Work, ICDD Working Paper Series, 25, 1–27.
33. Global political economy of care and gender – crisis, extractivism and contestation Christa Wichterich
INTRODUCTION Social reproduction and gendered care work have been at the centre of research and theoretical reflection of feminist political economics (Folbre 1994; Elson 2002). Feminist analysis reconciles the dynamics of the political economy of care with the socio-cultural economy of social reproduction, and combines an analysis of structures, discourses and subjectivities. It exposes unequal exchange and power relations based on gender and intersecting categories of social inequality, and attempts to bridge the production-reproduction-divide by an extended concept of labour, which includes paid and unpaid work. The core is the paradox of the market and GDP-oriented economic thinking that the work, which is necessary to produce and sustain life and needed by each human being from birth to death, is considered unproductive and is held in very low esteem. This paradox makes the care economy a highly contested area in society and in economics.
GENDER DIVISION OF LABOUR, HOUSEHOLD AND THE VALUE OF CARE Across cultures and countries, public perception as well as conventional economic theories naturalise care work as female embodied labour and capacity linked to the generative role of women to give birth and to breastfeed. These assumed anthropological constant and biological disposition legitimise the gender division of labour, various forms of domestication of women and their subordination in patriarchal regimes from hunter-gatherer societies to capitalist economies. Unlike in peasant households, the construction of the bourgeois household as an off-market economic unit in capitalism caused the separation of a private, intimate and invisibilised sphere of reproduction from the public sphere of production (Bock and Duden 1976). The dissociation of productive and reproductive labour is a process of doing femininity and masculinity in terms of hegemonial gender roles and characters (Hausen 1976). The configuration of the mother as housewife turns the functional division of labour into a hierarchical gender order excluding women from value-creating market production and devaluing reproductive labour. In the Fordist or Keynesian period it was the family wage of the industrial worker which shaped the economic couple of the male breadwinner and the not-earning, “not-working” housewife. The welfare state with institutions of social security and provisioning worked complementary to the gendered social reproduction in the household. Against this background, the second wave of women’s movements in the West identified labour as site of gendering, of doing, redoing or undoing gender, a process, which shapes gendered identities, agency and subjectivities (West and Zimmermann 1987). For Marxist 401
402 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work feminists, the relation between household and capitalist value creation became a key field of research. The so-called housework debate in the 1970s discussed in a paradigmatic way the socially and historically formed material correlations and ideological discourses around social reproduction in the private household. Maria Dalla Costa and Selma James (1975) and Silvia Federici (1975) kicked off a “wage for/against housework” campaign in order to visibilise the value of unpaid reproductive work in monetary terms, and thus symbolically revalue it. They strategically considered reproduction and care as life producing and life sustaining, actually productive labour beyond the Marxian and neoclassical separation of production and reproduction, and the concepts of market and exchange value creation. They claimed to politicise care work by deconstructing the private character of unpaid house and family work, and by exposing the public nature and essential importance of the care economy. Following Isabella Bakker (2007) social reproduction comprises (a) biological reproduction, (b) reproduction of the labour force and (c) caring for different needs during the life cycle of people by various actors and institutions. Women’s care work is the core resource in social reproduction. Feminist economists stressed the notion of care against reproductive labour in order to go beyond the functional logic of mere reproduction of the labour force. They analysed the particular nature of care work, which is charged with emotions, components of reciprocity, altruism and ethics, and is steered by socio-cultural ascriptions and norms. The care economy with a range of nursing, providing, feeding, cleaning, welfare and precautionary activities is situated at an interface of three interacting and intertwined power regimes, the reproductive regime in families and communities, the welfare and/or development state and the market (Palriwala and Neetha 2012). Shahra Razavi (2007) has added solidarity networks and voluntary work in self-help and community groups as a fourth dimension. She calls the care economy a care diamond to depict its high value and fluid agency marked by four main actors: family, community, state, market. The socio-cultural and the political economy of caring are deeply intertwined with repercussions for care workers’ identities while the market uses socio-cultural and religious norms, stereotypes and regulations for the sake of profit making. A key question is: who actually does the care work, in particular the time consuming, repetitive and menial work? The crucial concept of the liberal Western feminism of the 1970s was a gendered redistribution of reproductive work by shifting a share of reproductive work from women to men, and this way freeing women to participate in the labour market. Due to professional education, participation of middle-class women in waged labour increased considerably in the past decades in the Global North (while poor women had always been engaged in wage labour). In the Global South, the new international division of labour caused a high participation rate of women in off-shore labour-intensive industries and global production chains, in particular in garment and shoe manufacturing, electronic and chip production. However, in no region of the world has the feminisation of wage labour resulted automatically in an equitable division of reproductive labour (Pearson 2000). In former socialist countries, the state had organised and controlled social reproduction in public institutions, and care work got defamiliarised to a large extent what advanced women’s full integration as professionals into the productive sphere. In the Scandinavian social welfare states, day care centres for children and elderly people and father’s leave during early childhood, combined with positive discrimination of women in the labour market, opened new avenues for gender equality in unpaid care and waged work (Lewis and Giullari 2005). Though in western and southern European countries the social welfare state invested in facili-
Global political economy of care and gender 403 ties, public services and gender equality measures, the family remained the core institution for social reproduction (Esping-Anderson 1990), and these welfare states left a lot of the burden to reconcile family chores with professional life to the individual woman (Gordon 1997; Silius 2002).
CARE IN A CAPITALIST LABOUR MARKET While in the West most economists construct the binary of paid and unpaid care work as an opposition, feminist economists from the Global South prefer to call it a “gendered work continuum” (Dewan 2017). Inclusion of care workers into waged labour implies that market principles like competition, efficiency, growth and profit making expand into earlier non-market, non-commercialised areas, which are socio-culturally constructed as the heartland of privacy and intimacy like family, household, sexuality, friendship and neighbourhood relations (Razavi and Staab 2010). This process of capitalist penetration and enclosure mean another form of “primitive accumulation by expropriation of women’s unpaid labour” (Federici 2004) or “accumulation through dispossession” (Harvey 2004). This argument follows Rosa Luxemburg and her theory of permanent primitive accumulation by which capitalism for the sake of growth and profit maximisation has to always appropriate and incorporate something new which has been outside of its accumulation realm (Soiland 2016). Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof (1988) highlighted that women, their bodies and reproductive capacities, nature and the Global South are such “last colonies”. These forms of “land grabbing” in terms of “care grabbing” go along with skill training, education and professionalisation while conflicting narratives challenge care work as being an extension of unpaid housework rather than a profession. Social reproduction theory conceptualises social reproductive, domestic work as value-producing in the capitalist production process and as a space of production, namely of labour as a commodity which enables the working class to sell it in the market for the exchange of wages. Thus, social reproduction cannot be reduced to a sphere of commodity consumption (Bhatthacharya 2017: 72). The key argument is the functionality of social reproduction for capital accumulation, at an intersection of oppression driven by sexism, racism, ableism and class exploitation while the relation between the market and the extra-market work is perceived as a paradox combination of consent and compulsion. Historically deeply rooted in slavery and feudal economies, which rely on unfree labour, domestic services had always been at the intersection not only of gender and class but also of race and ethnicity (Glenn 1992). While domestic workers had never disappeared from well-off households, the “maid” returned to the upper strata and middle-class households of Western societies and filled the gap in care work, which opened up when middle-class women were integrated into the labour market and could afford low-waged domestic and care labour (Young 2001). Furthermore, in many countries the need for caring and nursing is growing due to longer life expectancy and a mounting number of elderly people who need care. Waged care work asks for new analytical categories as it encapsulates and blurs categories of Marxist and neoclassical economics due to the inherent moral bonds, emotions and relational factors (Hochschild 2000). Capitalist markets turn care services into a commodity in the labour market while they prolong the low esteem and invisibility of care. Mainstream economics justify the low valuation of care work because it is deemed to be unproductive and not value- or commodity-creating. As care work – e.g. feeding a child or a person with
404 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work dementia – has its own pace and only little scope for productivity increase, it cannot meet the market standards of efficiency and tempo (Madörin 2013). This shows that the driving rationale of the care economy and the logic of the capitalist economy differ significantly from each other. The main goal of the economy of care and social reproduction is provision, satisfaction of needs and well-being while the overall objective of the capitalist market economy is the maximisation of individual benefits of the “economic man” in terms of accumulation of money; its logic is informed by egoistic interests for profit making. Care work is a paradigmatic sector where the principles of moral economy and welfare policies interface and clash with the capitalist principles of the labour market. Being subjected to the market principles of competition and cost optimisation, the ethical, altruistic, reciprocal and human touch components of care get even more devalued and externalised. This causes – as Nancy Fraser highlights – a tendency to a care crisis in each form of capitalist society because its general growth and accumulation obsession undermines its own social reproduction (Fraser 2016). Analogous to resource extractivism the term “care extractivism” has been coined to analyse the intensification and the expansion of the commodification of care resources in the neoliberal context (Wichterich 2019). Care extractivism is a political and economic response to a crisis situation at the backdrop of cost containment and austerity policies. Under the auspices of shrinking welfarism and flourishing private investment, strategies of care extraction aim at managing crisis situations while cutting costs, intensifying efficiency and fostering economic growth. While the deflated term exploitation highlights the offender-victim relationship, the concept of extractivism stresses structural power relations in the political economy and the development model.
CRISIS OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION AND THE NEOLIBERAL TURN Structural adjustment programmes in the South, the globalisation of neoliberal strategies and austerity policies in the North changed the context for social reproduction and care economies significantly and made cost reduction the prime political objective. Along with changing social and demographic structures in many Western countries, this resulted in a crisis of social reproduction with a severe shortage of unpaid care workers in families and communities, and of paid care workers in social institutions like hospitals. The global boost of private enterprises in the service economy, and the privatisation of public welfare and health institutions aggravated the demand for cheap personal services and healthcare work. Austerity programmes cause the externalisation of social provisions and care work from the public welfare portfolio and their shift into the private sphere, household, community or voluntarism (Dowling 2021). Unpaid care work in households and communities is used to tackle crisis situations at the local level and compensate for lack of social provisions. Familiarisation of care and mobilisation of social activism and honorary work relieve the state of welfare strains, and shifts social responsibilities to private households and communities, in particular to women who are already providing the bulk of the needed care in everyday life (Dörre and Haubner 2012). In the care market, a vast number of commercial agencies train, recruit, place and employ care workers within countries and across borders (for Ghana see Awumbila et al. 2019; for
Global political economy of care and gender 405 Taiwan Loveband 2006). They play a significant role in stereotyping and ethnicisation of care workers from various provenance to make demand and supply meet, thus matching the political with the cultural economy of care. At the same time, the neoliberal turn and the privatisation boom driven by the imperative of economic growth and cost optimisation change the working conditions for waged care work. Employment patterns get flexibilised and informalised, contract and casual work spreads, work processes get taylorised and hierarchised, and parts of them get outsourced away from institutions, e.g. cooking, cleaning, diagnostics and technical maintenance were outsourced from hospitals. In the health sector, not only has a highly competitive industry of private hospitals, rehabilitation centres, old age homes and labs mushroomed, private training and education institutions have also been spreading. Financialisation of e.g. nursing education means that most of the students and their parents have to take up loans and have to repay debt for many years. Indebtedness creates individual vulnerability and precariousness as young nurses feel that they have to take up any odd job, even kinds of bonded labour, to repay their educational loan. On top of this, in cases of placement by commercial agencies, in particular abroad, even more is added, including fees for documents and fares (see for nurses from India Walton-Roberts and Rajan 2023). In most parts of Europe, care work in the health sector, including care for the elderly, has been subjected to modulisation and standardisation. It gets fragmented, taylorised and scheduled into time units which have to be professionally documented. These forms of care extraction measure and remunerate care labour like industrial piece work. Permanent documentation ensures control and transparency in a technocratic, productivist manner, disciplines care workers at the interface of the public and private sphere, and forces them into permanent self-control and evaluation. A key problem of modulisation from the perspective of caring is that these schedules don’t leave any time for showing empathy and applying a human touch towards the patients. The value added through empathy and affection does not count in wage calculations. Thus, waged care labour is organised in a way that it includes unpaid work and time, resulting in a systematic underpayment (Kümmerling 2016). Along with contract and casual forms of employment, modules construct care workers as competitive neoliberal market subjects and a cheap labour force. Due to cost saving goals, these neoliberal strategies have also been adopted by new public management in the public service and health sector (Riegraf 2013), including the US accounting system “Diagnosis Related Groups”. It classifies hospitalised patients and pays flat rates for standardised medical and care services (Busse et al. 2013). The popular 24-hour services in private households in Europe are arranged either through commercial agencies or informal networks. Live-in 24-hour care is a semi-feudal mode of care work, often without a proper contract and without social insurance. Employers expect care workers to be rational and loving at the same time, and want to get free disposal over their human, social and emotional capital. Mostly migrant care givers are paid a lump sum which covers only few hours of work assuming that they enjoy a lot of leisure time. Again, the boundaries between paid and unpaid work are fluid resulting in an appalling underpay of these just-in-time workers who have to be available day and night (Schwiter, Berndt and Truong 2015). The modules of rationalisation and industrialisation exert a tremendous pressure on care workers e.g. the ambulant care givers for the elderly in Germany who drive in small company cars from one client to the next. Their services and car rides become a race against time and
406 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work humaneness, with strains on the body, psyche and energy level of the care workers. The actual conflict between the logic of caring and the logic of profit making is downloaded to their body and mind. They have to manage the time constraints, the bureaucratic requirements of documentation, and their inner conflicts between efficiency and emotional bonds. The intensification and taylorisation of medical and nursing work permanently overtaxes care workers and results in “burn out” effects. They are trapped in a contradiction between professionalism and affection, closeness and distance, private and public. The extractivist strategies end up in depleting care resources and capacities assuming that they are endlessly available like natural resources (Rai, Hoskyns and Dania 2011).
GLOBAL CARE CHAINS AND CARE EXTRACTIVISM Contractualisation of care work, taylorisation, modulisation and documentation are recent strategies of care extraction additional to mobilisation of unpaid family work and voluntarism which mould a reconfiguration of social reproduction on a local level. At the same time, transnational care extractivism transforms the political economy of care, giving way to transnational care markets and accumulation regimes. To cope with the shortage of care givers, more care labour is recruited across borders in global care chains along power asymmetries between regions and countries (Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2001). In the context of migration, existing inequalities linked to gender, caste, class, ethnicity, race and the Global North/Global South reinforce the low esteem of care work and shape a new international division of care which constructs care workers as cheap and precarious labour force. In the 1970s, the Philippines became the first state which was keen to use labour export as a development strategy, and to supply women workers for the service and healthcare sector in wealthier countries. Many other states and migration routes followed, framed by migration policies and labour regimes in the sending and receiving countries. The objectives of “brokerage states” (Rodriguez 2008) in the Global South were to reduce the high unemployment rate in the country and to receive remittances in foreign currencies, hoping for a win-win situation. In receiving countries, the migrant care workers from the Global South/East compensate for the acute shortage of care givers while on the household level, migrant domestic workers cushion the employment and professional career of qualified middle-class women, and the adult worker model in the West. This unequal exchange in the political economy is masked by the socio-cultural economy of care and stereotypes. In the Global North, a culturalistic, often orientalistic and ethno-racist narrative assumes a predisposition of migrants for elderly and child care because of their allegedly more loving and caring attitude than that prevailing in individualistic Western cultures (Torres and Lindblom 2020). At the same time, transnational care chains withdraw care capacities and emotional work from the Global South and shift care energy from poorer to more affluent households, from poor to richer countries (Yeates 2009). Thereby, the local crisis of social reproduction is transferred from the Global North to the countries of origin of the recruited care worker, a kind of spatial fix of the crisis (Harvey 2001). Due to the export of care capacities, care and emotional capacities are missing in the households and countries of origin. Care gain for receiving countries relies on care drain from sending countries.
Global political economy of care and gender 407 As a transnational self-entrepreneurial subject and transnational mother (Morokvasic 2004), the care worker from the Global South/Global East has to cope individually with the care deficit in her own family. Mostly, the care of her own children and of elderly family members is handed over to female relatives. Sometimes it is transferred for a minimal payment to neighbours or migrant women coming from poorer regions or countries, e.g. in Poland to women from the Ukraine. However ultimately, many care gaps remain unfilled and exert severe strains on the reproductive systems on the micro-level of households and the national level. Care as a commons in societies and families of the Global South gets undermined and depleted (Widding, Sambasivan and Hochschild 2008). This results in a transnational landscape of stratified reproduction, and care inequalities (Lutz and Palenga Möllenbeck 2012).
CARE 2.0 Driving forces for ongoing restructuring of the care economy are the introduction of new technologies, automation and digitalisation, and digital platforms which offer services, both on a local and transnational level. Medical tourism represents another form of transnationalisation of care. For healthcare and biological reproduction middle- and upper-class patients travel for treatment and surgery to destinations where medical facilities and services are on offer at cheap prices. This includes medical reproductive tourism to places where reproductive technologies and services are cheaply and legally available e.g. egg-cell harvesting and surrogacy motherhood which is illegal in many countries (Sama 2012). The social stratification of healthcare and reproduction which results out of this signifies that in a neoliberal capitalist economy, care and healthcare are not organised as rights- and need-based social commons but economically as a commodity and an accumulation regime, and socially as a private asset and a system of privileges. Standardisation, modulisation and documentation of care work functioned as preconditions for platformisation, digitalisation and the introduction of robots in the care and health sector. A new type of entrepreneurship for service platforms and new growth markets for assistive digital technology, automation and surgical robots blended with artificial intelligence are spreading. Platforms which are accessible through apps on social media are supposed to reduce care work in private households by moving to a new stage of commodification of social reproduction and setting up a new infrastructure. Delivery services that bring food to the doorstep, care platforms that offer baby sitting or granny nursing, help platforms which provide cleaning of the house, and Airbnb which organises accommodation for travelling people – all of them transform the patterns of social reproduction. During the Covid-19 pandemic some of these platforms were big winners (Huws 2019). The robotics industry claims to revolutionise the healthcare sector as rehabilitation robots like robocoach take over physiotherapy, and companion robots, cuddly animals such as the baby seal Paro simulate affective relations. Robots that substitute monotonous and repetitive labour claim to work more precisely, effectively and efficiently than medical and healthcare professionals, leaving more time to care for patients. For years in Japan, androids, hubots and carebots have already been used to compensate for gaps in the care of the ageing population. The capitalist logic of developing machines to replace the living work in the care sector and personal services is another profitable techno-fix, a seemingly rational solution of the care crisis and the shortage of care givers. Will platforms, digitalisation and automation in the
408 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work future make care work redundant and thereby contribute to a mechanisation and dehumanisation of the care economy? It is questionable whether the remaining personal services will be further devalued or, on the contrary, upgraded.
CONTESTED AREA, STRUGGLES AND POLITICISATION OF CARE The Covid-19 crisis exposed and challenged the shortage, appalling work burden and the chronic underpay of healthcare workers in many countries. It revealed the essentiality of care for the economy and the survival of society at large. Thus, care was recognised and applauded by the public as never before, and it was politicised as never before. For decades, domestic workers in all continents have unionised against the invisibility and informality of their work and the ascribed docility and vulnerability of women workers (Boris and Fish 2014). Their key demand was for the recognition as “normal” workers in order to secure labour rights, social security provisions and a right to organise. They ask for contracts with fixed work hours and fixed leisure time to clearly mark a boundary of paid work, and reduce the constant availability ascribed to their job. Only if they work and live in dignity are they able to provide quality care. An outstanding transnational campaign was the self-organised campaign of domestic workers for an International Labour Office (ILO) convention, which resulted in 2011 in the adoption of Convention 189 on decent work for domestic workers. However, the adoption of the convention remains a kind of symbolic victory as only a few countries have ratified it: 35 countries in 2023. Underpaid and overworked nurses from Kenya to Poland, from Ireland to the US, went on strike not only for better pay but for more recognition. Sometimes their protests were challenged by the hospital management and a larger public and said to be an offence against care ethics and to violate patients’ rights. The protests and strikes by the care staff and nurses at the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany’s largest university clinic, marked a shift of focus from payment to the quality of care. Nurses and doctors claim that the neoliberal principles governing the health system make care workers sick and render the provision of high-quality services impossible. Therefore, the key demand of the late strikes was to employ more staff so that quality care could be provided. Referring to the slogan “More of us is better for everybody”, healthcare workers built an alliance with patients and ordinary citizens, jointly politicising the underlying crisis of social reproduction and the neoliberal care extractivism (Hedemann, Worms and Artus 2017). Quality care, which sustains social reproduction and well-being, is perceived as a common good for the functioning of society and for a “good life”. Thus, the care workers go far beyond the conventional trade unionist topics of wage and work-place conditions to policies of recognition and identity. The strikes of domestic and healthcare workers represent a new conflict formation with new political subjects different from the industrial working class, showing a trend towards feminisation of labour struggles. Politicisation of care means to highlight power relations from the household to the market, in the private and the public sector linking the political economy with the socio-cultural economy of care, and care workers’ agency with broader public discourses. Following Joan Tronto, politicising care means to discuss it as an issue of democracy, justice and citizenship, and implies resistance against care extractivism, marketisation, pri-
Global political economy of care and gender 409 vatisation and industrialisation with a transformative perspective (Tronto 1993). Presently, a growing number of community-based projects such as housing cooperatives, urban agriculture, self-organised kindergartens and solidarity clinics explore the alternative and transformative economic potential of the care economy. This change of paradigm opens up pathways to eventual transitions to a post-neoliberal economy based on the rationale of caring as suggested by the concept of “care revolution” in Germany (Winker 2015), by the Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy (2020) and the “Care Manifesto” in England (The Care Collective 2020). Conceptualising the economy from the vantage point of care is of utmost importance to (re)construct care as commons, to break up the gendered and racial division of labour, and to counter the culture of violence by the growth-obsessed economy, by militarisation and war.
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Global political economy of care and gender 411 Walton-Roberts, M. and I. Rajan (2023), “Nurse Emigration from Kerala: Revisiting the ‘Brain Circulation’ or ‘Trap Question”, in M. John und C. Wichterich, Who Cares, Care Extraction and the Struggles of Indian Health Workers. New Delhi: Zubaan, pp. 185–212. West, C. and D. Zimmerman (1987), “Doing Gender”, Gender & Society, 1 (2), 125–151. Wichterich, C. (2019), Care Extractivism and the Reconfiguration of Social Reproduction in Post-Fordist Economies. University of Kassel, ICDD Working Paper 25. Winker, G. (2015), “Care Revolution. A Feminist-Marxist Transformation Strategy from the Perspective of Caring for Each Other”, in W. Baier, E. Canepa and E. Himmelstoss (eds) Transform! Yearbook 2016. London: The Enigma of Europe, pp. 165–172. Yeates, N. (2009), Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers. Explorations in Global Care Chains. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, B. (2001), “The Mistress and the Maid in the Globalized Economy”, in L. Panitch, C. Ley, G. Albo and D. Coates (eds) Socialist Register 2001, Working Classes, Global Realities. New York, pp. 315–327.
FURTHER READING Bhatthacharya, T. (ed) (2017), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Federici, S. (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Folbre, N. (1994), Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and Structures of Constraint. London: Routledge. Hochschild, A. (2000), “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value”, in A. Giddens and W. Hutton (eds) On the Edge. Globalization and the New Millennium. London: Vintage, pp. 137–179. Lutz, H. and E. Palenga-Möllenbeck (2012), “Care Workers, Care Drain, and Care Chains: Reflections on Care, Migration, and Citizenship”, Social Politics, 19 (1), 15–37. Parreñas, R. S. (2001), Servants of Globalisation. Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Razavi, S. (2007), The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context: Contextual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Geneva: UNRISD. Widding Isaksen, L. U. D. Sambasivan and A. R. Hochschild (2008)‚ “Global Care Crisis. A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons?” American Behavioral Scientist, 52 (3), 405–425.
34. Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case Maria Kontos and Minna K. Ruokonen-Engler
INTRODUCTION Industrialized societies in the Global North are undergoing significant demographic and societal changes. The aging population and women’s increased labour market participation have generated enormous challenges for the provision, reorganization and redistribution of care work in general and elderly care in particular. This has been accompanied by neoliberal policies and the welfare state downsizing which has led to the commodification and outsourcing of care, creation of low-paid care jobs and increasing female labour migration into the care sector. Instead of strengthening public institutions with proper payment for care workers, the North European states have intensified the recruitment of nurses from abroad into the institutionalized health and elderly care (Horn and Schweppe 2019, 11). Both the provision of home-based and institutionally delivered care have become highly dependent on care workers and nurses from abroad. This development shows that the increased labour market participation of native women has not led to the equal redistribution of unpaid care work between genders, but to its gendered transnationalization and to a “new international division of reproductive labour” (Parreñas 2001). In this way, structural, gendered inequalities have been transformed into transnational interdependencies which, in turn, (re)produce global inequalities (Williams 2011). There are several players that influence the flows of care migration. International conventions (WHO, ILO) aim at governing the global care migration and at improving the working conditions of care workers in general. The nation states and their respective welfare, gender and migration regimes, however, play a crucial role in the organization and re/distribution of care work as well as in the accommodation of global care workers. Welfare state regimes, like the liberal, the corporatist/conservative and the social-democratic (Esping-Andersen 1999), incorporate different, gendered “caring regimes” (Razavi 2007) or “care models” (van Hooren 2012) and differ in regard to how far state, markets and families are involved in the financing and provision of care. Nordic welfare states, like Sweden, are following the social democratic care model and have traditionally relied on an institutionalized elderly care, whereas 70 per cent of the registered elderly in need of care in Germany are cared for at home (Lutz 2018). Germany follows a familialistic care model and family members, mostly women, have traditionally been responsible for elderly care. The increased labour market participation of women has led to a decline of the male-bread-winner-model and to the emergence of the adult-worker-model. This has been accompanied by the development of several mixed-structured (both mobile care and migrant care worker at the same time) or institutionalized forms of elderly care. Germany, for example, is currently suffering from a vast shortage of nurses, especially in elderly care institutions. Enormous workload, poor payment and low social status do not add to the attractivity 412
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case 413 of this labour field (Horn and Schweppe 2019). Instead of improving the working conditions in elderly care and thus tackling the structural problems, the recruitment of migrant nurses from abroad has been intensified (Horn and Schweppe 2019, 11). In the following, we take a closer look at the working conditions of transnational care workers in elderly care in Germany and focus on the problems caused by the transnational division of labour. We address two distinct care arrangements: migrant care workers in home-based care (1st section) and migrant nurses in institutionalized care (2nd section). We indicate major differences like the rather unregulated vs. highly regulated legal framing, the differentiation between the need for specific professional skills and deskilling experiences vs. the idea of the women’s natural care skills confirmed qua gender and consider the coping strategies of the care workers to tackle the working conditions they are confronted with.
HOME-BASED ELDERLY CARE Legal Framing and Policies In the last decades, different policies have been deployed in Germany to meet the increasing need for care work. General policy level has focussed on the mobilization of the unpaid labour of the family members: not only an unpaid leave for family carers was introduced, but the Inheritance Law (2008) was reformed in a way that it aims at mobilizing calculated solidarity by entitling a larger part of the inheritance to the family member who has been active in the care of the deceased family member. Furthermore, labour market and taxation policies have generated incentives for the formalization of the informal home-based paid domestic and care work (Kontos 2013; 2014), as there are an estimated 500,000 (Lutz 2018) live-in migrant care workers in Germany, mostly from the Central and Eastern European countries. In addition, some migration policies were adapted to enable the formal work of transnational care workers. For example, the Ordinance of Exceptions from the Recruitment Ban was changed in 2002 to include domestic workers. This made it possible to make recruitment agreements for the employment of foreign domestic workers for a period of up to three years. In 2005, these recruitment schemes were incorporated into the new Immigration Act. These policy efforts, however, have failed to formalize the work in this sector, as the costs for regularized care work exceed the level that an average household can pay. Moreover, many migrant care workers have preferred not to utilize the recruitment scheme and – despite recruitment agreements with several countries – the labour market is further supplied by informal migrant care workers. In contrast, migrant care workers coming from the new EU-Member countries can work in Germany under the scheme of the Service Directive (1996) as “posted workers”. By having this status, they are not only employed by firms based in the country of their origin but paid and insured according to the rules of these countries too. Since the labour market for care services remains beyond German regulations, this option is economically more accessible for average families with responsibilities for elderly care. As the working conditions and payment, foreseen by the legal regulations of the countries of origin, don’t differ much from the conditions and payments of informal work in Germany, the European mobility regime has proved to be more a path to legitimize precarious working conditions and low payments than a path to overcome them.
414 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work In addition, international organizations have engaged with the care worker question. The International Labour Organization adopted Convention No. 189 Decent Work for Domestic Workers (2010) as a basis for supporting their rights. The Convention takes into account the precarious situation of migrant care workers, as most of them are live-ins, and requests for the regulation of some of the central problems in this field: unregulated working hours, limited time for privacy and the right to family life. This is explicated as the right to have maternity leave with the option to return to the workplace. In practice, however, the realization of this individual right can be questioned in cases of transnational care workers, as it implies a return to the workplace without the new-born child. Furthermore, the Convention entails the right to decide between the practice of live-in or live-out care work. As a matter of fact, this is not negotiable, as the employing families often need a care worker for the 24-hour-care of the elderly. Altogether, the Convention does not effectively question the principle of the live-in work that renders family life impossible for live-in care workers. Moreover, the live-in 24-hour-care work offends the German Hours of Work Act that limits a working week to 48 hours. The German government, however, ratified the Convention with reference to an exception to the Hours of Work Act for employees who are responsible for the well-being of dependent persons. The ratification, however, has been criticized, as the exception to the Hours of Work Act was originally applied only for carers working as “parents” in SOS Children’s Villages and cannot therefore be generalized to other kind of care work (Kocher 2013). The Familial and Economic Logics of Live-In Care Work Traditionally, women’s unpaid work in the family has been conceived as a “natural” activity and “labour of love” (Bock and Duden 1977) rather than “real”, productive work. It seems to be the coincidence of the familial and economic logics and its ambivalences that has led to the characterization of paid care work as “work like any other, work like no other” (ILO 2010, 12). As with any kind of home-based care work, the public and private spheres and their opposing familial and economic logics overlap in paid elderly care at home. The workplace is the private realm of the employer, and the work tasks are those previously performed by female family members. Like unpaid family care work in general, paid care work, mostly performed by migrant women, is socially undervalued and deprived of the rewards of paid work outside the home (Resch 2002; Thiessen 2002). Driven by neoliberal restructuring of the economies in the Global South (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Parreñas 2001), mainly women migrate into care labour markets in the Global North. The geographical distance to their own family seems to be a prerequisite for the performance of the 24-hour-live-in-care-job, mostly needed in elderly care. This situation has led to the emergence of phenomena like “transnational mothers” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001) and “global care chains” (Hochschild 2001) as migrant women are forced to rely on the help of other people to care for their dependents while working abroad. From this follows that the care workers themselves become defamilialized at the same time as the paid care work is familialized (Kontos 2013; Kontos and Bonifacio 2015). The Specific Class Structures Deriving Out of Live-In Care Work The overlapping of family and economic logics impacts the interaction between employer and worker, as the opposing principles of these logics create tensions for all actors involved: the
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case 415 logic of satisfying human needs versus the economic logic. For the former, the broadest flexibility possible is required rather than a standardization of work in order to increase productivity and profit (Geissler 2002). For reasons of flexibility, the live-in situation, for example, 24-hour-availability, appears to be the most suitable solution. The familial character of care work is even perpetuated by the fact that the workers’ rights are usually not codified and work contracts are rarely fixed in a written form. Moreover, the working conditions depend on the moral standards of the employer, including their notions about and attitudes towards human needs and workers’ rights. The metaphor of “the worker being a family member” arises out of the familial character of the care work and obscures both economical and class differences between the care worker and the employer as well as the exploitation of the domestic worker (Anderson 2000; Parreñas 2001; Romero 1992). In this way, the domestic worker is kept in dependency and prevented to achieve what family members are expected to: namely a family of their own and economic independence (Young 1987). This situation can be considered with Bridget Anderson (2000) as “slavery” as it is based on the assumption that it is “the worker’s personhood rather than her labour power which the employer is attempting to buy” (ibid: 2). It is a “pre-modern, personalistic idiom of power … in which power is openly exercized but in which an attempt is made to humanize unequal and hierarchical power relations through social strategies such as gifts and fictive kin” (ibid: 6). The inclusion of domestic work in the list of occupations that are vulnerable to trafficking in the UN Trafficking Protocol in 2000 has supported human rights-based critical approaches (Sedacca 2019) like the victim-oriented “domestic slavery” (Anderson 2000; Mantouvalou 2012), “forced labour” and “trafficking” (Anderson and Rogaly 2005). The isolated work of the care worker and the fragmentation and diffusion of the role of the employer resonate in the lack of collective organization of care workers. Intermediary organizations that organize the recruitment and placement of workers for elderly care in German households formally bear the role of the employer. The family engaging the care worker is a client of the intermediary organization, although practically exercising the role of the employer as the formal employer is not present at the workplace. Since families are not collectively organized as employers of care workers and intermediary organizations are abroad, trade unions do not have any “partner” organizations to negotiate wages and working conditions to reach collective agreements. German trade unions for years made no efforts to organize informally working domestic workers, as irregular migrant workers were thought to be an instrument of the employers to undermine the rights of workers working formally, whereas paid care work was not conceived as a “real” work. Only recently, the United Services Union (Ver.di), a trade union for service workers, and the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) started to offer consultancy for domestic and care workers, utilizing the concept of human rights rather than that of workers’ rights. The ILO Convention 189 has, however, given a considerable boost to the organization of domestic workers and the International Domestic Workers Federation was set up, consisting of 75 affiliates from 58 countries and having in July 2020, over 560 000 domestic and household workers as members (IDWF 2020). This shows that despite the monadization and transnationalization of the work in this field, new technologies do not only offer possibilities for communication but for collective organization too.
416 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Coping Strategies and Resistance To change the employer or to exit the care sector altogether, seem to be the main strategies of the care workers to cope with their precarious situation. The strategy of job rotation, practised by care workers from Central and Eastern Europe, can be seen as a form of a periodic exiting of the employment relation. Under the conditions of closed borders and given the geographical proximity of the country of origin to Germany, care workers from these countries have been organizing their informal work in the form of short stays, possible with a tourist visa. After the establishment of the freedom of movement within the enlarged Europe, the self-organized rotation system has been continued, in order to reconcile paid work abroad and the family responsibilities at home (Metz-Göckel, Morokvasic-Müller and Münst 2008). At the same time, care workers from oversees – especially those from the Philippines – are forced to stay in the job for longer periods of time, not only due to the high travel costs but to the often irregular status too. They compensate defamilialization by joining communities of co-ethnic domestic workers that function as a quasi-family (Parreñas 2001). These gatherings are a locus of sociability for migrant domestic workers and enable mutual emotional support and self-help as well as information exchange about jobs and coping strategies in the work place (Parreñas 2001).
INSTITUTIONALIZED ELDERLY CARE Although elderly care is mostly provided at home in Germany, the need for institutionalized elderly care is growing. This field, however, is suffering from an enormous shortage of qualified labour force, since at least 50 per cent of the care workers in elderly care institutions are required to be qualified nurses (Prognos 2018). The Recruitment of Nurses from Abroad: the Legal Framing The shortage of nurses worldwide has created a global health care market where states are competing in attracting nurses from abroad. The recruitment of health care professionals is framed by the “Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel” adopted by WHO in 2010. The Code sets barriers to the extraction of health care professionals from the poorer to the wealthier countries and aims at discouraging their active recruitment from developing countries with a “critical shortage” of health professionals (WHO 2010, 6). The EU-legislation on free movement of workers on the other hand, fosters mobility of qualified workers within the EU. Similarly, new migration and labour policies in Germany prioritize migration of (highly) qualified workers to solve the skilled workers’ shortage. Beside these policy reforms, a new legal instrument, the “Recognition Act” (2012), was introduced to guarantee the assessment of the equivalence of the professional qualification in reference to the standard qualifications in Germany within a period of three months (Sommer 2014). In the case of credentials from third countries, the recognition procedure might, however, prescribe the attendance of specific further education courses. Moreover, the Recognition Act anticipates the proof of German language skills on a professional level. If not exhibiting the German language competence at the level B2 of the European Language Reference Frame, migrant nurses are employed under their qualification as nurse assistants and experience deskilling,
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case 417 which has been a systematic and racialized strategy to devalue migrant work since the 1960s when highly skilled nurses were recruited from South Korea. Thus, recruitment of nurses from abroad is not something new in Germany, but it has intensified significantly in the last few years. The introduction of the Recognition Act seems to have even led to the increase of recruitment programmes for skilled labour. Such programmes do not only support the job application process, but also the attainment of the working allowance, the recognition of the professional qualifications and acquisition of German language skills. At the same time, more intermediaries have become involved in the recruitment. However, only large or well-off institutions of elderly care can afford such programmes. Besides the public programmes, there are several private programs run by commercial agencies or welfare organizations to organize the recruitment. Such programmes seem to ease the labour migration from respective countries, whereas migrant nurses arriving autonomously and with the help of their own networks, seem to encounter many more problems with the administrative procedures and the acquisition of German language skills (Kontos et al. 2019). The Problem of the Equivalence of Professional Qualifications Migrant nurses seem to experience the “recognition” process as a devaluation of their professional qualification, as academic nurses’ qualifications from abroad are being levelled with the German vocational training (Kontos et al. 2019; Pütz et al. 2019). This incongruence results from the difference between the professional education systems: the training of nurses in Germany is vocational, whereas in many other countries in Europe and beyond it is academic. Since the Recognition Act focusses on the formal equalization of foreign certificates with the German vocational standards in nursing, the higher academic qualifications are de facto discarded. Consequently, the academically educated migrant nurses are not eligible to fully use their professional medical skills, as in Germany these belong to the professional repertoire of doctors. Literally, this means a devaluation of the professional competences of academic educated nurses from abroad and leads to deskilling. Working Conditions in Institutionalized Elderly Care Neoliberal policies and budget cuts have led to a chronic underfunding of the institutionalized health and elderly care sector as well as to an increased workload at workplaces. This has put nurses working in elderly care in a vulnerable and precarious position that renders them prone for exploitation. As the work is mostly isolated and under tight time schedules, their own health is at risk. Structurally induced, precarious working conditions pose limits to the realization of “good care” that requires communication and emotional care. This is often conceived as a “moral dilemma” by migrant nurses themselves (Kontos et al. 2019) who have different working experiences and who are often unfamiliar with the practice of “basic care work”, focussing on the body, common in the institutions for elderly care in Germany. As elderly care institutions strongly need nurses but are seldom in the position to recruit their workers from abroad, they often employ migrant nurses entering German labour markets autonomously. In case their professional qualifications have not been formally “recognized” at that point, they are employed in assisting positions and paid less, although performing the same work as other nurses. Working fulltime complicates the acquisition of language skills needed for the formal recognition of the professional qualifications. It is common for the
418 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work formal “recognition” process to be prolonged, due to the failing to provide proof of German language skills at the required B2 level. For third country nationals, this brings a risk of losing the working and residence allowance and contributes to their precarious position on the German labour market. Coping Strategies of Migrant Nurses in Elderly Care The institutionalized elderly care in general seems to be a far less attractive option for migrant nurses than nursing in hospitals (Kontos et al. 2019). Not only the stressful, isolated and bodily exhausting work, but also the lower social status and salary makes institutionalized elderly care more unattractive. Since the employees in this sector are rarely organized into trade unions (Prognos 2018), and only very few institutions of elderly care have workers’ councils, there is no collective body to fight for the rights of migrant nurses. Furthermore, institutionalized elderly care work suffers from missing career prospects (Prognos 2018). Migrant nurses cope with this situation by exiting the elderly care sector as soon as they receive the formal recognition of their professional qualifications and opt for the hospital sector (Kontos et al. 2019). In fact, the work in elderly care facilities seems to be more or less a stepping stone for further career development in the hospital sector, which offers more career prospects with improvements in salary and working conditions.
CONCLUSION In this chapter, we explored the situation of migrant care workers in elderly care in Germany. We discussed how, not only the demographic changes and women’s increased labour participation, but also that the neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state has led to the marketization and commodification of elderly care. We indicated how this development has resulted in the creation of low-paid care jobs attracting migrant women to informal home-based elderly care as well as to the recruitment of migrant nurses for institutionalized elderly care. As a consequence, the provision of both home-based care and institutionally delivered elderly care has not only become dependent on migrant care workers and nurses, but also promotes the reproduction of global inequalities between the Global North and Global South. In our discussion, we critically interrogated this connection by looking at the working conditions of the migrant care workers and nurses both in the home-based and institutionalized elderly care. On the basis of our discussion, it can be argued that the redistribution of care work in Germany fosters a transnational division of labour that Germany profits from. This can be seen in the disinterest of policy to regulate and to improve the working conditions in home-based elderly care as well as in the recruitment of nurses from abroad, as Germany benefits to a great extent from the current “care drain”. However, the costs of care migration fall back on the home countries of the migrant nurses: they not only carry the educational and training costs, but lose the country’s human capital and nursing resources (Mara 2020). Moreover, the migration of care workers to home-based care abroad extracts emotional resources needed for the care responsibilities in the country of origin (Widding Isaksen et al. 2008). The current COVID-19 pandemic has put the organization of health and elderly care in a new light. The structural problems and deficits that the health and care sector has been fighting with over the last decades have become more apparent and visible. The urgent demand for
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case 419 the health and care services during the COVID-19 pandemic has not only forced Germany to direct investments in the health and care sector but has led to a general discussion about the social and economic recognition of the jobs considered to be “system relevant” for the functioning of a society. This echoes the feminist critics of political economy that has underlined the need to reconsider the role of the reproductive care work and its visible and invisible forms, not only as a contribution to human well-being, but also central to economic growth (Razavi 2007). Several initiatives have started, not only to socially recognize, but also financially reward the institutionalized health and elderly care carried under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the focus of the media has concentrated on the capacities of health and institutionalized elderly care sector, the precarious situation of the migrant care workers in home-based elderly care under the COVID-19 pandemic has been invisibilized. The closing of the national borders in order to stop the spread of the COVID-19, however, has caused serious problems for the transnational migrant care workers shuttling between Central and Eastern European countries and Germany (Aulenbacher, Lutz and Schwiter 2021; Safuta and Noack 2020). This situation poses enormous challenges for the organization of home-based elderly care and shows how dependent the Global North has become on transnational care workers and nurses.
REFERENCES Anderson, Bridget (2000), Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour, London: Zed Books. Anderson, Bridget and Ben Rogaly (2005), Forced Labour and Migration to the UK, London: COMPAS and TUC. Aulenbacher, Brigitte, Helma Lutz and Karin Schwiter (eds.) (2021), Gute Sorge ohne gute Arbeit? Live-in-Care in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, Weinheim, Basel: Beltz Juventa. Bock, Gisela and Barbara Duden (1977), ‘Arbeit aus Liebe – Liebe als Arbeit. Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus’, in Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen (eds), Frauen und Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, Juli 1976, Berlin: Courage, pp. 118–199. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta (1999), Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geissler, Birgit (2002), ‘Die Dienstleistungslücke im Haushalt. Der neue Bedarf nach Dienstleistungen und die Handlungslogik der privaten Arbeit’, in Claudia Gather, Birgit Geissler and Maria Rerrich (eds), Weltmarkt Privathaushalt. Bezahlte Haushaltsarbeit im globalen Wandel, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 30–49. Hochschild, Arlie Russel (2001), ‘Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value’, in Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton (eds), On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, London: Vintage, pp. 130–146. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierretta (2001), Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadow of Affluence, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Horn, Vincent and Cornelia Schweppe (2019), ‘Transnational mobilities of care in old age’, in International Journal of Aging and Later Life, 13(2), 9–22. IDWF (2020), Who Are We?, accessed 28 September 2020 at https://idwfed.org/en/about-us-1. ILO (2010), Decent Work for Domestic Workers, Report IV (1), International Labour Conference, 99th Session, Geneva: ILO, accessed 28 September 2020 at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-- -ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_104700.pdf. Kocher, Eva (2013), ‘Hausangestellte im deutschen Arbeitsrecht. Ratifikation der ILO –Konvention 189’, in Neue Zeitschrift für Arbeitsrecht, 30(17), 929–934.
420 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Kontos, Maria (2013), ‘Negotiating the Social Citizenship Rights of Migrant Domestic Workers: The Right to Family Reunification and Family Life in Policies and Debates’, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(3), 409–424. Kontos, Maria (2014), ‘Migrantinnen in der häuslichen und institutionellen Pflege – Überlegungen zur prekären Anerkennung von Rechten auf Familienzusammenführung und ein Familienleben’, in Johanna Krawietz and Stefanie Visel (eds), Prekarisierung transnationaler Care-Arbeit – Ambivalente Anerkennung, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 3 pp. 7–55. Kontos, Maria and Glenda Bonifacio (2015), ‘Introduction: Domestic and Care Work of Migrant Women and the Right to Family Life’, in Maria Kontos and Glenda Bonifacio (eds), Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life. International Perspectives, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–26. Kontos, Maria, Minna-Kristiina Ruokonen-Engler and Anna Guhlich (2019), ‘Betriebliche Integrationsprozesse von neu migrierten Pflegefachkräften’, in Robert Pütz, Maria Kontos, Christa Larsen, Sigrid Rand and Minna-Kristiina Ruokonen-Engler (eds), Betriebliche Integration von Pflegefachkräften aus dem Ausland. Innenansichten zu Herausforderungen globalisierter Arbeitsmärkte, Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung Study 416, pp. 60–170. Lutz, Helma (2018), Die Hinterbühne der Care-Arbeit. Transnationale Perspektiven auf Care-Migration im geteilten Europa, Weinheim, Basel: Beltz-Juventa. Mantouvalou, Virginia (2012), ‘Human Rights for Precarious Workers: The Legislative Precariousness of Domestic Labour’, in Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, 34(1), 133–166. Mara, Isilda (2020), Health Professionals Wanted: Chain Mobility Across European Countries, Research Report 445, The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. Metz-Göckel, Sigrid, Mirjana Morokvasic and Agnes Senganata Münst (eds.) (2008), Gendered Mobilities in an Enlarged Europe: A Gender Perspective, Opladen, Farmington Hills: Barbara Budrich Publishers. Parreñas, Rachel S. (2001), Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Prognos (2018), Strategien gegen den Fachkräftemangel in der Altenpflege. Probleme und Herausforderungen, Freiburg: Bertelsmann Stiftung. Pütz, Robert, Maria Kontos, Christa Larsen, Sigrid Rand and Minna-Kristiina Ruokonen-Engler (eds.) (2019), Betriebliche Integration von Pflegefachkräften aus dem Ausland. Innenansichten zu Herausforderungen globalisierter Arbeitsmärkte, Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung Study 416. Razavi, Shahra (2007), The Political and Social Economy of Care in a Development Context. Conceptual Issues, Research Questions and Policy Options. Gender and Development Programme Paper 3, Geneva: UNSRID. Resch, Marianne (2002), ‘Humane Arbeit im Haushalt?’, in Claudia Gather, Birgit Geissler and Maria Rerrich (eds), Weltmarkt Privathaushalt. Bezahlte Haushaltsarbeit im globalen Wandel, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 71–85. Romero, Mary (2002), Maid in the U.S.A., New York, NY: Routledge. Safuta, Anna and Kristin Noack (2020), ‘A Pandemic and Then What? The Effects of the Corona Pandemic on Migrant Care Workers in Germany’, in Migration and (Im)Mobility Magazine Routed, 10, June 20, accessed 30 August 2020 at https://www.routedmagazine.com/care-workers-germany. Sedacca, Natalie (2019), ‘Migrant Domestic Workers and the Right to a Private and Family Life’, in Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 37(4), 288–310. Sommer, llka (2014), ‘Die Müh(l)en der staatlichen Anerkennung – Selektionsmechanismen der Umwandlung “ausländischer” in “deutsche” Pflegefachkräfte zwischen Berufsrecht und Anerkennungspraxis’, in Johanna Krawietz and Stefanie Visel (eds), Prekarisierung transnationaler Care-Arbeit – Ambivalente Anerkennung, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 56–81. Thiessen, Barbara (2002), ‘Bezahlte Hausarbeit. Biografische Befunde zur Gestaltung von Arbeits-Beziehungen im Privaten’, in Claudia Gather, Birgit Geissler and Maria Rerrich (eds), Weltmarkt Privathaushalt. Bezahlte Haushaltsarbeit im globalen Wandel, Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, pp. 140–152. Van Hooren, Franca J. (2012), ‘Varieties of Migrant Care Work: Comparing Patterns of Migrant Labour in Social Care’, in Journal of European Social Policy, 22(2), 133–147.
Aging societies and migrant labour force in elderly care: the German case 421 WHO (2010), The WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel, accessed 30 August 2020 at https:// www .who .int/ hrh/migration/code/WHO_global_ code_of_ practice_EN.pdf?ua=1. Widding Isaksen, Lise, Sambasivan Uma Devi and Arlie Russell Hochschild (2008), ‘Global Care Crisis. A Problem of Capital, Care Chain, or Commons?’, in American Behavioral Scientist, 52(3), 405–425. Williams, Fiona (2011), Towards a Transnational Analysis of the Political Economy of Care, Working Paper 6, ISSN 1654-1189, The Stockholm University Linnaeus Center for Integration Studies (SULCIS). Young, Grace Esther (1987), ‘The Myth of Being “Like a Daughter”’, in Latin American Perspectives, 14(3), 365–380.
FURTHER READING Anderson, Bridget and Isabel Shutes (eds.) (2014), Migration and Care Labour. Theory, Policy and Politics, Houndmills, Basingtoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Apitzsch, Ursula and Marianne Schmidbaur (eds) (2010), Care and Migration. Die Ent-Sorgung menschlicher Reproduktionsarbeit entlang von Geschlechter- und Armutsgrenzen, Opladen, Farmington Hills, MI: Verlag Barbara Budrich. Aulenbacher, Brigitte, Fabienne Décieux and Birgit Riegraf (2018), ‘Capitalism Goes Care. Elder and Child Care between Market, State, Profession, and Family and Questions of Justice and Inequality’, in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 37(4), 347–360. Haidinger, Bettina and Käthe Knittler (2019), Feministische Ökonomie. Eine Einführung, Wien, Berlin: Mandelbaum Verlag. Kofman, Eleonore and Parvati Raghuram (2015), Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kontos, Maria and Glenda Bonifacio (eds.) (2015), Migrant Domestic Workers and Family Life. International Perspectives, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Theobald, Hildegard and Matteo Luppi (2018), ‘Elderly Care in Changing Societies: Concurrences in Divergent Care Regimes. A Comparison of Germany, Sweden and Italy’, in Current Sociology, Special Issue Global Sociology of Care and Care Work, 66(4), 629–643. Yeates, Nicola and Jane Pillinger (2019), International Health Worker Migration and Recruitment: Global Governance, Politics and Policy, London: Routledge.
35. Questioning social reproduction theory: North African working-class migrants in France and their families Catherine Delcroix
INTRODUCTION This chapter discusses the educational aspirations and mobilization of working-class immigrant families from Maghreb countries and questions the explanatory power of the theory of reproduction of the social structure from one generation to the next and develops a complementary theory that focuses on these families’ action. For a long time, these working-class families were considered as having neither the necessary resources nor the indispensable capacities to help their children succeed in their schooling. Their forms of mobilization were then obscured and rarely studied. For example, in the 1980s, Zéhraoui (1985, 1996) in Boulogne-Billancourt and Zéroulou (1988) in Lille, studied family mobilizations of immigrants, and Delcroix (1995, 1999, 2004; and Delcroix and Inowlocki, 2021) studied the educational investment of immigrant fathers from the Maghreb in Nantes, then in Toulouse. The first quantitative survey confirming the role of parental aspirations of immigrants in the educational success of their children was carried out by Vallet and Caille (1996). Results of quantitative studies by Brinbaum (1999, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2013) highlights, in a comparable socio-professional environment, the higher educational aspirations and greater mobilization of Maghrebi families compared to long-term French ones. This discovery helps to explain the differential in educational success. These are phenomena which cannot be fully explained by the “reproduction theory” (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). Indeed, most of these immigrant families have little or no economic, cultural, social, or symbolic capital (or at least no “capital” which would be recognized as such in France) (Poullaouec, 2004). Immigrant fathers have been massively employed in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in industry or services: according to the TeO survey, nearly three-quarters of Maghrebi parents (75 percent of fathers and 77 percent of mothers from Algeria, 71 percent and 73 percent respectively of those from Morocco or Tunisia) have no diploma; more than 60 percent of all mothers are unemployed and have never been employed.1 Often stigmatized and being perceived as “having resigned” from their parents’ duty (“parents démissionnaires” is a rather frequent expression in social workers’ reports on such families), many of these families have reacted by resorting to the resources offered by the “Politique de la Ville” (this expression refers to a set of specific additional policies that have been implemented exclusively in France’s 400 most deprived urban areas). Furthermore, it is not because immigrant families lack every type of “capital” (in the Bourdieu and Passeron sense), i.e. objective resources (Bourdieu and Passeron, [1970] 2005), that they are totally deprived of ways to help their children succeeding in entering adulthood. They still have the capacity to mobilize different types of resources, whether objective resources drawn from the 422
Questioning social reproduction theory 423 extended family, the neighborhood, or the community (in connection with urban policy), or what we have come to call “subjective resources” (Delcroix, 2009). Here we will focus on a particular form of “subjective resources”: resources of meaning. These are constructed and discussed within each family whenever children are e.g. given information about their parents’ history, from their own childhood in the country of origin to their reasons for migrating, and about the conditions of their settlement in France. In this way, children learn to compare their own situation with that of their parents, to relativize and distance themselves from the obstacles they encounter, and to reflect on the stages of their own journey. These resources, which are jointly built up within their families, also give them the means to develop their self-esteem and thus to meet people who are likely to help them. In order to understand how this phenomenon and its mechanisms work it is necessary both to increase the number of fieldwork observations, to develop hypotheses based on the observations thus collected, and for hypotheses to be tested by means of surveys on statistically representative samples. This paper had independently carried out empirical work on the same sociological object (immigrant families’ children’s degree of school achievement), using two specific methodological approaches: qualitative and quantitative. When we discovered that the results converged, it led us to present a synthesis of the empirical findings. We have analyzed the data collected by national surveys from the early 1990s to the present day based on the TeO survey (Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon, 2015; Brinbaum, 2019) on the educational aspirations and investments of immigrant families and, more generally, working-class families. Once the social environment and other family characteristics have been controlled for, statistical models make it possible to accurately capture the effects of the various migratory origins on these variables. The conclusions of several fieldwork experiences conducted over a period of fifteen years on families living in deprived neighborhoods in various French cities (Nantes, Toulouse, four cities in the Paris region, etc.) show how these families struggle against precarious conditions. The fieldwork observations of such families – some of them migrant families, others not – essentially sought to find out what fathers and mothers were doing over the long term to combat the multiple risks associated with their precarious situation, and to help their children to “succeed” in their future (Delcroix, 2021). For the vast majority of these children, “success” means completing a training course (short or long), finding a job and staying in it, and starting a family. This concept takes into account the whole of a pathway, and, in particular, the educational and social distance carried by the child from his or her point of origin: the child’s starting point – the social status of the family of origin; it is not limited to the point of arrival. Furthermore, the subjective feeling of success must be taken into account as Claudine Attias-Donfut and François-Charles Wolff have shown in relation to social mobility (Attias-Donfut and Wolff, 2001). Collecting their life stories made it possible to learn about their history, the formation of their life project(s), and the strategies and courses of action that they had been implementing in order to achieve them (Santelli, 2001). In the first part, we will discuss the aspirations of working-class immigrant parents for their children, and their effects on educational investments. In the second part, we will present the various forms of mobilization, as well as the ways in which they enable (or hinder) intergenerational communication to promote the success of the younger generation. Finally, we will come back to what our results, obtained within the framework of the sociology of international
424 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work migration and the sociology of education, could contribute to the understanding of the future of children from working-class (long-term) French families.
PARENTS’ ASPIRATIONS FOR THEIR CHILDREN AND THEIR IMPACT ON FAMILY ORGANIZATION Men and women who left their countries in the 1960s and 1970s to come to France undoubtedly had great ambitions (Sayad, 2004). It was a period of European prosperity. However, prosperity in no way prevented the persistence of strong discriminations and racism against overseas immigrants. Those immigrant parents who nevertheless decided to remain in France and settle tended to transfer their long-term plans for economic and social success on and to their children. However, given the particularly strong dependency of professional achievement and social recognition on school achievement in France, the first step towards their children’s success was their school grades. Schooling thus came at the heart of such families’ migration projects. Their aspirations for their children’s school achievement were and still are very strong, as shown by the first statistical surveys carried out throughout France in the 1990s. In 1992, three-quarters of working-class families, whether they were of French origin or immigrants (Brinbaum and Kieffer, 2008) expressed the hope that their children, most of whom were still in primary school, would succeed in obtaining the baccalaureate; and this hope was even stronger if the child was already in secondary school (they gave up this hope if faced by the child’s difficulties during his/her years at primary school). Aspirations differed more according to the social origin of the families than according to their migration background. At the end of the 1990s, 57 percent of French or immigrant families wanted their children to get a baccalaureate diploma (which translates successful achievement of secondary schooling). In fact, while in previous generations the baccalaureate had meant symbolic entry into French society’s middle class, in the late 1960s it became the goal for all families whether or not immigrant ones. But even more surprisingly, families from Maghrebi origin showed higher aspirations for their children’s educational achievement than French families from an equivalent socio-professional background, i.e. working-class families. Furthermore, these aspirations were just as high for girls as for boys. Unlike French working-class families, who showed a clear preference for short vocational or technical studies, thus favoring rapid access to a first job, immigrant families from the Maghreb did not hesitate in considering that their children would go on studying for years after baccalaureate; and if need be, in general education. Eight years later, in 1998, these trends were confirmed by data from the Family Survey (associated with the DEPP Panel ‘95), which also showed a general rise in the aspirations of all families but in particular of working-class and immigrant families. Families from the Maghreb consider (on average) higher education diplomas as useful for finding a job, twice as much as French families from an equivalent socio-professional background. On the other hand, no doubt due to their very imperfect knowledge of the university system, expectations thus raised in some families were often vague or unrealistic. Immigrant parents also managed to pass on to their children their ambitions for social advancement. When questioned in the “Jeunes 2002” survey, more children from immigrant than from long-term French parents – keeping socio-professional background constant –
Questioning social reproduction theory 425 wished to pursue higher education; and the gaps became more pronounced when they were enrolled in vocational courses. These strong aspirations for general education were reflected in the school career paths. Building a Positive Relationship at School Helping each of one’s children to succeed in their school career implies organization and sacrifices. But how do immigrant parents ensure that their children develop a positive relationship to schooling? Each family invents its own tactics, which are revealed by interview surveys. In a very general way, school is presented as an opportunity and a resource. For example, Mr. Tahar, 45 years old, Algerian, employed as a construction worker, father of four children aged between 12 and 18, encourages his children to study well. He wants with his wife to try to get his children as far as possible. Even if everyone wants to do their thing, he thinks it possible to discuss their choices with his children, especially from secondary school onwards. He considers that there is a lot of work and that immigrants like him are at a disadvantage because they didn’t go to school. He tries to make his children understand that STUDYING IS EVERYTHING! He thinks that getting at least the baccalaureate is important; otherwise, as of today, you have nothing. He has no different project for girls and for boys. And, in order to push them forward, he has to deprive himself to pay for their studies. He adds that it is not easy to make savings when you get only minimum wage. As for Ms. Lilla, she is a young Algerian mother, only 30 years old, whose child is two years old. She has been attending the Protection Maternelle et Infantile (PMI) with him since he was born. The Maternal and Child Protection policy consists of free and optional regular monitoring of pregnant women, babies, and children up to the age of six years (Delcroix, 2021). This is the place where she first encountered the (highly developed) French system of social protection, typically focused on children. It was there that she became aware that if a child goes to nursery school it will have better chances of school achievement, and less chances of going into delinquency: this was – and still is – a major concern for parents, but also an obsession of authorities; an obsession which largely underlies the Politique de la Ville’s2 orientations. Ms. Lilla has a good knowledge of the neighborhood’s institutional resources. As well as many other parents she has met, she is aware that her children’s schooling achievement strongly depends on “good” follow-up from early childhood. Such close follow-up must be assumed by parents; but other co-educators: social, medical, educational professionals will each bring her/his useful contribution. Although her son is still very young, Ms. Lilla seems to have strongly internalized the very idea of prevention which is at the basis of the Politique de la Ville. Mrs. Fatima, 40 years old, Moroccan, is a housewife and the mother of six children aged between 6 and 20. Although she cannot read or write, she tries to keep up with her children’s schooling: she goes to her children’s teacher to tell them not to discourage them or push them to leave school with nothing because then they will get no job. Mr. Ahmed, 35 years old, is a Tunisian father of five children aged between 8 and 15. He has a job as a bus driver. To him, following his children’s schooling and getting involved in school is a moral obligation. “A great opportunity”: this is how immigrant parents, especially mothers, see the French school system. They come from another country with its specific school system, access to which they had no chances to get – at least for most of them. Therefore, they do not have the
426 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work attitude of mistrust towards the French school system that many working-class French parents may have. Immigrants still believe in the virtues of the egalitarian and republican French school system that were so much vaunted to them during colonization times. The testimony of Djamila, the mother of the Nour family, illustrates this point in an exemplary way. Born in a Moroccan village in 1956, orphaned at the age of five, she was taken in with her mother by a paternal uncle and immediately helped her daily with household chores; in addition, she began weaving wool carpets at home. But just as she was getting ready to start primary school, she had a great shock: her mother told her that she could not afford to send her to school. It is almost every day that Djamila recounts this episode in her life. She would have liked to study so much. She passed on to her children the idea that school offers an opportunity that must be seized. Her eldest daughter Leïla went to school in France. Despite initial difficulties, and despite the fact that both her parents were totally illiterate and against the lack of encouragement from some of her teachers, she held on and succeeded in her schooling until she passed her baccalaureate and a law degree. Through Djamila’s personal story, which she has told her daughter a hundred times, and through the impact that awareness of this story has had on Leïla herself, we can perceive a much more general pattern: when the story of the mother (or father), and in particular the story of their childhood has been told and passed on to their children, it can play a very important role in their relationship with school, with the world, and with time itself. Passing on their own history to their children has enabled parents to describe and make understandable lived situations that were radically different from those their children are experiencing, and that also helps with understanding how and why they themselves left their village or town to come to France, leaving all protections behind. We will return to this question at the end of the article.
MOBILIZATIONS AND FORMS OF SOCIAL SUCCESS Statistical surveys show that, on average, immigrants have very high expectations for their children’s educational achievement; and fieldwork observations give indications of the ways in which they manage to convince (at least some of) their children to study assiduously. But how do they go about helping them in their daily lives, given that they generally have very few financial resources to devote to this, and often lack academic knowledge and skills that would be necessary? Let us add that even if they were educated in their country of origin, where they would have learnt to read and write, it was in a language other than French, and sometimes in another alphabet; and that the contents taught to them as children obviously concerned their own country, its history and geography, and not the history or geography of France which is taught in French schools to their children. In the French system, selection is based on learning contents that are specific to the French cultural model. In other words, considerable is the challenge faced by immigrant parents who are so eager for their children’s school achievement in French schools. The latter cannot be measured globally, and field surveys discover multiple forms. Traditionally carried out by the mother in most families of all backgrounds, school monitoring (homework and lessons) appears weaker in immigrant families: thus, in 2008–2009 (TeO survey), it concerned 34 percent of children of Maghrebi parents, compared to 71 percent of children of French families from equivalent social backgrounds. Fathers’ support, which is
Questioning social reproduction theory 427 much lower, also varies significantly according to the country of origin respectively 21 percent for Algerian families, 29 percent for Moroccan and 40 percent for French families). However, for immigrant families this deficit is partially compensated by older siblings’ support to their younger brothers and sisters: this is the case in 48 percent of Moroccan and Tunisian families, and in 55 percent of Algerian families, as compared with 31 percent in French families from working-class and employee backgrounds. The role of siblings had already been observed in previous studies carried out by Yael Brinbaum. For young people with older siblings with at least a baccalaureate, help from the older siblings was given for almost three-quarters of the descendants of immigrants from the Maghreb, as compared with 54 percent for the majority population where parental help dominates. Immigrant families, when they realize they lack sufficient resources for helping their children, particularly for the elders – or sometimes in addition to the assistance provided – do turn to educational support as do a number of French families of workers and employees. Around 30 percent of the descendants of North African immigrants aged between 20 and 30 years old have benefited from tutoring (32 percent from Algerian families and 27 percent from Moroccan families respectively) but only 7 percent in French families (10 percent in workers’ and employees’ families: the latter make more frequent use (14 percent) of paid tutoring). These results are in line with those of qualitative surveys on the use of such resources provided by the Politique de la Ville as support courses and training courses (Brinbaum and Delcroix, 2016). The Effects of Passing On (As Against Not Passing On) Family History to Children We have already mentioned passing on family memories (reconstruction of family history) as an educational strategy that can help give children an awareness of their parents’ history, as well as an awareness of the reasons they are growing up in France. It is useful, and sometimes decisive in giving children some degree of “ontological security” (Giddens, 1984), in the sense of convincing them they are where they should be (and not elsewhere) and of being who they are (and not somebody else). This passing on or “transmission” is part of the range of educational strategies in a broad sense; but it is not implemented, far from it, in all families, and particularly in immigrant families. One such example of passing on memories gives an idea of the inventiveness of these immigrant families on this issue and the effects thus produced. It may show a much more general – if not universal – phenomenon. The example is that of Mr. Kamel, a Tunisian father of six children (the first four are girls) and his two oldest daughters, aged 19 and 16. He had got his baccalaureate in Tunis and had gone to France to study at university; but due to lack of financial means, he was forced to abandon getting higher education to take a job as a lorry driver. Often absent from home, he was nevertheless looking for ways to help his daughters succeed in their studies. The idea came to him to take them with him, one by one from the age of eight, on his professional trips to France or even to other European countries. Thus, several times a year, and each in turn, the two eldest daughters went on a trip with their father. They visited other cities, and they met their father’s colleagues. Both girls consider these trips as very special moments. Aïcha, 19 years old, explains how when she was visiting French towns and tourist places with her father, they would take several breaks. Her father told her then about the history of these places. He was comparing the cities with each other: with Toulouse but also with Tunis,
428 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work his hometown and (with) those they visited. He showed her the advantages and disadvantages of each place they were going to. For Aïcha it was the curiosity that he taught her that pushed her to learn foreign languages. At the time of the interview, Aïcha was in her second year of university, studying German and English. Khadidja, 16 years old, was more sensitive to other aspects of these trips: her father showed her how to drive and how to repair a truck. She discovered how he put on the handbrake. She said that she wants to drive, to get her license. She will take a BEP in Transport and Communication Services. She would first like to pass an economic and social baccalaureate and then create a trucking firm; not here. The testimonies of these two girls show how Mr. Kamel is opening “fields of possibilities” for his daughters; how he passes to them a way of looking at the world based on his experiences of migration and work, which have the advantages of allowing comparisons. He also encourages his children to learn the various codes belonging to different cultural and social worlds. Moreover, he builds a direct relationship with each of them that does not involve their mother. The two girls have got a precise knowledge of their father’s childhood and past; they know how and why he emigrated and with which project.
CONCLUSIONS In the 1990s, the first quantitative surveys were carried out on the aspirations of immigrant families for their children’s educational success and educational investment. Some qualitative researchers had already described the existence of such aspirations through ethnographic fieldwork. These converging results make it possible to report on the educational success of children from immigrant families in comparison with children from French families from a similar occupational class. The majority of immigrant families did not possess any of the three main types of family “assets” which, in the theory of reproduction (which is one of the best-known contributions of contemporary French sociology), are supposed to be indispensable to children’s educational success. Therefore, their children’s eventual achievement could not be but a consequence of their parents’ mobilizing other types of resources, of which we are proposing to identify several types here. There might be resources of the extended family, as well as resources proposed in deprived neighborhoods by the Politique de la Ville (for instance, school support by volunteers). But most importantly, there is what we have called the subjective resources of families, in other words everything that is related to their capacities for reflection, for mobilizing their members’ energies (for instance, those of older children for helping their younger siblings), and to their capacity for action. By using the definition of what “success” meant for working-class parents: not necessarily winning one of the very difficult and selective “Concours des Grandes Ecoles” leading to the highest tier of the French educational system, but much more modestly entering adulthood with having validated a (short or long) professional training cursus, finding a stable job, and founding a family, we have shown what makes sense for these families. These ways to enter adulthood demonstrates the social distance traveled from one generation to the next despite numerous initial difficulties.
Questioning social reproduction theory 429 And this change in point of view, this transformation of the sociological view of the careers of people of popular origin brought about by the study of the chances of upward mobility in immigrant families, obviously applies all the more to French families of origin since the theory of reproduction condemned them in advance to immobility. This is an important point; and especially so in the context created in France by Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of (social) reproduction. Indeed, the success of this theory has had some unintended consequences. Following a (scientist) orientation, its authors looked for impersonal laws linking together objective variables. In this spirit, when considering which types of resources parents could use to help their children’s school achievement, they focused exclusively on what they referred to as various forms of “capital”, regularly listing the three main forms as (a) economic capital: income and assets; (b) “cultural capital”: an original concept referring to parents’ level of education and of “culture” generally speaking; and (c) “social capital”: as parents’ “useful” personal relations, i.e. with actors – such as teachers who could help their children in their schooling and access to selective educational paths). In doing so however, they implicitly developed a point of view which – in retrospect – appears as typically middle class in at least two ways. First, in reducing resources to objective resources (for the sake of objectivity), to which working classes typically have no access; thus setting aside, and actually ignoring entirely the attitudes of those working-class parents who strongly enhance the value of studying and school achievement, who monitor activities of their children while out of school and encourage them to study rather than to play: in short, ignoring what we have come to call the subjective resources of (at least some) working-class parents, resources which – so we believe – are at least as relevant as a child’s IQ in accounting for her/ his school achievement. Secondly, in implicitly restricting the content of “school achievement” to entry into the highest tier of the French educational system, the Grandes Ecoles: although this remains implicit in the initial formulation of the theory of reproduction, some followers have – somehow naively – made it explicit in their writings. The methodological approach proposed crosses qualitative and quantitative surveys carried out over two decades. It is precisely this combination of methods that provides access to these different resources. It brings to light convergent and complementary results. The results of this research testify to the existence within these families of quantitatively and qualitatively significant and original investments, given the material and family constraints and the risks their children face. They provide conceptual tools that make it possible to construct another view of immigrant families that mirrors that of families from working-class backgrounds. For comparable socio-economic backgrounds, taking into account the aspirations and forms of mobilization that result from them makes it possible to understand the conditions of success and social mobility of some of these young people.
METHODOLOGIES 1.
Qualitative Materials
Our fieldwork (Delcroix, 1995a), conducted over a period of fifteen years in various French cities with funding from the municipality of Nantes (1989–1992), the Caisse Nationale des Allocations Familiales (CNAF) (1994–1998), the European Commission (1999–2003), and finally the National Agency for Urban Renewal (ANRU) (2005–2008), is mainly composed
430 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of about two hundred families from working-class backgrounds, whether migrant or not. We also rely on the long-term case study of a Moroccan family of eight children who have been living in France for over thirty years. We have lived with this family, we have observed them in their daily life, and each of their members has done us the honor of granting us interviews. We wanted to reconstruct the long-term dynamics of gender relations and inter- and intra-generational relations within this family. 2.
Quantitative Sources
The statistical results come from Yaël Brinbaum’s exploitation of several surveys carried out from the 1990s to the present day, from the Trajectoires et Origines (TeO) survey: Efforts of families to educate their children, as documented by the INSEE/INED survey of 1992. This is the first French quantitative survey focusing on educational investments by families. It concerns all parents in metropolitan France with at least one child aged between 2 and 25 years. The sample is representative of parents of schoolchildren. One of its initial objectives was to compare French families to immigrant families. Immigrant populations were over-represented. A study analyzed the educational aspirations of Maghrebi families, the most numerous among immigrants, by comparing families to French families of the same social background. (b) The Panel ‘95 and its complementary surveys of young people and families (Ministry of National Education, 1995–2005). The pupil panel follows a cohort of pupils who entered the sixth form in 1995. In addition to the school career paths completed year by year, a questionnaire was sent to families in 1998 and to the young people on the panel in 2002. Based on these longitudinal data, the following were analyzed: the links between the aspirations and practices of families, young people’s aspirations and educational pathways from primary school to the baccalaureate. The sample concerns young people who responded to the 2002 survey whose parents responded to the survey in 1998. It includes enough families of North African origin and French families of the same social background to validate comparisons between them (Brinbaum and Kieffer, 2008). (c) Trajectories and origins (INSEE-INED, 2008). The TeO survey aims to describe and analyze the living conditions and social trajectories of individuals according to their origins. It concerns 22,000 people aged between 18 and 60 living in an ordinary household in metropolitan France. The comparative study of family mobilizations is made possible by the over-representation of descendants of immigrants in the sample (Beauchemin, Hamel and Simon, 2015). (a)
NOTES 1 2
The academic success of children of North African origin (in comparison with French pupils of the same social background) was highlighted on the basis of the ‘95 panel (see methodologies at the end of the article), as was the role of aspirations on these achievements (Brinbaum and Kieffer, 2008). North African (Maghreb) and Black African families are often the target of public policies that are part of what is called “Politique de la Ville” – City Policy. The Politique de la Ville was initially conceived, constructed, and developed to bring additional public resources of all kinds – funds, personnel, social housing, school support – to children and families living in French cities’ most deprived neighborhoods (400 in total).
Questioning social reproduction theory 431
REFERENCES Attias-Donfut, C. and Wolff, F.-Ch. (2001), ‘La dimension subjective de la mobilité sociale’, Population, 56(6), pp. 919–958. Beauchemin, C., Hamel C., Simon, P. (2015), Trajectoires et origines. Enquête sur la diversité des populations en France, Paris: Ined. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1970) [2005], La reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Brinbaum, Y. (1999), ‘En amont de l’insertion professionnelle: les aspirations éducatives des familles immigrées’, in A. Degenne (eds), Insertion, transition professionnelle et identification de processus, Marseille: CEREQ. Brinbaum, Y. (2002), Au Coeur du parcours migratoire, les investissements éducatifs des familles immigrées: attentes et désillusions, PhD in sociology, Paris: Université Paris Descartes. Brinbaum, Y. (2013), ‘Les familles immigrées et l’école. À l’encontre des idées reçues’, Diversité, 174. Brinbaum, Y. (2019), ‘Trajectoires scolaires des enfants d’immigrés jusqu’au baccalauréat: Rôle de l’origine et du genre. Résultats récents’, Education et Formation, 100. Brinbaum, Y. and Delcroix, C. (2016), ‘Les mobilisations familiales des immigrés pour la réussite scolaire de leurs enfants. Un nouveau questionnement sur l’investissement éducatif des milieux populaires’, Migrations Société, 28(164), pp. 75–97. Brinbaum, Y. and Kieffer, A. (2005), ‘D’une génération à l’autre, les aspirations éducatives des familles immigrées: ambition et persévérance’, Éducation & Formations, 72, pp. 53–75. Brinbaum, Y. and Kieffer, A. (September 2008), ‘Les scolarités des enfants d’immigrés dans le secondaire. Des aspirations aux orientations’, Diversité, 154, pp. 141–146. Brinbaum, Y. and Kieffer, A. (2009), ‘Trajectories of Immigrants’ Children in Secondary Education in France: Differentiation and Polarization’, Population-E, INED, 64(3), pp. 507–554. Brinbaum, Y., Mogerou, L. and Primon, J.L. (2015), ‘Les trajectoires scolaires du primaire au supérieur des descendants d’immigrés et d’originaires d’un DOM’, in C. Beauchemin, C. Hamel, and P. Simon (eds), Trajectoires et Origines – Enquête sur la diversité des populations, Coll. Les Grandes Enquêtes: INED. Delcroix, C. (1995), Une nouvelle approche de la prévention et de la délinquance des jeunes Maghrébins: le rôle social des pères, Paris: ADRI. Delcroix, C. (1995a), ‘Des récits croisés aux histoires de familles’, Current Sociology/Sociologie Contemporaine, 43, pp. 61–67. Delcroix, C. (1999), ‘Les parents des cités: la prévention familiale des risques encourus par les enfants’, Les Annales de la Recherche Urbaine, 83–84, pp. 97–107. Delcroix, C. (2004), ‘Discrédit et action collective. La lutte d’une association de pères musulmans’, in C., Cossée, E. Lada and I. Rigoni (eds), Faire figure d’étranger: regards croisés sur la production de l’altérité, Paris: Armand Colin Publishing, pp. 191–210. Delcroix, C. (2009), ‘Transmission de l’histoire familiale et de la mémoire historique face à la précarité’ Migrations Société, 21(123–124), pp. 143–157. Delcroix, C. (2021), ‘Immigrant families in France and their experience of professionals’ prejudice against their children’, Contemporary Social Science, DOI:10.1080/21582041.2021.1948094. To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2021.1948094 Delcroix, C. and Inowlocki, L. (2021), ‘The Impact of Local Support and Integration Policies: A Comparative Analysis of the Situation of Migrant Families with “Incomplete Rights”’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, DOI:10.1080/23254823.2021.1953391 Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press. Poullaouec, T. (2004), ‘Les familles ouvrières face au devenir de leurs enfants’, Économie et Statistique, 371, pp. 3–22. Santelli, E. (2001), La mobilité sociale dans l’immigration. Itinéraires de réussite des enfants d’origine algérienne, Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail. Sayad, A. (2004). The Suffering of the Immigrant, Cambridge: Polity Press. Vallet, L.-A. and Caille, J.-P. (1996), Les élèves étrangers ou issus de l’immigration dans l’école et le collège français. Une étude d’ensemble, Paris: Ministère de l’Éducation nationale.
432 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Zéhraoui, A. (1985), ‘Mobilisations familiales et réussite scolaire’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 1(2), pp. 107–117. Zéhraoui, A. (1996), ‘Processus différentiels d’intégration des familles algériennes en France’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 37(2), pp. 237–261. Zéroulou, Z. (1988), ‘La réussite scolaire des enfants d’immigrés, l’apport d’une approche en termes de mobilisation’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 29(3), pp. 447–470.
36. Towards a global political economy of sex/ work: evidence of Argentina and Costa Rica Kate Hardy and Megan Rivers-Moore
INTRODUCTION Sex and sexuality have largely been left out of considerations of political economy and “sexuality is often placed on the constitutive outside” (Smith 2020: 3) of political economic analyses. Even critical political economy has tended to maintain a dichotomy between sexuality and economy, with the former relegated to the “private” realm and the latter as the public and therefore appropriate for analysis. This is despite important research that has demonstrated the imbrication of the public and the private, and challenged the exclusion of sexuality from economic analyses (Zelizer 2007). Furthermore, it is worth remembering that “the illicit and illegal economy is intimately related to, not separable from, the functioning of the ‘formal’ global economy” (Smith 2011: 530–531). Sex work, however, has been an exception to this, representing a fruitful site for examining where and how the sexual and the economic interact. While feminist authors have increasingly applied political economic analyses to sex work and argued for the inclusion of sex work in full understandings of the relations between the state, market, production and reproduction (Kotiswaran 2011; Hardy 2016; Berg 2021), these remain largely marginalised by mainstream political economies of work. As a result, workers in the global sex industry tend to be sidelined and their struggles hidden in the “main plot” of discourses of political economy. How then, are we to understand sex work within the global political economy and what are the implications for the possibilities of organising to reconstitute their conditions and the political economy itself? To answer these questions, the chapter first situates sex work within longstanding debates about political economy. Second, it contextualises sex work in Argentina and Costa Rica, locating the sex industry within the national scale political economy of each country. Third, the chapter concludes by outlining future directions in the political economy of sex work and reasserting the value that attention to sex work can bring to wider debates in political economy.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SEX/WORK Notwithstanding some notable and longstanding exceptions (Alexander 1994; Bedford 2009), sexuality remains marginalised in global political economy, which has traditionally foregrounded states and markets, conceptualised as separate from the “mess and matter of everyday life” (Smith 2020: 2). Despite this, a growing field of feminist scholars has challenged the notion that sexuality and also intimacy is “paradigmatically non-economic” (Zatz 1997: 295), falsifying the assumed separation between love and intimacy on the one hand, and money on the other (Folbre and Nelson 2000; Folbre 2002; Dyer et al. 2008). Indeed, Nicola Smith’s (2020: 4) work is instructive in arguing that “commercial sex [is] a site of particular relevance 433
434 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work to the study of capitalism and sexuality”. She continues, “indeed, there is arguably no other case in which the economy/sexuality dichotomy is more apparent and more contested”. Paying attention to forms of income generation – such as sex work – which operate in the informal economy is essential for understanding urban labour markets and labour in the Global South and increasingly also in the North (Chen et al. 2002; Gonzalez de la Rocha 2006; Vosko 2007). In Latin America, seven out of ten new jobs created are in the informal economy (Chant and Pedwell 2008). Authors are united in demanding that attention be paid to informal work as it constitutes a growing proportion of experiences of work (Beneria 2001; Bigsten et al. 2004; Funkhouser 1996). In fact, a number of scholars agree that the majority of the world’s workers are informal, vulnerable and unprotected (Bakker and Gill 2003). Further still, others claim that labouring in informal conditions is in fact the “natural” condition of workers under capitalism (Gallin 2001; Whitson 2007). Yet there is a consensus that informal workers are perhaps the most invisible, that the informal economy is a particularly precarious labour strategy and also a distinctly gendered affair (Hensman 2001). Informal and unregulated work, both in the Global South and in the North, cutting across sector, industry and occupation is female dominated (Beneria 2001; Gallin 2001; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Ward 1990). Rowbotham and Mitter (1994) point out, however, that women’s exclusion from the mainstream economy and thus their presence in informal work has always been particularly acute in the majority world. Sex work has always been implicated in differing ways in specific political economic formations, both preceding and within capitalist economic and social relations. Kamala Kempadoo (2004: 53) has demonstrated how “an exchange of sex for material benefits or money has been evident in the Caribbean region for several centuries”. Sexual-economic transactions sat at a “nexus” of sexual relations (both forced and otherwise) with white men for both slave and “free colored” women (ibid). Sexual relations with slave owners were often considered part of the service required by slaves, regardless of their purported role in the household or on the plantation. In addition, female slaves in British colonies would be made to work in prostitution markets and hired out for sexual services during economic downturns. Enslaved women also appear to have engaged at times in self-commodification of their sexual labour in order to generate an income in addition to slavery. Following emancipation and the end of slave-based plantations, many of these national economies shifted from the export of sugar, bananas and bauxite to tourism, but the sale of sexual labour remained as a key feature of the economic landscape, even increasing its importance and relevance to new tourist-based models of development (Enloe 1990). Indeed, as Truong (1990) points out, in some national economies, such as Thailand and others in South East Asia, sex work has been systematically incorporated into tourism-led export growth strategies and as such, represents a core and explicit feature of economic development. The apparent expansion of the sex industry over the last few decades means that it is no longer useful to posit the sex industries as “other” to late capitalist industry (Brents and Hausbeck 2007: 436), as they are now – and increasingly – integrated in the economy and in peoples’ practices of labour, consumption, leisure, survival and livelihood. Sex work is by no means only performed by women, nor does it only take place on the street. As such there is no one, singular, unifying story of the sex industry. Many different class and social relations proliferate and intersect. Indeed, there has recently been an important emphasis on shifting the focus of theories of sex work from cisgender women street prostitutes in order to shed light on other facets of the industry, including male and trans workers, pornography workers and exotic dancers, as well as focusing on female consumption of commercial sex (Agustín 2005; Berg
Towards a global political economy of sex/work 435 2021; Jones 2020; Scoular and Sanders 2010). A focus on sex work can “elucidate important questions about the articulation between the state, social reproduction, and economic practices that do not conform to orthodox capitalist wage labour relations” (Hardy 2016: 2). As is clear, feminist interrogations of political economy have demonstrated the ways in which developments in the macro-economy have “important implications for everyday lives” (Bedford and Rai 2010: 3). As such, in order to explore the ways in which these articulations are shaped by and shape political economies, in what follows we develop two case studies from the Latin American region – Argentina and – to examine the divergent ways in which macro-economic structures shape the everyday working lives of sex workers.
CASE STUDIES: ARGENTINA AND COSTA RICA Argentina Argentina’s economy is marked by cyclical cycles of debt defaults and crisis. The most dramatic occurred in 2001. By 2000, almost a third of the total population of Argentina were poor by World Bank standards. This reached up to 50 per cent in the poorest regions of the country (World Bank 2014). The alarming rise in poverty continued through 2001, jumping from 38.3 per cent in October 2001 to 57.5 per cent a year later. The number of people living in extreme poverty reached 27 per cent in 2002; this was double the amount recorded just twelve months earlier. In March 2001, Domingo Cavallo, Minister of Finance announced a Zero Deficit Plan, which cut pensions and public sector wages and reduced federal transfers to the provinces still further, leading to an explosion of piquetero protests. The nation erupted. Lootings, cacerolazos, sieges on public buildings and the homes of public functionaries joined the ranks of road blockades as new innovative forms of protest against the government. Tents and make-shift camps sprung up in the plazas across the country as the people took over public space to bring politicians to account. The impact on ordinary people of this crisis was profound. In the first three months of 2002 Argentine GDP sank by 20 per cent, over half the population were living in poverty and 43 per cent were either unemployed or underemployed (North and Huber 2004). Throughout 2002, institutional political instability hit new heights as five presidents passed through the door of the Casa Rosada (Presidential Office) over a two-week period and dual power existed between the institutional political system and the popular organisations (Petras and Veltmeyer 2005). In the context of such a crisis of such scale, participation in sex work became a tactic for survival for women and the people that depended on them. During the crisis leading up to 2001, many housewives emerged into the street, as their partners had become unemployed and unable to find work: Housewives were coming and saying “I’m working because my husband doesn’t have work. I need to pay the rent or they’re going to throw me out”. And they’d say to us “we’ll work in that corner over there”. All of this area was full of women who’d been working a long time … So they went to the corners. Isolated … so that they didn’t have problems with us … We came together and got to know each other and afterwards everyone came to this area (Susana Martinez).
Although sex work was used as a strategy by many women in times of acute economic need, such transience into and out of the sex industry was generally uncharacteristic of respondents’
436 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work working lives. Unlike has been suggested for elsewhere (Law 2000), sex work in Argentina was not used as a transitory strategy for supplementing income in times of personal and larger scale economic crisis, but instead was a long-term income-generating strategy. As such, it was less able to absorb shocks: Jorgelina Sosa said that whereas before the crisis, clients might tip, people were now simply paying the basic rate and nothing more: “[The crisis] really affected us … . The crisis arrived for us too. It arrived for us because it arrived for the client”. At such times, the scarcity of work led to growing divisions between the workers, as the lack was blamed on others who were seen to encroach on women’s spaces of work. For instance, some expressed resentment towards Dominicans working in Buenos Aires, particularly in Plaza Once and in Paraná others resented women travelling from the nearby city of Santa Fé to take advantage of easier conditions due to decriminalisation. As Argentina moved out of the 2002 crisis, it shifted towards a neo-developmentalist state strategy. Such an approach has been defined by Mariano Feliz (2020: 215) as a form which “promotes the articulation of social demands from below and from above in a way that helps sustained capital accumulation with some redistribution of income. As a development strategy it attempts at keeping social conflicts within the limits of capitalist social structure so as to avoid or ‘suspend’ crisis tendencies”. Even these more “socially inclusive models of development” such as those under the Peronist governments of Nestor and then Cristina Kirchner failed to incorporate sex workers and provide social protection in the Southern Cone country (Hardy 2016). The state in these years, “intervened in supporting some sections of the working classes in the ‘productive’ export orientated sectors, it has largely disinvested from the reproduction of sex workers and their families” (Hardy 2016: 3). This form of neo-developmentalism led to “uneven divestment of the state” in the reproduction of particular sections of the working class such as sex workers who labour outside the formal and “productive” sectors. As such, even during these years work in the informal economy continued to be the most viable option for most working-class women and women’s sexual labour power that was by far poorly educated women’s most valuable resource for commodification. Yet informal workers, including sex workers, remained excluded from accessing better quality healthcare systems and largely outside the new social accord in Argentina. The return of neoliberal policies under the government of Mauricio Macri in 2015 reassured world markets of the safety of Argentina as a site of investment, with commentators celebrating this shift to the right in government as a “potential bright spot among emerging market reform stories” (McArver 2015). In spring 2018, Argentina’s peso lost almost 20 per cent of its value in 45 days and the country entered yet another economic crisis. Dramatic inflation (which reached nearly 50 per cent last year), combined with a reduction in subsidies by the right-wing government under Mauricio Macri and at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Goñi 2018), sent the cost of basic foodstuffs, electricity and water spiralling. A third of the population were living in poverty. Lilian, who is 55, had worked in sex work on the corners of Constitución, Buenos Aires for two decades. Although she had given up working, she had had to return as inflation increased during the crisis of 2014. Women are well known to intensify both their reproductive and income-generating activities during crisis (Moser 1993) and by 2018 women were disproportionately affected by the crisis, as almost 50 per cent were either unemployed or working informally, meaning they had no labour protection or security net. Although sex workers needed to increase their prices in order to meet the rising costs of food, rent and energy, they were unable to, as Lillian said “workers’ wages haven’t kept up, so we’ve had to freeze our prices”. Unable to increase their prices, their only option was to extend the working day, both needing to see more clients and to spend
Towards a global political economy of sex/work 437 more time soliciting them: “We’re in the midst of a total crisis. We used to work four to five hours a day. Now it’s 12 including on Saturdays and Sundays, just to cover basic necessities”. As such, the conditions in which sex workers sell their labour are profoundly shaped by macro-economic structures, not only limited to but all by the vagaries of macro-economic structures and patterns of inflation, national debt and structural adjustment. Since sex work acts as a safety net for the majority of street sex workers in Argentina – even during times of relative prosperity and stability – cyclical economic crisis at the macro-scale deepens the crisis of social reproduction experienced by individuals in their everyday lives and labour. Costa Rica Costa Rica has long been thought of as a peaceful and prosperous “exception” in Central America, a middle-income democracy that abolished the military in 1948 but is surrounded by deep poverty, violence and instability. While this myth of exceptionalism has been widely challenged by many scholars as deeply racist and inaccurate on a variety of fronts (Molina Jiménez and Palmer 2006; Paige 1997; Rivers-Moore 2007; Sandoval García 2003), part of the reason it endures comes from the important social welfare programmes known as the garantías sociales put in place by the Calderón Guardia administration in the 1940s. These programmes were continued and expanded upon by José Figueres Ferrer after a forty-day civil war in 1948. Health and social welfare programmes accounted for 20 per cent of the national budget in 1938 and 45 per cent in 1958. Throughout the 1960s, Costa Rica spent twice as much per capita on health and social security as any other Central-American country (Honey 1994). Costa Rica’s Ministry of Health put in place many ambitious (and expensive) programmes from the 1940s to the 1970s, succeeding in eliminating malnutrition and many infectious and parasitic diseases. Morbidity and mortality rates dropped significantly during this period, nutrition programmes distributed food, free vaccinations were given, and improvements to drinking water quality and sewer infrastructures were widespread. Among these commitments to public health was attention to the prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and the Ministry of Health created a department with this goal in mind, that used its considerable resources to target urban street-based sex workers. Often couched in bellicose language, social workers and medical staff sought to catch “rebel” sex workers, put them under state control, prevent them from spreading diseases to the rest of the population and punish them if necessary. The state funded sanitary raids using troop transport trucks donated by the US government following the Second World War and would forcibly detain, test and treat hundreds of women in a single night, with dozens of Ministry of Health employees on hand (Rivers-Moore 2016). Sex workers experienced regular harassment from municipal inspectors and police during this period. While the garantías sociales are generally celebrated as hugely important to improving the social welfare of the majority of Costa Ricans, especially when compared to the country’s neighbours, the increase in repression and violence against sex workers during this period is rarely considered. Changes in the way sex workers were treated by the Costa Rican state came not because of calls for respect for their human rights or from objections to forced testing or illegal detention, but rather as a result of a series of economic crises that began in the 1980s, and the resulting structural adjustment of Costa Rica’s economy. Deals signed with the IMF and the World Bank in 1980, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1989 led to massive decreases in public spending, which impacted the Costa Rican population in a variety of significant ways (for example,
438 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work between 1981 and 1982, the number of children treated for malnutrition doubled) (Honey 1994; Raventós 1997). The Ministry of Health took on a regulatory role only, with treatment of patients handed over to the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (Costa Rican Social Security, CCSS). This led to a rise in infectious diseases in the 1980s and 1990s that had been eradicated or controlled. It also meant that the state was no longer able to systematically harass, detain and forcibly test and treat sex workers for sexually transmitted infections. A crucial aspect of the structural adjustment of Costa Rica’s economy was a turn towards promoting international tourism as a development strategy (Robinson 2003). As the public health system was being gutted, which in fact allowed sex workers some respite from state violence, tourism was quickly became a leading source of foreign exchange for the country. This process included what are known as “debt-for-nature” swaps, when some of Costa Rica’s debt was forgiven in exchange for environmental conservation, or what some have called “eco-structural adjustment” (Barton 2002). Costa Rica has been marketed as an ecotourism destination, sold especially to US citizens as a safe but still exotic destination (Rivers-Moore 2007). Flights are relatively short and inexpensive, and Costa Rica is considered a long-time ally of the US (indeed, the United States Agency for International Development provided massive amounts of funding to Costa Rica during the 1980s in exchange for Costa Rica’s “neutrality” in the regional civil wars of that period). Costa Rica is often lauded as an unmitigated success tourism story, and while the tourism industry does remain relatively balanced between small local businesses and large corporate projects, data on tourism employment and poverty suggest a complex and less universally positive picture (CEPAL 2007). In the context of neoliberal economic policies reducing public spending and promoting tourism, the sex tourism industry also emerged in the capital city of San José and a few close by beach communities. The state’s approach to the explosion of sex tourism has taken the form of permissive ambivalence: “in the context of increasingly globalized tourism, the state indirectly facilitates and benefits from sex tourism industry while distancing itself as much as possible from the participants” (Rivers-Moore 2016: 115). The Costa Rican state no longer has the capacity to harass and detain sex workers on a large scale, and indeed, the state benefits from the work that sex workers do, the money that they spend locally and the fact that they attract much needed tourists in a context of tourism dependency. But in true neoliberal fashion, sex workers contribute to the economy as informal workers, but are provided no support at all in terms of access to the struggling social security system, or even basic health and occupational safety. Sex workers who sell their services to tourists are young working-class women who have had a variety of other jobs, primarily in domestic work and factory work. They argue that sex work is appealing because it allows significantly more flexibility and higher wages then other jobs available to them. Many of them specifically referred to the exploitative labour conditions they faced as domestic workers, and the longer hours required. Mariana explains: In a normal job, you work twelve hours and make fifty dollars a week … I’ve worked my whole life. I’ve done everything and I’ve never had enough time for my son. I don’t come here just for the money, but also for the time I can spend with my son. In a normal job, that’s impossible.
Many sex workers also expressed frustration at trying to find work in a context of a shrinking economy and few new jobs:
Towards a global political economy of sex/work 439 Nowhere in Costa Rica are you going to find work. Here there are no sources of employment, there is no work here. Nowhere. And the jobs there are, are badly paid (Verónica).
Throughout the 2000s, Costa Rica’s informal sector grew, and unemployment has increased significantly. In opposition to the general trend across Latin America, income inequality in Costa Rica has been steadily increasing (OECD 2016). Poverty rates have remained stuck at approximately 25–30 per cent for at least a decade (Estado de la Nación 2021), and the Gini coefficient of 52.4 in 2021 (INEC 2022). All tourism is vulnerable to various kinds of catastrophes, including the global Covid-19 pandemic that closed borders completely. The reliance on the in-flow of tourists (and particularly sex tourists) as a key source of foreign exchange meant that Costa Rica had to re-open and allow free flow of tourists, with no vaccination or quarantine requirements, very early on in the pandemic. Reliance on these external relations and flows of foreign capital creates heightened vulnerability: both to the national economy in its dependent relationship on dollars from the Global North, but also of the health and well-being of workers such as sex workers whose labour is foundational in such tourist driven models of economic growth and development.
CONCLUSION In Argentina and Costa Rica – as much as in most countries across the world – the Covid-19 pandemic brought new challenges to sex workers. For street sex workers, isolation and curfew rules curtailed their ability to solicit and contact clients. Risks of transmission of the virus drove away demand and clients, leaving most workers with no form of income. While some sex workers shifted to online sex work, this was simply not an option for many who faced existing inequalities relating to literacy and lack of access to digital technology (Fassi 2020). The structure of the sex industry, how it is organised and experienced, is intimately tied to the broader political economy at any given moment and to specific local and national conditions. Viewing the relationship between state and market from the standpoint of sex workers’ lives and labour provides a specific insight into the ways in which productive and reproductive distinctions serve to precariarise women’s labour and working conditions. Sex work can be understood as a “para-capitalist economic strategy on which both state and capital rely to ensure the social reproduction of those locked out formal spheres of production” (Hardy 2016: 2) and for reproducing their own dependents. Understanding sex work as part of the continuum of “socially reproductive” work is therefore instructive in expanding our comprehension of the ways in which surplus value is produced under capitalism (Dalla Costa and James, 1972) and is able to challenge the binaries between productive and reproductive labour which often mark orthodox political economies of work (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Federici, 2004, 2012; Fortunati, 1989). As such, sex work can provide a lens for understanding elements of political economy that are usually marginalised or hidden from view. In both Costa Rica and Argentina, neoliberalisation has increased dependence on sex work, whether at the individual, community or national scale. Macro-economic structures and changes are experienced in the everyday tenor of women’s working lives in the sex industry, shaping how viable sex work is, how it fits into larger national economies and how liveable sex workers’ lives are. Analyses of the political economy of sex work, while taking into account transnational flows of capital (via, for example, debt or tourism) have largely remain focused on national
440 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work scale markets in sexual labour. The growing digitalisation of sexual labour, which has been accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic overrides the transnational borders which have previously meant that sex work depends on co-location in order for inter-corporeal services to be delivered. The impact of this on national scale political economy or how it remakes markets in sexual labour and the implications for development across the globe require considerably more attention (Hardy and Barbagallo and 2021). Moreover, as informal workers whose work is not only unregulated, but often unrecognised by the state, sex workers were not entitled to many of the employment or sustenance supports accessed by other workers as governments scrambled to socialise social reproduction in the midst of the crisis. Given that the majority of the world’s workers still generate income in informal conditions (ILO 2018), these workers should take centre stage in any understanding of the political economy of work. As such, sex workers can be considered archetypal in their experiences of work in the global economy. The exclusion of sex work from generalised approaches to political economy is partly responsible for the fact that these “unprotected workers remain both politically marginalized and economically vulnerable” (Smith 2011: 530–531). Bringing sex work and other forms of informal feminised labour closer to the centre of our conceptualisations of the political economies of work represents therefore not only an analytical turn, but also an urgent political project. Such a political project is not simply a scholarly one, but instead is being actively pursued and enacted by sex workers all over the world. Whether in formally recognised trade unions, such as in Colombia, Peru or The Netherlands or other forms of collective worker organisation (India, UK, Costa Rica, Argentina), sex workers are increasingly well collectivised and finding new channels for their voices. These existing infrastructures of mutual aid and organisation enabled sex workers’ organisations to respond rapidly and effectively to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic in order to offer much-needed support, goods and services to sex workers and to reproduce each other where existing strategies and state provision evaporated overnight. A key demand in the sex worker struggle across the globe is for the decriminalisation of their work in order to end intense state repression. While the degree of stigma that sex workers face may be more extensive than other workers, sex workers face police repression in the face of their organising efforts much like many other informal workers, including, for example, street vendors and waste pickers (Eaton et al. 2017). Collective organisation, despite the violence that ensues, is key in transforming the conditions in which sex workers sell their labour and the political economy of work itself. As such, in the words of Carmen, a street sex worker in Córdoba, Argentina, it is vital that “the girls keep fighting … that every day they are more organised and they keep going forward, growing more all the time” (Carmen, Córdoba, Argentina).
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Towards a global political economy of sex/work 441 Barton, J. R. (2002) ‘Unsustainable development: environmental protection issues in rural and coastal areas’. In C. McIlwaine and K. Willis (eds.), Challenges and Changes in Middle America: Perspectives on Development in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Harlow: Pearson: 191–217. Bedford, K. (2009) Developing Partnerships: Gender, Sexuality and the Reformed World Bank. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bedford, K. and Rai, S. M. (2010) ‘Feminists Theorize International Political Economy”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (1): 1–18. Beneria, L. (2001) ‘Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women’s Work’. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 15 (1): 27–53. Berg, H. (2021) Porn Work: Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bigsten, A., Kimuyu, P. and Lundvall, L. (2004) ‘What to Do with the Informal Sector?’ Development Policy Review 22 (6): 701–715. Brents, B. G. and Hausbeck, K. (2007) ‘Marketing Sex: US Legal Brothels and Late Capitalist Consumption’. Sexualities 10 (4): 425–439. CEPAL (2007) Turismo y Condiciones Sociales en Centroamérica: Las Experiencias en Costa Rica y Nicaragua. Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe. Chant, S. and Pedwell, C. (2008) Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward. Geneva: ILO. Chen, M. A., Jhabvala, R. and Lund, F. (2002) Supporting Workers in the Informal Sector: A Policy Framework. Working Paper on the Informal Economy. Geneva: ILO. Dalla Costa, M. and James, A. (eds.) (1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Dyer, S., McDowell, L. and Batnitzky, A. (2008) ‘Emotional Labour/Body Work: The Caring Labours of Migrants in the UK’s National Health Service’. Geoforum 39 (6): 2030–2038. Eaton, A., Schurman, S. and Chen, M. (eds.) (2017) Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Enloe, C. (1990) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Estado de la Nación (2021) Informe Estado de la Nación 2021. San José: CONARE. Fassi, M. (2020) ‘La red de trabajadoras sexuales que armamos nos está salvando durante el COVID-19’ Open Democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/es/5050/la-red-de-trabajadoras-sexuales-que -armamos-nos-est%C3%A1-salvando-durante-el-covid-19/ Federici, S. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Federici, S. (2012) Revolution at Point Zero Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Binghampton: PM Press. Feliz, M. (2020) ‘Beyond the “Pink Tide”: Dependent Capitalism in Crisis in Argentina and Lessons to Be Learned for Radical Social Change’. In M. Silver (ed.), Confronting Capitalism in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Folbre, N. (2002) The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: The New Press. Folbre, N. and Nelson, J.A. (2000) ‘For Love or Money – or Both?’ Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4): 123–140. Fortunati, L. (1989) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labour and Capital (Autonomedia; originally published in Italian as L’Arcano de/la Reproduzione: Casalinghe, Prostitute, Operai e Capitale. Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1981). Funkhouser, E. (1996) ‘The Urban Informal Sector in Central America: Household Survey Evidence’. World Development 12 (11): 1737–1751. Gallin, D. (2001) ‘Propositions on Trade Unions and Informal Employment in Times of Globalisation’. Antipode 33 (3): 531–549. Goñi, (2018) ‘Argentina gets biggest loan in IMF's history at $57bn’ The Guardian https://www .theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/26/argentina-imf-biggest-loan Gonzalez de la Rocha, M. (2006) ‘Vanishing Assets: Cumulative Disadvantages Amongst the Urban Poor’. In P. Fernández-Kelly and J. Shefner (eds.), Out of the Shadows: Political Action and the Informal Economy in Latin America. Philadelphia: Penn State Press.
442 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Hardy, K. (2016) ‘Uneven Divestment of the State: Social Reproduction and Sex Work in Neo-developmentalist Argentina’. Globalizations 13 (6): 876–889. Hardy, K. and Barbagallo, C. (2021) ‘Hustling the Platform: Capitalist Experiments and Resistance in the Digital Sex Industry’. South Atlantic Quarterly https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/ article-abstract/120/3/533/174127 Hensman, R. (2001) The Impact of Globalisation on Employment in India and Responses from the Formal and Informal Sectors. IIAS/IISG: Amsterdam. Honey, M. (1994) Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ILO (2018) More than 60 per cent of the world’s employed population are in the informal economy https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_627189/lang--en/index.htm Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INEC) (2022) Encuesta Nacional de Hogares: Resultados Generales. San José: INEC. Jones, A. (2020) Camming: Money, Pleasure and Power in the Sex Work Industry. New York: New York University Press. Kempadoo, K. (2004) Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labour. New York: Routledge. Kotiswaran, P. (2011) Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Law, L. (2000) Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in a Time of AIDS. London: Routledge. McArver, T. (2015) Politics trumps reform in emerging markets. The Financial Times. https://www.ft .com/content/d540c8c4-9654-32d3-99c3-33bf4ea336cc Molina Jiménez, I. and Palmer, S. (2006) Historia de Costa Rica. San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica. Moser, C. (1993) Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training. London and New York: Routledge. Nash, J. and Fernandez-Kelly, M. P. (1983) Women, Men and the International Division of Labour. Albany: State University of New York Press. North, P. and Huber, U. (2004) ‘Alternative spaces of the “Argentinazo”’. Antipode 6 (5): 963–984. OECD (2016) Costa Rica Policy Brief. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development. https:// www.oecd.org/policy-briefs/costa-rica-towards-a-more-inclusive-society.pdf Paige, J. M. (1997) Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (2005) Social Movements and State Power: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador. London: Pluto Press. Raventós, C. (1997) ‘De la imposición de los organismos internacionales al “ajuste a la tica”: Nacionalización de las políticas de ajuste en Costa Rica en la década de los años ochenta’. Revista de Ciencias Sociales 76: 115–126. Rivers-Moore, M. (2007) ‘No Artificial Ingredients? Gender, Race and Nation in Costa Rica’s International Tourism Campaign’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16 (3): 341–357. Rivers-Moore, M. (2016) Gringo Gulch: Sex, Tourism, and Social Mobility in Costa Rica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robinson, W. I. (2003) Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change and Globalization. London: Verso. Rowbotham, S. and S. Mitter (1994) ‘Introduction’. In S. Rowbotham and S. Mitter (eds.), Dignity and Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Organizing Among Poor Women in the Third World and the First. London: Routledge. Sandoval Garcia, C. (2003) Otros Amenazantes: Los nicaragüenses y la formación de identidades nacionales en Costa Rica. San José: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica. Scoular, J. (2010) ‘What’s Law Got to Do With It? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work’. Journal of Law and Society 37 (1): 12–39. Smith, N. (2011) ‘The International Political Economy of Commercial Sex’. Review of International Political Economy 18 (4): 530–549. Smith, N. (2020) Capitalism’s Sexual History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Truong, T. D. (1990) Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia. London: Zed Books.
Towards a global political economy of sex/work 443 Vosko, L. F. (2007) ‘Representing Informal Economy Workers: Emerging Global Strategies and Their Lessons for North American Unions’. In D. S. Cobble (ed.), The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor. Ithaca: ILR Press: 272–291. Ward, K. (1990) Women Workers and Global Restructuring. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Whitson, R. (2007) ‘Beyond the Crisis: Economic Globalization and Informal Work in Urban Argentina’. Journal of Latin American Geography 6 (2): 122–136. World Bank (2014) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development International Finance Corporation Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency Country Partnership Strategy for the Argentine Republic. Zatz, N. D. (1997) ‘Sex Work/Sex Act: Law, Labor, and Desire in Constructions of Prostitution’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 22 (2): 277–308. Zelizer, V. (2007) The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
FURTHER READING Beloso, B.M. (2012) ‘Sex, Work, and the Feminist Erasure of Class’. Signs 38 (1): 47–70. Cruz, K. (2018) ‘Beyond Liberalism: Marxist Feminism, Migrant Sex Work, and Labour Unfreedom’. Feminist Legal Studies 26 (1): 65–92. Hardy, K. and Barbagallo, C. (2021) ‘Hustling the Platform: Capitalist Experiments and Resistance in the Digital Sex Industry’. South Atlantic Quarterly https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/ article-abstract/120/3/533/174127 Hardy, K. and Rivers-Moore, M. (2018) ‘Compañeras de la calle: Sex Worker Organising in Latin America’. Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 59: 97–114. Vijayakumar, G., Chacko, S. and Panchanadeswaran, S. (2015) ‘“As Human Beings and As Workers”: Sex Worker Unionization in Karnataka, India’. Global Labour Journal 6 (1): 79–96.
Section D. Intersections of struggles
37. Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community: connections and politics Miguel Martínez Lucio1
INTRODUCTION For some time, the question of how trade unions link into social movements and into communities more broadly has become an important part of the debate in labour relations, partly resulting from the belief that this is a vital and necessary part of the renewal of the labour movement itself. There has been a range of interventions arguing that the future of trade unions is dependent on the way they engage with communities, community-based organizations, and social movements. The changing nature of the labour market, in terms of increasing fragmentation and continuous instability within work, means that trade unions must consider relations beyond the workplace as being fundamental to its ‘renewal’. In addition, these social spaces beyond the workplace, at both macro and micro levels, have seen a range of developments around new types of social organization and specialist bodies. Hence, dealing and engaging not just in terms of communities but also with non-government organizations and social movements is seen as imperative. This chapter will outline the way these debates have developed. It will outline how the link to the social (and community) union debate has evolved and why, and how the debate on the links between trade unions and social movements has been structured by focusing on a range of practices and relations across distinct organizational and political levels. In addition, the emergence of ‘social movement unionism’ indicates that the question of the ‘social’ has also become steadily internalized within trade union structures and identities. The chapter will reflect on the way trade unions engage, both within communities and with social movements, through highlighting the role of context and history. On the one hand, community developments and new links with social movements may be hierarchically oriented – and even state sponsored – to the extent that they create a new set of bureaucratic dilemmas and tensions within and around trade unions. On the other hand, with regards to social movements, much may depend on the types of social movement and the way that these social movements engage with work-related questions. This means that there are uncertainties and challenges in the way the macro or micro level of social representation develop and how they engage with work- and employment-related issues: much may also depend on the specific context one is observing. To that extent, the question emerges as to how radical and innovative forms of ‘social movement trade unionism’ evolve and why; and this needs greater attention to detail in terms of the political dimensions and spaces of the social and the way it has emerged.
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BACKGROUND: DECLINE, CHANGE, AND THE GROWING INTEREST IN THE SOCIAL AND IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS For some time, the question of how trade unions link not only to social movements, but also communities more broadly, has been driven by a concern with the decline of the labour movement. Due to the growing academic fascination with consumption politics, social identity, and organizational fragmentation, some have been critical of the way this notion of decline has often been either overstated or utilized as a way of dismissing trade unions and worker representation as a social force (Kelly, 1998: 108–125). While it may be somewhat ill-advised to label these views generally as being ‘post-modern’, as Kelly does (ibid), there is a sense in which questions of union decline have been the focal point of considerable attention across a range of studies and perspectives. There is a view that trade union density and influence has been in decline since the 1980s, generally speaking, even though the need for trade unions, both economically and politically, is seen to be important among many workers (D’Art and Turner, 2008). The extent of change is also underpinned in terms of increasingly fragmented labour markets and unstable workplaces which consist of increasing levels of management control. The relatively stable and autonomous workplace that was present for part of the 20th century has been undermined for several decades, placing pressure on the ability of trade unions to achieve the orderly regulation of working conditions. In addition, firms have become less committed to specific geographical spaces and communities, becoming relatively more mobile in terms of their direct investment strategies (Greer and Hauptmeier, 2016). The spatial and industrial stability that allowed trade unions to operate in a coherent and organized manner has, therefore, been undermined for some time. Hence, the future of trade unions is increasingly dependent for some on the way they engage with communities and engage with their representation, as well as the creation of coalitions with community-based organizations as a means of responding to such changes. The changing nature of the labour market in terms of fragmentation and continuous ruptures means that trade unions must consider relations beyond the workplace as being fundamental to their ‘renewal’, especially as other actors are emerging with a range of interventions regarding work and employment. In addition, at both the macro and micro levels, these social spaces have seen a range of developments around new types of social organizations and specialist bodies. Hence, widening the remit and presence of trade unions across different social and economic spaces is vital for future development and relevance. This has spawned an extensive debate on trade union ‘renewal’ and ‘revitalization’ that has run for well over thirty years (Murray, 2017). This debate and its related academic constituency have covered a range of issues regarding bureaucracy and modernization; the nature of representation inside and outside the workplace; and questions of organizational values and identity, especially in relation to increasingly large groups of ‘outsider’ workers (Murray, 2017). In part, the challenge has been that trade unions had developed a form of insularity during the age of ‘Fordism’ and ‘organized capitalism’ (Lash and Urry, 1987). Trade unions became over-reliant on institutional mechanisms that were firm- or sector-based (e.g., collective bargaining) or, in some cases, linked to formal political exchanges with the state (see Atzeni, 2010, 2016). This has, in some senses, created trade unions primarily focused on ‘insiders’ and specific industrial relations agendas that did not always recognize the diversity of the workforce. Even where trade unions had elements of social identity and broader social links these features had been weakened due to increasing institutionalization. Martínez Lucio and
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 447 Connolly (2012), for example, point to the decline of trade union social–political identity in democratic Spain since the 1970s: in fact, by the early 2000s the trade union movement ended up being not only isolated due to institutionalist factors, but also taken aback by the social movement-styled 15M that emerged in 2011 in Spain which was, at first, hostile to it (Köhler and Calleja Jiménez, 2015). New waves of social movements and networks – formed around precarious young workers, certain groups of migrant workers, and others – began to develop beyond the remit of the formal labour movement in many national contexts. Hence, a part of the trade union renewal and revitalization debate therefore focuses on this need to configure – or reconfigure – the ‘social’ sensibilities and ‘movement’ qualities of the trade union movement (in much the same way that Kelly, 1998, argued for a need to link industrial relations debates to debates in mobilization and social movement dynamics).
ENGAGING WITH THE SOCIAL: THE REORIENTATION OF TRADE UNION PROCESSES AND PRACTICES The engagement – or re-engagement – of trade unions with the social in terms of movements and communities can be approached across three dimensions in terms of academic intervention. The first relates to the external relations trade unions have with such external actors and spheres; the second relates to the practices and agendas of trade union organizations, as well as the changing nature of work, that are of a ‘social’ nature; and the third is the rationale and general activity of trade unionists in their internal evolution and changes. It is important to approach this question through these different dimensions, as each represents a different set of developments and a different form of engagement with the concept of social movements and communities – suggesting that there is a set of choices and political questions related to each of these various developments. The first dimension is very much based on trade unions’ external relations with ‘society’ in terms of what one could define as macro and micro approaches. In the first instance, there is a body of thought that points to how trade unions have engaged with social movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on a range of topics and issues. This debate highlights how the space of worker representation has become increasingly contested as other forms of representation and forms of worker and citizen voice engage with work-related issues; for example, equality in relation to the nature and level of wages (Heery and Frege, 2006). What we have seen is a range of social organizations engage with a broader set of industrial relations issues – although some of these bodies are more institutionalized while others are less so and based on forms of mobilization. (For a useful summary of debates on these ‘new’ voices, see Dundon et al., 2020: 91–97.) These organizations vary in terms of their degree of institutionalization and their relationship with trade unions (Heery et al., 2012). There may not only be indifference, but also very little overlap and engagement. However, such relations can also be conflictual in nature, as trade unions may compete with social movements and civil society organizations over work-related questions such as ‘living wages’ (Heery et al., 2012). Social movements and NGOs often feel that trade unions are not sufficiently attuned to workers beyond the institutionalized regulatory activities and influence of specific and narrow industrial relations processes: and this was clear in the initial critique of Spanish trade unions by the 15M movement in Spain when it emerged (Köhler and Calleja Jiménez, 2015). However, there may also be cooperation in relation to campaigning and to advice/expert knowledge that
448 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work is shared on specific work and socially related matters (Heery et al., 2012); one notices this in the arena of mental health and well-being in the United Kingdom where some trade unions have worked with organizations specialized in such matters (Martínez Lucio, 2020). Heery et al. (2012) point to this important yet varied set of complex relations (which mark the social and political spaces of industrial relations), and the importance of understanding these external social dimensions and how they evolve across time in terms of the way trade unions and social movements frame their approaches and occupy different spaces at different conjunctures in relation to each other (see also Köhler and Calleja Jiménez, 2019). These issues and complexities are also apparent in the way social movements and civil society organizations more generally engage with trade unions at a transnational level. Increasingly focused on questions of labour rights and ‘decent’ work standards in global supply chains, there are increasingly greater levels of coordination and joint campaigning between trade unions and socially oriented organizations; for example, War on Want, or Oxfam. Reinecke and Donaghey (2015) have noted that a greater degree of coordination and joint working between trade unions and consumption-based social movements contributed to the establishment of a set of codes of conduct, as in the case of the textiles sector in Bangladesh. However, these relations may not always be cordial, as noted earlier, and in some cases the latter may displace trade unions and develop specific relations with employers. Increasingly, the presence of more institutionalized social NGOs can also isolate or marginalize both grassroots social movements and trade unions at the local level in terms of the ability of such bodies to network and engage directly with employers around corporate social responsibility agendas and decent work issues. The piecemeal reorientation of the trade union movement towards the social and external societal dimensions of their activities is also visible in what one could call the micro level in terms of community unionism. This level is an important feature of the debate on worker representation (Roca and Díaz‐Parra, 2020). The growing interest in community unionism has been a key feature of discussions on trade unionism, although the extent of the practice tends to vary. Tattersall (2019) has pointed to the way local level coalition building can emerge, ranging from issues-based alliances and solidarity to more broader relationships and alliance-based action in terms of long-term campaigns and strategies. In addition, the emergence of a community facing trade union strategy and forms of solidarity with local social dynamics and movements can also vary. Stephenson and Wray (2005) have pointed to the importance of cultural relations and local memory as a significant dimension of trade union engagement in communities, as in the post-industrial mining communities in the northeast of England. The debate on community unionism sees the social identity of unions (or its rekindling, anyway), and local community coalitions and presence, as comprising a key part of trade union renewal (Holgate, 2015). Trade unions in some national contexts already have a community presence through their networks of local offices and centres, although often these may be administrative as much as anything else, but in some trade unions there is a territorial dimension that does connect (or potentially connect) them with localities and local social movements (Martínez Lucio and Connolly, 2012; Marino, 2015). Yet, as with the debate on social movements more generally, this engagement may create tensions or curious dilemmas for trade unions. Research on worker centres in the United States, for example, has shown how there has been growth in a variety of worker centres in cities and other localities that deal with a range of issues for workers and that provide a variety of facilities for employment, political, and cultural activities (Fine, 2011). Their relations with trade unions have been variable,
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 449 nonetheless, although cooperation and overlap has not been uncommon (Fine, 2011). Hence, the community dimension is an important part of the dynamic of trade unions and social movement relations in the trade union renewal literature, although idealized notions of the ‘community’ have tended to prevail in aspects of the broader debates on community unionism. Secondly, from certain perspectives, this question of trade unions and social movements/ social spaces links to debates on how new issues and agendas have evolved within the narrower remit of industrial relations processes. The link between the social sphere and worker representation is, in some senses, the outcome of a widening in the field of employment relations issues. The growing interest in broader questions of equality – particularly the position of issues related to gender, ethnicity, or race – brings forth the need for greater connections across different issues in intersectional terms (McBride et al., 2015). The range of concerns has been widened considerably and, to a certain extent, has further generated a need for a greater set of connections between groups of workers and their experience of work and societal existence more generally. In addition, there has been a growing interest in questions of employment contracts, as the existence of precarious work has meant that many worker experiences are much more diverse in terms of their attachment to their employing organizations (Kalleberg, 2009). Such circumstances compel worker organizations to engage more broadly beyond established, stable workplaces. They need to address a much wider set of issues around equality and diversity, combined with the challenges of precarious employment, and the personal problems and issues facing workers that emerge due to such new work regimes (Sennett, 1998). Traditional trade unionism is compelled to broaden its activity externally and, therefore, to engage with social movements and local social communities as a way of generating improvements for workers and creating broader sets of knowledge regarding the way capitalism is acting on the workforce. The engagement with the social is therefore driven by the expansion of issues, concerns, and experiences that require more complex sets of voice mechanisms. The third dimension to the social movement/community unionism and trade union question relates to the actual rationale and identity of the latter in relation to the former. This concerns the way in which a ‘social movement’ dynamic or sensibility is shifting the very nature of trade unionism and its internal mechanisms and approach. Increasingly, there has been a growing interest in the way mobilization theory has been explicitly introduced into industrial relations thinking as a way of appreciating the broader dynamics of worker mobilization and the way it unfolds (Kelly, 1998). Rethinking the pattern of mobilization in broader terms has been a key part of the way conflict and struggle have been reimagined within the labour relations tradition; it has drawn from wider social debates in the form of Tilly (1978), although it has not been without its critics (so for a summary of these debates, see Gall and Holgate, 2018). Although the work of Kelly (1998) does not systematically engage with broader social movements per se (Heery, 2018), it has become an important bridgehead into wider debates linked to social movement theory and processes. Furthermore, new social movements have also been central to the development of new practices within trade unions (see Wagemann and Grote, 2019). These have linked into organizing debates and new ways of reimagining the trade union movement (McAlevey, 2015) with reference to social movement engagement and awareness (Voss and Sherman, 2000) – not just as a set of practices but, rather, as a ‘larger transformative vision’ (Tapia and Alberti, 2019: 123). This is seen clearly in the emergence of new forms of ‘independent’ and radical trade unions that are more closely aligned with direct participative and social dynamics (Alberti and Però, 2018; Però, 2020).
450 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Much of the social movement and trade union debate mirror many of the earlier concerns of Peter Waterman, who argued for a new logic of trade unionism and worker representation based on ‘networking’ and directly participative logic at levels of the labour movement (Waterman, 2001). For many, the question of social movement unionism is as much about the logic of participation as it is about the remit and structures of the organization. It reflects certain aspects of the much broader concern with how social movements themselves are shifting in some quarters and generating broader social features (for a discussion on new social movements see Buechler, 1995). This third dimension of the debate on social movements, communities, and trade unions is therefore concerned with the logic of organization and the question of democratic principles: it is driven by a concern with the moving of the focus away from institutionalized accounts of industrial relations towards a more multi-layered understanding of worker associations (Atzeni, 2016). As Diani (2019) points out, we need to start engaging with approaches that look at different patterns of coordination – or modes – and how there are a variety of organisational forms, alliances and coordinating processes that exist between industrial and social actors.
OF DIVERSITY AND POLITICS: ENGAGEMENT AND AGENDAS IN TERMS OF THE CONTEXT OF REPRESENTATION However, while we have seen a broader and multi-dimensional engagement with social movements as organizations and as a form of being or acting, much also depends on the context of trade unions and their initial identity. Part of the problem with some of the debate on social movement and trade unions is that it does not always appreciate the diversity and complex dynamics of the latter. We cannot simply work based on some ideal typical or singular model of trade unionism and then contrast it with some idealistic understanding of social movement dynamics. First, trade unions vary in terms of their identity, both between and within countries. Hyman (2001: 3–4) argued that trade unions face in different directions: As associations of employees, they will have a central concern to regulate the wage-labour relationship: the work they perform and the payment they receive. Unions cannot ignore the market. But as organizations of workers, unions embody in addition a concept of collective interests and collective identity which divides workers from employers. Whether they endorse an ideology of class division and opposition, unions cannot escape a role as agencies of class. Yet unions also exist and function within a social framework which they may aspire to change but which constrains their current choices. Survival necessitates co-existence with other institutions and other constellations of interests (even those to which certain unions may proclaim immutable antagonism). Unions are part of society.
In this respect, the way trade unions engage with social movements and develop related strategies will vary according to these traditions, which may also differ according to sectoral and not just national context. The engagement with coalition building across the social may, in part, link to various national traditions and whether trade unions see themselves as ‘social’ in orientation with links to NGOs being central to their identity as in Italy (see Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013: 150); however, others present different views regarding established trade unions in that national context as can be seen with the way leading trade unions have in some cases been known to hold ambivalent views and positions on migration (see Cioce, 2020).
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 451 Much may therefore depend on the nature of participatory politics and approaches within a trade union (Marino, 2015). Either way, there is a need to understand the more complex and heterogenous set of actors and interests that have emerged within and around the labour movement if we are to understand the industrial relations of the changing labour market (Pilati and Perra, 2022) and how new and traditional actors interact more generally (Smith, 2021). Histories of political and social struggles nationally may also mediate the experience of social movement unionism and tensions in relation to it (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013; Dibben et al., 2012). In this respect, these national contexts and histories of struggle may frame the nature of engagement with social movements. That said, we do need to be cautious and appreciate the complex interactions between identity, ideology, and purpose, as it is not a matter of simply viewing external factors as some form of independent variable but, rather, as part of a broader interplay of such factors that influence the development of strategies (Hodder and Edwards, 2015). In addition, how trade unions understand their own limitations in terms of their historic or established responses to work-related issues, and attempt to balance this with new forms of intervention in a deliberate (although not always successful) manner, needs to be appreciated (Connolly et al., 2019). Nevertheless, there is a range of contextual factors that mediate the relation between social movements, community dynamics, and trade unions. Second, we need to be alert to broader sets of economic, political, and social factors beyond the realm of industrial relations that play a part in these relations and movements between actors. We need to map the regulatory space of any system to note the competing actors that exist and challenge for control of regulation and voice (Hancher and Moran, 1989; MacKenzie and Martínez Lucio, 2005). How different organizations are historically related to the role of regulation may determine the level of competition and cooperation between them. The social movement–trade union debate does not always focus on the way the former may in some cases position itself closer to employers, for example, and be used as a form of expert advice, consultant, and even partner on certain employment issues from a managerial perspective. This is noticeable with some NGOs of a more institutional nature working on questions of mental health, stress, and equality/diversity issues with employers: see Martínez Lucio (2020). In addition, some social movements linked to consumption-related issues can occupy specific spaces in such a way that they generate important reference points or a competitive source for trade unions. In Spain, in the 1970s, neighbourhood associations were often aligned during the struggle against the state with the labour movement on matters of collective consumption (urban development, public transport, and so on), but found themselves becoming disconnected and creating a parallel form of pressure group due to complex processes of institutionalization and de-politicization within urban and local governance (Martínez Lucio, 1991). There may be a wide range of contingent factors and uncertainties in the process of social mobilization that may need to be considered. Part of the problem lies in the way the labour or industrial relations academic tradition has engaged the notion of social mobilization from social movement and mobilization theory in what appears to be a problematic manner, often ignoring these contingencies and variations and the more complex contexts of political and social processes (Tilly, 1995; see also Jenkins, 1983, and Jasper, 2004). Furthermore, how campaigns and issues evolve and develop across time – and how they sustain themselves – is related to a range of generational, cultural, and longer-term factors based on a series of interactions, as seen with the feminist movement (Whittier, 2010). Social identity and movements are not solely related to deliberate action. Hence, alliance building is more complex, evolutionary, and multi-layered, and not solely some singular, heroic, one-off event of political engagement
452 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work (Diani, 2019). This could also mean changes of attitudes within trade unions towards social movements may be gradual and slow in terms of the way they evolve (Heery, 2018). Greater attention to the more nuanced debates on social movement per se are therefore important, in part because interest in the trade union movement may be less developed than we would like it to be within those spheres, although this can change. This discussion, so far, has argued that we need to look at the situation more broadly to appreciate the complexity and potential of the link between social movements, community dynamics, and trade unions. In addition, there is also a need to highlight certain gaps and challenges within the discussion. We have already noted that the more complex history of trade unions as social organizations needs greater acknowledgement within the debate: equating the social with mobilizing may generate certain expectations that undermine long-term achievement considering the difficulty of alliance building, as well as the politics of it. The social is a much broader space, as stated above, and engagement with it occurs across various dimensions at different points (Köhler and Calleja Jiménez, 2019). In relation to community unionism, Stewart et al. (2009) rightly pointed to the question of the broad nature of ‘community’ and the different meanings given to the term and to alliances between trade unions and communities that exist. There is a tendency to contrast the ‘industrial’ and the ‘social’: for some unknown reason, many narratives are based on the potential for salvaging the former through the latter, but that rests on a stereotypical notion of what the social is. The social sphere is as contradictory and prone to bureaucratization as is the industrial. Furthermore, the changing nature of political identity in trade unions is also relevant if the link to social movements and community activism is to be understood. In their work on political identity and the changes within many trade unions, Mathers et al. (2019) argue that we need to locate this discussion regarding social movements and trade unions in terms of the way unions are radicalizing in some cases and generating new forms of mobilization and political narratives in their own right. The economic context and its changes might propel this as we see with the impact of austerity measures, but we also need to account for the political projects that envelop trade union renewal in terms of social movements: these must therefore be viewed as an essential part of any discussion on the subject (Fairbrother, 2008; Mathers et al., 2019). Therefore, assuming that trade union renewal is simply a case of creating a gateway to the social ignores the importance not only of different political discourses, but also how that link is as much in need of radical input if the relation is not to be merely symbolic and based on a set of segmented issues. Visser (2019) has pointed to one possible future scenario wherein trade unions are displaced and substituted by social movements: hence, much depends on how trade unions reform, and learn from – and adapt to – social movement dynamics (Fairbrother, 2008). Especially as there is always the risk that trade unions may simply masquerade as social organizations that link to specific sets of social movements: the shifts in trade union interest may simply be rhetorical in some cases. In fact, the very issue of identity can be unstable on all sides, being generated in unclear and contingent ways – something that research on social movements has been addressing for some time (Nagel, 1994; Gamson, 2015).
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 453
CONCLUSION: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IN TERMS OF TRADE UNIONISM The question of social movements and their relation to trade unions – along with the locality and community union dimensions – is one that, thankfully, is moving to the centre of the discussions on work and politics. It is a highly varied and rich debate – perhaps in a way that the chapter has not done justice to because of limitations of space. It focuses on the very identity and purpose of collective worker action, and more importantly on the boundaries of that action and the way it develops across them. To some extent it is a debate that critically reviews the meaning of regulation and representation at work, thus questioning the political and academic institutionalization and boundaries of these (see Atzeni, 2010). It contributes to understanding the role of worker action in relation to the social, the community, and radical democratic practice (broadly speaking); it also points to the need to locate these within a historical perspective. This is important given that the social and community dimensions of worker organizations have been extensive and important at various points in the past, not least during the origins of the trade union movement, as have the broader questions of social identity (see Herrigel, 1993). The debate on trade union renewal has been focused largely on the way trade unions and collectives of workers are more broadly representing social issues, locating themselves beyond the workplace in social space, and redefining the role of the social more broadly (and perhaps returning to some of their social and political origins as noted earlier). Increasingly, however, the debate on renewal also calls for a need to locate these developments in relation to a broader political reflection. For some, debates on renewal became apolitical and technical in their orientation, failing to look beyond immediate ‘membership’ matters (see Simms and Holgate, 2010 for a critique). This leads onto the question of what is the ‘political’, and what kind of politics this necessitates in terms of worker representation. What is required is not simply an approach that rethinks boundaries in terms of the ‘social’ and the ‘workplace’ – as this may simply lead to a servicing or elite-dialogue approach without recourse to a broader understanding of the dynamic link between society and economy. What appears to be emerging, however, in some streams of thought is a belief that the questioning of these boundaries requires a new political imagination that links to a more radical democratic agenda, though broader political analysis such as Mouffe’s (2013) work on radical democracy is rarely found in such discussions, especially in the trade union and industrial relations dimensions of these discussions. The idea of there being a need to understand notions of difference, ongoing political critique, and a broader set of autonomous dialogues within society suggests that the renewing of traditional trade unionism is not the end of this process in itself: social voices and engagements span a much broader set of constituents, and questions of governance and control require new political formats that question the way institutional boundaries have been established. The ‘remaking’ of industrial relations and the study of worker representation more generally owes much to the debates on social movements and community unionism (and to related debates on organizing). However, to what extent many social movement initiatives within and beyond the trade union movement are at times simply a rhetorical practice or a masquerade, given bureaucratic inertia and lack of political commitment, is something that will need further discussion. Yet regardless of tensions between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ strategies in these new alliances and forms we are witnessing a new logic and change in terms of worker representation (Wagemann and Grote, 2019). Much of this requires us to view formal types of
454 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work regulation and representation as being one part of the process of establishing empowerment and engagement that transcends current political hierarchies: to that extent, this debate on social movements, communities, and worker representation is therefore more than a technical feature of the exhausting question of ‘union renewal’ but is instead part of a political rethinking raising deeper issues of purpose and identity.
NOTE 1
I would like to thank Maurizio Atzeni and Heather Connolly as well as Katia Pilati, Mario Diani, and Andrea Signoretti from the University of Trento for very helpful comments on the chapter and its narrative. I would also like Keith Povey for reviewing the paper’s style.
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Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 455 Heery, E., and Frege, C. (2006). New actors in industrial relations. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 44(4), 601–604. Heery, E., Williams, S., and Abbott, B. (2012). Civil society organizations and trade unions: cooperation, conflict, indifference. Work, Employment and Society, 26(1), 145–160. Herrigel, G. (1993). Identity and institutions: the social construction of trade unions in nineteenth-century Germany and the United States. Studies in American Political Development, 7(2), 371–394. Hodder, A., and Edwards, P. (2015). The essence of trade unions: understanding identity, ideology and purpose. Work, Employment and Society, 29(5), 843–854. Holgate, J. (2015). Community organising in the UK: A ‘new’ approach for trade unions? Economic and Industrial Democracy, 36(3), 431–455. Hyman, R. (2001). Understanding European Trade Unionism: Between Markets, Class and Society. London: Sage. Jasper, J. (2004). A strategic approach to collective action: looking for agency in social-movement choices. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 9.1(2004), 1–16. Jenkins, J. C. (1983). Resource mobilization theory and the study of social movements. Annual Review of Sociology, 9(1), 527–553. Kalleberg, A. L. (2009). Precarious work, insecure workers: Employment relations in transition. American Sociological Review, 74(1), 1–22. Kelly, J. (1998). Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilisation, Collectivism and Long Waves. London: Routledge. Köhler, H. D., and Calleja Jiménez, J. (2015). ‘They don’t represent us!’: opportunities for a social movement unionism strategy in Spain. Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, 70(2), 240–261. Köhler, H. D., and Calleja Jiménez, J. (2019). ‘Social movement unionism in Spain?’, in Grote, J. R. and Wagemann C. (eds.), Social Movements and Organised Labour: Passions and Interest. London: Routledge. Lash, J., and Urry, L. (1987). The End of Organised Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. MacKenzie, R., and Martínez Lucio, M. (2005). The realities of regulatory change: beyond the fetish of deregulation. Sociology, 39(3), 499–517. Marino, S. (2015). Trade unions, special structures and the inclusion of migrant workers: on the role of union democracy. Work, Employment and Society, 29(5), 826–842. Martínez Lucio, M. (1991). Trade unions and communism in Spain: The role of the CCOO in the political projects of the left. Journal of Communist Studies, 6(4), 80–99. Martínez Lucio, M. (2020). Trade unions and stress at work: the evolving responses and politics of health and safety strategies in the case of the United Kingdom’, in Burke, R. J., and Pignata, S. (eds.), Handbook of Research on Stress and Well-Being in the Public Sector. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 15–32. Martínez Lucio, M., and Connolly, H. (2012). Transformation and continuities in urban struggles: urban politics, trade unions and migration in Spain. Urban Studies, 49(3), 669–684. Mathers, A., Upchurch, M. and Taylor, G. (2019). Social movement theory and trade union organising, in Grote, J. R. and Wagemann, C. (eds.), Social Movements and Organised Labour: Passions and Interest. London: Routledge. McAlevey, J. (2015). The crisis of New Labor and Alinsky’s legacy: revisiting the role of the organic grassroots leaders in building powerful organizations and movements. Politics & Society, 43(3), 415–441. McBride, A., Hebson, G., and Holgate, J. (2015). Intersectionality: are we taking enough notice in the field of work and employment relations? Work, Employment and Society, 29(2), 331–341. Mouffe, C. (2013). Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, Martin, J. (ed.). London: Routledge. Murray, G. (2017). Union renewal: what can we learn from three decades of research? Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 23(1), 9–29. Nagel, J. (1994). Constructing ethnicity: creating and recreating ethnic identity and culture. Social Problems, 41(1), 152–176. Però, D. (2020). Indie unions, organizing and labour renewal: learning from precarious migrant workers. Work, Employment and Society, 34(5), 900–918.
456 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Pilati, K., and Perra, S. (2022). The insider–outsider divide and contentious politics: the tripartite field of the Italian labour movement. West European Politics, 1–27. Reinecke, J., and Donaghey, J. (2015). After Rana Plaza: building coalitional power for labour rights between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations. Organization, 22(5), 720–740. Roca, B., and Díaz‐Parra, I. (2020). Spatial perspectives on labor and social movements: multidisciplinary dialogues and dilemmas. Sociology Compass, 15(10), 1–10. Sennett, R. (1998). The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. WW Norton & Company. Simms, M., and Holgate, J. (2010). Organising for what? Where is the debate on the politics of organising? Work, Employment and Society, 24(1), 157–168. Smith, H. (2021). The ‘indie unions’ and the UK labour movement: towards a community of practice. Economic and Industrial Democracy, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/ 0143831X211009956 Stephenson, C., and Wray, D. (2005). Emotional regeneration through community action in post-industrial mining communities: The New Herrington Miners’ Banner Partnership. Capital & Class, 29(3), 175–199. Stewart, P., McBride, J., Greenwood, I., Stirling, J., Holgate, J., Tattersall, A., Stephenson, C., and Wray, D. (2009). ‘Introduction’, in McBride, J., and Greenwood, I. (eds.) Community Unionism. London: Springer. Tapia, M., and Alberti, G. (2019). Unpacking the category of migrant workers in trade union research: a multi-level approach to migrant intersectionalities. Work, Employment and Society, 33(2), 314–325. Tattersall, A. (2019). ‘Interests and types of solidarity in union-community relations’, in Grote, J. and Wagemann, C. (eds.), Social Movements and Organised Labour: Passions and Interest. London: Routledge, 66–81. Tilly, C. (1978). From Mobilization to Revolution. New York: McGraw Hill. Tilly, C. (1995). To explain political processes. American Journal of Sociology, 100(6), 1594–1610. Visser, J. (2019). Can unions revitalize themselves? International Journal of Labour Research, 9(1/2), 17–48. Voss, K. and Sherman, R. (2000), Breaking the iron law of oligarchy: unions revitalization in the American labor movement, American Journal of Sociology, 106(2), 303–349. Wagemann, C., and Grote, J. R (2019). Countermovement in terms of radical change, in Grote, J. R. and Wagemann, C. (eds.), Social Movements and Organised Labour: Passions and Interest. London: Routledge. Waterman, P. (2001). Globalization, Social Movements, and the New Internationalism. New York: Continuum. Whittier, N. (2010). Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women’s Movement. Temple University Press.
RECOMMENDED READING Fairbrother, P. (2008). Social movement unionism or trade unions as social movements. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 20(3), 213–220. Grote, J. R. and Wagemann, C. (eds.) (2019). Social Movements and Organised Labour: Passions and Interest. London: Routledge. Heery, E., Williams, S., and Abbott, B. (2012). Civil society organizations and trade unions: cooperation, conflict, indifference. Work, Employment and Society, 26(1), 145–160. Holgate, J. (2015). Community organising in the UK: A ‘new’ approach for trade unions? Economic and Industrial Democracy, 36(3), 431–455. Roca, B., and Díaz‐Parra, I. (2020). Spatial perspectives on labor and social movements: Multidisciplinary dialogues and dilemmas. Sociology Compass, 15(1), 1–10.
Trade unions (ism), social movements and the community 457 Stewart, P., McBride, J., Greenwood, I. Stirling, J., Holgate, J. Tattersall, A., Stephenson, C. and Wray, D. (2009). ‘Introduction’ in McBride, J. and Greenwood, I. (eds.) Community Unionism. London: Springer.
38. Global unions and transnational labor movement Julia Soul and Cecilia Anigstein
INTRODUCTION In the course of neoliberal globalization, transnationalized terrains for the organization of the working class and labor movement emerged. Two strands of social research, each of them spotlighting particular dimensions of labor unions dynamics, discuss these changes: a. The field of industrial relations that analyzes the emerging structure of transnational labor relations and collective bargaining. International coordination emerged as a matter of “strategic choice” for union revitalization (Lillie and Martínez Lucio: 2004) and as the potential terrain for new institutional “power resources” (Herberg: 2018). Literature in this area argues that the transnational labor movement confronted global capital, advocating for the enforcement of a multilayered network of regulation tools – such as agreements, recommendations or conventions. The extended implementation of Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) – even though in the private governance terrain – is considered as the basis of an emergent global collective bargaining structure. The GFAs are expected to potentially embrace precarious workers from low-wage countries and in direct relation with productive locations (Baylos: 2009, Fitcher, Helfen and Sydow: 2011; Fitcher and McCallum: 2015). b. Insights on collective action evidence the emergence of transnational bodies, dynamics and conflicts confronting the race-to-the-bottom of employment, wages, and working conditions (Brookes and McCallum: 2017; Munck: 2010; Van der Linden: 2008). They point to the active involvement of labor organizations in the so-called “contra-hegemonic globalization” or “globalization from below” – marked by the Zapatista uprising in January 1994 and the global protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999 (Santos: 2007; Scipes: 2020; Seoane and Taddei: 2009). This set of actions largely surpasses the industrial relations sphere, as labor movements make up a part of the political movements pursuing transformations in governmental dynamics. These insights connect with an uneven process of reorganization of the working class (Carbonella and Kasmir: 2015; Kasmir and Gill: 2018). Three general trends that affect the social reproduction of laboring populations and communities can be traced back to the dawn of neoliberal globalization. In the first place, the territorial configuration of roughly 5000 Special Economic Zones (SEZ) spread mainly through the so-called “Global South”. In these spaces featured by their immediate links to world-market oriented production, labor relations rely on low-wages and limited or not-unionization rights (Neveling: 2018) The same precarious job conditions prevail in the logistic hubs of infrastructure related to the distribution and circulation of imported commodities (Moody: 2017). In the second place, the national states turned into National States of Competition (Hirsch: 2001) affected institutional systems – largely 458
Global unions and transnational labor movement 459 privileged as unions’ sphere of intervention. In the third place, the commodification and privatization of reproductive tasks directed an arrow towards the core of former social reproduction regimes and increased precarious, low-wage jobs in these sectors. Migrant labor is another key trend featuring working-class contemporary formation. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), 4.7% of the global workforce are migrants. These 164 million people are either unemployed or engaged in precarious work, with no labor or union rights and in jobs in labor-intensive sectors like urban services, care industries, agrifood or garment chains – some located in SEZs (ILO: 2021). Thus, scholars have identified the emergence of three working-class groups: the “classic” waged groups, the precarious and labor-intensive sectors settled in the SEZ and the so-called global labor reserve army (Karataşlı and Silver: 2015) composed mainly of the increasing migrant population precariously incorporated in Global North labor markets, and of those vast contingents loosely classified as informal laborers. The Financial Crisis in 2008 and the political responses to it renewed labor unrest, and triggered further shifts stemming from labor processes reorganization, the recognition of ecological crisis and the emergence of feminist and gender demands. In sum, the current transnational labor movement deals with the intertwined dynamics of changing working classes, the erosion of national institutional systems and renewed demands and actors, in an open process spurred by the ongoing crisis. This chapter summarizes an approach to three dimensions of the transnational labor movement: its organizational architecture, the demands it pursues and the political programs it mobilizes. It argues for an understanding of these issues in connection with the uneven mutations and transformations of the working classes. It is organized as follows: the first section describes the shifts that international unionism has experienced since the late 1960s, to understand current political programs and organizational structures targeting multinational firms. The second section discusses the strategies to face the hegemonic/counter-hegemonic globalization process. It focuses on the making of networks and alliances to confront or to influence the free-trade policies. The third section presents the contemporary dynamics of the transnational labor movement focusing on three issues: the new agenda topics; the renewed transnational actors organized as an expression of productive transformations and labor struggles; and the strategies to influence global governance and support local processes. Finally, the conclusions discuss and analyze the manifold role played by the transnational labor movement in a multi-scalar field of power relationships.
LABOR INTERNATIONALISM TODAY: BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AND NATIONAL COMPETITION STATES As stated above, the consolidation of neoliberal globalization entails several factors underlying labor movement shifts and transformations since the last quarter of the twentieth century. The most relevant are the connected dynamics of productive internationalization and the reconfiguration of nation-states as they are compelled to shape favorable conditions for capital investments. Both trends may have provoked a sort of institutional inadequacy for labor organizations, which are still segmented along national, regional, corporate or regional lines (Lillie and Martínez Lucio: 2004). At the same time, this transformation gave way to new sources of power and scope for labor movement action (McCallum: 2017; Webster: 2015).
460 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The long-lasting international confederations map was consolidated on a twofold basis. In the first place there existed a set of national confederations grouped around the East-West geopolitical cleavage, with the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and its Latin America, Africa and Asia and Pacific regional branches; the World Confederation of Labor (WCL) – formerly under social-christian orientation – and the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), organizing communist and socialist unions around the world (Hyman: 2005; Van der Linden: 2008). The political influence of these international organizations over the role played by their local or national members and working classes has been widely discussed (Bachelor: 2011; Scipes: 2016). Secondly, rooted in nineteenth-century industrial unions, is a set of International Trade Secretariats (ITS), organizing national industrial branches (metalworkers, garment, transport, among others). In the 1960s, corporate delocalization and regional integration processes represented nascent challenges to these organizational structures. There is general agreement pointing to multinational corporations as the main agents of these transformations, since their decisions about investments and locations had a direct, although uneven, impact on local communities and states. Thus, since the mid-1960s the ITS promoted the creation of World Councils in multinational companies, with three main goals: to facilitate information exchange between unions dealing with the same companies; to support international solidarity; and to provide a coordination sphere for joint collective bargaining – with some successful interventions in support of strikes and direct actions and coordinating the negotiation of corporate international expansion (Gennari: 1984; Muñoz Vergara: 1979; Soul: 2018). At the same time, the three International Confederations targeted multinational companies as a common goal, advocating for regulation tools to supranational bodies, such as codes of conduct or recommendations (Tapiola: 1979). The consolidation of regional integration processes and the fall of the Soviet Union (Brookes and McCallum: 2017; Bourques and Hennebert: 2011; Herod: 1998) shaped new global political terrains that challenged labor movement organizational structures and strategies – already undermined by working-class disorganization and defeats. In 2002, International Secretariats turned into Global Union Federations (GUFs) and merged into more embracing organizations, while former international federations merged into a unique dominant international Confederation. New global unions aimed to organize supply chains, joining together the variegated sectors involved in manufacturing and services. Currently, the main GUFs are: UNI Global Union (Union Network International until 2009), founded in 2000 from the merger of FIET, MEI and CI with the IGF;1 and Industriall, created in 2012, when the former IMF, ICEM and ITGLWF2 merged in a unique global union. Workers in Food processing industries are organized by the IUF;3 and Logistic and Transport workers are organized by the ITF,4 which maintains its original structure since its foundation in 1896. Education and Public Service workers are also organized by Education International (EI) and Public Services International (PSI) respectively. Concerning the World Confederation’s structure, two of the former three merged to form the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in 2006. In this way, the global labor movement and its strategic orientation is expressed by a unique dominant global confederation that organizes waged workers in Africa, America and Asia through three regional organizations: Asia-Pacific ITUC-AP; the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA); and African ITUC-AF along with a close relationship with the European Trade Union Confederation and the GUFs (Bourque and Hennebert: 2011). According to
Global unions and transnational labor movement 461 ITUC data, it organizes more than 200 million waged workers all around the world, through national confederations and workers’ centers. The dominant strategy of these international Confederations relies on social dialogue, considered as a viable mechanism for conciliating social interests. It is based on a three-pronged approach: first, the configuration of a labor relations arena at the global scale through the signing of GFAs. The set of GFAs is considered a response to the expansion of transnational corporations. As the former International Secretariats, current GUFs are the main actors in pursuing a transnational field for labor relations. Second, the involvement in decision-making through tripartite and social dialogue instances at the national and supranational bodies – mainly the ILO, but also regional councils or advisory bodies. Third, the pursuit of the “voice of labor” in supranational bodies, either as observer, active participant or through leverage and lobby tactics. With the advance of the neoliberal offensive, critical voices to the social dialogue strategy were raised. Some national confederations from the Global South, which had confronted neoliberalism and authoritarian governments, forged an alternative strategy so-called social movement unionism. It is worth mentioning that some features and topics – such as the importance of “democratic” unions or the necessity for community-based alliances – from the social movement unionism strategy have been incorporated into the discourses and programs of several labor activists in the Global North (Moody: 1997), the Global Federations and in ITUC interventions. As stated below, Global South labor movement strategies and leaderships have been growing in relevance since the turn of the century, in the light of global protest processes and the rise of a renewed agenda.
LABOR MOVEMENT AND GLOBALIZATION: FROM GOVERNANCE TO ANTI-GLOBALIZATION Globalization has been considered as a twofold process: on one side, it involves a hegemonic dimension of global governance performed by institutional articulations of supranational or regional bodies. According to Santos (2007), global governance expresses the political side of neoliberal globalization, reframing civil society’s role at a global scale. Global governance seeks the incorporation of NGOs, the labor movement, “advisers” and other actors in the making of regulations and rules at a scale where no state-order or elected authorities can be invoked (Arditi: 2015; Matas Morel: 2013). On the other side, globalization involves a counter-movement performed by social movements, communities and activism networks contesting the commodification trends unleashed by the hegemonic process, pursuing the making of social and economic alternatives, through democratic and participative practices, animated by a redistributive rhetoric. This vast network of multi-scalar organizations, actors and events performs what has been called a “counter-hegemonic” globalization or globalization from below (Carr: 1999; Munck: 2010; Santos: 2007). As has been advanced, the prevailing strategy of the international labor movement draws on the institutional resources of global governance. Historically integrated into the ILO, international confederations have played an important role in the making of conventions and recommendations, contributing to forging broad global agreements about basic labor standards to be enforced by national states. Thus, at the same time that national confederations advocate for the enforcement of ILO conventions by the nation-states, the ILO has been a global politi-
462 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work cal arena for labor movement claims and demands to nation-states – especially those related to union and collective bargaining freedom. The international labor movement plays an advisory role in OECD bodies. As such, it seeks for the enforcement of the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which consist of a set of basic labor, environmental and transparency standards to be promoted by the member-states. Although not binding, the Guidelines provide an arena for labor movement complaint against multinational companies’ practices, especially those involving labor rights violation, but also related to environmental or corruption issues. National and regional confederations also play different roles in the institutional and political architecture stemming from economic integration processes and free-trade agreements – and, eventually, from other factors mediating the globalization process. The free-trade spirit underlying integration agreements has been a contested terrain for national confederations. Supranational labor and social regulations entail different institutional arrangements and different roles for the labor movement. The labor chapter of USMCA,5 replacing the side-labor agreement of the former North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enforces a set of ILO Conventions on labor relations and articulates with a broader reform of the Mexican labor relations system – the latest a long-term demand of the independent labor movement. The European Workers’ Councils of the European Union envisage supranational mechanisms for a social dialogue, while the national confederations of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) play a merely consultative role within tripartite national representations (Soul: 2019; Lillie and Martínez Lucio: 2004; Badaro: 2000). Concerning the broad array of Free Trade Agreements, the dominant claim of labor unions has been the inclusion of “social” or “labor” clauses. Nevertheless, it has faced two limitations: the first is that working-class interests (local and potentially transnational) are usually diluted in the strategies of insertion in the international markets performed by the competitive nation-states; and the second limitation is that, in spite of the inclusion of these chapters, labor movement legitimizes competition and free-trade dynamics which are the cause of precariousness, unemployment and the weakening of the labor movement (Cross: 2017). In the meantime, a “southern” strategy was forged. As mentioned, social movement unionism stems from democratic struggles in southern countries – where unionized workers are a minor fraction of the working classes. Much of the social dialogue approach does not envision a broader social role for the labor movement in national or local contexts of impoverished and dispossessed workers. In response, social movement unionism relies on unions’ involvement in coalitions advocating for popular interests and social justice in the political sphere, confronting governments and states, rather than focusing exclusively on labor relations (Scipes: 2014; Waterman: 1993). There is then, continuity between the so-called social movement unionism initiatives and the unfolding of broader contesting processes of neoliberal hegemony. These struggles targeted neoliberal hegemony mainly as an authoritarian free market offensive that undermined social goods and protections, and thus affected not only waged workers, but the whole “society” (informal workers, petty producers, peasants, etc.). The resistance to the Free Trade Agreement of Americas (FTAA) is a paradigmatic process, not only because the project was rejected, but also because it was a test for the social movement unionism strategy. Since the mid-1990s, Latin American, Caribbean and North American labor movements have been involved in different actions to confront the FTAA. The Interamerican Regional Labor Organization – currently the TUCA – in alliance with NGOs, and social movements promoted the Hemispheric Social Alliance to pose an alternative agenda, claiming for a labor chapter. This initiative has been considered a pioneering
Global unions and transnational labor movement 463 experience of counter-hegemonic resistance to neoliberal globalization (Saguier: 2007). The more the discussions developed, the more unions and other organizations realized their propositions would not be taken into account. The strategy of denouncing the regressive social consequences of the FTAA for waged workers and subaltern classes, building regional and national alliances and performing street actions was gaining space in the coalition. It was initially promoted by some critical confederations within IRLO,6 in the context of a deep crisis in many Latin American countries – at the dawn of the so-called “pink tide” governments – and succeeded, when the FTAA was “buried” in the Summits of the Americas in 2005. Among the organizations that promoted this alternative strategy was SIGTUR,7 a networked coalition of Global South Confederations – Argentinian CTA,8 South African COSATU,9 Brazilian CU10T and Korean KCTU,11 as a projection of the struggles against neoliberal policies they were performing at a national scale. Three distinctive elements of the network are: its fully Global South membership, which reinforces its relevance in the new labor transnationalism; that its members have been confronting the strategy carried out by other fractions of labor movement in their countries to face neoliberal hegemony; and, finally, its understanding of the importance of precarious, informal and non-waged workers in the making of new union strategies (Dobrusin: 2014, Webster, Lambert and Bezuidenhout: 2008).The Brazilian CUT, the Landless Workers’ Movement and the Workers’ Party, were among the main promoters of the World Social Forum launched as a response to the Davos Economic Forum by a variegated array of political organizations and social movements. Across the sea, the European Social Forum, which ran in 2002, joined together social movements, traditional and new radical unions that sought to confront neoliberal and free-trade policies (Bieler and Morton: 2004) In sum, the reorganization of the international labor movement discussed above went hand-in-hand with the shaping of a twofold political strategy of participation (underpinned by a social dialogue logic) and confrontation (underpinned by a social movement logic).
THE CONTEMPORARY TRANSNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT: SOCIAL PRACTICES AND ACTORS OF A GLOBAL LABOR AGENDA Current capitalist global responses to the financial crisis rely on automatization trends, the intensification of extractive modes of overcoming capital’s “natural barriers” and the deepening of austerity policies on social reproduction. Therefore, the transnational labor movement faces new contested terrains such as the “future of work”, the “climate crisis” and the “feminist and gender agenda”. The politicization of gender and ecological topics points to the role of transnational corporations and supranational bodies in the configuration of these new antagonistic terrains (Maffei and Llanos: 2010; Stevis and Felli: 2015). In this context, the transnational labor movement reproduces its two-pronged dynamics of participation and confrontation. Concerning labor relations, the dominant strategy has consolidated around transnational corporations and their supply chains as the core of global collective bargaining arrangements. Currently, more than 300 GFAs have been signed. Most of them set general labor standards, and a few are only related to health and safety or environmental topics. As this continues to be a matter of “private governance”, the very constitution of a global sphere for labor relations is a contested terrain by global unions and the bedrock for transnational bonds (Soul: 2018). To
464 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work support the GFAs enforcement and implementation, global unions promote the constitution of transnational union networks. These bodies highlight the relevance of transnational connections among workers and organizations to achieve the improvement of labor conditions. Recent insights on transnational unionism highlight the importance of the local embedding of global agreements since their enforcement relies on local forces (Fitcher: 2011; McCallum: 2013; Wad: 2007). Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the existence of a global network in weak unionized sectors, does not contribute to the improvement of working conditions without the direct involvement of local actors (Galhera: 2014; Magalhaes Rodrigues: 2014). Inversely, the position of groups of activists pursuing the building of local unions through militant and direct-action tactics becomes stronger when they are engaged in global organizations, which can unfold global campaigns of solidarity and support (Soul: 2022; McCallum: 2013; 2017). A global union network brings together unions promoting rank-and-file activism and unions relying on institutionalized spheres of action. Yet, each particular situation depends on the local balance of forces, the national unions’ commitment to transnational organizing and the sectoral or branch dynamics (Anner et al.: 2006; Anner: 2015). The UNI-sponsored Amazon Alliance (Boewe and Schulten: 2019), and the industrial-sponsored metalworkers Global Councils (Soul: 2018) show these uneven outcomes of the transnational articulation sponsored by global unions. This strategy faces two limitations: it seems more effective for strengthening international solidarity bonds than for setting a transnational sphere of labor relations and, at the same time, it seems difficult to engage rank-and-file members in a “transnationalized” scale of union action. Both failures have been addressed by alternative strategies. The International Dockworkers Council (IDC) – a dockworkers split-off from the ITF – is a very insightful example of how organizing tactics relying on direct solidarity between locations, rank-and-file involvement and the appeal to collective power stemming from labor process control may strengthen workers’ position in the struggle for better working conditions and against labor precarization (Durrenberger and Erem: 2009; Fox-Hodess: 2020). Other authors have pointed to transnational programs of workforce supply as the sphere where the contradictions between “governance” and “struggle” arise. Global agrifood and garment chains are privileged instances where this happens, because they rely on a migrant workforce. As actors of “governance”, some unions may pursue the setting of clear wages and working conditions, monitoring the contracting moment of transnational programs of workforce supply, while others may seek for workers’ organization and collective action, as wages and conditions arranged through the programs are notably worse than those offered to local workers (Reigada: 2017). Meanwhile, facing similar conditions, the US-Mexico agriculture workers combined direct action, transnational organizing and the building of a pan-ethnic identity to set up a novel union in the heart of an agrifood productive region (Zlolniski: 2019). Garment industry unions have been early involved in the Clean Clothes Campaign, a transnational initiative joining corporations, unions and consumers’ associations advocating for the enforcement of labor and human rights across the supply chain. In recent years, the global labor relations strategy converged into a broader orientation to global governance focused on the promotion of debates and interventions around the notion of just transition. As a political principle, just transition is included in the Paris Agreement and is the core of the global campaign for the enforcement of the Decent Work and Economic Growth goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development program. The principles and goals attached to just transition provide moral and political support to international labor
Global unions and transnational labor movement 465 movement demands and statements. In its 2018 Congress, the ITUC adopted just transition as its programmatic cornerstone intertwining social and environmental justice in the political paths to “green” jobs and low-carbon economies (Jenkins et al.: 2020; McCauley and Heffron: 2018). This principle also informs a broad array of social and political interventions that seek for an ongoing global social dialogue. Thus, just transition is the terrain within which labor conflicts triggered by automatization, the duality between “green” and “dirty” jobs and the shifts needed for the transition to low-carbon environments can be managed. Recent research identifies a set of differential local engagements based on this principle. On one side, Global North labor movements may discuss topics related to green jobs and automatization, energy transition and democratization (Gouverneur and Netzer, 2014). On the other side, Global South labor movements entangle a just transition narrative into a set of radical political concerns including the creation of green jobs, the use of commons, food sovereignty and the defense of water sources and territories (Anigstein: 2022; Anigstein and Wyczykier: 2019). This entanglement stems from the double participation of the international labor movement in the political processes. On one side, it secures its place as a voice – though a secondary one – in the global governance sphere, where global federations and the ITUC are invited as observers and can promote debates and resolutions through lobbying and leverage tactics. Related to these bodies, international labor movement demands have a defensive objective: they aim for the protection of their members from precarization, dispossession and wealth concentration. On the other side, local and national branches of global unions firmly promote counter-movements and countermeetings, launch statements and alternative proposals as part of broader civil society coalitions and networks, enlarging “globalization from below” processes (Kenfack: 2018; Räthzel et al.: 2018; Sáinz, Sanchez and Lobato: 2020; Stevis and Felli: 2015; Sweeney and Treat: 2018). Finally, feminist movements have seriously questioned traditional international unions’ approach to gender topics. In the terrain of global governance, global federations have framed two Conventions that point to important feminist demands: No. 189 – that sets standards for domestic workers – and No. 190 – for those facing violence and harassment in work environments. Nevertheless, radical aspects of the feminist movement point to central male-centered ways of shaping representation relations between members and the unions, and between these and the state. Scholars describe a twofold approach on this topic. On one side, lies the “affirmative action” approach, which seeks to reach equal representation in directive bodies and union boards. Many groups of women have self-organized to claim for those places within their unions, as much as the promotion of female membership participation through training programs and special activities. On the other side, these rank-and-file movements usually claim for recognition of feminist demands on the part of unions’ executive boards or leaderships, contributing to the expansion of the field of what can be considered “labor issues”, spurring debates about reproductive and care work and the (lack of) unions’ engagement in this. The international women’s strikes have been a privileged place to open up such debates and to make them visible. In more active countries such as Argentina, local members of global federations or local branches of the ITUC may support the women’s strikes – as many leaders and activists are actively involved in the movement (Varela: 2020; Arriaga and Medina: 2020; Arruzza et al.: 2019), however, transnational labor organizations have not pronounced on them. Notwithstanding this, transnational labor movement embraces a broad array of demands concerning gender equality and banning violence against women. In sum, labor and feminist
466 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work movements are engaged in an ongoing, non-linear and, for the time being, locally forged relationship.
CONCLUSIONS: THE TRANSNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND THE (RE) MAKING OF THE WORKING CLASS Contemporary transnational labor movement dynamics unfold through the interplay between two spheres of social relations defined around labor or industrial relations and the global governance architecture. The chapter describes the long-lasting configuration of a dominant strategy structured around the struggle to set a transnational scale of labor relations and to pose “the workers’ voice” in global governance institutions. This dominant strategy faces limitations, which stem from the institutional inadequacy and from the eventually contradictory institutional/movement dynamics that underlies the constitution of the labor movement. Regarding the institutional inadequacy, the territorial reconfiguration of production and circulation circuits produces a gap between the organization of production and two general features of unions’ organizing ground: sectoral cleavages (which overcame the former craft basis) and the national-centered scale of action. The merger of former International Secretariats into Global Unions seeks to organize workers across global supply chains to fill in this gap. Another limitation consists of the scope of representativeness: while unions maintain themselves in the institutional terrain of waged-centered labor relations systems, the global productive chains entail a diversity of forms of labor subordination broadly considered as informal. The promotion of networks, councils and other transnational bodies aims to strengthen unions at their places, and to expand membership among those unorganized – precarious or non-unionized workers. As was mentioned, this organizing flexibility replicates unevenly at the national or regional scale, constrained by uneven institutional arrangements and by local union dynamics – some more oriented towards rank-and-file organizing, some more bureaucratic and non-participative. This strategy entails two political assumptions: on one side, the assumption that democratic nation-states and labor relations systems are the key arenas for the promotion of labor and human rights. Thus, unionization, social dialogue and collective bargaining are privileged goals in global labor movement campaigns. In this context, regulation tools launched by supranational bodies, such as ILO Conventions or OECD recommendations become relevant institutional resources supporting labor positions at the national scale. The second assumption concerns the economic role of governments, that should aim to protect the productive structure and investments and to expand protection and regulations related to workers’ welfare. Based on it, transnational labor movement promotes the support to anti-neoliberal political coalitions, articulating with social movements. This political strategy unfolded mainly in the countries of the Global South during the last decade of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st. Relying on these assumptions, labor organizations perform a swaying dynamic between broader coalitions with social movements and global governance bodies. Articulations with social movements are the ground of demands and actions that the labor movements translate into politics while (intents to) promoting “the workers’ voice” in institutional bodies of “global governance”. Inversely, they actively contribute to shape social movements’ “dialogue” with global and local institutions. As was
Global unions and transnational labor movement 467 mentioned, uneven labor movements articulate particular local and situated developments in universal notions – such as just transition, labor rights or social justice.
NOTES 1 International Federation of Employees, Technicians and Managers; Media and Entertainment International; Communications International; International Graphical Federation respectively. 2 International Metalworkers Federation; International Federation of Chemical, Energy Mine and General Workers Union; International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation respectively. 3 International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Association. 4 International Transport Federation. 5 United States, Mexico, Canada Free Trade Agreement. 6 InterAmerican Regional Labor Organization (Regional Branch of Former International Confederation of Free Trade Unions). 7 South Initiative on Globalization and Union Rights. 8 Congress (later Central) of Argentinian Workers. 9 Congress of South African Trade Unions. 10 Unique Workers’ Central. 11 Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.
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39. Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy Jeemol Unni
1. INTRODUCTION The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates the informal employment of persons worldwide, aged 15 years and above, as 2 billion workers, consisting of 62 percent of all workers (ILO, 2018). There is a vast regional variation in informal employment. In Africa, 86 percent of workers are informally employed, 68 percent in Asia and the Pacific and in the Arab states. Informal employment is the lowest in the developed world, 40 percent in the Americas and 25 percent in Europe and Central Asia (ILO, 2018). The nature and form of organizing of this large proportion of informal workers are different from that of the formal workers due to their invisibility and dispersed nature of work, where a majority do not have a designated place of work like a factory. In this paper I examine examples of organizations of informal workers and the organizing strategies of workers in the informal economy, primarily by making reference to the Indian case, and reflecting on my own practice as an academic-organizer active in informal workers’ unions and campaigning. In the next section I discuss some key definitions of informality and informal employment. Next, I briefly discuss some theories of organizing that are helpful to understand informal worker organizations and their strategies. In the third section, I put these theories to work against empirical evidence and I discuss a range of non-traditional organizations and/or forms of organizing that have emerged with the rising process of labour informalization. In the final section, I summarize the new forms of organizing noted in the paper in various typologies.
2.
DEFINING INFORMAL WORKERS
There has been a long debate on what constitutes the informal sector and why it still exists when early writers had predicted it was a transitory phenomenon. Four schools of thought are important in this literature, the dualistic school (Hart, 1973; Harris and Todaro, 1970), the legalist school (de Soto, 1989), the structuralist school framed around the study of petty commodity production (Moser, 1978) and the voluntary school (Maloney, 2004).1 These studies did not provide a precise definition of the informal sector. In 1993, the ILO, in its 15th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS), defined the Informal Sector as ‘Unincorporated enterprises owned by households. Fixed and other assets do not belong to the production units but to their owners. Do not have a legal entity other than that of the household’ (ILO, 1993). This was an enterprise-based definition intended to help garner statistics on the contribution of the informal sector to the economy. The organizations of informal workers were not happy with this definition as it was noted that a large number of ‘informal’ workers existed in the formal enterprises as well. In 2003, the 471
472 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work ILO defined a new category of Informal Employment, which was based on the nature of work or job and included the self-employed workers (ILO, 2003; Agarwala, 2009).
Source:
ILO, 2018, Figure 5, Panel C, p. 14.
Figure 39.1
Informal employment as per the ILO, 2003 definition (percentages, 2016)
Today, the ILO (2018) identifies various components of informal employment, as a percentage of total employment in various regions of the world (Figure 39.1). Informal employment is to be found in informal enterprises, formal enterprises (as per ILO 1993 definition) and also in households. Informal employment in households includes domestic workers and others hired by households. Moreover, the inclusion of informal employment in the agricultural sector – previously the focus was on urban sectors – has further raised the proportion of informal workers worldwide, to nearly 86 percent of total employment in Africa and 71 percent in Asia and the Pacific. Clearly informal employment is an important phenomenon in developing countries, and increasingly also in core economies, and hence it is essential to study the organization of these workers, which may provide them representation and a voice. Some definitions of informality focus on lack of regulation of the economic activities and lack of protection of the workers involved. For instance, following Portes and Castells (1989), Tardanico (1997), Cross (1998) and Hussmanns (2004), Rosaldo, Tilly and Evans (2012) proposed defining informal work as labor that creates legal goods and services, but is not regulated nor protected by the state in ways that other labor is. Others stress instead the many economic, social and political interconnections and relations of informality in the context of specific regional economies. Rina Agarwala (2009) underlines how: the premises of economic sociology yield a more comprehensive definition of the informal economy that I term “relational” … . In contrast to definitions based on modernization and neoliberal assumptions of isolated economies, relational definitions of the informal economy
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 473 expose the structures, networks, and political institutions that intertwine informal workers with the formal economy, society, and the state. Each of these definitions have their specific usefulness, scope and limitations. The ILO definitions place the emphasis on measuring and estimating the size of the informal sector and informal employment, in order to produce quantitative estimates to prove the significance of their contribution to the economy and develop labour protection policies. On the other hand, instead, one of the advantages of the sociological definition is that ‘it defines informality in relation to state policy, thereby creating ostensibly clear lines of demarcation’ (Collier, et. al., 2011, quoted in Rosaldo, et. al., 2012).
3.
THEORIES OF ORGANIZING
Agarwala’s (2009) definition of informal economy as ‘relational’ can be considered as inspired by Charles Tilly’s conceptual work on inequalities being relational and based on power asymmetries (Tilly, 1998). Charles Tilly was one of the early writers on the relation between inequality, democracy and citizenship. Citizenship was a key element in democratization. Tilly (1995) made the point that globalization was eroding labour rights. With the rise of international organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, the immediate loser was the state. This affected labour rights as the state was the agency that enforced the rights (Gentile and Tarrow, 2010). Tilly suggested that workers would need ‘to invent new strategies at the scale of international capital’ (Gentile and Tarrow, 2010). Charles Tilly’s (quoted in Heller and Evans, 2010), contention that: citizenship consists of mutual rights and obligations binding governmental agents to whole categories of people who are subject to the government’s authority, those categories being defined chiefly or exclusively by relations to the government rather than by reference to particular connections with rulers or to membership in categories based … race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. It institutionalizes regular, categorical relations between subjects and their governments’ (Tilly, 2004: 128, italics added).
Though Charles Tilly did not speak of informal workers, we can speculate from the above quote how later writers may have seen a theory of organizing for informal labour emerging in his writings. One of those ‘whole categories of people’ could be taken to be the informal workers. Tilly’s vision of citizenship focused on the quality of the relationship between the individual and the state. Heller and Evans (2010) extended this idea to the local state at the city municipal level. Indeed, the state and the city are central actors in the organizing and bargaining strategies of informal worker organizations. Street vendor organizations, for example, make their ‘claims’ to the local city municipalities seeing these urban local bodies as their ‘duty-bearers’ (see Unni, 2004; Rao-Cavale, 2019). In fact, in his exploration of citizenship at the city level, Appadurai (2002) refers to poor informal workers in the city of Mumbai, India, engaged in menial occupations such as rag picking, cart pulling, petty vending and petty industrial job work, as ‘citizens without a city’. He documents the organizing strategy of these workers through an alliance of an NGO (SPARC), a women’s small saving group (Mahila Milan) and the National Slum Dwellers
474 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Federation. This alliance made demands on the city for housing rights for the informal workers, which is the place of work of home-based workers and homeworkers. In her study of Indian informal workers Agarwala (2009) noted them: organizing and cementing new relations with the state along citizenship lines. To retain their membership and fit the unique conditions of their work, Indian informal workers are creating an altered form of unionism that appeals to the state, rather than employers, for increases in welfare, such as health and education, rather than for work benefits, such as minimum wages and job security.
In this fashion informal workers’ organizations give the state a more central role and attempt to attract the attention of elected politicians, using the rhetoric of citizenship rights and the power of their votes. The city or neighbourhoods in cities are the ground to mobilize the dispersed, unprotected workforce, rather than the shop floor, thereby bypassing the employers. Crucially, given the extreme diversity in informal workers’ conditions and experiences, distinct forms of organizing are necessary. The realization of informal workers’ rights actually requires a context-specific articulation and voice at various levels (Unni, 2004). The sections below explore some of the forms of informal organizing which have emerged in recent times, with a special focus on India.
4.
NON-TRADITIONAL ORGANIZING: INFORMAL WORKERS
Given the staggering levels of informal employment worldwide, and its further likely expansion with COVID-19, it is paramount to explore novel models of organizing that recognize the needs and features of informal workers. In fact, across developing countries, informal workers have found various means of organizing themselves. Chen et al. (2007) make a distinction between two forms of organizations of informal workers, non-government organizations (NGO) and member-based organizations (MBO). MBOs are ‘those in which the members elect their leaders and which operate on democratic principles that hold their elected officers accountable to the general membership’ (Chen et al., 2007: 4). Trade Unions, Cooperatives and Self-Help Groups can be considered as forms of MBOs. Informal worker organizations can also take ‘hybrid or mixed formations that lie somewhere between an MBO and an NGO’ (Bonner and Spooner, 2011: 131). Some of these organizing models and experiences are explored below. (i)
Welfare Boards
One of the organizing strategies of informal workers is to collaborate with the state and local bodies for their needs and demands. One such popular form is the Welfare Board formed for various industries on the demand of the informal workers in them. There are many welfare boards for specific industries in India. The South Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have had the largest number of industries with such boards for over three to four decades. The more recent central welfare board is under the Construction and Building Workers Act, 1996. Like the other funds, this requires the construction company to pay a defined ‘cess’ to this fund and register the workers who will receive social security benefits from the fund. The workers registered under the board and the state also contribute to the fund. While the funds are collected,
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 475 the registration of workers declines and there are large surplus funds accumulated under this Act. To receive welfare benefits from these boards, unions must certify workers’ informal status (Agarwala, 2009). Once they become a member, informal workers receive an identity card with an official state stamp that certifies their employment status, regardless of their employer. Informal workers use this card to get their child into a local school, fight for water at the municipal corporation or avoid police harassment when they are commuting to and from work before sunrise and after sunset. In other words, attaining state recognition for their informal work is expressed in India as a means to social legitimacy. Agarwala (2009: 335) found Indian informal workers organizing and cementing new relations with the state along citizenship lines: To retain their membership and fit the unique conditions of their work, Indian informal workers are creating an altered form of unionism that appeals to the state, rather than employers, for increases in welfare, such as health and education, rather than for work benefits, such as minimum wages and job security.
(ii)
Citizenship Rights-based Approach
A different experience of organizing is that proposed by rights-based approaches. A rights-based approach to organizing does not emphasize the status of the worker; rather it mobilizes citizenship towards claim-making. It is, ultimately, a citizen-based approach. Informal worker organizations are increasingly demanding citizenship rights where the duty bearers are the state at the national or local level, rather than the employer (Unni, 2004). Rather than demanding benefits from employers, workers are making direct demands on the state for welfare benefits (see also Agarwala, 2008). In this case, informal workers deploy the rhetoric of citizenship rights to offer their unregulated labour and political support in return for state recognition of their work. Indeed, this form of mobilization reveals the relational nature of the informal economy and informal employment. This form of mobilizing can give rise to a ‘politics of dissent’ where new spaces of struggle emerge in the cities (RoyChowdhury, 2003). Within this changing relation between the state and labour, Agarwala studied the strategies of seven informal worker organizations in India, six of which were trade unions, and one was an NGO. She documented how earlier trade unions agitated for laws that would guarantee worker rights, often through welfare boards. But even in the industries where a large proportion of workers were informally employed (as in the bidi industry) these laws only benefitted the formal segment of workers. This was following the traditional state labour relation. But after the reforms in India, Agarwala (2008: 392) found ‘informal workers organizing along class lines and using their power as voting citizens to expand their rights and make social welfare claims on the state’. That is, the organizations of informal workers moved from a strategy of demanding ‘worker rights’ to one of ‘citizenship rights’. Worker organization in her study noted that workers were no longer interested in demanding higher wages but were ‘more concerned about human rights issues, such as education, malaria, safe child delivery, and isolation. They don’t want to rebel anymore, they want a job’ (Agarwala, 2008: 394).
476 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work (iii)
Self-organizing: The Case of the Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
One of the most discussed cases in the literature on informal workers’ organizing is indeed that of the Self-employed Women’s Association (SEWA). SEWA is a Central Trade union in India registered in 1972 with a membership of over 1.5 million poor, self-employed women workers from the informal economy across 18 states in India.2 It is the single largest trade union of informal workers in India and in the world. It is an organization of women workers that aims to promote decent employment with work and income security, social security and child-care. The organization takes up the cause of workers in the informal economy in trades such as home-based work, street vendors, waste workers and rag pickers, and other self-employed workers. It works in collaboration with and forms networks with academics, government officials and professionals to enable the voice of the informal workers to reach the policy makers. A large number of professionals are also formally associated with SEWA. The SEWA Bank is one of its most successful ventures, where credit is provided to poor informal workers whom the official banking system have ignored. SEWA has, since its early days, made contacts and networks with international bankers, businesswomen and created the network called Women’s World Banking, taking the work of SEWA Bank to an international level.3 The broader philosophy of SEWA has been to work with informal workers at the micro level, with local government agencies at the meso level and with international agencies at the macro level. This strategy is expected to provide voice, visibility and viability to informal workers and help attract the focus of policy makers on an otherwise marginalized and ignored set of workers in the informal sector. SEWA has mobilized the power of statistics in creating awareness and focus attention on the massive dimension of the problem using the fact that the informal economy contributes substantially to the economy. I relate my personal experience working with SEWA as an example. In 1997 Ela Bhat, founder of SEWA, posed the question to our institution: ‘What is the size of the informal economy and how much does it contribute to the Indian economy?’ According to her, from her experience at that time, statistics on the contribution of the informal workers to the economy were essential to convince the government to prioritize this sector. It was also important to estimate the number of workers in the various trades, like street vending, to be able to negotiate with the local urban municipality for vending space and licenses. Renana Jhabvala, in the preface to the book Informal Economy Centre Stage (Jhabvala, et. al., 2003), the output of a project on this issue brought out how the workforce had shifted from being mostly formal to being mostly informal which convinced the Ahmedabad Municipality to focus on issues of the informal sector. The methodology used in the study for measuring the informal sector was adopted by the country’s National Statistical Office, NSO, in its labour force survey, especially for measuring the informal workforce, since 1999–2000. Based on the model developed, an international collaboration of researchers, activists and policy makers was established called WIEGO – Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing – that works with the ILO and the World Bank to formulate policies for the sector (Unni and Sudarshan, 2001). At the micro level, SEWA, India negotiated with government hospitals and prisons to procure fruits, vegetables and eggs and with government offices to contract cleaning services from self-employed enterprises organized into cooperatives (Chen et al., 2001; Unni, 2004).
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 477 (iv)
Waste Picker Organizations
Waste pickers have formed organizations all over the world, such as in Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Uruguay and India. Several international studies have tried to explore the features of these organizations in comparative perspective. One study in particular has compared waste pickers and their organizations in five cities across the world; namely, Bogotá (Colombia), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Durban (South Africa), Nakuru (Kenya) and Pune (India) (Dias, 2016). The study found that waste pickers have: pursued a number of strategies in their struggle for inclusivity, such as mass mobilization, forging of strategic alliances at local, national and international levels, and struggle for integrative policy and legislation in order to gain recognition and secure their livelihoods. Organizing may take the form of membership-based organizations (MBOs) such as cooperatives, associations, unions, community-based organizations or microenterprises (Dias, 2016: 333).
In Brazil they more often formed cooperatives, while in India they may choose to form trade unions. One waste-picker group can choose more than one form of organization to deliver services. In India, SEWA mobilized for the collective rights of waster pickers, and so did the trade union Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP). Both organizations formed cooperatives for the purpose of service delivery (Samson, 2009: 14–32). KKPKP is an organization of waste pickers in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Waste picking is considered an economically and socially low-ranking economic activity in India. By organizing these workers in collaboration with professionals into a trade union, KKPKP was able to promote waste picking as a productive, valuable and meaningful work, so that it was recognized and the workers gained respect in society (Kabeer et. al., 2013; Routh, 2017). The KKPKP negotiates with the municipal government for waste contracts and better prices as well as collaborating with the government in many of its schemes. ‘KKPKP successfully used the fact that municipal governments in India have constitutional responsibility for waste management to demand medical insurance for waste pickers and for earmarking of spaces across the city for scrap sorting’ (Kabeer et. al., 2013: 257). With its growing influence, KKPKP was represented in various policy-making bodies of the local and national government. It has an alliance with the Global Alliance for Waste Pickers, but is cautious in its expectations from it (Kabeer, et. al, 2013). (v)
Group Farming
Agricultural workers form a large component of informal workers in developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia and the Pacific (see Figure 39.1). In South Asia the size of the farms is rather small so large-scale mechanization as a method to increase productivity is not a good option. In 2015–2016 in India, for instance, 68 percent of operational holdings were classified as ‘marginal’ (below one hectare); 17.6 percent were classified as small (1 to 2 hectares); 9.6 percent as semi-medium; 3.8 percent as medium; and only 0.6 percent as large (GoI, 2020). The small farms are either cultivated by women or operated by women as unpaid labour on family farms (Agarwal, 2021). One of the ways to organize rural women engaged in farming to increase productivity on small farms is through group farming. With the patriarchal systems in place, women rarely own the land that they cultivate. Some of the advantages of group farming
478 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work for women are: to operate land that they cannot own; gain negotiation power in the land, input and output markets; increase financial resources; overcome social restriction on mobility; and bring women leadership to the fore. Agarwal (2018) documents the experience of two experiments in group farming in India in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. In Andhra Pradesh, the group farming experiment started in 1993 under the Mahila Samakhya Programme. The UNDP funded the programme during 2005 to 2016. The programme however, slowly folded up when the funding ceased. This was a rather poor experience and showed that it was not a sustainable experiment. However, the experiment in Kerala was much more successful. Kerala started as a self-help group (SHG) model by Kerala State Planning Board and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) under the Kudumbashree Poverty Alleviation Programme in 1998. Group farming was organized under community development corporations (CDCs) in Kudumbashree. The joint liability group (JLG) linked to bank credit under the NABARD Scheme was made mandatory in 2015. These linkages and the political will of the state government is perhaps a reason why JLGs are still active in Kerala. In 2016 there were 61,836 JLGs and 2,016,550 women cultivators were involved in the programme. Around March 2020, at the time of the COVID-19 lockdown, 48,940 JLGs were cultivating, and 31,241 (63.8 per cent) were ready to harvest (Agarwal, 2021). In times of a disaster these women’s groups also organize relief for the affected populations. During the COVID-19 crisis, women’s groups under Kudumbashree in Kerala organized collective kitchens (Agarwal, 2021), providing an agile response to the pandemic in a context of lack of state action (see also Kannan, 2020). (vi)
Gig and Platform Workers Collectives
The practices of hiring have changed considerably since digital technology took sway. While gig and platform work are very prevalent in the Global North, the Global South is also catching up (ILO, 2021) The ILO estimated that there were 777 active platforms operating in January 2021, 383 in the delivery sector, 283 web-based platforms, 106 in the taxi sector and five hybrid platforms (ILO, 2021, Figure 1.3: 47). It is difficult to estimate the number of workers engaged in the gig economy, but there is both demand and supply of workers in various occupations in the Global North and South (See ILO, 2021, Figure 2 and Figure 1.8: 53). ‘The data on labour supply captures the number of workers registered on these platforms and labour demand captures the number of public projects and tasks that are posted by clients’.4 There are two forms of platform or gig workers. (a) Crowd work: Tasks are posted on a digital platform and a large number of workers also register themselves on the platform. The task is undertaken like a contest and the best gets paid or the platform may choose the workers on some predetermined basis. Examples of such platforms are oDesk, Amazon Mechanical Turk or Crowdflower. This is a form of outsourcing a predetermined task or work. Informal or freelance workers can perform the task and submit to the platform. (b) Demand via apps: This is mainly some local service offered on an app, such as cleaning services, transportation or food vending (De Stefano, 2016). Owners of assets like cars or homes can better utilize the asset by making them available for use on a rental, examples are taxi services such as Uber and Ola and homestay arrangements like Airbnb. This form of hiring or undertaking work through a platform or app is increasingly becoming popular and various industries are experimenting with it. The workers in the platform or gig economy are vulnerable as they are invisible and may not be recognized as workers. They
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 479 face the same problems that workers in the informal economy, domestic workers hired by households and outsourced workers in global value chains face. The employer is not clearly identified and hence it is difficult for these workers to negotiate or bargain for remunerative wages, social security and good working conditions. On the employers’ side an awareness is developing to regulate the work on these platforms in favour of the workers to make the system more efficient. Six major digital labour platforms (Cabify, Deliveroo, Grab, MBO Partners, Postmates and Uber Technologies) signed and committed to adhering to the ‘Charter of Principles for Good Platform Work’ at the 2020 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland (ILO, 2021). Similarly, on the side of the workers a consortium of university researchers, the Fairwork Foundation, provided a code of good practices and principles for the regulation of platform work, to ensure decent work standards on digital labour platforms. The foundation translated the principles into measurable thresholds to evaluate platforms by providing ratings and certifications to platforms (Graham and Woodcock, 2018; ILO, 2021). The workers themselves have started to form cooperatives and other forms of organizations to represent themselves. Various forms of solidarity and cooperative organizations of platform workers sprang up first in Europe and then elsewhere (Unni, 2018). SMart is a cooperative dedicated to freelancers (http://smart-eu.org), started as a collective of artists in Belgium and then grew to other European countries to include other freelancers. It works within a cooperative framework. Appropriate IT systems help to work around various forms of entry barriers and marginal cost tends generally towards zero once the system is established.5 The movement is small and not reached scale in most cases, but these experiments will soon develop into a new form of organizing informal workers on digital platforms. ILO (2021) reported such organizations being formed in a range of sectors with the support of unions to ensure fair working conditions for platform workers. Some examples are Green Taxi Cooperative and Eva in the taxi sector, Coopcycle in the delivery sector, NursesCan in healthcare and Fairmondo in e-commerce. (vii)
Global Networking
A relatively new strategy of organizing informal workers is through networking across the globe. The rise and spread of Global Value Chains in many labour-intensive sectors, in fact, make global solidarities and strategies possible. This strategy relies on sensitizing consumers to the global division of labour and the struggles of workers in the Global South (Glucksmann, 2016). There are many sectors where production and labour relations are extremely fragmented, and yet where we observe global labour campaigning, with varying degrees of success. These sectors include garment and textile, as well as electronics, or construction (Mezzadri and Fan, 2018; Unni and Scaria, 2008; Pun et al., 2020; Dutta, 2021). In India, several unions and labour-centred organizations are adopting a global networking strategy. Some examples are discussed below. International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC): ITUC has adopted a global strategy at organizing, and it is reaching out to partners across the globe to craft international labour instruments. This is expected to help address the problem of mobile capital and the unfettered power of brands and global retailers (Chen et al., 2010). New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI): In response to globalization NTUI holds the view that organizing labour rights should apply at the level of global value chains and not the national
480 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work state alone (Tiwari, 2017, Chen et al., 2010). NTUI focuses on two strategies: First, to organize at the level of the first stage suppliers in the global value chain. A living wage at this level is essential for the impact to cascade down to the third and fourth tiers. Second, to build a civil society organization working in collaboration with the local government and university at a cluster level, for example, an area in Bangalore where the garment work is concentrated, to provide basic services like water and crèche facilities. This allowed the organization entry into the shop floor to negotiate better a wage arrangement for all workers in the cluster. Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO): SEWA worked to form a policy advocacy network called Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) with a coalition of informal worker organizations, academics and policy representatives. It has been working actively with the ILO and has had great success in formalizing the collection of statistics on informal work through official government statistical offices (Vanek, 2020). WIEGO, along with the International Union of Food and Allied Workers played an enabling pivotal role in collaboration with the International Domestic Workers Federation in rallying for the Convention of Domestic Workers, C189, 2011 (Blackett, 2020). WIEGO is committed to the co-production of knowledge on the informal economy with organizations of informal workers. In the words of its founder, international coordinator Martha Chen, WEIGO aims ‘to privilege the voice and expertise of informal workers in our research report, and to bridge the ground realities of informal workers and mainstream academic and policy debates … to build theory inductively from ground research’ (Chen, 2020: 74). WIEGO has been a vanguard in the movement of organizing informal workers internationally.
5. CONCLUSION The ILO (1993 and 2003) provided economic definitions of informal sector and informal employment which are useful to provide country level estimates of the size and contribution of the informal economy. A sociological ‘relational’ definition of the informal economy is useful to place informality in relation to state policy (Agarwala, 2009). Early theorist Charles Tilly (1997) defined citizenship as binding government agencies to whole categories of people not defined in terms of gender, race or ethnicity. Tilly (1995) noted that globalization was eroding labour rights and workers would need to invent new strategies to deal with international capital. Though Tilly did not mention informal workers, the idea of citizenship and the state was extended to the level of the city or urban local bodies (Appadurai, 2002; Heller and Evans, 2010) which was the arena for the struggles of informal workers. Following from these broad definitions and theories of organizing and from the ideas of Routh (2017) we highlight some unique features of informal worker organizations and their strategies. As we have seen through examples of organization of collectives of informal workers, these organizations differ considerably in their work and strategy from the traditional trade unions. Organizational Model: The informal worker organization is decentralized in their approach, unlike traditional trade unions which tend to be highly centralized in their decision making. This is mainly because the poor informal workers need quick and workable solutions to their local problems. They are not interested in long-term and larger national goals. These organ-
Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 481 izations can be termed a ‘loosely integrated collection’ of associations of workers of several trades. If they are an organization catering to only one trade then they form a federation of organizations and can be termed ‘worker aggregations’ (Routh, 2017). Bargaining Model: Informal workers most often do not have a clear long-term employer-employee relationship with a single employer as they are mainly casual employees or self-employed workers. Hence, in the new strategies employed by informal worker organizations the bargain is not with an employer, but with the state. Their negotiation tactics must also differ due to this as we describe below. Negotiation Model: The informal worker organizations bargain with the state and also work in collaboration with the state as discussed earlier. As the state is often a facilitator of the trade, the approach followed by these organizations is one of collaboration rather than confrontation. In order to facilitate the informal trades, collaboration with some form of organization of the state or civil society is essential. Hence power is gained through ‘strategic cooperation’ rather than confrontation (Routh, 2017). Assertion as Workers: It took a long struggle for the state and society to recognize informal work as productive market work and those engaged in such work as workers. Partly because a large proportion of informal workers were women and partly because the work was invisible to statistics, they were not recognized as workers. With organization these workers have recognized the need to assert their identity as workers. Hence the initial struggle of the collective organizations was to provide identity cards to the workers. Identity cards issued by well-known organizations like SEWA and KKPKP were considered valuable in asserting their identity as workers. There was recognition that their identity as workers was more socially legitimate than that of their gender or caste (Agarwala, 2013: 60–63). Assertion of Citizenship Rights: As the organizations realized that their bargaining power with employers is low, the strategy changed to demanding citizenship rights from the state. The informal worker organizations fought for rights to social security, and for civic rights such as right to education, health, water and sanitation. This is a practical approach as a lack of civic infrastructure impedes the immediate profits of the self-employed traders and small manufacturing. Furthermore, lack of social infrastructure of health and hygiene impedes the long-term development of the next generation of workers. Ultimately, the organizations of informal workers need to focus on four issues: the documentation of informal workers to help a formalization of their employment rights, where possible; the universalization of social security; the development of systems for access to justice; and access to basic services.6 As we noted in the discussion in this paper, the new forms of organization differ from the traditional trade union form. All the four issues noted above are addressed by these new forms of organizations. The strategy of organizing workers is continuously evolving. Today we see some sets of strategies and certain kinds of organizations. It is likely that as governance mechanisms of the state and innovative technology evolve, and based on outcomes of struggles, the strategies of the informal workers’ and the nature of their organizations will grow and evolve as well.
NOTES 1 2 3
See WIEGO, “History and Debates” at http://wiego.org/informal-economy/history-debates) See https://www.sewa.org/about-us/ See https://www.womensworldbanking.org/about-us/
482 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 4 5
6
The data on labour supply captures the number of workers registered on these platforms (though not necessarily active), and labour demand captures the number of public projects and tasks that are posted by clients. A few examples are: Stocksy United, a global cooperative of stock photographers and videographers. https://www.stocksy.com. Enspiral Network, a global collective of social enterprise ventures and social entrepreneurs. Started in New Zealand it now has entrepreneurs from around the world. https://enspiral.com. Up and Go, a platform of women-owned small business with fair work practices for on-demand quality cleaning services in the USA. It claims that businesses with them receive 95 percent of the service fee, much higher than other app-based gig workers. https://www .upandgo.coop. As noted by Rajeev Khandelwal, Ajeevika Bureau, speaking at a Webinar on May 17, 2020.
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Evolving forms of organizing workers in the informal economy 483 Gentile, A. and Tarrow, S. (2009) Charles Tilly, globalization, and labor’s citizen rights, European Political Science Review, 1(3), 465–493. Glucksmann, Miriam (2016) Completing and complementing: The work of consumers in the division of labour, Sociology, 50(5), 878–895. GoI (2020) All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015–16, Department of Agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmer’s Welfare, Government of India. Graham, Mark and Jamie Woodcock (2018) Towards a fairer platform economy: Introducing the fairwork foundation, Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, Social Inequality and the Spectre of Social Justice, 29, 242–253. Harris, John R. and Todaro, Michael P. (1970) Migration, unemployment and development: A two-sector analysis, The American Economic Review, 60(1), 126–142. Hart, Keith (1973) Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 11(1), 61–89. Heller, Patrick and Peter Evans (2010) Taking Tilly south: Durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis, Theory and Society, 39(3–4), 433–450, DOI 10.1007/ s11186-010-9115-3 ILO (1993) Resolution concerning statistics of employment in the informal sector, adopted by the Fifteenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Geneva: ILO. ILO (2003) Guidelines Concerning a Statistical Definition of Informal Employment, Endorsed by the Seventeenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, Seventeenth International Conference of Labour Statisticians, International Labour Organization, Geneva: ILO. ILO (2018) Women and Men in the Informal Economy, 3rd Edition, International Labour Organization, Geneva: ILO. ILO (2021) World Employment and Social Outlook. The Role of Digital Labour Platforms in Transforming the World of Work, Geneva: ILO. Jhabvala, Renana, Ratna Sudarsan and Jeemol Unni (2003) Informal Economy Centre Stage: New Structures of Employment, India: Sage Publication, India. Kabeer, Naila, Kirsty Milward and Ratna Sudarshan (2013) Organising women workers in the informal economy, Gender and Development, 21(2), 249–263, DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2013.802145 Kannan, K.P. (2020) Covid-19 lockdown: protecting poor means keeping Indian economy afloat, Economic and Political Weekly. Maloney, W. F. (2004) Informality revisited, World Development, 32(7), 1159–1178. Mezzadri A. and Lulu Fan (2018) ‘Classes of labour’ at the margins of global commodity chains in India and China, Development and Change, 49(4): 1034–1063. Moser, Caroline (1978) Informal sector or petty commodity production: Dualism or dependence in urban development? World Development, 6(9–10), 1041–1043. Pun, Ngai, Tommy Tse, Victor Shin and Lulu Fan (2020) Conceptualising socio-economic formations of labour and workers’ power in global production networks, Sociology, 54(4), 745–762. Rao-Cavale, Karthik (2019) The art of buying time: street vendor politics and judicial governance in metropolitan India, in Rosenberg, Gerald N., Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Shishir Bail (eds.), A Qualified Hope: The Indian Supreme Court and Progressive Social Change, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rosaldo, Manuel, Tilly, Charles, and Evans Peter (2012) A Conceptual Framework on Informal Work and Informal Worker Organizing, Working Paper, UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, March 2012, available at: https://irle.ucla.edu/old/research/documents/EOIWConceptualFramework -Rosaldo-Evans-Tilly-03.12.pdf (accessed 3 September 2023). Routh, Supriya (2017) Locating worker power in a changing bargaining scenario, in Noronha, Ernesto and Premilla D’Cruz (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India, Singapore: Springer, pp. 221–240. RoyChowdhury, S. (2003) Old classes and new spaces: Urban poverty, unorganised labour and new unions, Economic and Political Weekly, Dec. 13–19, 38(50), 5277–5284. Samson, Melanie (ed.) (2009) Refusing to be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World, WIEGO, January, 14–32. Tilly, Charles (1995) Globalization threatens labor’s rights, International Labor and Working-Class History, 47(Spring), 1–3.
484 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Tilly, Charles (1998) Social movements and (all sorts of) other political interactions – local, national, and international – including identities, Theory and Society, 27(4), Special Issue on Interpreting Historical Change at the End of the Twentieth Century (Aug.), 453–480. Unni, Jeemol (2004) Globalization and securing rights for women informal workers in Asia, Journal of Human Development, 5(3), 335–354. Unni, Jeemol (2018) Formalization of the informal economy: Perspectives of capital and labour, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 61(1), 87–103. Unni, Jeemol and Ratna Sudarshan (2001) When home-based workers raise their voices: An Indian perspective, SAIS Review, 21(1), 109–115. Unni, Jeemol and Suma Scaria (2009) Governance structure and labour market outcomes in garment embellishment chains, The Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 52(4), 631–650. Vanek, Joann (2020) Advances in statistics in informal employment: an overview highlighting WIEGO’s contribution, in Chen, Martha and Francoise Carre (eds.), The Informal Economy Revisited: Examining the Past, Envisioning the Future, London, New York: Routledge, pp. 47–51.
FURTHER READING Gallin, Dan (2001) Propositions on trade unions and informal employment in times of globalisation, Antipode, 33(3), 31–549. Joseph, Rajesh, Lobo Roshni and Natrajan Balmurli (2018) Between ‘baksheesh’ and ‘bonus’: Precarity, class, and collective action among domestic workers in Bengaluru, Economic and Political Weekly, 53(45), 38–45. Kapoor Aditi (2007) The SEWA way: Shaping another future for informal labour, Futures, 39(5), 554–568.
40. The power and politics of precarious resistance Marcel Paret
INTRODUCTION What are the consequences of contemporary global capitalism for collective resistance? While for some observers, the growing specter of precarity spells disaster for working-class agency, others note the emergence of new forms of struggle as economically insecure groups resist their precarity. This chapter explores the terrain of precarious resistance, with particular attention to sources of power and political dynamics. For many across the globe, the contemporary world of work produces a precarious livelihood. The causes are many, complex, and difficult to pin down, ranging from slow economic growth and technological change to globalization and the power of corporation. Regardless of the causes, economic insecurity often manifests in relation to the informalization of work. Informalization refers, generally, to the distancing of work from state regulation and social protections. In the first section below, I discuss varied forms of informalization and economic insecurity, including the growing significance of groups that scholars refer to as precarious workers and surplus populations. The second section turns to questions of power. One of the most important consequences of widespread economic insecurity is that many workers are unable to access forms of working-class power that predominated during the 20th century, namely unions, collective bargaining, and strikes. Instead, the increasingly precarious working class must turn to other sources of power. Especially crucial is associational power, which derives from collective organization and solidarity rather than a particular positioning within the economy. I argue that economically insecure groups may develop and enhance associational power through three additional forms of power: symbolic power, rooted in moral appeals for recognition; logistical power, which stems from the disruption of circulation; and citizenship power, based on appeals to status as formal citizens and national insiders. The growing importance of associational power within contemporary global capitalism amplifies the significance of questions regarding the politics of solidarity. Such politics revolve around issues of inclusion, exclusion, and who collective struggles manage to incorporate and inspire. The third section proposes the framework of class formation as a useful way to conceptualize and analyze these processes. The class formation approach emphasizes the contingency of collective action, which may run in quite varied directions, as individuals begin to develop a shared sense of belonging based on material conditions of work and livelihood. One of the most important consequences of the growing emphasis on associational power is the simultaneous significance of non-work and non-class identities, such as race, gender, and geography. Such identities have become central to collective struggles by economically insecure groups. The fourth section of the chapter examines two cases of collective action by economically insecure groups: struggles for public service delivery by the urban poor in South Africa; and struggles for state-implemented welfare boards by informal workers in India. In both 485
486 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work instances, precarious layers of the working class developed associational power and bolstered it with symbolic power and citizenship power. The two cases demonstrate that groups with very little economic leverage nonetheless have the capacity to forge important collective struggles, and that non-work identities are central to processes of class formation. They also underscore the contingency and variability of such struggles, which address different historical contexts and emphasize different identities.
ECONOMIC INSECURITY IN CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL CAPITALISM Economic insecurity defines the contemporary political economy of work. Throughout the globe, and especially in the developing societies of the Global South, many people lack jobs that can sustain their own livelihood as well as their families. Two prototypical situations stand out. One prototype is the growing throngs of individuals doing precarious work, which one may define as work that is, in some way, unstable, unpredictable, or risky (Kalleberg 2009). This category increasingly includes those in various forms of temporary employment, such as Uber drivers, food delivery workers, on-demand caregivers, many workers hired through “temp” agencies or subcontractors, day laborers, and many more. Characteristic features of precarious work include volatility, low pay, and lack of access to benefits such as health insurance or paid vacation and sick leave. The other prototype is what scholars often refer to as “surplus populations,” which refers to workers whose labor is rendered unnecessary from the perspective of employers and capital accumulation (Li 2017). The defining feature of this group is long-term unemployment. It includes, but is not limited to, “discouraged” work-seekers who would like a job but have given up searching for one due to an apparent lack of opportunities. There is debate about the relevance of these phenomena within the broader historical trajectory of global capitalism. Some believe that these features are new, or at the least have become more prominent, in the four decades from the 1980s to the 2020s (Standing 2011). In contrast, and at times in response, others contend that precarious work and unemployment have long been features of global capitalism (Neilson and Rossiter 2008). This debate has an important spatial dimension. Some critics of the thesis that economic insecurity is relatively new suggest that this is an ethnocentric perspective, centered on the developed countries of the West or Global North. Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, however, most workers never experienced the kind of stability and prosperity that many – though certainly not all – workers of the United States and Western Europe experienced during the middle of the 20th century. Indeed, to a certain extent, the global spread of precarious work in recent decades features a transfer of practices and conditions from East/South to West/North (Bremen 2013). Putting aside the question of historical novelty, what explains the contemporary prominence of economic insecurity? While the global economic crises stemming from the 2008/2009 financial meltdown and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic certainly exacerbated economic insecurity, precarious workers and surplus populations were prominent well before these events. The sources are many and complex. One is slow economic growth and a lack of productive investment. This stems partially from a global decline in manufacturing output and employment, which underpinned crucial sources of worker power and prosperity in the 20th century (Benanav 2020). Relatedly, financialization of the economy has shifted resources away from
The power and politics of precarious resistance 487 activities such as manufacturing, and towards the buying and selling of currency and financial products such as stocks, bonds, and futures. These shifts pull resources out of the productive economy, reduce employment, and undermine the bargaining power of workers. Within this broad context, precarious work emerges through a double process of informalization from above and informalization from below (Theron 2010). On the one hand, employers have increasingly sought to increase profit by shifting risks onto workers, such as through temporary and flexible employment relationships, the elimination of unions and employee benefits, and avoidance of state regulation. Such processes underscore the connections between precarious workers and surplus populations, as the presence of the latter enables the growing insecurity of the former. Employers can exploit workers and subject them to harsh working conditions, precisely because there is a low demand for labor relative to the large numbers of people who require paid work to survive. On the other hand, those confronting a lack of employment opportunities may seek to address their situation through independent survivalist activities, such as re-selling groceries or offering services like car washing or hair cutting. If informalization from above is about cutting labor costs and expanding profit, informalization from below is about survival and creating economic opportunity.
POWER IN THE CONTEXT OF ECONOMIC INSECURITY Insecure livelihood goes hand-in-hand with a lack of power. For those with greater access to sources of power, and especially collective forms of power, livelihood tends to be more secure. During the 20th century, workplace organizing emerged as a central source of power for the working class. Such power accrued especially to workers in the manufacturing sector, who could disrupt production by withholding their labor. Many, and probably most, workers in the world today do not have access to this kind of power. To make sense of this situation, I outline five different sources of power: structural, associational, symbolic, logistical, and citizenship. Structural power refers to leverage that workers accrue due to their position within the economy. In her classic analysis of worker movements, Forces of Labor, Beverly Silver (2003: 13) elaborates two subtypes of this power. Workplace bargaining power accrues to workers who are “enmeshed in tightly integrated production processes,” enabling them to significantly disrupt production on a wider scale. It may involve workers, for example, who occupy a key position within an assembly line, or who are responsible for transporting goods within a supply chain. Conversely, marketplace bargaining power accrues to workers who have a privileged position with respect to the labor market. This occurs, for example, when workers possess scarce skills in high demand, when unemployment is low, or when workers may rely on nonwage sources of income. These forms of structural power have not disappeared. Some workers, such as those situated within the complex logistics chains of Walmart, Amazon, and Alibaba, may still be able to disrupt production and circulation by withholding their labor. Likewise, highly educated workers and individuals with special skills, such as programmers and those with expertise related to digital technology, continue to reap benefits from the global economy. For those with limited education and unstable employment, however, structural power is inaccessible. High levels of unemployment, the devastation of rural subsistence economies, and the retreat of social welfare systems erode marketplace bargaining power in countries across the globe. For those without a stable job, workplace bargaining power is a pipe dream.
488 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Precarious workers and surplus populations must therefore turn to other strategies. Silver contrasts structural power with associational power, which accrues to workers due to collective organization, such as through trade unions or political parties. Structural power and associational power may become mutually reinforcing. This is the case, for example, when manufacturing workers build unions, go on strike, and form worker-oriented “labor parties.” In the contemporary period, however, working classes are increasingly building associational power without access to structural power. Crucially, this frequently entails the embrace and deployment of non-work identities linked to citizenship, community, gender, race, and more. Such moves underscore the articulation or combination of class and non-class identities. Jennifer Chun, in Organizing at the Margins (2009), considers the situation of subcontracted and independently contracted workers in South Korea and the United States – janitors, home care workers, and golf caddies – who have very little structural power. From this position of weakness, she argues, the workers managed to rebuild and strengthen their associational power by generating and deploying “symbolic leverage,” or what we may call symbolic power. Rooted in demands for public recognition, this involved overcoming two forms of marginalization: ambiguous employment relations that undermined workers’ access to labor rights and protections; and social devaluation of workers due to gender, citizenship, and economic status. In response, Chun shows, workers engaged in classification struggles to assert their status as workers for a given employer, and in visible “public dramas” to assert and reclaim their dignity and worth. These symbolic strategies centered on moral claims. Economically insecure groups may also bolster their associational power through two other forms of power, logistical power and citizenship power. Logistical power involves the disruption of public space and especially the circulation of goods and capital (Webster et al. 2008: 13). In addition to leveraging public space for the assertion of moral claims, as in Chun’s public dramas, protesters may also block traffic, shut down ports or other hubs of circulation, or thwart online communication. While employment within strategic nodes of circulation certainly helps workers to achieve such disruption, it is not necessary. Anybody may collectively organize to block a road, regardless of his or her specific employer or employment status. A big question, of course, is whether such efforts garner public support. Weakly supported disruptions of public space and business will likely have limited impact, and invite state repression. In Riot. Strike. Riot., Joshua Clover (2016) suggests that logistical power – or at least the quest for logistical power – defines the contemporary period. This is because capital has increasingly shifted resources out of productive activity and into circulation, especially through the rising role of finance. Within this global political economy, what he calls “circulation struggles” become prominent: riots, blockades, occupations, and communes. In contrast to the strike, which revolves around workers, the price of labor power, and the process of production, riots revolve instead around a broad category of the dispossessed, a group that includes precarious workers and surplus populations. Further, riots do not emphasize the workplace and the cost of labor, but rather consumption, circulation, and the price of market goods. Logistical power thus lies at the root of a broader shift in which both capital and the dispossessed seek the conditions of their reproduction within processes of circulation, rather than production. The importance of logistical power, and the questions of morality and public support that underpin efforts to achieve it, feed into the last form of power, which I refer to as citizenship power. With the decline of structural power, working classes are increasingly turning to the state to make claims and secure their livelihood. On the one hand, many workers have weak
The power and politics of precarious resistance 489 attachments to employers (e.g. temporary work, subcontracted work), very little power at work, or no employer at all. These factors make workplace claims especially difficult, if not entirely impossible. On the other hand, the nation-state has a popular mandate to care for the residents within its territory, particularly those with citizenship status. This enables citizens to make claims on the state to provide security and protection. In formally democratic societies, citizens may exercise further power through their status as voters, putting pressure on politicians to deliver certain provisions or arrangements in exchange for support at the ballot box. Citizen claims on the state also have a moral or symbolic element. In contrasts to Chun’s workers in the United States and South Korea, however, they are rooted not in forms of social devaluation, but rather a formal status as privileged insiders. As I will show below, some informal workers have used forms of citizenship power to great effect. With the growing significance of associational power, questions of solidarity loom large. Whom do collective struggles include, and whom do they exclude? The answers revolve around the political orientation of resistance, including the motivations that lie beneath, the identities they deploy, and the targets they pursue.
THE POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY AND CLASS FORMATION In the wake of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, Guy Standing’s two widely popular books, The Precariat (2011) and A Precariat Charter (2014), helped to bring attention to the growing specter of economic insecurity. He pays particular attention to precarious workers, who he refers to as the “precariat.” For Standing, the precariat is a global “class-in-the-making,” and its presence represents the erosion of labor standards. While many accounts affirm Standing’s emphasis on growing economic insecurity, critics underscore two problems with his analysis (Paret 2016). One critique is that the book tends to focus on the developed economies of the Global North, and thus ignores the longer history, and greater prominence, of precarious work in the developing and postcolonial world. It also pays little attention to surplus populations, which are prominent in the latter. Another critique is that Standing attempts to separate the precariat from the broader working class. In so doing, some suggest, he downplays the inherent precarity of the working-class condition, and the commonalities that bind together different layers of the working class. This second critique, in particular, has important implications for questions of solidarity and associational power. Standing’s analysis of the precariat hinges upon a specific understanding of the contemporary class structure, which involves disaggregating the working class into four separate categories: the salariat, proficians, proletariat, and precariat. The salariat includes individuals in long-term permanent jobs with extensive benefits and access to company profits (e.g. through pension plans), while proficians have weaker attachments to specific employers but similarly high incomes, due especially to their technical skills. The proletariat, or what Standing sometimes refers to as the “old working class,” includes workers in stable employment, often unionized, who rely primarily on wage income. Standing’s argument is that this classic group, the proletariat, is shrinking amidst the swelling ranks of the precariat, which lacks stable employment. For Standing, the future of society depends on whether the precariat may develop into a collective force for social change. He appreciates that the precariat holds potential for moving beyond the stale visions of the proletariat, which link benefits and protections to stable
490 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work employment. Conversely, the precariat looks towards a society where individuals have more control of their own time and productive capacity. Standing also argues, however, that the precariat is itself fragmented, and divided into three primary groups: those from traditional working-class communities, who are now experiencing downward mobility; denizens, such as migrants, ethnic minorities, and ex-convicts; and the educated youth, who experience status frustration because their economic opportunities do not match their expectations. Pessimistic about the agency of the first two groups, Standing places the greatest hope on the third, the educated but precarious youth, for ushering in a new world. This approach is useful to the extent that it helps illuminate the ways in which the contemporary global economy fragments the working class with respect to both identity and experience. At the same time, however, it is too over-determining, closing down possibilities for solidarity rather than opening them or posing them as questions. Rather than assuming the political orientations of the myriad groups that occupy extremely varied forms of employment – more and less stable – one might instead treat those political orientations as fluid and contingent. In this perhaps more optimistic approach, one may examine the tensions and constraints that get in the way of particular solidarities, as well as the ways in which certain groups have sought to overcome them. The notion of class formation provides a useful analytic framework for this kind of investigation. Class formation refers to the process through which individuals develop a shared sense of belonging based on material conditions of work and livelihood, and engage in collective action. In a now classic essay, Ira Katznelson (1986) argues that class operates at four different levels: the social structure, including the organization of the capitalist economy and patterns of employment, among others; ways of life, including lived experiences both inside and outside of work; dispositions, referring to worldviews and values; and collective action, meaning the ways in which individuals organize and forge acts of resistance. Individuals fragment or combine along each of these four levels. For Katznelson, class formation involves the “process of connection” between them, and thus the way in which solidarity or division at one level shapes solidarity or division within the other levels. There is no guaranteed connection between social structure, ways of life, dispositions, and collective action. They are linked, but independent. They draw upon and influence each other, but also have their own patterns and dynamics. For example, two unemployed individuals who are living in poverty may nonetheless live in different neighborhoods, have different cultural views, vote for different political parties, and respond differently to social movements. One may join a protest and block a road while the other remains at home. Alternatively, however, they may choose to join hands in a movement to improve the conditions of poor and unemployed people. The outcome is contingent, even if there is some connection between the different levels. It may therefore be most useful to presume that the first three levels – social structure, ways of life, dispositions – set limits for the fourth level, creating the conditions within which varied forms of collective action may emerge. One of the strengths of this class formation approach is that it creates space for considering non-class identities without losing the importance of material conditions such as employment, income, and assets. Factors such as race, gender, and geography may intervene and articulate with class divisions to shape processes of class formation. This is especially important in a context of economic insecurity, where many individuals have weak attachments to workplaces and employers. For scholars such as Standing, this detachment from work presents an obstacle to agency and collective action. As the preceding discussion of power illustrates,
The power and politics of precarious resistance 491 however, groups may turn this weakness into a strength if they manage to mobilize around identities that extend beyond work and class. This alternative strategy is central to forms of symbolic and citizenship power. In a global economy defined by economic insecurity and declining structural power, processes of class formation are especially crucial. They determine the extent to which groups can access associational power, and whether they bolster it with logistical, symbolic, or citizenship power. These are inherently political questions, which collective actors answer for themselves in the process of struggle. Such answers depend on the identities and tactics that they choose. As the class formation approach highlights, the presence and content of collective action is highly contingent.
RESISTANCE IN SOUTH AFRICA AND INDIA To illustrate these dynamics surrounding power and solidarity, I turn to two cases of collective action in the Global South, where economic insecurity penetrates especially deeply, but where popular resistance thrives as well. One case involves the urban poor in South Africa; the other involves informal workers in India. In both instances, economically insecure groups built associational power to make claims for a more secure livelihood. I briefly take each in turn, before turning to a comparative analysis of the two. In South Africa, the dramatic transition from apartheid to democracy in the 1990s brought political rights for the Black majority without a fundamental transformation of the economy. Including discouraged work-seekers, the national unemployment rate hovers between 30 and 40 percent, while roughly one-third of the employed toil in temporary jobs. Extreme and racialized inequality persists, with the Black poor increasingly concentrated in impoverished urban townships and informal shack settlements. The harsh living conditions, which often feature a lack of access to quality housing, water, and electricity, betray the hopes associated with the democratic transition, including the promises of the ruling African National Congress to deliver a “better life for all.” Against this backdrop, widespread local protests began to emerge in the middle of the 2000s, accelerated following the 2008–2009 global financial meltdown, and persist into the present (Alexander 2010). Elsewhere, I have described South Africa’s widespread local protests as enacting a new tactic of resistance that I term the “community strike” (Paret 2020). The word community here represents both a site of struggle and a collective actor. Rather than focus on workplaces, residents launched their protests from residential areas. Their demands frequently revolved around what residents and the media referred to as “service delivery,” which denoted resources such as housing, water, and electricity that residents wanted the state to provide. Community was also a collective actor because residents waged their battles in the name of place-based communities, which encapsulated all of the residents within circumscribed geographic areas. This helped Black residents, as citizens who expected democracy to bring a better life, call attention to the ways in which the state had neglected them. In doing so, economically insecure residents were able to build symbolic power. Local protests also relied heavily on logistical power, as they frequently entailed burning tires, road blockades, and sometimes destruction of property (Paret 2015). Turning to the Indian case, Rina Agarwala’s (2013) Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India documents the class position and struggles of informal workers,
492 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work who represent 93 percent of the labor force. She focuses her analysis on two types of casual workers, in the construction and bidi (cigarette) industries, who do not have formal contracts, who experience high vulnerability to exploitation, and whose jobs are highly insecure. Rather than seek formal labor protections and benefits, such as minimum wages or paid vacation, they instead sought welfare benefits directly from the state. Indeed, rather than seeking to overcome their exploitation at work, they framed themselves as key contributors to the state’s market-oriented agenda of flexible production. Further, instead of organizing at the workplace, informal workers organized primarily within neighborhoods. The key innovation that Agarwala highlights is the creation of industry-specific welfare boards. Implemented by state-level governments, these are tripartite institutions funded jointly by workers, employers, and the state. Workers pay to become members and, in return, they receive an identity card affirming their status as informal workers. As members of a welfare board, informal workers are entitled to state-provided benefits such as education scholarships, health care, and subsidies for housing, funerals, and weddings. Informal worker organizations pressured the state to create and implement these boards. Crucially, they were most successful in states marked by high levels of pro-poor political competition, such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala. To leverage this political competition, informal workers asserted their citizenship power by presenting themselves as a “mass vote bank” that politicians could potentially win over through material concessions. There are remarkable parallels between these two examples. In both instances, economically insecure groups targeted the state to provide for their basic reproductive needs, whether in the form of service delivery in South Africa or welfare boards in India. This involved organizing within residential areas, rather than workplaces. Through this approach, the urban poor (South Africa) and informal workers (India) compensated for their lack of structural power by building associational power. Crucially, in both instances, collective resistance bolstered their associational power with citizenship power. While in South Africa, residents argued that the democratic state was obligated to provide for them as citizens, in India, informal workers deployed their status as voters to convince politicians to implement welfare provisions. There were also important differences, which stemmed from the characteristics of the groups involved and, in turn, the ways in which they framed their struggles. They built different forms of symbolic power. In South Africa, many of the protesters were unemployed, and the residents of a given area did not share a common employment status. Whereas informal workers in India leaned heavily on their status and contributions as flexible workers, the urban poor in South Africa instead gave moral weight to their struggles by emphasizing the importance of community. Issues of race loomed just beneath the surface. Notions of place-based community helped residents to call attention to the contradiction between, on the one hand, a state that claimed to be redressing the legacy of apartheid racial domination, and on the other hand, the persistence of highly racialized inequality and concentrated poverty. In contrast, gender was much more prominent for informal workers in India. Women played important leadership roles in informal worker organizations, such as the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), and their efforts to secure state recognition of reproductive work helped them to challenge patriarchal assumptions within the household and the public sphere. Despite their similar emphases on state-provided welfare provisions, the two movements also led to different consequences. Informal workers in India had greater success with respect to the institutionalization of their gains, which occurred through the state-implemented welfare boards. It is important not to overstate the success of these efforts, as the provision
The power and politics of precarious resistance 493 of benefits through welfare boards remains limited. According to one report, for example, as of 2020 only half of the more than 50 million construction workers were actively registered, and only one-third had received cash benefits (Upadhyaya 2020). Further, the reorganization of social security measures through new labor laws threaten to undermine the operation of welfare boards (Barnes 2018). These developments underscore the political character, and contingency, of collective organization and livelihood among the most precarious layers of the working class. Nonetheless, India’s welfare boards represent one possible avenue for challenging economic insecurity. Resistance in South Africa was more fragmented. Protests were highly localized, often with little coordination across residential areas. As a result, the state offered a disjointed response, focused on making exceptions to specific residential areas. The weakness of the South African resistance may have stemmed, at least partly, from their especially weak attachments to the labor market. Unlike informal workers in India, the unemployed in South Africa could not point to their labor contributions. This weaker standpoint, from the perspective of symbolic power, may explain the greater reliance on logistical power in the South African case: the consistent barricading of roads to block traffic.
CONCLUSION This chapter points to the growing prominence of economically insecure groups, such as precarious workers and surplus populations, within contemporary global capitalism. These groups typically lack structural power, which might enable them to go on strike and make claims against employers. Instead, economically insecure groups are drawing on alternative forms of power – associational, logistical, symbolic, citizenship – and placing heavy emphasis on non-class and non-work identities. This does not mean that class and work no longer matter. Economic conditions, and sometimes even worker identities, still matter greatly, as illustrated in the examples from South Africa and India. Yet, economically groups are also building power by highlighting the articulations of class and work/unemployment with other identities related to community, race, gender, and citizenship. Through these approaches, precarious workers and surplus populations are forging collective struggles and making demands, often on the state. The struggles in South Africa and India point to a possible pathway towards an equal and just world that begins with questions of reproduction. Rather than seeking to better lives by improving wages and working conditions, this pathway prioritizes institutions of social protection that extend beyond labor, and that make welfare public rather than private. Public welfare may include basic income, education, health care, food, housing, and public services such as water and electricity. If the examples considered here are any indication, state provision of these goods is likely to be at the core of collective struggles in the 21st century.
REFERENCES Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Peter. 2010. “Rebellion of the Poor: South Africa’s Service Delivery Protests – A Preliminary Analysis.” Review of African Political Economy 37: 25–40.
494 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Barnes, Tom. 2018. “Indian Labor Movements under Modi,” pp. 186–189 in Gilded Age, edited by Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere. Acton, Australia: ANU Press. Benanav, Aaron. 2020. Automation and the Future of Work. London: Verso. Bremen, Jan. 2013. “A Bogus Concept.” New Left Review 84: 130–138. Chun, Jennifer Jihye. 2009. Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Clover, Joshua. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot. London: Verso. Kalleberg, Arne. 2009. “Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition.” American Sociological Review 74(1): 1–22. Katznelson, Ira. 1986. “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” pp. 3–41 in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Li, Tania Murray. 2017. “After Development: Surplus Population and the Politics of Entitlement.” Development and Change 48(6): 1247–1261. Neilson, Brett, and Ned Rossiter. 2008. “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception.” Theory, Culture, and Society 25 (7–8): 51–72. Paret, Marcel. 2015. “Violence and Democracy in South Africa’s Community Protests.” Review of African Political Economy 42(143): 107–123. Paret, Marcel. 2016. “Towards a Precarity Agenda.” Global Labor Journal 7(2): 111–122. Paret, Marcel. 2020. “The Community Strike: From Precarity to Militant Organizing.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 61(2–3): 159–177. Silver, Beverly. 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Standing, Guy. 2014. A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Theron, Jan. 2010. “Informalization from Above, Informalization from Below.” African Studies Quarterly 11(2–3): 87–105. Upadhyaya, Himanshu. 2020. “Building Discontent: Welfare Boards Have Failed to Protect India’s Construction Workers.” The Caravan, July 31, https://caravanmagazine.in/labour/welfare-boards -failed-protect-india-construction-workers. Webster, Edward, Rob Lambert, and Andries Bezuidenhout. 2008. Grounding Globalization: Labor in the Age of Insecurity. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
FURTHER READING Eidlin, Barry. 2014. “Class Formation and Class Identity: Birth, Death, and Possibilities for Renewal.” Sociology Compass 8(8): 1045–1062. Greenberg, Miriam, and Penny Lewis. 2017. The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Strategies in an Urban Age. Ithaca: ILR Press. Paret, Marcel. 2016. “Precarious Class Formations in the United States and South Africa.” International Labor and Working-Class History 89(Spring): 84–106. Rossi, Federico M. 2017. The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scully, Ben. 2016. “Precarity North and South: A Southern Critique of Guy Standing.” Global Labor Journal 7(2): 160–173.
41. Spatial dimensions of strikes Jörg Nowak
The analysis of spatial dimensions of strikes has rarely been developed with a specific terminology and conceptual framework, and has largely been undertaken as part and parcel of analyses that also deal with other aspects of strikes. With the development of the field of labour geography since the late 1990s, there have been a certain number of analyses of strikes and labour conflicts with an explicit focus on space and place (Herod 2002; Neethi 2016; Nowak 2019). Obviously, the analysis of spatial dimensions of strikes should not imply to isolate spatial aspects from other aspects of strikes. Rather the other way around, a spatial analysis of strikes is called upon to prove what may be its specific contribution in highlighting characteristics of strikes that have not yet been discussed in other types of analysis. Spatial dimensions of strikes have been analysed in the past 100 years across two lines of analysis: the first line of analysis looks at the spatial distribution of strikes across national or transnational spaces with reference to a certain cycle of mobilisation like the strikes during the Russian Revolution in 1905 and the British miners’ strike in 1984/1985 (Luxemburg 1906; Rees 1985; Griffiths and Johnston 1991). In this line of analysis, given cycles of strikes are analysed regarding the possible presence of spatial patterns in those strikes, discussing possible causes and factors that give rise to these spatial patterns. In this way, spatial patterns are one aspect in which characteristics of strikes can be approached. A second line of analysis looks at spatial aspects as primary determinants (among others) of strikes, such as the spatial isolation of a group of workers which may give rise to a certain amount of group coherence. The prototype example in this respect are mining communities which – due to the geologically restricted areas in which mining can be done – are often composed of a large number of workers from one sector concentrated in one area. Due to an article by Kerr and Siegel (1954), comparing workers from various sectors and their strike proneness, this thesis became known as the Kerr-Siegel hypothesis. Comparing data from 11 countries, Kerr and Siegel found a high number of workdays lost relative to the number of employees in the respective industry in mining and the maritime industry, and a medium-high number for the textile and lumber industries. “The capacity for group cohesion is dependent on the fairly steady contact of the members of the group, which in turn creates the basis for permanent organisation … An isolated mass can be kept from internal solidarity not only by the turnover of its membership but also by racial, religious and nationality barriers.” (1954, 193). Spatial isolation was not the only factor here, but also the dominance of a single industry in one community and some continuity in the composition of the group, but these aspects were often linked to another, i.e. the presence of certain minerals in the soil is linked up with the mining industry, and the spatial concentration on ships and in port districts is irrevocably linked with the nature of the maritime industry. The Kerr-Siegel hypothesis was used later in order to establish general trends for the development of strikes, i.e. the shrinking numbers of workers in mining and the diversification of industries in many industrial areas were seen as determining factors for a “withering away of the strike” in the literature in the 1950s and 1960s. This thesis was later seen as refuted with the increase in strikes of semi-skilled workers in manufacturing and in the public sectors in 495
496 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the late 1960s and the 1970s in core countries. Thus, while spatial aspects in terms of local isolation and employment in the same industry might have effects on the strike proneness of workers, these are not to be regarded as absolute requirements for strike proneness. High amounts of strike proneness among public sector workers demonstrate that group coherence within one sector can also be established across a national territory within not very isolated communities. The two lines of analysis described here – one focused on national or transnational patterns of the spatial distribution of strikes, and another focused on spatial determinants of strike proneness – have rarely been combined or compared as different approaches to the spatial patterns of strikes. The first line of analysis is rather similar to a macro-approach relating to territories and economic sectors, whereas the second line of analysis rather focuses on how workplaces, communities of workers and national sectors are embedded into larger society, similar to a meso-approach. Analyses that combine both lines in some respect, are those that look at the mobility of workers, i.e. the changing rather than the constant composition of workforces as factors for the diffusion of traditions of labour militancy. Instances of this are documented for artisans in the early 19th century in Europe, Portuguese workers returning from France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for Brazilian construction workers in the 2010s who kept on changing workplaces across the country (Wills 1996; Nowak 2019). This example and the one of mining communities already demonstrate that it is hard to establish immediate causal determination on the level of spatial aspects: both the spatial non-mobility of workers as well as the spatial mobility of workers across space can facilitate strike action. A third line of analysis runs along the “discovery” of cycles of strikes through the application of spatial standards. While this has been done frequently with regional (subnational), sectoral and national specific numbers for strikes, an application of the same method to the global level is still in its early stages. The path-breaking work of Screpanti (1984) claims the existence of four global strike waves, from 1869 to 1875, from 1885 to 1891, from 1910 to 1920 and from 1968 to 1974. Apart from the strike wave from 1885 to 1891, these all occurred at the peak of a Kondratieff wave. Looking at the application of Kondratieff long waves to strikes from the late 2010s, and extending Screpanti’s perspective that only includes core countries, Nowak proposes a slightly different schema with a global strike wave from 1978 to 1984 instead of 1968 to 1974, right after the peak of the Kondratieff cycle, and a fifth global strike wave from 2010 to 2014 at the end of a long downswing (Nowak 2019, 113-117). We might even deal with a long global strike wave that extends from 2010 to 2020, given the large number of people’s uprisings, protests and strikes in 2019 and 2020, and the belated uptick in strikes in the USA since 2018 with teachers’ strikes in 2018, a General Motors strike in 2019, and a large wave of wildcat strikes in the first half of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other significant economies that saw a consistent strike wave in the period of 2010 to 2014 are China, Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa among emerging economies, and Canada, South Korea and Spain among core countries. While more profound and detailed research about global patterns of strikes is yet to be conducted, facing severe challenges due to patchy or missing data for some countries, the fact that hitherto not obviously visible strike patterns can be discovered when using the global level as unit of analysis, confirms the usefulness of a spatial analysis of strikes in order to discover constellations beyond the blind and obvious. A similar approach was used by Beverly Silver in the book Forces of Labour (2003) in which a database on labour unrest in the automobile industry is used to detect regional patterns of strikes that followed capital investment, starting in North America, then moving to Western
Spatial dimensions of strikes 497 Europe in the postwar era, and finally erupting in South America, South Africa and South Korea. While strikes are here largely conceptualised as occurring on the national level, this action in various national spaces is embedded by Silver in a larger global context of capital looking for spatial fixes (a term borrowed from the work of David Harvey) that allow to evade the demands of organised labour through relocation in space. The implication here is that capital will not be able to play this game of finding new spatial fixes forever since space is limited, but Silver also points to new options for capital such as financial fixes or a product fix, i.e. the introduction of new key products that can replace the automotive industry as the leading global industry of the 20th century. Space is in this way understood as a central terrain of conflict that can be used by capital and by labour, but also as a terrain that can be replaced by other terrains if it is exhausted from the point of view of capital. Silver’s approach represents another route of engaging in the third line of a spatial analysis of strikes, i.e. to discover strike patterns that were not obvious to the observer without employing a global perspective, demonstrating another time how a spatial perspective can contribute to a new understanding of strikes. From this global outlook, I want to come back to the first line of spatial analysis of strikes which is looking at certain spatial patterns in strikes and strike waves. Certainly, Luxemburg’s analysis of the Russian strike waves between 1896 and 1905 is a landmark for this line of analysis (1906). The European debate about the political mass strike had begun in the early 1900s, mainly inspired by political strikes in Belgium, Austria and Sweden demanding the right to vote. But the mass strikes in Russia in 1905 brought in a new element, i.e. the mix-up and a back and forth of economic and political strikes, and the mass mobilisation of formally unorganised sections of the middle class, the working class, of peasants and of soldiers. The Russian strikes since the early 20th century were diffusing throughout the giant Russian (and Polish) territory without any central coordination, and Luxemburg noted that the mass organisation was often ahead of the engagement of formal political groups that were rather trying to catch up with the events. It was this seemingly spontaneous movement of strikes and uprisings through space that seemed to be a new element in the working-class movement, though it surely had precedents in popular revolts that occurred in various continents before the working-class movement had formed as a distinct phenomenon from broader popular movements. Luxemburg interpreted these movements as outcomes of a broader social process of revolution that cannot be planned ahead of time, but that can require political leadership in order to guide its course. A similar line of analysis on a broad scale was only taken up again in the 1980s in analyses about the uneven spatial distribution of strike participation in the British miners’ strike. The lack of a united front in this strike was seen as a central aspect of its failure since the supply of coal from the non-striking Nottinghamshire coalfields enabled the British government to continue its hard-line position. In this debate, the participants tried to nail down what determined this uneven participation, and it proved difficult to isolate those factors that caused the uneven scenario of mobilisation. Rees (1985) mentioned as possible causes for the uneven strike participation wage differences between mining areas that were introduced in the late 1970s, and how strongly a region was affected by pit closures, but also regional traditions of solidarity between miners and the larger community, what he called an “ideological gulf between coalfields” (1985, 400) and an ensuing failure of the miners to develop a universal collective identity across mining regions (ibid.). Therefore, the explanations for the regional differences in strike participation go back to the economic position of pits in the overall
498 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work industry, but also to large differences in locally anchored political traditions and links with the community. In this way, the classical discipline of regional studies in human geography is applied to demonstrate how regional aspects play into the trajectory of a long and unusual labour conflict. Nonetheless, it proved difficult to clearly derive the patterns of strike participation either from workplace organisation, company politics, the threat of closures or wage differences (Griffiths and Johnston, 1991). There is the element of the local culture of a place, or of the political traditions of a place for which it seems hard to find “hard facts” that give rise to those traditions. For example, the same subcontracting system that was seen as a cause for low strike participation in the Northern Nottinghamshire region, and a concomitant conservative coalfield culture was also used for a long time in a strike-prone region, and similar indeterminacies show up comparing other characteristics in different coalfields. On another level, the spatial perspective of Rees facilitates attention to the various specificities in places of labour mobilisation, i.e. the engagement of the miners’ union in South Wales in conflicts about Welsh devolution, school milk cuts, dangerous gas tanks and the anti-Apartheid campaign since the early 1970s (1985), were expressions of more profound patterns of union-community relations beyond an economistic-sectoral trade union tradition. This tradition made itself felt in South Wales during the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s. Another method of spatial strike analysis is the one used by Neethi (2016) who investigates four labour conflicts in the state of Kerala in India. Three of those are among informal workers, and Neethi is able to show how not only the availability of workers on the labour market requires community engagement by employers, but also how these community ties are then used by workers in order to improve their conditions of work. The emphasis of labour geography on the multiplicity of places that constitute and facilitate industrial action thus allows us to broaden the perspective beyond the traditional focus of industrial relations research on the state, unions and employers. Furthermore, Neethi is also able to show why a neat distinction into the local place as the realm of workers and the global space as the realm of capital cannot be upheld. Local capital is a key actor in creating and reproducing a local workforce, and therefore local labour markets without which there would be no capitalist labour process. In this way, Neethi demonstrates why places gain in relevance for capital with global supply chains. A focus on the global scale as a realm of coordinated action is emphasised by Andrew Herod (2002) who coined the term “labour geography” for labour studies with a spatial focus of analysis. He analyses the campaign of steel workers in Ravenswood, Virginia in the USA who created global linkages in order to confront the Swiss-based owners of their company, and the global repercussions of a strike in two plants of General Motors in Flint, Michigan in the USA in 1998. After two months of strike, just-in-time production led to layoffs of almost 200,000 workers in plants in the General Motors supply chains across the USA, Canada and Mexico. This perspective of workers and trade unions engaging on a global scale stands in contrast to the one of Silver who conceptualises labour unrest as responses to changing geographical patterns of capital investment (2003). While this scheme of “where investment goes, labour unrest follows” can be seen as capital being haunted by labour unrest, it can also be interpreted as a pattern of late reactive action which remains focused on the national scale despite capital’s global movement. Following Luxemburg’s analysis of mass strikes that diffuse across a certain territory without a coordinating centre (1906), Nowak set out to determine if spatial patterns can be detected in mass strikes that unfolded in the Global South in the 2010s, insisting on spatial limits and patterns of mobilisation present in those strikes (2019). Nowak discovered three
Spatial dimensions of strikes 499 forms of diffusion: (1) diffusion of a certain form of strike within one sector: sectoral copycat strikes; (2) the diffusion of strikes in the same national framework: national cross-sectoral mass strikes; and (3) the establishment of certain forms of strikes and the diffusion of experiences in one industrial region: regional mass strikes. These analytical categories raise the question to what extent economic sectors are of a spatial nature, but in any case, the interdependency of national and regional spatial patterns with sectoral limits of strike waves demonstrates that we cannot apply a “pure” spatial method without looking at other intersecting influences. The application of this scheme to the South African strikes in mining in 2012 and 2014, to the strikes in the automobile sector in India in the 2010s, and the strikes in Brazilian construction in the 2010s showed that those mass strikes occurred as combinations of those patterns. In South Africa, the strike in the mining sector in August 2012 was followed by strikes of truckers and farmers in the next month, showing a combination of the sectoral and cross-sectoral mass strikes, and the five-months-long strike in mining in 2014 triggered a one-month-long strike in the automobile sector. The massacre against miners in early August 2012 gave rise to a significant political rupture between the metal union, the biggest trade union confederation, and the governing party, the African National Congress (Nowak 2015). The mass strikes in Brazilian construction started in early 2011 and expanded throughout the Brazilian territory until 2014, thus lasting more than three years. While the strikes in construction were the most consistent phenomenon sector-wise over this timespan, they were accompanied by a high level of labour conflict in the public sector, among bus drivers, metal workers, street sweepers and in the tourism industry. The street protests in the summer of 2013 gave rise to a teachers’ strike in Rio de Janeiro in the immediate aftermath. In this case, we see another combination of sectoral and cross-sectoral mass strikes, although with less tight links between both. Nonetheless, the political effects of the strikes were much less pronounced in Brazil. The strikes in the Indian automobile industry, in contrast, show a weaker variant of the first form of intra-sectoral diffusion with a series of strikes in the late 2000s as well as in the early 2010s, and with a strong regional focus on the larger New Delhi region. It was also in this region that strikes diffused to other sectors like the textile and electronics industries (of which some parts supply to the automobile sector). Plus, the different regions showed different patterns of action, with the practice of factory occupations more widely used in the New Delhi region (Nowak 2019). A similarity of the strike waves in all three countries lies in the fact that the strikes in one specific sector are most disruptive in their forms, including violence by private and public security forces as well as by workers (South Africa, India), and widespread arson against transport and housing facilities at large construction sites in Brazil, and see a protracted series of mobilisations. It is therefore that the strikes in those sectors gained visibility in the media and public debate, becoming a focal point, and in all three countries concerned those strikes demonstrated the limits of the respective models of development: in South Africa, the strikes in mining demonstrated the continued dependence on the mining industry and adverse working conditions in the post-apartheid state and the complicity of the main mining union and former freedom fighters in the Marikana massacre. In Brazil, the strikes in construction, economically based on a government-led infrastructure investment programme, demonstrated how the centre-left governments had entered into compromises with the large construction companies that continued their old-age precarious conditions of work with few differences to the era of the military dictatorship. Lastly, in India the strikes in the automobile sector showed that state-of-the-art manufacturing by Japanese multinationals comes with harsh working
500 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work conditions with severe impacts on the health of workers, and can only be maintained with the help of police repression. But this vanguard role of workers from a specific sector also comes with limits: sectoral identities of workers allowed a common identification, and at times inspired workers from other sectors. On the other hand, more long-term alliances between those striking workers from different sectors remained marginal at the political level, or failed to materialise at all. Another obvious limit is that none of those strike waves created strong international links, except for the aftermath of the Marikana massacre (Nowak 2015). This identification of three forms of diffusion of mass strikes relies on the characterisation of mass strikes by Luxemburg: significant diffusion without a coordinating centre – which does not imply that there is no planning involved, but planning and organisation of those strikes is located in various centres that do not follow a unified plan. Surely, mass media, social media and personal connections do play a role in diffusion nowadays. An important qualification is the existence of spatial patterns of diffusion like intra-sectoral or national identification of workers which are both facilitating in terms of providing a collective identity for the struggle, but which also play the role of limits which can be used to contain the strikes. Luxemburg herself (1906) had used four levels in order to categorise strikes. She differentiated according to the aim of strikes, i.e. between political and economic strikes, but underlines that in mass strikes both dimensions often overlap or follow upon each other. A second level of distinction used by Luxemburg concerns the extension of strikes (sectoral, local, regional, general), a third one the direction (offensive or defensive). The fourth level concerns the form: demonstrative mass strikes are held for a limited period, while fighting mass strikes are held without prior limitation of duration. A second analytical level beyond the identification of forms of diffusion, or spatial patterns, is the categorisation of mass strikes according to the form of organisation. This categorisation by Nowak (2019, 59f) builds on the concepts established by Luxemburg and differentiates mass strikes according to the level of decentralised initiative and the political form. The first category here is demonstrative mass strikes, that are held for a limited time, usually one or two days, and are organised by a clearly identifiable actor or coalition. The second category is fighting mass strikes. These are not planned for a limited time period but end when demands are fulfilled or workers and/or their organisations give up, and have one or two organising centres. The third category is worker-led fighting mass strikes. These are also not planned for a limited time period, and there are no clearly identifiable centres of coordination in this form of mass strike. The mass strikes in Russia and Poland analysed by Luxemburg in Russia, and the ones studied by Nowak in India and Brazil fall into this category, although some of the single strike events are organised by clearly identifiable organisations, but not the entire strike wave as such. It is important to note here that both the distinction into three spatial forms of diffusion of mass strikes and the three forms of organisational characteristics do not imply any hierarchy between those forms but are analytical distinctions that allow us to see mobilising and limiting factors. A qualification or evaluation of those strikes has to look at the political conjuncture in which they occur, and all of those forms can come with success or failure, thus there is no clear recipe according to spatial pattern or organisational form used. A result of Nowak’s (2019) analysis of strikes in the Indian automobile sector and in Brazilian construction in the 2010s is that in different workplaces within those strike waves there was considerable variation in terms of how those strikes were organised. In all four cases studied, trade unions played a role, at times a limiting employer-friendly one, at times
Spatial dimensions of strikes 501 an insurgent one. As in the miner’s strike in Britain, local traditions of struggle played a role, but also specific conditions of the workplaces like the spatial isolation and long and precarious transport to the workplace at construction sites, often accompanied with makeshift housing in containers in compound-like conditions. For example, the role of the corporate trade union at the construction site for the Belo Monte dam in Northern Brazil rather fanned the flames of discontent, and allowed other trade unions to contest the role of the official union as representing the 35,000-strong workforce at the large construction site (2019, 193ff). The concentration of workers at four different and quite distant compound areas both limited the communication between workers, but also made it hard for the company and police to control the workforce, giving rise to various committees that represented the workers at different compound areas. Another result from this research is that relative spatial isolation does not prohibit successful struggle since the two more isolated workplaces in terms of geography saw the most developed forms of struggle. In both cases, the prominence of the company and the construction project for the national economy facilitated successful worker action (2019, Chapters 4 and 5). Especially in the case of strikes in Brazilian construction, the high demand for construction workers in the said period enabled workers to attain positive results of their struggles. More intense connections of striking workers with other actors in the same region or on a national level were another important factor for the success of strikes since public attention surely increased the pressure, and also provided important financial, infrastructural and legal resources. The case studied by Rosa Luxemburg, mass strikes in a general insurgent situation, has seen manifold instances during 2019 and 2020 in Haiti, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Chile and Bolivia. The latest examples are the uprisings in Belorussia, Myanmar and Colombia in 2020 and 2021. How the interaction between mass strikes and a general insurgency develops, and how workers and their organisations influence those insurgent dynamics remains a crucial focus of analysis for future studies.
REFERENCES Griffiths, M. J., and Johnston, R. J. (1991), ‘What’s in a Place? An Approach to the Concept of Place, as Illustrated by the British National Union of Mineworkers’ Strike, 1984–85’, Antipode, 23 (2), 185–213. Herod, Andrew (2002), ‘Organizing Globally, Organizing Locally: Union Spatial strategy in a Global Economy’, in Jeffrey Harrod and Robert O Brien (eds), Global Unions? London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, pp. 83–99. Kerr, Clark, and Siegel, Abraham (1954), ‘The Interindustry Propensity to Strike – An International Comparison’, in Arthur Kornhauser, Robert Dubin and Arthur Ross (eds), Industrial Conflict, New York, USA: McGraw Hill, pp. 189–212. Luxemburg, Rosa (1906), ‘The Mass Strike, The Political Party, and the Trade Unions’, reprinted in Helen Scott (ed.) (2008), The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, Chicago, USA: Haymarket, pp. 111–181. Neethi, P. (2016), Globalization Lived Locally. A Labour Geography Perspective, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Nowak, Jörg (2015), ‘Mass Strikes in Brazil, South Africa and India after 2008: Separate Battles, but a United Struggle?’, in Andreas Bieler, Roland Erne, Darragh Golden, Idar Helle, Knut Kjeldstadli, Tiago Matos and Sabina Stan (eds), Labour and Transnational Action in Times of Crisis, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 53–68. Nowak, Jörg (2019), Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India. Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression, London, UK: Palgrave.
502 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Rees, G. (1985), ‘Regional Restructuring, Class Change, and Political Action: Preliminary Comments on the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in South Wales’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3, 389–406. Screpanti, Ernesto (1984), ‘Long Cycles in Strike Activity: An Empirical Investigation’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 25 (1), 99–124. Silver, Beverly (2003), Forces of Labour. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wills, Jane (1996). ‘Geographies of Trade Unionism: Translating Traditions Across Space and Time’, Antipode, 28 (4), 352–378.
KEY READING Herod, Andrew (2002), ‘Organizing Globally, Organizing Locally: Union Spatial Strategy in a Global Economy’, in Jeffrey Harrod and Robert O Brien (eds), Global Unions? London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge, pp. 83–99. Luxemburg, Rosa (1906), ‘The Mass Strike, The Political Party, and the Trade Unions’, reprinted in Helen Scott (ed.) (2008), The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, Chicago, USA: Haymarket, pp. 111–181. Neethi, P. (2016), Globalization Lived Locally. A Labour Geography Perspective, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Rees, G. (1985), ‘Regional Restructuring, Class Change, and Political Action: Preliminary Comments on the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in South Wales’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 3, 389–406. Silver, Beverly (2003), Forces of Labour. Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
42. Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt Verónica Gago and Lucía Cavallero
THE FEMINIST STRIKE AS A POLITICAL AND ANALYTICAL TOOL The first national women’s strike in Argentina took place in the pouring rain on October 19, 2016, a few weeks after the women’s strike for abortion in Poland. The force of that strike led us to decide to call an international strike on March 8, 2017. Thus, it began to be amassed, communicated, debated, and above all, built in multiple spaces, by diverse classes, in conjugations that enabled the strike to accommodate and expand with heterogeneous realities, with geographies that, although distant from one another, are connected by overlapping zones, struggles, and realities that are not reduced to the borders of nation-states. Since 2016, the feminist strike has successively taken on several different names: “national women’s strike”; “international strike of women, lesbians, travestis, and trans people”; “international and plurinational feminist strike”; and even “feminist general strike.” In Argentina, half a million women participated in the marches following the women’s strike in 2017; 800,000 took to the streets for International Women’s Day in 2018, 2019, and 2020. The feminist strike has become a global phenomenon, but one that emerged from the global South. The tool of the feminist strike maps new forms of exploitation of bodies and territories from a perspective that is simultaneously that of visibilization and insubordination. The strike reveals the heterogeneous composition of labor in a feminist register, recognizing tasks that have historically been disregarded, showing its current imbrication with generalized precarization and appropriating a traditional tool of struggle to overflow and reinvent it. Thus, the international strike opened up a feminist perspective on labor. Because the feminist strike recognizes territorial, domestic, reproductive, and migrant labor, it broadens the very notion of the working class, from below. It starts from the recognition that 40 percent of workers in Argentina are involved in diverse modes of the so-called informal economy, vindicated in some experiences as popular economy. We could take this further and say that the strike opens up a whole program for research. What do we call labor from the perspective of the living and working experiences of women, lesbians, trans people, and travestis? When the feminist movement faces the question of what it means to go on strike from reproductive labor, we are, in a practical way, mapping the multiplicity of tasks we take on, the intensive and extensive working days that are not paid, or are badly paid, or are remunerated in a way that always expresses the hierarchy of the sexual division of labor. Some of those tasks have gone almost unrecognized as work; others have been called names that only serve to belittle them. The feminist strike provides a class content to the demands and the language of the protest even if the vocabulary is not explicit, precisely because it brings us to stop the machinery that makes social reproduction possible, demonstrating its strategic character, which is, at the same time, constantly hidden. The feminist strike, unlike the traditional labor strike (that is, of the masculine, waged, unionized labor move) is not linked to categorized and recognized 503
504 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work “trades,” but rather tasks that sometimes even invent their own names to make them palpable. At the same time, it refers to production and its inevitable link with reproduction and makes explicit why certain tasks correspond to a determined sexual division of labor and why capital accumulation is impossible without gender mandates. In this sense, it is simultaneously a labor strike and an existential strike: it shows the areas in which life and work become mixed and lose their distinction. The international strikes of women, lesbians, trans persons, and travestis allow for debating and visibilizing a map of the heterogeneity of labor in a feminist register. Diverse feminisms have put forth a method of struggle that lives up to the challenge of the current composition of what we call territories and bodies in conflict, starting from struggles against neo-extractivist dispossession and from migrant, precarious, neighborhood, domestic, and community work. That movement also produced elements for understanding waged labor, as well as the union dynamic, in a new way.
A CRITICAL APPROACH TO WORK In Argentina, the perspective that allows for problematizing work outside of the waged framework, comes, in a short genealogy, from the social movements that debated unemployment in political terms on the streets. In a singular way, that claim was associated with one of the most intense crises, that of 2001, a moment of economic collapse after decades of neoliberal intensification (directly translated into privatizations, austerity measures, and record level unemployment). The conceptualization of what constitutes dignified, remunerated work, and even what tasks are considered work, as we know, is always a political question. Since then, a myriad of forms of work “without a boss,” exemplified by the hundreds of factories and companies that have been recuperated by their workers, have emerged as a response to systematic layoffs, bankruptcies, and capital flight. Such projects have given rise to forms of self-management that have combined welfare benefits packages, won from the state after long struggles, with a strong desire for autonomy, territorial enterprises managed by popular assemblies, and the valorization of community work, all framed by the urgent need to survive in an increasingly desperate situation. Those experiences demonstrated the political nature of those tasks by producing a community value (production of value based on the spheres of the reproduction of life) capable of organizing resources, experiences, and challenges to condemnation of the unemployed to the categorization of “exclusion.” In that moment, the massification of social benefit packages was carried out as a governmental attempt to “respond” to the crisis, at the same time as their conquest was determined by the force of social movements that were able to negotiate the corresponding work requirement. The political genealogy of the valorization of reproductive labor, particularly in popular economies whose leadership is clearly feminized (as they emerged from social movements and then achieve institutional recognition), is a key point raised today by feminist economics. Markedly different forms of managing and negotiating the decline of the “male breadwinner” emerge between the popular economies. Divergent political strategies emerge from those genealogies and definitions. That is precisely where the feminist perspective on labor intervenes. In Argentina, like many other countries in the region, the debate about the remuneration of reproductive, and more generally, informalized labor overlaps with the history of social subsidies, won by demands made on the state by specific struggles for the recognition of those
Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt 505 forms of existence that are predominately non-waged in the wake of neoliberal structural reforms. How have these benefits packages, largely targeted at women, recognized—in an ambivalent way—care work and feminized community labor? That valorization has to do with how those tasks spill beyond the confines of the home: into self-managed soup kitchens, day cares, health care initiatives, and so on. This spillover is due to the crisis that destroyed masculine “heads” of households through massive unemployment. But, more than anything, it is the effect of the politicization of the crisis through community and popular organizational dynamics. The broadening of the strike action (like the displacement of the picket from the factory to the highway beginning in the late 1990s) functions as a practical denunciation of how power structures negotiate austerity. The expansion of the feminist strike measure does not leave out wage disputes, but, at the same time, it redefines them and forces them to face the reality of non-waged labor. It multiplies the meanings of the strike without diluting its historical force. It relaunches the strike as the key for understanding how the transversality of social conflict is at play in the intersection of exploitation and sexist violence.
THE EXPANSION OF CLASS The expansion of the class through the multiplication of labor demonstrated by the current feminist movement is due to the fact that it does not accept the premise that workers are only those who receive a wage. In this sense, by expanding the tool of the strike, we provoke a crisis in the patriarchal concept of labor because we question the idea that dignified work is only that which receives a wage; therefore, we also challenge the fact that recognized work is predominately masculine. Like in a game of dominoes, this next implies questioning the idea that productive work is only that which is done outside the home. Thus, feminism takes up the problem of redefining labor—and, therefore, the very notion of class—because it demonstrates the heterogeneity of unrecognized tasks that produce value and disobey the hierarchization and division that the wage creates between workers and the unemployed. It is a political movement: by decoupling recognition of work from the wage, it rejects the idea that those who do not receive a wage are condemned to the political margins. The feminist movement, especially the movement of popular feminisms (which brings together a multiplicity of Latin American experiences under diverse names), shows that we cannot delegate to capital—through the tool of the wage—recognition of who are workers. That is why we say #TrabajadorasSomosTodas (#AllWomenAreWorkers). Now, that statement does not operate as a blanket that covers and homogenizes an abstract class identity; rather, it functions because it reveals the multiplicity of what labor means from the feminist point of view, with all of its hierarchies and all of its struggles. When it is connected to difference, the class dimension does not turn class into a privileged element for understanding conflict (which, by flexibilizing the notion of class, risks ultimately putting it in the center again). It is something that is more radical, precisely because it emerges from the feminisms of the peripheries: the question of class can no longer be abstracted from the colonial, racist, and patriarchal dimension without being revealed as a category that covers up hierarchies. Against the trends of a “lean in” feminism or the attempt to fit feminism into neoliberal agendas, the class dimension emerges here as a main issue and defines the conflictiveness.
506 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work In this way, we also put another idea of productivity into play: productivity is not confirmed by whether or not we are exploited under the wage form. Rather, the reasoning is different: the form of exploitation organized by the wage invisibilizes, disciplines, and hierarchizes other forms of exploitation. This opens up another fundamental line of investigation: how do financial apparatuses update the colonial pact today with forms of domination and exploitation? Here it is essential to create connections between the most precarious territories of labor and the most abstract apparatuses of finance in order to think about new forms of exploitation and value extraction and, especially, the role of women’s bodies and feminized bodies in them. The collective and multitudinous body of the feminist movement is now disputing the body in terms of its potencia: that is, it is defending the indeterminacy of what the body can do. In other words, the very idea of labor power. That is where its multiplicity, its expansion, comes from. With this understanding, the body ceases to be an individual confinement and the object of liberal rights, and instead becomes interwoven with insurgent territories, putting social wealth into dispute.
REPRODUCTIVE LABOR AND DEBT Financial colonization spills over in terms of household debt taking the most impoverished and precarious populations as its territory to conquer, as Silvia Federici has documented historically. In countries like Argentina, this is linked, in retroactive terms, to the way which social subsidies have been connected to mass bankarization, in a process that has been going on for over a decade in the region (Gago 2017). Targeted social assistance also reinforces a hierarchy of merit in relation to women’s obligation according to their roles in the patriarchy family: having children, taking care of them, educating them, vaccinating them. This shows the clear importance of the dynamic of the politicization of reproduction that makes those tasks spill over outside of the enclosure-form of the heteronormative family model. We would also like to think about work from that feminist perspective connecting it with domestic debt. Carrying out a feminist reading of debt (Cavallero and Gago 2021) shows how public indebtedness, which accelerated exponentially during Mauricio Macri’s government (2015–2019) translates into economic adjustment policies that spill over into homes as domestic debt. Thus, the link between debt and work must be highlighted: household debt also operates as a mechanism that enforces precarization by forcing workers to accept work that is increasingly poorly paid. As a result, debt becomes the internal motor that drives limitless flexibility as it organizes and dictates forms of labor. At the same time, debt is a means of exploitation that manages to intensify and adapt to the progressively heterogeneous realities of labor. Finance, shot through with technical complexity and thought of in terms of its everyday impact, should be understood as an extractive logic of capital, organizing what we call “financial extractivism.” Thus we are faced with a very different situation from the unemployment crisis at the beginning of the century, a fact which can only be observed thanks to the feminist perspective that was deployed and became massive through the political process of the strike. Consequently we want to point to a new moment of crisis, but rather than being characterized by unemployment,
Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt 507 its distinctive feature is over-employment. However, between these two measurements, what primarily changes is the gender that is made visible for understanding the labor market. According to one study,1 between 2016 and 2018, 340,000 women entered the labor market (that is, they went out to look for work outside of their homes) in comparison to 35,000 men during the same period. This indicates, on one hand, that women played a particular role in sustaining domestic economies during the crisis, that they embarked on and were overworked in precarious and informal jobs in the face of the generalized decrease in incomes. But it also indicates that women worked more, and for longer hours, while they also had to go into debt as never before, through social subsidies and other types of credit offers. According to that same study, 320,000 of those women found informal or non-waged jobs, which reinforced the historical tendency of the type of labor market insertion that women experience (Cavallero 2021). Unrecognized work in the home was translated into income inequality that, in turn, was transformed into a gear of debt. In relation to the social subsidies, another study2 shows how the value of the Universal Child Allowance depreciated throughout this period, becoming a mere guarantee for taking out debt. The Universal Child Allowance is one of those policies that was overwhelmingly targeted at women in feminized popular economies, as a way of making up for what was previously provided by the family wage in institutions of formal work. It is important to highlight that this subsidy recognizes the predominately feminized role of reproductive and care work. An accelerated process of indebtedness would be unleashed based on this subsidy starting in 2015. In 2020, 1,900,000 women who receive the Universal Child Allowance have debt with the National Social Security Administration.3 This means that 92% of the women receiving this subsidy took out debt between 2016 and 2019.4 The context of high inflation, rate increases for public services, and the precaritization of employment made it compulsory and obligatory to take out debt to access the most basic goods and services.
MORE WORK, MORE DEBT Our investigation5 of the pandemic begins to show how the proliferation of private debts in the economic crisis exploits domestic and community work and territories, and, at the same time, allows us to map the political dilemmas of the current moment. Unpaid debts for rents and utilities, including electricity, water, gas, and internet access, grew at an accelerated rate during the months of imposed quarantine meant to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Currently, feminized and precarized economies are the preferred objects of indebtedness. This tendency is especially notable in single-parent households with women caring for children, thus converting indebtedness into another means by which gender inequality has intensified. We must also analyze how domestic indebtedness intervenes in the gap between paid and unpaid labor and especially what is happening now. The urgent situation of the economic crisis, accelerated by Covid-19, has intensified women’s indebtedness, continuing a trend that we have observed during the past few years. In working-class neighborhoods, where the impact of the health emergency and reduced incomes has been felt most strongly, debts for internet connectivity—that is, paying for data usage to sustain public school distance learning—grew considerably, absorbing a large part of the IFE (Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia, or Emergency Family Income).
508 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work The situation is paradoxical in its drama: an increase in care work, in addition to the intensification of unremunerated labor that includes the education of children inside the home, generates more debt. The unacknowledged work in households translates into income inequality that, at the same time, becomes the motor of indebtedness. It is this situation of obligatory and recurrent indebtedness, moreover, that produces a direct relation to the growth of illegal economies, including informal employment without benefits or protections for those already in vulnerable situations. If some analysts speak about today’s workers as “wage hunters and gatherers,” who can no longer guarantee their own reproduction through a single, stable wage, we speak of the “debt hunter and gatherer” as a figure who expresses the deepening dispossession and precarization that is often called the feminization of poverty. In this regard, it is fundamentally important to highlight the feminized character of the precarized economies that are the preferred object of indebtedness today. A feminist reading of financial hardship, like the one that we have been developing, confronts the abstract dynamics of finance in its relation to everyday life. It also deals with forms of violence in homes and in other arenas, and in terms of current modes of exploitation in remunerated and non-remunerated labor. Here, domestic debt also appears in its most political guise: as a means of metabolizing the effects of economic adjustment, which forces people to supplement already insufficient incomes in order to consume products whose prices are increasingly dollarized (food, medicine, rent).
THE HOUSEHOLD AS A LABORATORY OF CAPITAL The feminist critique of the idealization of domestic space as safe space is now visible to all. But we want to go a step further and ask how capital will take advantage of this confinement to reconfigure forms of labor, modes of consumption, the parameters of income, and gender relationships. More concretely, we want to ask: are we facing a restructuring of class relations that takes the sphere of reproduction as its main stage? Feminists have politicized domestic space for a long time. We have said that value is produced there, that the care that sustains life there is historically rendered invisible and necessary, that enclosure within four walls is a political order imposed by patriarchal hierarchies. Are we seeing a transformation of capital that seeks to take advantage of this crisis by hyper-exploiting domestic space? Could it be that the imperative to telework, from home schooling to the home office, is maximizing the demand for productivity from that home-factory that functions behind closed doors, seven days a week, with no limits to the working day? Who can ensure that, after the emergency health situation ends, these advances in labor flexibilization, which atomize workers and make them even more precarious, will be rolled back? We ask again: what type of home are we talking about? Interiors with little space, saturated with family burdens, and that now must also be productive for jobs that, until a few months ago, were carried out in offices, factories, workshops, shops, schools, and universities. But domestic space also overflows individual homes: it is made up of neighborhood and community spaces that are super-exploited in the crisis, that invent networks with scarce resources, and that have warned of an emergency situation for some time now. The quarantine can be understood from the point of view of asking which movements generate debts and which generate incomes and rent. This method not only demonstrates who
Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt 509 can stay at home and who cannot, but also shows that moving about or staying in place have differential effects in terms of incomes and debts. This situation was not created overnight. It has a genealogy in our region that we can quickly synthesize. While, in the 1980s, debt disciplined democratic transitions in Latin America as a way out of dictatorship, in the 1990s the set of neoliberal reforms associated with the Washington Consensus imposed new debt thresholds, and the last few years have been witness to a strong resurgence of financial penetration in our countries, combined with more intensive poverty and the dispossession of natural resources and common goods. Moreover, this particular cartography enables us to see the bodies, economies, and territories over which debt is produced. This is the feminist methodology that we have been elucidating, which moves from finance to bodies. Who is responsible for taking on debts? How? With what interest rates? And what types of work, remunerated or non-remunerated, characterize the most indebted sectors of the population? These are some of the questions that we have been developing over the last few years, as much in our political action as in the production of knowledge and information. Now, we are interested in examining the accelerated arrival of a new proposal for financial inclusion in the midst of the pandemic. We propose analyzing this question on the basis of five points: (1) how the launching of emergency subsidies involves recording and producing information about a new population in a process of accelerated precarization during the pandemic; (2) forcing that population to become banking users to receive the emergency subsidy, even when it is known that monetary transfer will only last a short time (in other words, the bank account will remain, but the subsidy will not); (3) the appearance of new technologies to mediate that payment, disputed between private FinTech companies and public banks; (4) state intervention to “include” that population in a financial circuit that is also behind the exchange rate runs to devalue the peso; and, finally, (5) the reconfiguration of domestic territories as a simultaneous process of precarization and financialization. The intrusion of new financial technology (FinTech) into the most precarious homes is one of the most salient features of this pandemic and it allows us to hypothesize that it is pushing a new wave of household indebtedness. This occurs at the same time that domestic spatiality is being powerfully reconfigured, as we analyzed above. In that sense, our hypothesis is that the intersection between financial inclusion and the household at this exceptional moment exhibits three processes simultaneously. First, a greater need for and exploitation of domestic work (now defined as essential work) both at home and in community territories. Second, the demonstration that the violence required to financialize decisive areas of social reproduction uses the pandemic as a privileged accelerator (linking gender-based violence to financial violence). And finally, the dispute over the intensification of financial extractivism as the management of increasingly extreme poverty.
FEMINIST UNIONISM The meanings enabled by the feminist strike are linked to the struggles historically related to the labor and living conditions of the majorities, that are updated today to account for the forms that labor takes as generalized precarity and the tasks that are rendered invisible and naturalized, again and again, for certain bodies. A year into the pandemic, these understandings are urgent because they explain all the everyday violence, connecting both obvious and
510 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work less obvious threads. The strike makes it possible to take these questions linked to structural violence and turn them into a strategy of political intervention in the midst of the crisis. It also traces a historical link with the archive of strikes (from the women’s rent strike of 1907 to the factory strikes in the 20th century to the strikes on the highways of the unemployed workers, better known as pickets). But now it broadens its meaning even further, taking that practice to domestic interiors, to community territories and the streets: all the labor spatialities that the feminist strike brings to light. At the height of the pandemic, “stay at home” (a historic twist on the “from home to work and work to home”) has been a major laboratory of that indistinctness. In opposition to the idea of a suspension that seemed to be established in the pandemic, real estate and financial capital never took a break. That is why it is important to continue expanding our imagination of what it means to strike: how can we remove ourselves from the constant extraction of financial and real estate rents? How do we stop them, and confront them? What type of political alliances does this require? But feminist unionism also exceeds the traditional unions. It is a way of organizing demands and claims, that takes seriously how feminism has broadened the concept of work and focusing in on social reproduction. Feminist diagnoses of the pauperization of the conditions of waged, domestic, migrant working conditions, under accelerated processes of precarization, are even more true in the pandemic, both because they expand the notion of labor and because they propose union strategies for intervening in that expansion. Demonstrating the multiplication of working days within one single day, the exhaustion involved in putting one’s body on the line in the crisis, simultaneous tele-work with school work and childcare in the home, all the juggling required to make ends meet with incomes that become smaller in line with the rate of inflation, the replacement of the state’s responsibilities by overly exhausted networks whose resources are never enough, expands the field of struggles, it points to free labor, disputes recognition and resources that include, while also going beyond, the wage. Calling it feminist unionism is also useful for showing that there is no care agenda that could be recognized by the state, without also transforming organizational modes, both of unions as well as other types of organization. There has to be a way of organizing conflict and confrontation for that work to be recognized. And also, when we say feminist unionism, we include the ways in which the conflict against the extraction of rents is organized. In other words, we do not limit the agenda of unpaid work or care work, but we also talk about the unionism carried out by campesina women calling for agro-ecological modes of production and the way in which tenants fight against real estate capital’s extraction of rent. We think that the concept of feminist unionism perhaps does more justice to the ways in which modes of organization have been transformed and the transversality and connection between struggles produced by feminist organization around the international strikes. If, at the beginning of the pandemic we asked if we were facing a restructuring of class relations within the domestic sphere, that attempted to make households into a laboratory for capital, today we have many more elements to map that dispute. Exercising the feminist strike again, here and across the world, enables us to carry out a confrontation on that plane. The question is how to keep building a unionism that overflows the framework of the demand of waged workers, to take the agility and astuteness of demand-based struggle to the terrains of social reproduction: housing, health care, education, care, neighborhood security. It is a matter of creating alliances with workers in each sector, but also of building an agenda that goes further because it includes neighborhood residents, users, renters, precarious workers. It is
Feminist strike, social reproduction, and debt 511 a question-horizon that emerges because when we go on strike we also produce the time for political invention.
NOTES 1 2 3 4 5
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, “El peso de la crisis lo están cargando las mujeres” http:// noticias.unsam.edu.ar/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/8M_2019_v2.pdf Observatorio del Derecho Social de la CTA-Autónoma, “Fuerte deterioro de la asignación universal por hijo y la jubilación mínima” https://ctanacional.org/dev/fuerte-deterioro-de-la-asignacion -universal-por-hijo-y-la-jubilacion-minima/ According to data from the Dirección de Economía, Igualdad y Género del Ministerio de Economía (Office of Economy, Equality, and Gender of the Ministry of Economy) in the report: “Las brechas de género en Argentina. Estado de situación y desafíos.” Data from the Centro de Economía Política Argentina (Center for Argentinean Political Economy) on the indebtedness of poor households. We develop this research in the framework of Grupo de Investigación e Intervención Feminista (GIIF), in the project: “Debt, Vulnerability, and forms of Care,” International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs.
KEY READING Butler, Judith, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (London: Harvard University Press, 2015). Cavallero, Lucía, Debt as a device of financial violence in the popular and feminized economies, (PhD Thesis), University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2021. Cavallero, Lucía and Verónica Gago, A Feminist Reading of Debt, Liz Mason-Deese, trans. (London: Pluto Press, 2021). Cooper, Melinda, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone, 2017). Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). Federici, Silvia, Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (Oakland: PM Press, 2020). Gago, Verónica, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, Liz Mason-Deese, trans. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
43. The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America Tomás Palmisano and Juan Wahren
1. INTRODUCTION The extraction and commodification of natural resources, or commons, has been constant in capitalism’s development. With the expansion of this mode of production, the international division of labour paradigm has consolidated the installation of industrial activities—and wage labour—in the hegemonic countries in parallel to intensifying nature’s spoliation and people’s exploitation in the global south. This long-term process has gone through various stages where the geopolitical dynamics of global accumulation promoted certain activities and regions of the world to the detriment of others. From the beginning of the 21st century, a renewed impetus was given to productive projects which were based on the intensive exploitation of natural resources or, as we prefer to call them, commons/common goods (bienes comunes). In Latin America, this context sparked an academic and political debate in which concepts such as extractivism, neo-extractivism, extractive model, accumulation by dispossession, or spoliation acquired increasing relevance as analytic tools to understand this current phase of capitalism. This analytic discussion is drawn on a long critical tradition that focused on the differential forms adopted by capitalism in its space–time expansion. In this sense, as Martin (2017) suggests, the debaters recover critically: the classic contributions of political economy of the 19th and 20th centuries—especially Marx’s thoughts on “primitive accumulation” and Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis about geopolitical differences in the development of colonies and metropolises; the postulates of dependency theory, and its critics, related to the subordinate role of Latin America in capitalism; the thesis on coloniality in Latin America and its long-lasting effects over the centuries; the analyses that took place mainly in Europe from the new moving forward over the “commons” that was unleashed with the neoliberal hegemony; the concepts of contemporary political geography, such as David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” or Jason Moore’s “commodity frontiers”—among others. This theoretical corpus has been strengthened with contemporary Latin American contributions which emphasise: the territorial impacts of extractive projects; the idea of bienes comunes as a concept that highlights the persistence and defence of decommodification of nature; the relation between national and subnational scales on its implementation; the transversality of extractivism beyond the political orientations (from neoliberal to pink-tide governments); the dispute of meanings around nature and natural resources; the several alternative ways of living proposed by indigenous peoples, peasants, and local inhabitants (e.g. Giarracca and Teubal, 2014; Martin, 2017; Svampa, 2015). Recognising the lack of conceptual consensus (Martin, 2017), in this article, we define contemporary extractivism as an accumulation model based on large-scale exploitation—and exporting—projects of natural resources or commons located in the global south. The devel512
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America 513 opment and widespread use of “state-of-the-art technologies” has allowed new extraction forms, and with them greater productive volumes. These activities involve both non-renewable and renewable resources, but frequently the latter—for instance land and water—are highly degraded by their intensive exploitation, like large-scale mining, hydrocarbon extraction (conventional and unconventional), agribusiness, industrial fishing and fish farming, gentrification and urban real estate speculation, and infrastructure projects. After the import substitution model crisis as an industrial strategy for development that was rehearsed in some countries of the global south after World War II, national governments created and supported a favourable regulatory framework for extractive activities based on the neoliberal paradigm. This normative has permeated—and been reproduced—in the public policy of governments with different ideological signs, especially since the “commodities boom” prices that took place mainly in the first decade of the 21st century. The growing importance of natural resources or commons in Latin American exportations has deepened the long-standing trends of the continent, giving rents—as a valuation of monopolistic control of a resource—more relevance than profit and wages. In parallel, the widespread adoption of this development model has generated negative socio-environmental impacts that affect workers, local populations, and ecosystems. This implies, in most cases, an incompatibility of extractive activities with other productions or ways of living, which is expressed in the dispossession—manifest or latent—of lands, resources, and territories. The correlate of these dynamics has been a proliferation of socio-environmental or territorial conflicts arising from the resistance of various groups against the progress of this model. The social struggles are carried out by different actors and social movements, like peasants, indigenous people, local people—and to a lesser extent, workers directly employed in extractive activities—who appeal to several direct or institutional actions in order to raise awareness of the effects that extractivism has produced on their daily lives. Frequently, they co-create a multi-scale activism network that connects organisations from different places in the country, the continent, or the world. Although their claims are linked to the opposition to a specific project or activity, they also usually promote the creation of alternatives to extractivism locally, regionally, and globally. In the following sections, we describe three organisations that are engaged in intense social struggles against extractivism. After analysing Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Brazil), Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades (Argentina), and Congreso Nacional Indígena (Mexico) we recover some theoretical elements that emerge from the empirical cases.
2.
PARADIGMATIC STRUGGLES AGAINST EXTRACTIVISM
The diversity of organisations, subjects, and claims makes it difficult to fully show this conflictive scenario, so we propose an analytical selection of specific cases in order to analyse them in depth. First, we will address the long tradition of the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) against latifundio and agribusiness as a paradigmatic case of peasant struggles in resistance to extractivism. Secondly, we will analyse the case of the Argentinean Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades (UAC), whose main confrontation has been opposing the expansion of large-scale mining, but over the years it has included other issues like fracking and agribusiness extractivism. Finally, the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI), which is formed by numerous indigenous communities that live mainly in Mexican
514 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work territory, many of which are in open conflict with infrastructure projects, large-scale mining, hydrocarbon facilities, and forest predation, among others. These social struggles are rooted in long traditions of resistance in Latin America which have been reactivated since the new phase of extractivism began. The election of these organisations was motivated not only by their long trajectories in territorial and socio-environmental struggles, but also by the fact that every group has developed a wide and diverse set of actions, discourses, and alternative projects to extractivism in particular, and to capitalism in general. Likewise, they have their communication tools—official websites and email newsletter—where their own voice and reflections can be found. Through them, these movements have been able to achieve greater visibility for their collective actions, as well as to influence national and global public opinion around their main demands. 2.1
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST)1—Brazil
From the second half of the 20th century, it has been registered that a growing incorporation of technology and machinery into agriculture has resulted in the expulsion of labour and workers. In Brazil, this process, combined with an uneven and concentrated agrarian structure and some geopolitical tendencies, has triggered a new wave of conflicts around land access. The latifundio—a big-scale land exploitation usually unproduced or underproduced for speculative reasons—became the political aim of multiple peasant movements. During the early 1960s, there were some public policies of expropriation and land distribution but the long dictatorship that governed between 1964 and 1985 shut them down. Within this repressive context, and under the influence of the neoliberal paradigm, a new expansion of crops oriented to exportation and agroenergy was promoted, continued, and deepened during the following democratic period. Along with traditional oligarchies, big transnational companies (chemicals, industrial, financial) increased their control of key sectors in the production chain and propelled the extension of production packages (monocultures with intensive use of chemical inputs and heavy machinery). These elements intensified, even more, the pressure over land and consolidated the antagonism between peasants and rural workers, on the one hand, and landowners and transnational corporations, on the other hand. Capital concentration and centralisation combined with labour-saving technology implied both increasing profits and rents and the exclusion of workers and peasants from rural work and access to land. The MST was born in the 1980s when the democratic scenario returned. Comelli et al. (2006)2 highlighted that, together with the agribusiness expansion, there were three other factors that explain the emergence of the movement. First, the gradual weakening of the dictatorship favoured the rising of new forms of protest, political articulation, and identity reaffirmations. That context framed the strengthening of the landless rural worker, a subject who refused to migrate to the cities and fought for the land to avoid losing their rural way of life. Second, through the latter half of the 20th century, some members of the Catholic Church adherents to the Liberation Theology Movement—a left tendency and praxis that is focused on the material and spiritual conditions of poor people—have done important social and political work based on a doctrine that favours the rural poor people and their right for access to land. Third, the new cycle of political mobilisation also facilitated the convergence of the first two groups with sectors of unionism and social activists from various branches of the left (socialists and communists), many of whom had participated in the agrarian activism during the 1960s in the Ligas Camponesas (Peasant Leagues).
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America 515 Officially the MST was founded in 1984. The “landless rural worker” figure included occupants, migrants, peasants, small farmers, and rural workers, among others, who shared the same demand: land to cultivate food. The movement established three objectives to guide their actions throughout the decades: fight for land access, agrarian reform, and social change in Brazil. In order to achieve this political project, the MST considered that the occupations of unproductive large pieces of land would be one of its main tools for collective action. These occupations supposed the materialisation of the agrarian reform which consisted not only in gaining access to land but also in building an alternative societal model. This long-term and complex process usually began by identifying the unused land, its occupation, and the construction of a camp. Families then gradually appropriated the territory while the expropriation was being negotiated with the state. If the action was successful and the families obtained the ownership of land, they would build an agrarian reform settlement. The organisational structure of these settlements has changed remarkably over the years; from models of collective management of land and means of production to mixed models where family production is combined with community labour. The radicalism of land occupation has triggered countless episodes of police and parapolice violence.3 The achievements of this type of action, in which the MST is not the only movement involved but one of the most important, have been enormous: between 1979 and 2016, 9,444 settlements were founded in Brazil, where 1,127,078 families lived and covered an area of 82,159,838 hectares (NERA, 2017). In parallel to land occupation—which from the mid-2000s also included lands and facilities owned by large companies—the MST has consolidated, in several settlements, a food production model based on agroecology. While facing the socio-environmental and economic problems generated by the hegemonic agricultural practices highly dependent on chemical supplies, peasants and technicians began to try an alternative model based on the sustainable use of agrobiodiversity and the recovery of ancestral knowledge. Crop diversification, the use of compost and biological controllers for insects and plants, and using native seeds are some of the techniques applied to maintain the delicate balance between environmental protection and economic viability. In summary, the struggle for land done by the MST represents the path taken by many Latin American and global organisations (such as the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo or La Vía Campesina, which was founded by the movement in alliance with other organisations) that resist the progress of agribusiness and its concentrating dynamics. While recovering the long tradition of peasant resistance, they keep the demand for an integral agrarian reform active which is redefined and enriched with the adoption of the agroecological production model. Obtaining land for those who work it has also included the movement of urban dwellers to settlements, initiating—not without difficulties—processes of (re)peasantisation. This enhancement of peasant work is also expressed in the diversity of productive projects that are held inside each settlement, where a “constructive tension” between autonomy and the directives of the movement is manifested. Finally, on its organisational consolidation, the diversity of actors that the MST convenes has been broadened by also promoting a closer connection with consumers in cities, so that they (re)politicise food supply relations in a context of agribusiness hegemony.
516 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work 2.2
Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades (UAC)—Argentina
In the early 1990s, a series of institutional changes related to the management of natural resources took place in Argentina. This framework, based on the neoliberal paradigm, prompted the installation of several extractive projects, especially large-scale mining. With that normative, the national state delegated to the provinces the management of natural resources, forbade state mineral companies—mines can only be exploited by private actors— and established a tax regime extremely favourable for companies giving them long-term stability and low rates of royalties (Giarracca and Teubal, 2014). When the commodity boom prices started at the beginning of the 2000s, this legal framework attracted several foreign investments. In the Andean regions, the large-scale mining projects proliferated and with them, the tensions with the inhabitants of towns and cities. One of the founding milestones of the socio-environmental struggle against large-scale open-pit mining projects took place in the province of Chubut. In 2002, several inhabitants of Esquel, a Patagonian town of 30,000 people, organised a broad and heterogeneous movement against a gold-mining project installation. The autoconvocados (self-convened), as they called themselves, belonged to various social sectors and occupations and forged the motto No a la mina (No to the mine) based on their concern about the irreparable effects of the activity on their living conditions, where tourism and agricultural production had a central place (Wagner, 2016). After holding a broad set of protest actions, the movement succeeded in holding a plebiscite in March 2003 where 81 per cent of the voters declared their opposition to the project (Giarracca and Teubal, 2014). The magnitude of the movement was so important that shortly after the plebiscite a provincial law (No. 5001) was enacted banning open-pit metalliferous mining that uses cyanide in the entire province of Chubut. This triumph triggered a process of mobilisation and national organisation of the populations opposed to these large-scale mining projects, some of them already operating, as in the case of Alumbrera in Catamarca or Cerro Vanguardia in Santa Cruz, and others in pre-production stages, as in San Juan or La Rioja. In mid-2006, the Foro Nacional de los Pueblos Autoconvocados Ambientalistas (National Forum of Self-convened Environmentalist Peoples) was held in the province of Córdoba, in central Argentina. The organisations that participated in this meeting decided to create an articulation instance that would allow the struggles to be brought closer together, the construction of joint strategies, and the gathering of the organisations in defence of the commons (UAC, 2018). As a result, the Unión de Asambleas Ciudadanas (Union of Citizen Assemblies—UAC) was born, a second-degree organisation that periodically gathers (between two and three times a year) socio-environmental assemblies and autonomous organisations that face extractive projects. Although large-scale mining rejection has been one of the central topics of the UAC, it also includes groups created around other matters such as cellulose pulp production, hydrocarbon activity, nuclear energy projects, the industrialised agricultural or livestock production (agribusiness), and the impact of large infrastructure projects, among others. Up until 2019, the UAC has met thirty-three times. In each encounter, this space has forged a strong political identity that is based on the rejection of personalist leaderships, their decision making is based on assemblies and consensus, and the exercise of autonomy. This autonomy implies both a distance from political parties, companies, and state agencies, as well as an immanent conception of the organisation itself: the UAC is held for two or three days in which the members of the various organisations gather, and during the intervals, the activity is focused on the execution of the decisions made through a series of commissions (press,
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America 517 reflection, legal, art, anti-patriarchal, etc.). In this dynamic, the dual functioning of the UAC is expressed: as a network—which constantly links organisations—and as a meeting—which takes place at a certain time and place with a previously agreed periodicity—(Álvarez, 2017). In this sense, the UAC functions as an autonomous think tank that allows the several dozen organisations that participate in each meeting to collectively develop legal, political, and mobilisation strategies. Their repertoire of action includes legal and administrative claims to the state, allegations in the press, roadblocks, artistic interventions in public events, and occupation of public spaces, among others. The long and intense path of the UAC leaves many aspects to highlight. The first one is linked to the great articulation capacity of the socio-environmental movement. For fifteen years, hundreds of organisations from different parts of Argentina, and bordering countries, have met to exchange knowledge and feelings about the implications of extractivism in the territories. Together with the countless direct and institutional actions, the result of this process has been the construction and systematisation of an independent expert knowledge (Svampa, 2015) that the same organisations disseminate and enrich in their respective locations. The second aspect to highlight is that in response to extractive capitalism’s reconfiguration capacity—whose strategies have changed with the political trends of the recent decades and is expressed in each territory in a specific way—the UAC has made its identity and its scope more complex. Born from the fight for the “No to the mine”, a reactive strategy against the advance of large-scale mining, the UAC has expanded its demands not only including resistance to other extractive activities but also proposing alternatives that are based on “an equitable economy, that is respectful with ecosystems, regional economies and local cultures and identities” (UAC, 2018: 2. Own translation). Finally, the self-reflection process in this space has been so powerful that in 2018 the Union of Citizen Assemblies decided to change its name to Union of Assemblies of Communities (UAC), also accounting for the identity transformation of this collective subject. 2.3
Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI)—Mexico
With the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Zapatista Army—EZLN) in 1994, a new protest cycle began in Mexico, Latin America, and on a global scale. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the Socialist State Bloc, the hegemony of capitalism—in its neoliberal form—seemed unbeatable, but the neo-zapatism renewed the horizons and perspectives of social movements, trade unions and left-wing organisations. This movement also consolidated the collective actions of the indigenous people in Mexico and all Latin America who were invisibilised for a long time within the framework of the capitalist and colonial world-system. In 1996, while the peace talks between the EZLN and the Mexican federal government were being held, the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) was formed as an articulation space for the different indigenous peoples of Mexico who were invited by the Zapatistas to the dialogue roundtables to directly present their demands for autonomy in territorial and cultural areas. The results of this negotiation were the San Andrés Accords, which were aimed to strengthen the respect for the indigenous people of Chiapas, natural resources preservation, to ensure more participation of indigenous communities in the decisions and control of public expenditures, development plans and political, educational and judicial policies, and the autonomy of indigenous communities, their own culture and their right to participate in state affairs. Although these agreements were unknown to the Mexican
518 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work government, the CNI remained as an autonomous organisational space and grew uninterruptedly to include all the country’s indigenous peoples. Their political principles are summarised in the following seven points: (1) to serve, not to serve oneself; (2) to build, not to destroy; (3) to represent, not to supplant; (4) to convince, not to defeat; (5) to obey, not to command; (6) to go from below, not from above; and (7) to propose, not to impose. With the gradual growth of extractive activities in the country (such as hydroelectric, hydrocarbons, large-scale mining, agribusiness, infrastructure projects, and forest predation) in several indigenous communities throughout Mexico, the CNI engaged itself in an increasingly pronounced struggle against them. Each step of these projects was experienced by the indigenous communities as a dispossession of their ancestral territory. At the same time, they registered the increase of institutional and paramilitary violence, as well as the drug cartels’ actions. Usually, these agents acted together and articulated with the progress of the extractive companies in the indigenous territories. Major projects included hydroelectric dams, large-scale mining projects to extract gold, silver, iron, lithium, coal, and copper, among others; conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons (tight gas and shale oil); agribusiness of avocado, lemon, sugar, and cotton, other crops, and other extractive projects (CNI, 2016). One of their leaders, Carlos González García, summarised the main contradictions of capitalism based on the exploitation of labour and the dispossession of nature: “Capitalism derives the wealth generated from the land while basing itself on dispossession, that is, appropriating and destroying the earth; and on the basis of exploitation, which means, appropriating human labour and making it miserable” (González García, 2015: 303. Own translation). Although the main strategy of political action of the communities is territorial resistance and direct actions, in 2017 the CNI and the EZLN decided to expand it to the institutional dispute. They established an Indigenous Government Council (CIG) with delegates from all the indigenous peoples of Mexico with the aim of strengthening self-government in their territories, which they have been doing for years. Its main spokesperson is María de Jesús Patricio “Marychuy”, leader of the Nahua people and former independent presidential candidate in the 2018 elections. This combination between the struggle in the territory and in the national political arena expresses an interesting novelty for a movement that has maintained a distance from the state institutions. In fact, despite the recent political changes in Mexico, indigenous communities have witnessed new projects that intensify the possibility of losing their territories. In this context, the main dispute in the CNI–CIG territories that opposes extractivism is around the Mayan Train project, promoted by the government of the “Fourth Transformation” of President Manuel López Obrador. Located in the central-southern zone of the country, this project implies the continuity and expansion of the development plans of infrastructure (roads, railways, and logistics facilities) to improve the transit of raw materials of those regions, in a clear example of the advance of the commodity frontiers over the indigenous territories. Finally, it should be noted that, along with the processes of resistance to extractivism, the CNI–CIG deploys in their territories’ diverse alternative models in the productive, social, political, and cultural dimensions, based on the autonomy and self-management of the communal territories at the local and regional levels. With this strategy, the movement consolidates a translocalised territorial network in different regions of the country where they experiment and inhabit social innovation based on traditional knowledge. In this sense, the CNI–CIG, together with the EZLN, self-manages vast territories in Mexico, configuring itself as the main social actor that opposes the advance of extractivism in its different forms as well as proposing
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America 519 concrete alternatives anchored in the territories and communities in resistance and re-existence of the indigenous peoples of Mexico.
3.
LEARNING FROM STRUGGLES
From the analytical dialogue between the contemporary framework about extractivism and the description of concrete social struggles, emerge highly suggestive elements to understand the particularities of the contemporary capitalist development in the global south. Firstly, the current extractivism emerges as two dynamics converge. On the one hand, the long-term dynamics of nature and people’s exploitation in the global south, where the dispossession of the local population combined different intensities of value extraction and commons enclosures. This dynamic exemplifies the long-standing effects of coloniality as well as the geopolitical configuration in which Latin America maintains a role as a commodity’s supplier for the global market. On the other hand, the development and widespread use of state-of-the-art technologies allowed new forms of spoliation, and the commodification of new territories and elements. Therefore, territories rich in biodiversity but far from consumption centres, mountains with low-grade ore, low-fertility lands for monocultures, and secondary hydrocarbon deposits, became profitable. Large companies, mostly transnational, seek to integrate these territories into the world economy showing as sacrificeable or non-productive (Svampa, 2015). In contrast, peasants, indigenous people, and local people struggle in different ways and with uneven resources to keep, reproduce, and enhance their living conditions. Secondly, even though these social struggles usually emerged as a reaction to extractivism’s advance on their territories, they also become proactive. With heterogeneous and multiple strategies, these groups try different ways of overcoming capitalist ties. For instance, regarding agrarian production, agroecology used to be one of the main alternative models based on the sustainable use of agrobiodiversity and the recovery of ancestral knowledge. There are always risks of state and corporate appropriation of these alternative strategies, but their necessary link with land distribution and social change—as MST claims—helps to keep the radicalism of the dispute. The political organisation is another field of social innovation in the movement analysed. As it could be seen in the UAC case, the internal organisation under the assembly form not only involves adopting consensus as the decision-making process centre but also, putting into practice the idea of autonomy as being self-ruled. Self-government is also one of the main values of CNI’s principles that recovers and enriches the indigenous tradition of territorial administration. Similarly, most of the resistance movements entail, at the same time, diverse processes of territorialisation that construct pre-figurative and alternative scenarios to the territorialisation logic of extractive capitalism. Thirdly, while extractivism is a long-term and widely disseminated process, the struggles that resist it must develop strategies that account for its particularities. Even when organisations achieve goals—such as the approval of some legislation to protect their environments or the expulsion of a company from the territory through direct action—the extractive activities are so important for development models in the global south that many activists recognise that anti-extractivism is a lifelong struggle. In a context of extreme asymmetry of power, the threats of new projects have been present daily throughout the years, which forces social movements to develop—voluntarily or involuntarily—a strategy that guarantees transgenerational replacement. In order to face the passage of time, younger members continuously join
520 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the organisations. The youths not only ensure the continuity of resistance, but also set new horizons, demands, and strategies for action. Aiming to face the spatial expansion of extractivism, the movements resort to various strategies at different scales. At a local scale, they develop a territorial project—as we mentioned in the previous paragraph—to share with their neighbours living ways outside of the models proposed by the state and large companies. This strategy endows organisations with greater durability over time by solving an important part of the materiality of life. At a national scale, the organisations develop support networks with other activists, politicians, artists, and intellectuals, among others. Likewise, when they assess that the political context allows it, they articulate—not exempted from tensions and conflicts—with some state agencies which allows them to enhance some of their strategies. At a continental and global scale, the struggles analysed demonstrate a huge capacity of the movements to weave alliances among themselves and with other collectives, translating their experiences, strategies, and knowledge to people from all over the world. Avoiding an idealisation of their history and recognising the great challenges posed by a very uneven dispute, social movements put into action real alternatives—with its lights and shadows—to the extractivism constructed as the only possible way of development of Latin America and the global south.
NOTES 1 2 3
For further information about MST’s history, statements, and demands, we strongly recommend visiting the MST web page: https://mst.org.br/ This work also includes an extensive collection of state-of-the-art academic and activist writings that analyse the history and specific dynamics of the organisation. The most famous incident occurred in 1996 in El Dorado dos Carajás in Pará where 19 peasants were killed. As a tribute to these victims, April 17 was established as the International Day of Peasant Struggles.
REFERENCES Álvarez, L. (2017). Asambleando el mundo. La experiencia de la Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades en las luchas socioambientales en Argentina. Debates en Sociología (45), 113–140. https://doi.org/10 .18800/debatesensociologia.201702.005 CNI (Congreso Nacional Indígena) (2016). Espejos. Retrieved from http://www.congresonacion alindigena.org/espejos/ Comelli, M., García Guerreiro, L., Petz, M.I. and Wahren, J. (2006). Movimiento Sin Tierra: antecedentes y construcción territorial. In N. Giarracca et al., Cuando el territorio es la vida: la experiencia de los sin tierra en Brasil (pp. 47–59). Buenos Aires: Antropofagia. Giarracca, N. and Teubal, M. (2014). Argentina: Extractivist Dynamics of Soy Production and Open Pit Mining. In H. Veltmeyer and J. Petras (eds.), The New Extractivism. A Post Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty First Century? (pp. 479–489) London/New York: Zed Books. González García, C. (2015). Participación de Carlos González García. In M. Millán et al., El Pensamiento Crítico Frente a la Hidra Capitalista III (pp. 302–312). México: Sexta Internacional. Martin, F. (2017). Reimagining Extractivism: Insights from Spatial Theory. In B. Engels and K. Dietz (eds.), Contested Extractivism, Society and the State, Development, Justice and Citizenship (pp. 21–44). Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
The political economy of extractivism and social struggles in Latin America 521 NERA (Núcleo de Estudos, Pesquisas e Projetos de Reforma Agrária) (2017). DATALUTA—Land Struggle Database: Report 2017. Retrieved from http://www2.fct.unesp.br/nera/projetos/dataluta _brasil_en_2017.pdf Svampa, M. (2015). Commodities Consensus: Neoextractivism and Enclosure of the Commons in Latin America. South Atlantic Quarterly 114(1), 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2831290 UAC (Unión de Asambleas Ciudadanas) (2018). Sistematización de las Conclusiones de los Encuentros de la UAC. s/d: Comisión de Reflexión/Comisión de Prensa y Comunicación UAC. Retrieved from https://asambleasciudadanas.org.ar/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/CuadernilloUACAbril2018.pdf Wagner, L. (2016). Conflictos socioambientales por megaminería en Argentina: apuntes para una reflexión en perspectiva histórica. Áreas. Revista Internacional De Ciencias Sociales (35), 87–99. Retrieved from https://revistas.um.es/areas/article/view/279201
Section E. Intersections between work in the Global North and the South: exploring the links in key productive sectors
44. Exhaust and switch: labour and the garment industry in global production networks Nikolaus Hammer
INTRODUCTION Reports on the global garment industry have come to be inextricably associated with local episodes of (super-)exploitation and conflict. Fundamental to such processes are complex structures that put workers into competition and dispose of them after they have exhausted their capacities. Production networks in the global garment industry are segmented into a range of product markets, spatially dispersed and fragmented into different functions in the production process. Productive and commercial capital organize a range of functions from primary cotton growing, the production of fabric and garments, their second-hand use and recycling, as well as design, marketing, supply chain organization, logistics and consumer finance. At the same time they draw on a range of social relations that are embedded in specific local political economies. This concerns not only production relations such as informal factory employment, own-account and homework but also broader social relations of domination based on gender, religion, caste or race. Both the success and fundamentally exploitative nature of the industry are based on ever shifting articulations of circuits of capital across local political economies of production and reproduction. Differences across these realms and social relations feed the uneven and unequal expansions and contractions of capital circuits. The power imbalances in the way local political economies are constantly re-articulated into global production networks leave little structural or associational leverage for garment workers. Insofar as the exhaustion of local labour capacities and subsequent switching to other sourcing locations determines the fundamental dynamic in the garment industry, a strategic selectivity towards social downgrading is built into it. The following sections explore in more depth how exhaustion and switching are inscribed in the composite nature of production circuits; forms of work and exploitation; social reproduction; and regulation and resistance.
EXTENDING COMPOSITE PRODUCTION CIRCUITS AND GLOBAL SOURCING NETWORKS The history of the garment industry is one of varying global production networks that constantly re-articulate the parameters of competition, across geographical spaces and the relations between productive and commercial capital (Gereffi, 2018); between industrial and non-industrial, urban and rural contexts; as well as a wide range of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ social relations (Bair and Werner, 2011; Mezzadri, 2017). It is intricately tied to the emergence of commercial as well as industrial capitalism, and squarely based on the modern corporate, state, and military complexes as testified by the Dutch and British East India Companies or 523
524 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the transatlantic slave trade that supplied cotton plantations in the US South (Beckert, 2014). Even today’s garment industry is plagued by persistent allegations of forced labour in Central Asian cotton production. Historically, the extension of capital circuits was achieved through different forms of subcontracting and geographical dispersion such as the putting-out system whereby merchant-intermediaries supplied materials to workers’ homes or small workshops where specific products, or only tasks, were completed. While the putting-out system was central just before the industrial revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, it still retains a crucial role in contemporary ‘composite’ production circuits (Mezzadri, 2017). Mezzadri (ibid.), for example, shows how specific tasks such as embroidery are put out to workers’ homes in rural areas in India, while being fully integrated into more urban, industrial, parts of the production process as well as global production networks. Such processes of ‘backshoring’, as Mezzadri calls them, can take different forms, including some putting-out elements, and are found across countries in the Global South. Indeed, they persist in the Global North too where they range from industrial production being backshored to rural ‘greenfield’ areas (before the wave of offshoring in the 1970–80s; Phizacklea, 1990), to home working, or the recent ‘reshoring’ or ‘nearshoring’ of small-scale production to serve the speed-to-market demands of fast fashion (Ceccagno, 2017; Doeringer and Crean, 2006; Hammer and Plugor, 2019). These developments emphasize two key points that apply across specific historical and spatial variations (both articulated in detail by Mezzadri, 2017). On the one hand, (commercial) intermediaries not only have a crucial role in facilitating links between different steps in the production process but also in shaping production more directly, if only to bolster their own position in the commercial sphere. The allocation, scheduling and pricing of work, for example, impact the extent to which different tasks are integrated or under which relations of production and contexts of social reproduction they are performed. What follows from this composite nature of production circuits, on the other hand, is that productive and commercial capital is fragmented and develops along different trajectories, drawing on local and regional dynamics of competition and social relations in order to edge out a position in global production networks (also Pickles et al., 2016; Werner, 2016). The shape of contemporary production networks emerged over the 1970s and subsequent decades when the confluence of decreasing trade barriers, new communication technologies and decreasing transportation costs allowed lead firms to move from backshoring to offshoring (Gereffi, 2018; Rosen, 2002). As barriers to trade were reduced, lead firms went a step further in the search for cheaper labour costs and offshored large parts of their production to, initially, SE Asia. This development was significant far beyond its geographical dimension. First, it coincided with SE Asian economies’ development strategies of export-orientation, which considered garment manufacturing as an entry sector. This period also marked the beginning of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA; 1974–2005), which accorded export quotas to developing countries. Both the continuous search for low labour costs as well as the need to source from elsewhere once a country’s MFA quota had been reached, extended the always uneven space of sourcing locations in SE, and later, South Asia (Rosen, 2002). Second, offshoring also entrenched the buyer-driven nature of garment value chains that dominate the industry today. Most lead firms gave up production functions and, instead, concentrated on branding and marketing, fashion design and supply chain organization. Thus emerged the buyer-driven structure of garment value chains (Gereffi, 2018), with global brands controlling access to the
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 525 consumer at the same time as they choose which of the many hyper-competitive production clusters to source from. While US buyers initially assisted Chinese manufacturers in upgrading their facilities and processes so they would conform to buyers’ standards as regards volume, time and quality (Gereffi, 2018; much less so with regard to social and environmental standards), assumptions that manufacturers’ upgrading trajectories would enable them to challenge buyers did not come to pass. Limited upgrading, e.g. to original brand manufacturing (ibid.), also led manufacturers to extend their own subcontracting chains in order to achieve flexibility in terms of labour costs, specific tasks and production scheduling (Saxena and Baumann-Pauly, 2020). Further, powerful intermediaries emerged that coordinate full package supply-chain organization for buyers, with Li and Fung, a multinational corporation in its own right, probably the prime example (Merk, 2014). Such commercial and logistics intermediaries are far from neutral parties, though, as they widen competition to ever new manufacturing locations, evidenced, for example, by the entry of African sourcing destinations such as Ethiopia and Lesotho. Finally, in this buyer-led-firm-driven picture, states must not be forgotten as many economies fundamentally rely on foreign exchange income from garment exports. For example, apparel contributed 11 and 15 per cent, respectively, to Bangladesh’s and Cambodia’s GDP as well as more than 80 per cent of their export earnings in 2019. As countries have become dependent production clusters they have often suspended key labour laws in export processing zones (Neveling, 2017) or shown stronger authoritarian developments regarding freedom of association and collective bargaining (Lawreniuk, 2020). Protests against government-mandated wage increases that are far below living wages are often quelled by police and military force (Ashraf and Prentice, 2019). Key shifts in the global production networks (see Table 44.1 for key importers to the United States and the European Union) show similarities as well as important regional differences. The continued role of China is evident for both consumer markets, as is the diminishing role of Hong Kong. Japan and South Korea successfully upgraded and diversified into higher value-added sectors. The central feature, however, concerns the rise of new entrants, from Bangladesh in the 1990s to Cambodia and Vietnam after the millennium (e.g. Saxena, 2014), or more specifically Latin American and Caribbean producers as regards the US market (Gereffi and Memedovic, 2003), as well as Eastern European and North African exporters to the European Union (Pickles et al., 2016; Rossi, 2013). The end of the MFA in 2005 and the accession of China (2001) and Vietnam (2007) to the World Trade Organization have further accentuated overcapacities and intensified power imbalances between buyer-lead firms and manufacturers. Kumar (2020) captures this in the concept of monopsony capitalism which is particularly apt in the case of the garment industry. Anner (2019) shows how this environment fuelled the rise of specifically ‘predatory’ purchasing practices whereby key sourcing parameters are further squeezed under the threat of switching to other suppliers. Buyers are able to demand lower prices and faster delivery at the same time as variations in styles have become much more frequent, if not continuous (particularly in what has come to be called ‘fast fashion’; e.g. Taplin, 2014). By contrast, suppliers are compelled to accommodate frequent late changes to order specifications, deal with order fluctuations and often have to accept orders below cost (Anner, 2019 for India; Hammer and Plugor, 2019 for the UK). Most importantly, the pressures from these predatory purchasing practices are passed on to workers, leading to a further, and marked, deterioration
4.0
8.1
4.0
3.6
3.3
3.3
South Korea
Italy
Mexico
Philippines
India
4.9
2.5
2.4
2.1
1.6
1.5
0.6
*
*
Canada
Japan
Indonesia
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Honduras
Cambodia
Vietnam
6.4
2.3
2.6
3.2
4.3
4.9
0.6
2.0
0.7
6.0
1.1
5.2
1.6
1.2
0.2
39.0
10.9
2.1
2.3
2.6
4.8
4.1
0.6
1.6
0.7
7.1
0.7
4.5
1.8
1.1
0.2
35.6
26888 (a)
217 (a)
1233
506
1001
600
-5
133
-5
692
-22
358
66
-50
-95
854
Note: (a) % growth 2000–18; (b) data for 1993; (c) % growth 1993–2018. Data sources: Worldbank; Eurostat; author’s calculations.
0.1
1.1
3.2
2.5
2.7
3.0
0.9
3.2
Dominican Republic 2.8
2.7
13.7
3.0
4.4
6.3
13.4
Hong Kong
10.7
13.5
1991–2018
0.5 (b) 0.3 0.2 0.0
Bulgaria Vietnam Cambodia
0.8
1.1
1.5
1.6
1.5 (b)
2.5
3.2
3.2
3.3
3.6
3.8
5.5
8.2
9.4
12.3
Slovakia
Sri Lanka
Romania
Bangladesh
Hungary
Czech Republic
Poland
Pakistan
Tunisia
Indonesia
Morocco
US
India
Hong Kong
Turkey
China
0.4
1.2
1.2
0.8
1.3
4.0
4.0
2.0
2.0
3.5
2.8
4.0
3.5
3.6
2.4
6.3
4.8
11.0
15.6
2000
0.7
1.7
1.3
0.6
1.4
2.6
6.9
0.7
1.5
3.0
3.0
2.8
1.5
2.4
1.2
7.2
0.6
11.3
38.5
2010
(Euro values) % Growth
1991
2018
1991
2010
(USD values)
2000
Share of total EU15 imports
Share of total US imports
3.2
3.0
1.3
0.5
1.3
2.4
13.1
0.6
2.2
4.3
4.2
1.9
1.2
2.4
1.1
6.3
0.3
10.5
28.9
2018
25956
4900
1262
223 (c)
506
685
2981
40
354 (c)
498
371
104
30
137
2
302
-85
293
725
% Growth 1991–2018
Main textile and wearing apparel importers to the United States and the European Union (15), 1991–2018
China
Table 44.1
526 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 527 in wages and work and employment conditions, in tier 1 manufacturers as well as in extended subcontracting arrangements. This is underlined in Table 44.2 which compares monthly earnings in manufacturing with living wages calculated by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance. The gap between actual female wages and levels that allow a decent and dignified life appears quite striking. Such dynamics of super-exploitation, where wages are below workers’ reproductive needs, can also be found in the Global North. Here it was the hollowing-out of labour market enforcement and industrial relations that opened a space for the growth of an informal economy and super-exploitation (Ceccagno, 2017; Hammer and Plugor, 2019). What remains are complex sourcing networks whose dynamic are fundamentally based on unevenness and vast power differentials. The shape and power of commercial capital has shifted from a focus on rents that accrue from selling to consumers, to those from organizing global supply chains and, during the recent decade, developing ties with popular media (cultural influencers) and financial intermediaries (consumer credit to ‘buy now, pay later’). Importantly, the power imbalances between capital and labour as well as capital mobility shape the industry’s dynamics: capital seeks out labour and productive capacities – in different locations as well as production relations – and switches to alternative sources once the former are exhausted.
RE-COMBINING OLD AND NEW FORMS OF WORK AND EXPLOITATION The garment industry consists of complex, diverse, inter-linked producer settings that are embedded in specific local political economies. The need to close the capital circuit at the level of the global value chain or production network (linking different functions such as primary material production; design; the cut-make-trim stage of manufacturing; the attachment of buttons, zips and other accessories; of logistics, warehousing and fulfilment; and consumer finance, amongst others) contrasts with the myriad of capital circuits at producer level where competition plays out under local circumstances (Pickles et al., 2016). While emergent, these two levels are intricately linked, articulating accumulation imperatives with different, local, forms of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labour. Thus, as the industry integrates different production circuits it also integrates various forms of labour and multiple forms of exploitation (Mezzadri, 2017). The workforce is ‘made ready’ for sweated production (ibid.) in a range of contexts, from tier 1 factory settings to informal subcontracted units, own-account workers and homeworkers. Equally, the primary agents of such varied processes of the subjugation of labour vary, from owners and managers to commercial intermediaries, resulting in an industry that re-articulates capital circuits with different forms of exploitation, from wage labour to the many shades of disguised wage labour and bonded labour. The repertoires of extracting labour from labour power necessarily vary across space and production relations and often re-articulate old forms of control and exploitation with contemporary requirements (e.g. to satisfy employment and tax regulations or buyers’ social auditing standards). A key principle across the board, however, consists in shifting the risks from market and order fluctuations down the subcontracting chain and from the employer to the worker, in fact, in instrumentalizing those market fluctuations to further workers’ dependency or even relations of neo-bondage (Carswell and De Neve, 2013). Equally, gender, immigra-
*
Vietnam
5,496,428
34,387
15,077
8,949,153
48,608
20,247
31,197
4,684,570
18,727
3,847
1,630,045
29,442
*
58,093
23,856
37,886
5,886,112
23,588
4,547
1,939,606
37,661
2,324,930
12029 (a)
9,413
7854 (a)
*
*
*
*
3,640,585
16386 (b)
10,066
11451 (b)
1,282,335
*
3,471
426,654
*
2012
Note: (a) 2010 data; (b) 2013 data; (c) relates to 2015 data. Data sources: Asia Floor Wage Alliance; International Labour Organisation, Ilostat.
16,706
Sri Lanka
19,645
*
*
Pakistan
Philippines
12,096
3,015,230
6.968
1,868,774
India
Indonesia
1,178,815
2.333
*
1,639
Cambodia
China
19,132
10,754
2009
3,330,647
16036 (b)
9,651
5254 (b)
984,019
*
*
376,651
*
5,231,401
20,802
10,911
14,035
1,658,397
*
4,610
656,614
*
2015
4,927,223
16,282
10,255
5,822
1,370,642
*
*
633,495
*
2015 (fem)
5,402,187
26,093
12,006
16,990
2,435,171
*
*
*
11,416
2017
Mean nominal monthly earnings in manufacturing (ILO) 2017
2012 (fem)
2015
2009
2012
Monthly living wage (Asia floor wage)
Monthly manufacturing wages compared to living wages
Bangladesh
Table 44.2
5,021,084
19,249
11,399
6,629
1,917,191
*
*
*
9,826
2017 (fem)
2017
55.1 (c)
33.1
47.8
17.5
32.6
*
*
*
26.1
wage
living
as % of
(fem)
528 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 529 tion status, and caste constitute historically grown and locally specific terrains, against which further differences are created. These varied and overlaid social relations give rise to different marginal forms of agency for workers at the same time as employers exploit such structures to segment the workforce (Hammer and Riisgaard, 2015). The articulation of production relations and wider social structures is most directly manifested in the way the workforce is constructed across different tasks or stages of production. For example, many observers have noted the striking difference in the composition of factory workforces in North and South India (Anner, 2019; Jenkins and Blyton, 2017; Mezzadri, 2017). While the overwhelming part of workers in the national capital region of Delhi is made up of male circular migrants (who migrate, in line with seasonal order fluctuations, between their villages of origin in other states and the industrial centre of Delhi), it is mainly young women from rural contexts that constitute the labour force of factories in places like Bangalore. Equally, Mezzadri (2017) shows how the backshoring of embroidery tasks to Bareilly (some 250 km from Delhi in Uttar Pradesh) is to women in Muslim households, thus, women whose alternatives for work outside the household are severely restricted. A common principle across production relations is that workers are only paid for productive time at work. Where guaranteed break times exist, they are often overridden by the need to reach specific production targets. Jenkins and Blyton (2017, 102), for example, discuss how, in a fairly large factory, a union proposal to enforce regular breaks was rejected by workers who wanted to avoid working even longer hours. In factory contexts, managerial control in the labour process has been, and remains, very direct while leaving room for different means and practices of control. While in some cases control is exerted through production targets, in others it is achieved through piece rates. Furthermore, production tends to be fundamentally characterized by variation: styles and different tasks inevitably vary, in terms of the time they take or the level of skill and difficulty they require, and therefore have direct implications for workers being able to make a living. Thus, apart from the work pace, targets set and piece rates, the allocation of specific tasks – and the ensuing dependency on the line manager or intermediary for ‘good work’ – is an equally important mechanism of control, both in a factory context (Jenkins and Blyton, 2017) as well as under putting-out practices (Mezzadri, 2017). What is common between different labour control systems, on the one hand, is that the link between production quantity, task allocation, time and the rate is constantly changing as work is organized for new orders. On the other hand, these systems are manipulated in such a way as to create a ‘debt’ relation. Jenkins and Blyton (2017), for example, analyse a ‘time bank’ system in a Bangalore factory that translates market and production discontinuities into workers’ debt to the factory. In this case, employers keep paying workers during factory down-times that are beyond workers’ control (from supply chain issues to electricity outages) but record this time as debt that has to be worked back in the future. At time debt rates of 200-300 hours per worker the chances of ever paying this back on top of a standard week’s hours are slim. Interestingly, labour turnover in Bangalore is relatively high, suggesting that time debt in this case is less a tool to tie workers to the workplace than to control the labour process (Jenkins and Blyton 2017). As regards the backshoring of embroidery work, Mezzadri (2017, 135–51) demonstrates the importance of interlocked modes of exploitation through the dual role of advances contractors pay to labourers: they serve to ensure the latter’s subsistence as much as they keep them tied to that specific contractor’s business. Thus, in factory and out-contracting contexts, market contingencies are mobilized to establish debt relations, and exhaust labour capacities before switching to less depleted groups in the labour force.
530 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work As older forms of control and interlocked exploitation are reshaped and articulated into contemporary production networks, there is evidence that work and employment conditions have deteriorated. Anner (2019), for example, shows how predatory purchasing practices have increased contingent work, targets and work intensification in garment factories in Delhi and Bangalore. A range of management practices ensure that earnings are not only variable but also well below living wage standards: 80 per cent of workers in Anner’s sample (ibid., 714) say that their total wage never covers their basic needs. Employment takes different shades of insecurity, often in the same workplace. Anner (2019, 721) reports about one workplace that “approximately one third of the employees worked piece-rate, one third were on day contracts, and one third had longer-term contracts (perhaps for six months)”, or ‘permanently temporary’ as one respondent termed the latter. Equally, whereas in 2012 only 15 per cent of workers reported having to perform 60 or more operations per hour, this went up to 50 per cent in 2017 (ibid., 718). At the same time, production targets have changed from daily to hourly targets which further reduces workers’ autonomy in the labour process, for example, to take breaks. Those who have not met their targets are required to stay until they reach them, and about two thirds of workers report that overtime during peak orders is sometimes or always obligatory, and not paid at the legal premium (ibid., 718). It is important to recognize that this labour process also has a central corporeal dimension. On the one hand, the daily and longer term exhaustion is so intrinsic that few workers are able to work beyond their thirties (Mezzadri 2017, 177). On the other hand, corporeal disciplining practices (that might be triggered by very minor or, in fact, no infringements) range from the refusal of drink or toilet breaks, naming and shaming over factory loudspeakers, verbal and physical abuse, separation and confinement, to sexual harassment. The power imbalances within the production network are reflected in the workplace: employment regulations are rarely enforced, workers have hardly any associational power and union members are regularly victimized.
THE MAKING OF WORKERS AND EXPLOITATION Any investigation beyond stylized macro dynamics of global production shows that the control of labour reaches far beyond the workplace and highlights the many ways labour is embedded in local relations of production and social reproduction (Mezzadri, 2017; Jenkins and Blyton, 2017). These spheres co-constitute each other and have a crucial role in the reproduction of the labour force, in material as well as social respects, at a daily and inter-generational level, as well as regards the linkages between capitalist, patriarchal and other social relations of oppression. This is to say that processes at work are not endogenous and mobilize divisions rooted in non-work realms. Labour is ‘made’ ready to work across a range of material and social spaces, from living spaces, households, education and skilling, and the workplace, to relations of gender, religion, caste, race and class. The insertion of local production clusters into global production networks, therefore, is also a re-articulation of a local fabric of different forms of exploitation with those global network dynamics (Bair and Werner, 2011). On the one hand, forms of social domination shape particular, historically and spatially embedded, dynamics of social reproduction which co-constitute forms of labour control. Mezzadri (2017, 151–55), for example, shows how contractors establish differentiated relations of dependency amongst home workers. They pay advances to skilled male workers and
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 531 thereby establish a debt relation which, in turn, not only ties those workers to the same contractor but also to work at the latter’s, lower, rates. Importantly, though, such advances are not paid to women homeworkers who are sufficiently ‘tied’ to the household through practices of purdah and, in consequence, this particular type of work. Somewhat paradoxically, Mezzadri (2017, 150) argues, women can remain free workers as regards their exploitation in the credit market as they are already socially unfree due to existing patriarchal norms. Another instance worth mentioning here is that of dormitory labour regimes associated to large factory operations. Such regimes organize social reproduction through a range of rules on social interaction, daily life and gender relations that have a wider disciplining effect that is funneled further into labour control. Most notorious in this respect was the (now outlawed) sumangali system in Tamil Nadu in which girls and young women were recruited into multi-year contracts of living and working in the factory compounds of textile mills. The patriarchal ‘selling point’ of working to save for a dowry was, in this case, undermined by capitalist exploitation: as the theft of wages and bonuses was common, the ‘payoff’ simply consisted in exhausted bodies before the system expelled them. As the previous section has shown on the other hand, employers’ workplace practices aim at externalizing virtually all costs related to social reproduction. It almost goes without saying that the garment labour process, consisting of 10 to12 hour days, at times seven days a week (Jenkins and Blyton, 2017, 99), depletes its labouring bodies with back pain, allergies, exhaustion and the loss of eyesight being common consequences. In the same way, however, as health and safety measures constitute additional costs, so do employer contributions to healthcare and welfare schemes. Even where such schemes exist, there is a systemic gap between workers’ entitlements to such facilities and them being able to claim them and receive any support (Ruwanapura, 2017). The continuum of ‘health and safety’ issues is as wide as it is structural in the industry and ranges from 40,000 fingers that are reportedly severed per year in the Pearl River Delta to workers’ bodies hardly being able to work beyond the age of 30 (Anner, 2019, 722; Mezzadri, 2017, 169–178). Furthermore, the externalization of the costs of reproduction is fairly complete when workers’ migration and living conditions come into the picture. This concerns the circular migration in India which sees workers return to their villages of origin during seasonal lows of production (Mezzadri, 2017, 132–135) but also concerns workers who live in informal colonies or slums. As Mezzadri (ibid. 174) reports, many “migrant workers in micro-units simply sleep in the contractor’s unit.” Researching such working/living contexts in Italy, Ceccagno (2017) shows how childcare is outsourced, often across regions or back to migrants’ countries of origin, so that workers are available for the daily, weekly and seasonal ebbs and flows of the market. The creation of a cheap and compliant workforce takes place across the realms of production and social reproduction. The extraction of labour is interwoven with a fabric of social relations of oppression that is crucial in devaluing labour as well as in externalizing the costs of social reproduction. The consequences of these processes are severe, particularly in the informal economy and in the absence of a social security and care net. As the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated when many brands initially refused to pay for orders that had been placed, produced and even shipped, any disruption of demand hits garment workers, who have to exist below living wages (see Table 44.2 above), most directly and immediately (CCC, 2020). In many ways, workers’ bodies become their last line of defence, be that in mass faintings or in individual acts of resistance. Anner (2019, 722), for example, reports of a worker who, when she cannot work any further, puts on a jumper to work up a temperature in order to be sent
532 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work home. Whether at collective or individual level, at a daily or seasonal level, or when their working lives come to a premature end, workers whose bodies are too exhausted to keep the productive pace, are expelled into their living spaces and places of origin (Mezzadri, 2017), particularly in the context of a large informal reserve labour force.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REGULATION AND RESISTANCE Garment workers clearly have little structural and associational power. Resistance is often unorganized, spontaneous and sporadic. Where protests appeal to brands and consumers, they often occur in hindsight, that is, after factories have closed and the chances of obtaining any outstanding wages are extremely small (Tartanoglu Bennett et al., 2021). Resistance in the labour process notwithstanding, a good deal of (spontaneous and transient) collective mobilization and protests take place outside the workplace. To some extent, this is due to workers having more freedom to organize in public spaces (e.g. against very low government-mandated wage increases). In another sense, however, this reflects the local political economies of social reproduction: as garment workers’ exploitation at work is tied so intricately to other forms of social oppression, it cannot come as a surprise if some conflicts manifest in areas of daily social reproduction. Kumar (2020) has developed a valuable extension of this scenario as he argues that pressure from monopsonistic buyers led to consolidation processes amongst suppliers such that large buyers are becoming more reliant on large producers which, in turn, significantly alters labour’s structural power. Such perspectives on resistance contrast, however, with corporate social responsibility initiatives, on the one hand, and more multiple stakeholder- and state-led initiatives that have gained prominence over the last years, on the other hand. NGOs have challenged the unilateralism of the corporate social responsibility movement but also reproduced some of the focus on corporate codes, consumers and the emergence of a social auditing industry (Esbenshade, 2004; Palpacuer, 2017; Reinecke and Donaghey, 2015). However, there are alternative models (see also Kuruvilla, 2021; Locke, 2013) that establish forms of governance that bring both the state and lead firms into the equation. An important model for the governance of the industry was developed after the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 workers and injured more than 2,500. This was the largest in a series of factory fires and factory collapses and led to the conclusion of a binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (between mainly European brands and retailers and Global Union Federations) as well as a Compact for Continuous Improvements in Labour Rights and Factory Safety in the Ready-Made Garment and Knitwear Industry in Bangladesh (initially between the government of Bangladesh and the European Union, facilitated by the International Labour Organization) (Bair et al., 2020). Whereas the Accord, which came with very wide-ranging inspections of building safety and remediation programmes, resulted in clear improvements in workplace safety, Bair et al. (ibid.) demonstrate that efforts to impact core labour rights ultimately failed as they were undermined by the Bangladesh government and employers. In particular, the way provisions to increase workplace participation were enacted made independent worker representation more difficult (Ashraf and Prentice, 2019). The Accord constituted a significant advance in governance as it was an industrial agreement, signed jointly by capital and labour. However, its aim at impacting the governance of
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 533 the garment production network remained partial: neither did it include the government or the employers (who saw it as a competitor to the government’s authority to regulate and a threat to the managerial prerogative at the workplace) nor did it change brands’ and retailers’ buying behaviours (Saxena and Baumann-Pauly, 2020). Thus, the Accord moved beyond the unilateralism of the corporate social responsibility movement but, rather than representing a form of private governance that could complement public governance in the form of the Compact, the latter effectively undermined the former in Bair et al.’s (2020) assessment. A different form of public-private governance that is gathering momentum are requirements for lead firms to conduct mandatory human rights due diligence. In this case, governments commit firms of a certain size to assess their supply chains for risks of human rights violations and to regularly and publicly report these assessments. Examples include the UK Modern Slavery Act, the French loi de vigilance and the currently debated German Lieferkettengesetz. While they are legal requirements on large multinational corporations to conduct due diligence and report, rather than agreements on core labour rights with trade unions and labour representatives, they do contain important provisions on supply chain transparency and have extra-territorial effects which are being used by civil society organizations in their campaigning (ECCJ and CORE, 2020). Given garment workers’ lack of structural and associational power, strategies that focus on lead firm practices and the governance of production networks adopt a strategy of ‘follow the money’ which allows trade unions and NGOs to be heard. This contrasts with longstanding experiences whereby solutions the industry veers to are ones that do not challenge capital’s position: it was a burgeoning social auditing industry that was trusted (erroneously as it turned out; Kuruvilla, 2021) to deal with working conditions rather than the active encouragement of freedom of association and collective bargaining. Bair et al. (2020, 982–984) report, for example, that trade unions continue to be prohibited in Bangladesh’s export processing zones and that election processes for workplace representation remain flawed. Effective forms of governance likely have to connect lead firms, the government as well as workplace representation through joint liability as this allows agreements to become enforceable and to integrate worker representation at the local level (without necessarily being restricted to factory contexts and formal trade union organization).
CONCLUSION Global production networks in the garment sector thrive on the differentiation and unevenness across space as well as the range of relations of production and social reproduction. Different sourcing locations and groups of workers are articulated into particular production networks as others are invariably disconnected from those networks (Bair and Werner, 2011). At the level of the garment production network, or a sweatshop regime as Mezzadri (2017) has conceptualized it, cases of economic and social upgrading have to be contrasted with systemic dynamics of exhausting local industrial, labour and social capacities, that is, economic and social downgrading. The state plays a crucial role in shaping permissive regulatory spaces across both the Global North and South, with the informal economy remaining a key reference point (Hammer and Plugor, 2019). While specific historical forms of exploitation are adapted and reshaped in contemporary contexts, there is little in terms of a ‘modernizing’ trajectory: capital seeks out labour and productive capacities and switches to alternative sources once the
534 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work former are exhausted. Conceiving the industry as a regime, Mezzadri (2017, 188) argues that “the sweatshop regime already is our industrial modernity”.
REFERENCES Anner, M. (2019) Predatory purchasing practices in global apparel supply chains and the employment relations squeeze in the Indian garment export industry, International Labour Review, 158(4), 705–727. Ashraf, H. and R. Prentice (2019) Beyond factory safety: labor unions, militant protest, and the accelerated ambitions of Bangladesh’s export garment industry, Dialectical Anthropology, 43(1), 93–107. Bair, J., Anner, M. and J. Blasi (2020) The political economy of private and public regulation in post-Rana Plaza Bangladesh, ILR Review, 73(4), 969–994. Bair, J. and M. Werner (2011) Commodity chains and the uneven geographies of global capitalism: a disarticulations perspective, Environment and Planning A, 43(5), 988–997. Beckert, S. (2014) Empire of Cotton. A Global History (New York: Vintage). CCC (2020) Un(der)paid in the pandemic: An estimate of what the garment industry owes its workers (Clean Clothes Campaign), https://labourbehindthelabel.org/under-paid-in-the-pandemic-an-estimate -of-what-the-garment-industry-owes-its-workers/ [accessed 6/12/2020]. Carswell G. and G. De Neve (2013) From field to factory: tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu, Economy and Society, 42(3), 430–454. Ceccagno, A. (2017) City Making and Global Labor Regimes. Chinese Immigrants and Italy’s Fast Fashion Industry (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan). Doeringer, P. and S. Crean (2006) Can fast fashion save the US apparel industry? Socio-Economic Review, 4(3), 353–377. ECCJ and CORE (2020) Debating mandatory human (and corporate liability) rights due diligence legislation. A reality check (Brussels: European Coalition for Corporate Justice and Corporate Responsibility Coalition), http://corporatejustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/debating-mhrdd -legislation-a-reality-check.pdf [accessed 6/12/2020]. Esbenshade, J. (2004) Monitoring Sweatshops. Workers, Consumers, and the Global Apparel Industry (Philadelphia/PA: Temple University Press). Gereffi, G. (2018) Global Value Chains and Development. Redefining the Contours of 21st Century Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gereffi, G. and O. Memedovic (2003) The Global Apparel Value Chain: What Prospects for Upgrading by Developing Countries (Vienna: UNIDO). Hammer, N. and R. Plugor (2019) Disconnecting labour? The labour process in the UK fast fashion value chain, Work, Employment and Society, 33(6), 913–928. Hammer, N. and L. Riisgaard (2015) Labour and segmentation in value chains, in Newsome, K., P. Taylor, J. Bair and A. Rainnie (eds.), Putting Labour in its Place. Labour Process Analysis and Global Value Chains, pp. 83–99 (London: Palgrave). Jenkins, J. and P. Blyton (2017) In debt to the time-bank: The manipulation of working time in Indian garment factories and ‘working dead horse’, Work, Employment and Society, 31(1), 90–105. Kumar, A. (2020) Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kuruvilla, S. (2021) Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains. Problems, Progress, and Prospects (Ithaca/NY: ILR Press). Lawreniuk, S. (2020) Intensifying political geographies of authoritarianism: toward an anti-geopolitics of garment worker struggles in neoliberal Cambodia, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110(4), 1174–1191. Locke, R. (2013) The Promise and Limits of Private Power. Promoting Labour Standards in a Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Merk, J. (2014) The rise of Tier 1 firms in the global garment industry: challenges for labour rights advocates, Oxford Development Studies, 42(2), 259–277.
Labour and the garment industry in global production networks 535 Mezzadri, A. (2017) The Sweatshop Regime. Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Neveling, P. (2017) Capital over labor: health and safety in export processing zone garment production since 1947, in Prentice, R. and G. De Neve (eds.), Unmaking the Global Sweatshop. Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers, pp. 123–146 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Palpacuer, F. (2017) Voluntary versus binding forms of regulation in global production networks: exploring the ‘paradoxes of partnership’ in the European anti-sweatshop movement, in Prentice, R. and G. De Neve (eds.), Unmaking the Global Sweatshop. Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers, pp. 57–86 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Phizacklea, A. (1990) Unpacking the Fashion Industry. Gender, Racism, and Class in Production (London: Routledge). Pickles, J., A. Smith, R. Begg, M. Bucek, P. Roukova and R. Pástor (2016) Articulations of Capital. Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell). Reinecke, J. and J. Donaghey (2015) After Rana Plaza: Building coalitional power for labour rights between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations, Organization, 22(5), 720–740. Rosen, E. (2002) Making Sweatshops. The Globalisation of the US Apparel Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press). Rossi, A. (2013) Does economic upgrading lead to social upgrading in global production networks? Evidence from Morocco, World Development, 46(6), 223–233. Ruwanapura, K. (2017) Limited leave? Clinical provisioning and healthy bodies in Sri Lanka’s apparel sector, in Prentice, R. and G. De Neve (eds.), Unmaking the Global Sweatshop. Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers, pp. 203–225 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Saxena, S. (2014) Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. The Labour Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries (NY: Cambria Press). Saxena, S. and D. Baumann-Pauly (2020) Off the radar. Subcontracting in Bangladesh’s RMG industry, in Saxena, S. (ed.), Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia. Bangladesh after Rana Plaza, pp. 45–61 (Abingdon: Routledge). Taplin, I. (2014) Global commodity chains and fast fashion: how the apparel industry continues to re-invent itself, Competition and Change, 18(3), 246–264. Tartanoglu Bennett, S., N. Hammer and J. Jenkins (2021) Rights without remedy: the disconnection of labour across multiple scales and domains, Work in the Global Economy, 1(1-2), 75–93. Werner, M. (2016) Global Displacements. The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell).
FURTHER READING Brooks, E. (2007) Unraveling the Garment Industry. Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Hale, A. and J. Wills (eds) (2005) Threads of Labour. Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell). Kabeer, N. (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labor Market Decisions in London and Dhaka (London: Verso). Rossi, A., A. Luinstra and J. Pickles (eds) (2014) Towards Better Work. Understanding Labour in Apparel Global Value Chains (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Seabrook, J. (2015) The Song of the Shirt. The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh (London: Hurst & Company).
45. Imperialism and labour: palm industry in the territories of Black communities in the border areas of Colombia and Ecuador (Tumaco-San Lorenzo) Edna Yiced Martínez
PALM OIL: OLD PRACTICES, NEW FACE The expansion of capitalism through conquest and plunder turned a large part of the world into a larder for the capitalist centre from colonial times to the present. Under different strategies; coups d’état, invasions, economic sanctions, blockades among others, the global south continues to be subjected to its function as cheap suppliers of raw materials for the market and anchored to the primary and extractive sector, such as mining, oil and gas extraction and agribusiness. Agribusiness is one of the main productive activities in the region and part of its success is based on the way in which land is accessed and managed, the way in which natural resources are used and waste is managed, but above all by the forms of labour control. One of these agro-industries is that of palm oil, led in South America by Colombia and Ecuador. The recent consolidation and expansion of palm oil in both countries has occurred principally in the region of the Pacific, and particularly in the Tumaco and San Lorenzo area, a place inhabited mainly by African-American communities, dedicated to subsistence activities such as farming, fishing, hunting, and small-scale mining. For centuries Tumaco–San Lorenzo has been subordinated to imperialist relations of production playing a key role as a provider of cheap raw material and labour force. Nevertheless, the palm oil industry has introduced new forms of control of territories and labour, and has deepened racial-colonial social relationships. Local communities have become completely dependent on the palm oil trade, as well as on monetary transactions, bank credits, and technological packets, elements all controlled by big palm oil companies.
PALM OIL SHORT HISTORY The oil palm variety most cultivated around the world is the Elaeis guineensis (EG) and the principal products for commercial trade are red palm oil from the fruit and kernel oil from the seed. Palm oil is used in the food industry, but also to produce cosmetics, plastics, and “biodiesel”, and is today, the most important vegetable oil for industrial production and has become the most highly commercialized oil around the world (Henderson and Osborne 2000). By 1850 palm oil was one of the main exports from Africa to Europe, particularly from the area known as the Oil River in Nigeria (Hartley 1988; Lynn 1997; Henderson and Osborne 2000). The whole production of oil came from fruits that local native communities collected 536
Imperialism and labour 537 from wild or semi-wild groves, but due to the increase in industrial demand for palm oil, the mere collection of wild fruits was no longer sufficient to meet the needs of the market. The problem for European traders then became how to provide more palm oil without increasing the cost of production; the solution was to establish monocultural operations. In 1891 William Lever, founder of UNILEVER, and the Belgian Government signed a convention which set up La Societé Anonyme des Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) in the Belgian Congo. This convention gave Lever rights to over 750,000 hectares of land where Lever was allowed to collect native oil palm fruits or to plant palm trees to build the necessary infrastructure for transportation. At the same time, the Belgian Government would ensure that HCB had adequate access to land, labour, and palm production (Wilson 1954; Fieldhouse 1978; Wubs 2008). The convention ambiguously regulated the control and use of the land and legalized Lever’s concession of Congolese territories, while it recognized “native” rights to collect and to commercialize oil palm fruits. Natives would work “freely” collecting and transporting the fruit, receiving a minimum daily rate and food rations as remuneration, while Belgian citizens would be in charge of administrative and mercantile tasks. Given the high demand of oil, improving the productivity was a critical issue for Lever. Supplementary taxes, slavery and labour camps where adults worked and lived (Fieldhouse 1978; Marchal 2008), were some of the strategies. In the early nineteenth century Lever controlled a large portion of the palm oil trade and production in West and Central Africa. By 1920 they owned huge plantations in British colonies and the biggest palm oil producer company the Royal Niger Company (Aghalino 2000). Before WWII, industrial production of palm oil was concentrated in West and Central Africa, nevertheless, the palm oil industry started to consolidate itself in the colonial territories of Malaysia and Indonesia. Malaysian and Indonesian governments have been committed to developing strategies to foster the palm oil industry by creating programmes such as the Federal Land Consolidation Authority (FELDA) and the Federal Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (FELCRA). Today, Malaysia and Indonesia produce 83.5 percent of the world’s palm oil and 87.9 percent of the palm oil that is traded on the global market. Working in palm oil plantations is a very exhausting, difficult, dangerous, and low-paying activity; correspondingly, it is primarily carried out by unskilled labour. Companies hire poor foreign marginalized migrants who are vulnerable to labour and human rights abuses, and tend to be overworked and underpaid (Colchester et al. 2013). In Colombia, United Fruit established the first large commercial plantation in 1945 in Magdalena. In 1952, Lee Hines, an ex-member of the staff of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics started the first palm oil plantation in Ecuador (Carrion and Cuvi 1985). By the mid-1970s the oil palm industry was not only a very well-established and prosperous business in both countries, but the impetus behind one of the most major transformations in the relationship between land, landholders, workers, and rural communities the region has ever known. Large oil palm plantations introduced the modern agriculture-enterprise complex, displacing the “hacienda-finca” production relations that had been at the core of agricultural production since colonial times. Palm oil enterprises have been under the control of some of the biggest industrialist-landholders, affiliated to FEDEPALMA in Colombia and ANCUPA in Ecuador. Both federations have been chaired by persons with very close ties to influential political circles and government administrations in each country.
538 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
IMPERIALISM AND PALM OIL AGRIBUSINESS When analysing the evolution of the palm oil business in West Africa and its further expansion to Malaysia and Indonesia, it is hard to deny the imperialist structure and development of this business. However, in revising academic literature on imperialism today, it is in fact difficult to find someone, besides activists and some leftist academics, arguing that the current situation in the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador is a product of imperialist relations or is framed by them, and thus the connections between the situation in West Africa early in the twentieth century and what is currently taking place in the Pacific region remains largely hidden. The reason for this neglect regarding the imperialist character of the palm oil business today could be connected to some of the following facts. First, the generalized conception of how imperialism works, and the still prevailing notion that imperialism is inseparable from huge armies, large contingents of bureaucrats or imperialist agents, large-scale and intensive wars, and a huge investment of capital. Second, the way in which agribusinesses such as palm oil have been studied and analysed. There is a general notion that capitalist investments in land, food and agricultural production represent a new sphere for capital accumulation, a situation stimulated principally by the peak in oil prices and the search for new energy sources, and the accumulation crisis (Harvey 2003) Today, the situation in the region this text is about is remarkably similar to what occurred in West Africa during the establishment of the oil palm plantations. The discourse on the civilizing effects the industry brings to people and the environment is also strikingly similar, as are the racist structure of production and the distribution of profit. But what are the concrete connections between the palm oil business in the Congo or Nigeria in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the current palm oil business in Tumaco and San Lorenzo? What is the connection between the palm oil business that operated in West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century and the model operating in the Pacific today? What is the relation of a production model that operated within a context of struggle between countries with one in which investors and beneficiaries are mainly local and national elites and where production is mainly aimed at supplying national or regional demand?1
UNDERSTANDING IMPERIALISM Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, two of the first authors to analyse the global dimension of capitalism, became pioneers of a world-system perspective.2 Luxemburg emphasized the role played by society rather than regulated wage-labour in capitalist accumulation, exploring the details and effects of competition between capitalists to gain control of access to raw materials, cheap labour, and markets to realize the surplus value (Luxemburg 1913 [2008]). Lenin, in turn, focuses principally on the product of this competition, explaining the reasons and ways in which finance capital, and the monopolist structure over the market, take a predominant position within the system (Lenin 1916 [2010]) While Luxemburg emphasizes the relations between non-capitalist societies within the capitalist system and the conditions through which non-capitalist societies are key to the accumulation of capital, as well as the violence this process contains, Lenin pointed out the way this process occurs inside the advanced capitalist countries in Europe and the USA. Despite the differences, both authors agreed that imperial-
Imperialism and labour 539 ism is an intrinsic characteristic of a system that constantly needs expansion to increase its rate of profit, an intrinsic part, and feature of the capitalist system. Expanded reproduction, in which capitalism appropriates surplus value produced by the wage-labour scheme within a context in which the workers only have their labour power to sell, has not been the basis of capital accumulation in Latin America. In this part of the world, capital accumulation has been based principally on the dispossession of land and the exploitation of natural resources and labour. Here surplus value is created through many different non-wage-labour institutions such as slavery, the encomienda system, and peonage, generating large concentrations and monopolies of land, money, and technology, and higher rates of accumulation for the core of the system than elsewhere (Amin 1974; Frank 1982, Leal and Restrepo 2003). In Latin America, imperialism has been working since the early expansion of the world-system and has maintained itself and expanded through wars, dictatorships, and armed occupation. Yet, imperialist domination cannot be reduced solely to its more visible expressions such as foreign capital, political, and technical subordination. Imperialism is the basis upon which the capitalist system has been functioning. Together with exceptional situations such as military intervention, occupation, coups d’état, and dictatorships, there is the normal operation of the capitalist system, the normal activities of businesses and markets (Marin and Milla 1995). Today, it is mostly local governments who carry out administrative tasks and guarantee the supply of raw materials at the lowest cost to benefit the national and international capitalist. With a synchronized division of tasks, the capitalist class in developed nations defines the production agenda, while their counterparts around the world carry it through to keep the system running. The world-system perspective and its further developments, mainly on unequal exchange theory have focused on understanding the historical configuration of the hierarchical structure of capitalism, especially by analysing the role that the periphery has been playing in the accumulation system. Unequal exchange theory developed in the 1970s by Arrighi, Amin, Rodney, and others, introduces a critical perspective of the trade relationship between the so-called developed and developing countries. They argue that the capitalist system split the world into a core and a periphery, the wealth of nations in the core is obtained at the expense of those placed on the periphery through an imperialism trade system that combines different forms of coherence and pressure mechanisms. Between the centre and the periphery, unequal trade exchange is imposed, where the transfer of products with unequal value and unequal price of production provides, consequently, an advantage to the core (Amin 1974; Wallerstein 2013). In that way, the “developing” countries supply capital to the advanced ones, not vice versa (Amin 1974), while huge parts of the world stay underdeveloped (Rodney 1973 [2018]). Under the imperialist scheme, the exchange value of a commodity is no longer the amounts of capital and labour expended in production but the reciprocal demand of the exchanging parties that determine prices, and thereby the rewarding of the factors (Arghiri 1972). Yet, despite the success of unequal exchange theory in breaking out some myths about how and why some countries grow rich and others poor, this perspective remains fixed to old geopolitics. In that way, it overlooked the internal dynamics of every country, as an example, increasing the rate of poverty in the most developed countries such as the USA or Germany, and the global process of “peripheralization” of the labour force and living conditions, characterized by the prevalence of unequal exchange through expanded production around the world,
540 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work called by David Harvey accumulation by dispossession. It also ignores the local capitalist from “peripheral” countries and their role in the world-system economy. Another problem with unequal exchange analysis is, it does not truly allow us to see how exactly imperialist trade works on the ground, what is being exchanged, or what kind of elements take part in these exchanges. Imperialism must be understood as a set of relations through which the unequal transfer or exchange of ecology, goods, and labour is performed. This set of relations was established since the early expansion of capitalism and had been sustained first, through the direct occupation of land and territories, first inside of Europe and then, worldwide. In Latin America, after the departure of European colonizers, the local criollo elite, direct descendants of Europeans, ruled the continent, and today over two centuries later, their respective offspring and their allies still hold the economic, political, and military power. All the European settlers, criollos, colonial administrators, and modern local elites constitute a ruling class which works together to appropriate individual, social, and collective production from around the world, searching by any means to extend their control to the remote corners of the world. By going beyond the geographic dimension, we should understand imperialism as a multi-geographical structure, with a “global core” and a “global periphery”. Inside this structure, the capitalist class comes from everywhere, is guided by a relationship of collaboration to keep the system running, but also of competition to control markets and get the maximal rate of profit.
PALM OIL IN SAN LORENZO–TUMACO The configuration of Tumaco and San Lorenzo as one core of the oil palm agribusiness has as its backdrop the concentration and monopoly of land ownership since the 1960s, a process that was accelerated in Latin America as a whole in the 1980s through the implementation of the neoliberal agenda. The transformation of the role of land into a productive structure in a capitalist sense has also meant the consolidation of a “modernizing bourgeoisie” which, without abandoning their position as landholders, diversified their influence by becoming at the same time industrialists and bankers.3 This new modern ruling class is present in every major part of the productive sector and not only do they have political, monetary, military, and technological advantages, they also boast a supposed higher moral standard supported by a Eurocentric and racist conception of Colombian and Ecuadorian society in which they see themselves, as their European counterparts did, as redeemers with a civilizing mission, as can be seen in the following text, written by H. J. Upeguí, former boss of Fedelpalma: It was a pure jungle, there was nothing else. In the first period, it was difficult for the natives to tie themselves to a fixed job. One saw them in absolute poverty, but they felt that they got what they needed without having to make too much effort (…) They picked coconuts from the ground and ate coconuts. They would go to the river and catch fish. And they had in the backyard of their houses a plantain and yucca plant” (Ó Loingsigh 2013: 142).
In the 1960s, during the first years of the introduction of the crop to Tumaco–San Lorenzo, the governments created programmes to promote the palm oil plantation within Black-Afro communities. Promising better living standards, the government and companies tried to persuade farmers to cultivate the crop. However, just a few of them were seduced by the offer. In this context, to persuade the communities by any means necessary was a key point. By 1996, the
Imperialism and labour 541 number of hectares under control of the palm companies in Tumaco increased from 14,000 to 30,0004 (Hoffmann 2004; Escobar 2008). The expansion of oil palm plantations also means the expansion of large landholder properties and the reduction of collective smallholders. This situation has direct and significant impacts on the methods of land control and administration the communities have traditionally employed (Hoffmann 2004; Corponariño 2008). In Tumaco, 44,000 inhabitants out of a total of 160,000 work in the palm industry, but only 3,500 of them are permanent workers. In San Lorenzo, approximately 5,000 of the 45,000 inhabitants work on the plantations, but less than 2,000 of them were hired as direct employees. Local people are hired under an outsourced model to do “semi-skilled” or “unskilled”, low-paid activities, including but not limited to conditioning soils and seedlings, pest controls and fertilizing, pruning, collecting, and transporting the fruit. The daily salary earned by a worker performing “unskilled” tasks is calculated on a piecework basis and is based on the kind of task they perform. By contrast, White-mestizo people from other regions perform administrative and scientific tasks. The fruit is collected by teams: one middle-aged man (el cortero) cutting the bunch, a gatherer (papera-mulera) collecting fallen fruits (usually women or young men), and the driver. The price per ton varies from six to eight USD, of which the cortero receives 70 percent, since he does the most dangerous and exhausting work. The average amount of fruit collected by a group oscillates between one and a half and two tons per day, which means the group earns 15–20 USD per working day. Some workers earn part of their salary through a bonus to be used only in the companies’ stores. In these stores the price of the goods (mostly food and appliances) is higher than in other places, but due to the fact that the bonus can only be used in those stores, workers do not have much choice. Many people working on the plantations have suffered severe mutilations, others have become sick or even died because of the working conditions in the plantations and the frequent exposure to and mismanagement of pesticides (Nuñez 2007). Workers commonly complain that companies either delay or do not pay their contributions to the health system at all, despite the fact that workers pay monthly contributions to have access to social security. There are also claims of repression through official or para-official forces on direct orders from the palm companies. Furthermore, the companies bring in and hire people from other regions as a strategy not only to lower costs but also to pressurize and intimidate workers, thus fuelling hostility between people on both sides of the border (Roa 2012). Another mode of engagement with the agribusiness is to become a small farmer growing from one to 10 hectares of palm, in association with large enterprises. Under the “Strategic Alliance”, small farmers receive loans and basic technological instruction and are obliged to only plant oil palm on their farms and to sell the produce to a particular company. These farmers mainly produce under a family labour structure, or by contracting local workers, usually for harvesting work. The income for small farmers producing palm oil is between 400 and 600 USD monthly. Small farmers became highly dependent on cash payments to support their families. They also are dependent on chemical products such as fertilizers and pesticides and technologies over which they have no control. This productive model has also made them the most vulnerable element in the chain of production since they take on the whole cost of production while the companies get a guaranteed source of fruits without assuming any risks. Thus, any changes affecting the crops and especially the international oil markets will affect first and foremost the small producers.
542 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Labour conditions in the palm oil plantations are frequently and strongly criticized, even being compared with slavery. The region of Tumaco–San Lorenzo has one of the highest poverty rates and NBI (gross national product) in Latin America. Monthly wages or incomes earned by workers and farmers do not cover living conditions to reproduce energy spent during the production process, and to support a family’s needs: food, housing, medical care, clothes, education, childcare, transport, recreation, and a retirement pension. Neither do they cover additional needs for the development of a social group such as infrastructure and access to art and culture.
THE MAGIC OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE WORK Classical, neoclassical, and critical perspectives on the economy have limited their study of labour relationships under capitalism to a small part of the whole process, i.e., the production of commodities via the wage-labour relationship, and the wage as the core of the relation between worker and capitalist. The proletariat has been defined as a group of people who sell their labour power to obtain the means needed to live. But what happens when wages do not cover the basic conditions for the minimum reproduction of the labour force? How do people fill the gap between what they earn as wage-labour farmers and what they and their families basically need? How do they meet the rest of their needs which are not covered by their salary? In Chapter IV of the second section of the first book of Capital, Karl Marx analyses how money is transformed into capital, studying the character of labour power as a commodity and the way in which, in the capitalist mode of production, labour power produces surplus value that is transformed into capital. Marx understands labour power as “those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use value of any description” (Marx 1867 [1976]: 270). But, those “capabilities” Marx refers to exist thanks to a social-biological structure of production, and not as a consequence of human actions per se. They are not something intrinsic to human beings, but the product of socialization and also of collective and communitarian work. Together with the production of palm oil, most people in Tumaco–San Lorenzo carry out independent activities to benefit from natural resources. Fishing and hunting with farming work on their plots or as hired labour provide workers-farmers and their families food and basic housing. But there are also networks of communitarian and family-based work, most of them supported by women (mothers, sisters, aunties, and daughters). This work provides material support, as well as childcare, care in old age, recreation, and so forth. Those relations support the workers whether they earn enough money for food or not, or suffer the “collateral effects” of working for the palm business such as poisoning, illness, injuries, and when the person labouring is no longer of use to the companies. By analysing the connection between social reproduction and production of palm oil as a commodity, we can see capitalists’ appropriate surplus produced at three levels: first, they use a nursed, skilled, and socialized living labour force, one ready to work even though the capitalists have not paid a dime to guarantee basic living conditions. Then, during the working day, the labour force produces amounts of exchange commodities, a surplus value which becomes the private property of the capitalist. And finally, by paying less than the labour force needs to reproduce itself to recover the energy used in the production process, capitalists
Imperialism and labour 543 are extracting additional benefits from those elements that meet the gaps between workers or farmers’ income and what they need for basic subsistence. Profit in palm agribusiness is possible due to the appropriation and exploitation of social relations that bring to life a nursed, skilled, and socialized labour force, as well as the overexploitation of living work. A capitalist investing in palm oil receives, on the one hand, the surplus value produced by workers during the working day, and on the other, all of the socio-bio-ecological elements used during the entire production process that exceeds the normal “working day” on plantations. Thus, the relations between the Black-Afro workers-farmers and the whole community and palm oil companies become a “zero-sum game” in which all loss of utility for workers-farmers, communities, and the environment constitute the gain of palm companies. This zero-sum game has been played for centuries and is maintained through different methods of coherence: during colonial times through slave labour, and today through labour contracts, or disadvantageous cooperation contracts, supported by displacement, land dispossession, and armed intimidation. The beneficiaries of this unequal exchange are located in different parts of the world, and the benefits are distributed according to where they are located in the production chain: agricultural entrepreneurs, national industrialists, international industrialists, speculators, and bankers.
CONCLUSIONS Imperialism is not a political project of particular nations or states but is rather an intrinsic feature of the normal operation of the capitalist system, characterized by constant patterns of unequal exchange. Within the geographical and racialized scheme places like West Africa, Asia, and Tumaco–San Lorenzo, constitute the pantry of raw materials and the cheapest labour force with help from local and national governments. In palm oil plantations along with the work done by direct workers, there is the work done by families and the community that guarantees the worker the basic conditions to keep working. In the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador, Black farmers and workers not only have to reproduce their living conditions but also to exceed that which constitutes the fountain of capital and wealth for the capitalist. In Congo, Niger, or Benin as well as in Colombia and Ecuador communities are forced to take part in this unequal exchange because physical and ideological violence is constantly employed against them in the form of forced displacement, threats, and murder, as well as through the disqualification as “uncivilized” or “underdevelopment” of communitarian and non-profit oriented production relations. Through the palm oil industry, we can see the fraudulent character of the exchange between the core of the system, and its periphery, which is expressed by two facts; the unequal distribution and appropriation of surplus value for the production of commodities and the unequal distribution and appropriation of the whole structure of production, which involves nature, human bodies, and social skills. As a result of a fraudulent exchange, the wealth produced by the many is appropriated by a select few. Within the geographical and racialized labour division created by imperialist trade, the personal, collective, and communitarian network of local Black communities in the periphery constitutes the whole universe of social production that is further transformed into private property by local and global capitalists.
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NOTES 1 2 3 4
Colombia exports just 30 percent of its palm oil production. The main buyers are the UK, Spain, and Germany (Mingorance 2006). Ecuador exports more than 50 percent of its crude red palm oil to Colombia. Other relevant pioneering authors in the discussion of imperialism were Rudolf Hilferding and Nikolái Bujarin. Those events occurred parallel to each other in these countries and can be studied in the work of Abasalon Machado, Julio Silva Colmenares, Isabel Cuvi, Pierre Gondard, Manuel Chiribocha, and others. Not all 30,000 hectares were planted with the crop, but were nevertheless the property of large palm companies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Aghalino, S.O. (2000), ‘British colonial policies and the oil palm industry in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, 1900–1960’. African Study Monographs, 21 (1), 19–33. Amin, Samir (1974), Accumulation on a World Scale. London, UK: Monthly Review Press. Arghiri, Emmanuel (1972), Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. New York, USA: Monthly Review Press. Arrighi, Giovanni (1979), ‘Peripheralization of Southern Africa: Changes in production processes’. Review Fernand Braudel Center, 3 (2), 161–191. Carrión, Lucia and Cuvi, Maria (1985), La Palma africana en el Ecuador: Tecnología y expansión empresarial. Quito, Ecuador: FLACSO, Colección de Investigaciones. Colchester, Marcus, Chao, Sophie, Dallinger, Jonas, Sokhannaro, H.E.P. Dan, VoThai and Villanueva, Jo (eds) (2013), Oil palm expansion in South East Asia. Trends and implications for local communities and indigenous people, Bogor, West Java, Indonesia: Forest Peoples Programme and Samdhana Institute. Escobar, Arturo (ed.) (1996), Pacífico: Desarrollo o diversidad? Estado, capital y movimientos sociales en el Pacífico colombiano. Bogota, Colombia: CEREC, Ecofondo. Fieldhouse, David (1978), Unilever Overseas. The Anatomy of a Multinational 1895–1965. London, UK: Hoover Institution Press publication. Frank, Andre Gunder (1982), Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil, Monthly Review Press: London and New York. Hartley, Charles William Stewart (1988), The Oil Palm. London, UK: Longman. Harvey, David (2003), The New Imperialism. New York, USA: Oxford University. Henderson, Janice and Osborne, Daphne (2000), ‘The oil palm in all our lives: How this came about’. Endeavour, 24 (2), 63–80. Hoffmann, Odile (2004), Comunidades Negras en el Pacífico Colombiano. Dinámicas e innovaciones étnicas. Lima: Instituto Frances de Estudios Andinos. Leal, Claudia and Restrepo, Eduardo (2003), Unos bosques sembrados de aserríos. Historia de la extracción maderera en el pacífico colombiano, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), Universidad Nacional de Colombia: Bogot. Lenin, Vladimir (1916 [2010]), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. London, UK: Penguin Classics. Luxemburg, Rosa (1913 [2008]), The Accumulation of Capital. New York. USA: Routledge Classics. Lynn, Martin (1997), Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchal, Jules (2008), Lord Leverhulmes’s Ghost: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo. New York: Verso. Marin, Ruy and Milla, Margara (eds.) (1995), La teoría social latinoamericana. La centralidad del Marxismo. Tomo III. Mexico City: Ediciones el Caballito S.A.
Imperialism and labour 545 Marx, Karl (1867 [1976]), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Mingorance, Fidel (2006), The flow of palm oil Colombia-Belgium/Europe: A study from a human rights perspective, HREV for the CBC, Bruxelles (Belgique). Nuñez, Ana Maria (2007), ‘Los efectos en la salud humana y el ambiente por la producción de aceite crudo de palma africana en San Lorenzo. Esmeraldas’. Altropico: Territorios ancestrales, identidad y palma. Una lectura desde las comunidades afroecuatorianas, pp. 123–150. Ó Loingsigh, Gearóid (2013), La reconquista del Pacífico: invasión, inversión, impunidad. Bogotá, Colombia: Proceso de Comunidades Negras – PCN. Roa, Ivan (2012), ‘El desborde de la violencia Raza, capital y grupos armados en la expansión transnacional de la palma aceitera en Nariño y Esmeraldas’, Thesis, Facultad Latinoamerica de Ciencias Sociales, Ecuador: FLACSO. Rodney, Walter (1973 [2018]), How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London, UK: Verso. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2013), The Modern World-system: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA: Academic Press. Wilson, Charles (1954), The History of Unilever. London, UK: Cassel and Company LTD. Wubs, Ben (2008), International Business and National War Interests: Unilever between Reich and Empire 1939–1945. London, UK: Routledge International Studies in Business History.
KEY READING Kirchberger, Ulrike (2013), ‘Die “Ecuador Land Company”: Ein deutsch-britisches Kolonisationsprojekt in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Kirchberger Ulrike: Aspekte deutsch-britischer Expansion: Die Überseeinteressen der deutschen Migranten in Großbritannien in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Stuttgart, Deutschland: Franz Steiner Verlag. Lenin, Vladimir (1916 [2010]), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. London, UK: Penguin Classics. Luxemburg, Rosa (1913 [2008]), The Accumulation of Capital. New York. USA: Routledge Classics. Potter, Lesley (2011), ‘La industria de aceite de palma en Ecuador: Un buen negocio para los pequeños agricultores?’, Eutopia, Revista de Desarrollo Económico y Territorial, 2, 39–54. Wallerstein, Immanuel (2013), The Modern World-system: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA: Academic Press. Whitten, Jr. Norman E. (1995), Class, Kinship, and Power in an Ecuadorian Town. The Negros of San Lorenzo. California, USA: Stanford University. Williams, Eric (1994), Capitalism and Slavery. North Carolina, USA: University of North Carolina Press. Wilson, Charles (1954), The History of Unilever. London, UK: Cassel and Company LTD. Wubs, Ben (2008), International Business and National War Interests: Unilever between Reich and Empire 1939–1945. London, UK: Routledge International Studies in Business History.
46. Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question in the era of generalized monopolies Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo Crossa Niell
INTRODUCTION Skilled migration is a phenomenon that has gained increasing importance on the international agenda, not only because it refers to the most dynamic segment of contemporary international migration, but also because it inaugurates a new cycle in North-South, or core-periphery, relations. It is a phenomenon closely related to the new dynamics associated with the development of the forces of production and, more specifically, to the way in which innovation ecosystems have been restructured on the basis of a highly-qualified and skilled migrant labor force formed on the periphery of the world system, a labor force that is playing an increasingly important role in the current context of capitalist development on a global scale. To analyze highly-skilled migration in this context is a complex endeavor that requires, inter alia, abandoning traditional frameworks for the analysis of these migration dynamics: ‘brain drain’, ‘brain circulation’ and, more recently, exhibiting a fallacious and unwarranted optimism, ‘brain gain’ (Czaika, 2018). It should be noticed that the most important and dynamic segment of this type of human mobility corresponds to migrants trained in areas of knowledge related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM areas); i.e. areas of knowledge related to the capitalist development of the forces of production. This, in turn, is related to the growing demand for foreign scientists and technologists generated by the main capitalist powers in order to expand their capacity for innovation and the production of knowledge-intensive goods. Hence the need to unravel the restructuring modalities experienced by innovation systems over the 21st century, as a sine qua non requirement for deconstructing the new dynamism of highly-skilled migration, its causes and consequences. Under these circumstances, it is of crucial importance to analyze the architecture that characterizes innovation ecosystems in the current phase of capitalist development, with Silicon Valley at the forefront, where open innovation modalities prevail—modalities that involve a wide and varied constellation of participating agents who interact through complex relationships (direct and indirect, local and transnational) that are regulated within a legal-institutional framework that governs intellectual property rights in favor of monopoly capital and the centers of imperialist power. It is important to underline that the new ways of organizing scientific and technological labor—which we refer to as a ‘general intellect’, using a concept coined by Marx to emphasize the social profile of accumulated knowledge as a productive resource and form of capital—have enabled an explosive growth in the rates of patenting and, simultaneously, an unprecedented concentration of patents in a handful of large corporations that exercise monopoly power in capitalist markets.
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Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 547
CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT AND SKILLED MIGRATION This phenomenon is embedded in a broader context defined by the dynamics of neoliberal restructuring and the predominance of monopoly capital to such an extent as to lead Samir Amin (2013) to refer to the current phase of capitalism as the “era of generalized monopolies”. Monopoly capital not only has an increased presence in the financial and extractive fields, but it has also undergone a profound metamorphosis characterized by the separation and geographic redistribution of the different phases in the production process, taking advantage of both the open possibilities offered by the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the advantages of using enormous wage differentials prevailing between different countries and regions (the so-called ‘global labor arbitrage’). This, in turn, has led to a geographical relocation of sites of manufacturing production and a separation of labor-intensive and knowledge-intensive operations, where the former are frequently located in peripheral countries and regions, while the latter are normally sited in core economies. Without going into greater detail, it should be noted that the manufacturing production process installed in peripheral economies, in addition to being labor-intensive, corresponds to export-oriented maquila or assembly operations that operate with imported inputs and under tax exemption regimes. Hence, far from the export of manufactured goods—which nourishes the fetish of a supposed industrialization of the periphery—what is involved is an indirect or the disembodied export of labor power (Crossa and Delgado Wise, 2021). Along with this, the direct export of labor force is also generated simultaneously through labor migration, taking into consideration that the main effect of neoliberal policies—through the implementation of structural adjustment programs—is the dismantling of domestic productive apparatus in peripheral economies and a subordinated productive reinsertion into the international market in the form of export enclaves, whether based on manufacturing or natural resource extraction. As a result, we have the generation of an absolute surplus population (a concept devised by Marx to refer to an advanced phase in the development of capitalist contradictions), held in reserve in the rural communities of rural landless workers and the informal sector of peri-urban economies, under conditions of strong pressures to migrate northward. It is important to underline that both the direct and indirect export of labor power in the collective form of a labor force expresses new forms in the dialectic of center-periphery relations. Here we refer to the direct and indirect export of labor as a commodity (labor power), the one commodity in the capital accumulation process capable of creating a greater value than itself, namely surplus value. This is, moreover, the specific imprint of neoliberalism in North-South relations, without implying the abandonment of the traditional role of the periphery in terms of the export of raw materials and natural resources to supply consumption in core countries. Furthermore, in contemporary capitalism, this mode of labor exportation acquires its broadest connotation by including, not only low or relatively low-skilled labor, but also by incorporating segments of a skilled and highly-skilled labor force. In addition to unleashing new modalities of unequal exchange, this involves a reconfiguration of dependency relations in a hitherto unprecedented sense: the increasing dependence of core economies on scientific and technological labor force formed and originating on the periphery of the world system. At the heart of the export process linked to the production of a labor force based on skilled and highly-skilled labor is the profound restructuring that innovation systems have undergone over the course of the neoliberal era of capitalist development, starting in the 1990s and gaining momentum over the course of the 21st century.
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SILICON VALLEY’S IMPERIAL INNOVATION SYSTEM A strategic element of capitalist development in the era of generalized monopolies is the extraordinary dynamism that the development of the forces of production has generated through the device and dizzying pace of patenting. Here it is vital to recognize the structural characteristics of the most advanced ecosystem of technological innovation, which has been hegemonized by the United States in the form of Silicon Valley. The materialization of the ‘general intellect’ (the collective body of scientific knowledge regarding the development of the forces of production) carried out in this complex ecosystem facilitates the control of large multinational corporations over the scientific and technological capacity of an impressive mass of intellectual workers trained in different parts of the world, in countries located in both the center and periphery of the world system. This ecosystem handles the interaction of a wide range of agents and institutions that allow the dynamics of innovation to accelerate, reducing the costs and risks associated with independent inventors and entrepreneurs—organized through embryonic innovative companies known as startups—to be capitalized by large corporations through the acquisition and monopolization of proprietary rights and patents (Delgado Wise, 2020). Some of the most outstanding features of what we conceive of as the Imperial Silicon Valley Innovation System are: (1) The internationalization and fragmentation of Research and Development; (2) The creation of scientific cities such as Silicon Valley; (3) Control and appropriation of research agendas and scientific labor by large multinational corporations; (4) The expansion in the North-South horizon of the labor force involved in areas of STEM; and (5) The creation of an ad hoc institutional framework aimed at the concentration and appropriation of the products of the general intellect: 1. The internationalization and fragmentation of R & D under ‘collective’ modalities of organizing and promoting innovation processes: peer-to-peer, the share economy, the commons economy and the crowdsourcing economy, all operating under what is known as Open Innovation. These are ‘extramural’ forms of invention developing on the outdoors of the multinational corporation environment, which involve the opening and geographic redistribution of knowledge-intensive activities, with the growing participation of external partners of large corporations, such as startups, which operate as fundamental cells of the new innovation architecture of venture capital providers, clients, subcontractors, head hunters, law firms, universities and research centers (Chesbrough 2008). This new way of organizing the general intellect has given way to the permanent configuration and reconfiguration of innovation networks that interact under a complex inter-institutional fabric commanded by large multinational corporations and the imperial state (see Figure 46.1). It is worth noting that under this framework, scientific and technological labor developed through startups is not formally subsumed by capital, since inventors are not direct employees of large corporations. Hence, it is a subtle and indirect subsumption supported by an institutional framework established by the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and a sophisticated ecosystem fabric that fosters collective development of general intellect products on a planetary scale for private appropriation by way of patents and another series of private mechanisms mediated by law firms responding to large multinational corporation requirements. This has established a dialectical relation between accumulated social knowledge and its collective
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 549
Source:
Author’s elaboration based on Strategic Business Insights.
Figure 46.1
Graphical representation of the Silicon Valley ecosystem
impulse accelerated by networks of scientists and technologists on the one hand, and its private enclosure and appropriation to meet the compulsion of capital accumulation on the other hand (Rikap, 2021). 2. In recent years scientific cities such as Silicon Valley and the new ‘Silicon Valleys’ have been established in peripheral areas or emerging regions, mainly in Asia, where collective synergies have managed to accelerate innovation processes. Annalee Saxenian (2006) characterizes this process as a new georeferenced paradigm, which moves away from the old research and development models, giving way to a new culture of innovation based on flexibility, decentralization and the incorporation (under different modalities) of new players who are able to interact simultaneously in local and transnational spaces. Silicon Valley appears as the pivotal space of a new global innovation support architecture, around which multiple peripheral links are woven, operating as a sort of scientific maquiladoras
550 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work located in regions, cities and universities in peripheral regions. This gives rise to perverse modalities of unequal exchange, through which peripheral and emerging countries transfer the costs of reproduction of a highly-qualified labor force to core economies and monopoly capital involved in the dynamics of scientific and technological innovation, as well as the potential to generate extraordinary profits or monopoly rents from the products forged by it. 3. Control and appropriation of research agendas and scientific labor by large multinational corporations, through the implementation of various forms of subcontracting, associations, as well as capital risk management established through two parallel means. On the one hand, through specialized teams of lawyers working for large corporations, who are thoroughly familiar with the institutional framework and the patent operating rules imposed by the PCT-WIPO. Under this complex and intricate regulatory framework (see Figure 46.2), it is virtually impossible for an independent inventor to register and patent his products alone unaffected by the predatory greed of large corporations. On the other hand, through teams of lawyers who operate as headhunters, contractors, subcontractors and managers, doing all the necessary maneuvers in order to appropriate and manage the products of the general intellect at their own convenience. This new form of corporate interference and control of innovation dynamics is known as strategic investment. The incorporation of large multinational corporations in this new global dynamic of innovation reveals that monopoly capital operates essentially as a rentier agent that appropriates the products of the general intellect without participating in its gestation and development. In other words, extraordinary profit constitutes the leitmotif of monopoly capital in the form of technological rents, resembling the attribution that Marx gives to ground rent: the possibility of demanding a significant portion of social surplus value for the sole fact of being the direct proprietor of a good, in this case the patent, without it being produced nor reproducible by the labor force incorporated through the production process. Hence, in the era of generalized monopolies, monopoly capital ceases to be a progressive agent in the development of the productive forces, turning into a parasitic entity, which even decides which potentially transcendent products enter the market and which remain petrified in the freezer of social history. 4. The expansion in the North-South horizon of the labor force involved in areas of STEM, with increasing strategies of recruitment of a highly-qualified labor force from the peripheries through outsourcing and offshoring mechanisms. It is important to note, in this sense, that highly-skilled migration from peripheral countries plays an increasingly relevant role in innovation processes, generating a paradoxical and contradictory dependence of the North on the South: more and more patent generators originating from peripheral and emerging countries. 5. The creation of an ad hoc institutional framework aimed at the concentration and appropriation of the products of the general intellect through patents, under the tutelage and supervision of the WIPO in agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Delgado Wise and Chávez, 2016). Since the late 1980s, there has been a tendency to generate legislation in the US in tune with strategic interests of large multinational corporations in terms of intellectual property rights. Through rules and regulations promoted by the WTO, the scope of this legislation has expanded significantly, while the Office of the United States Trade Representative has promoted the signing and implementation of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). As a result of intellectual property disputes within the
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 551
Source: Image adapted from Patent Cooperation Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization, 2015: http://www.wipo.int/pct/es/faqs/faqs.html
Figure 46.2
Patent Cooperation Treaty of the World Intellectual Property Organization
WTO being increasingly complex due to their multilateral nature, the US strategy also includes bilateral FTA negotiations as a complementary measure to control markets and increase corporate profits. The regulations established by the PCT, modified in 1984 and 2001 under the legal framework of the WIPO-WTO, have contributed significantly to the strengthening of this trend. It is important to add that, according to the nature and characteristics of the Imperial Innovation System mentioned above, the United States is listed as the leading global capitalist power in innovation, accounting for 23.9 percent of the total amount of application patents registered at WIPO between 1996 and 2018. However, in terms of patent application, China surpassed the United States having reached, 23.1 percent in this same period (see Table 46.1).
NEW CONNECTIONS BETWEEN INNOVATION AND SKILLED MIGRATION The generation and appropriation of the products of the general intellect in contemporary capitalism demands a growing contingent of qualified labor force in areas of STEM. This demand cannot be fulfilled by the main imperialist powers themselves, requiring the growing
552 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Table 46.1
Patents applied for and granted by country, 1996–2018 1996–2018
Patents Total
Applications 45,361,224
Percentage distribution 100.0%
Registered 19,447,764
Percentage
Percentage
distribution
registered
100.0%
Ranking
42.9%
Subtotal
37,412,593
82.5%
15,696,151
80.7%
42.0%
China
10,497,318
23.1%
3,138,160
16.1%
29.9%
3
USA
9,862,774
21.7%
4,646,826
23.9%
47.1%
1
Japan
8,627,834
19.0%
4,093,992
21.1%
47.5%
2
South Korea
3,534,255
7.8%
1,811,789
9.3%
51.3%
4
Germany
1,406,340
3.1%
357,246
1.8%
25.4%
7
Canada
842,421
1.9%
388,204
2.0%
46.1%
6
Russia
831,702
1.8%
622,539
3.2%
74.9%
5
India
652,043
1.4%
130,933
0.7%
20.1%
13
Great Britain
601,246
1.3%
165,056
0.8%
27.5%
12
Australia
556,660
1.2%
341,406
1.8%
61.3%
8
Source: SIMDE-UAZ. Estimations taken from WIPO, 1996–2018.
Table 46.2
World-wide migrant population with tertiary education, 1990–2010 Year
Annual growth rate
1990
2010
1990–2010
Total migrants*
154,161,984
220,729,300
1.8 2.7
Migrants with tertiary education **
16,245,039
27,781,759
% of migrants with tertiary education
10.5
12.6
* Data from UN-DESA, 2013. ** The 1990 figure refers to populations aged 25 years and above (ARTUC, et al.) ** Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility: The Role of Non-OECD Destinations. The 2010 figure referring to populations aged 15 and above is based on data taken from the 2010/11 DIOC database. Source: Estimations based on UN-DESA data. Tables of total migrant stock at mid-year by origin and by major area, region, country or area of destination, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/data/ estimates2/estimatesage.shtml; DIOC 2010/11; ARTUC, et al.
participation of a migrant labor force coming mainly from peripheral or emerging countries (see Table 46.2). In this context, the United States, with Silicon Valley as its driving force, is at the epicenter of the global innovation systems metamorphosis. Among other things, according to WIPO data, the United States appears as the country with the largest number of patents in the world, with a cumulative total of 4,646,826, between 1998 and 2018 (see Table 46.1). Furthermore, the strategic dominance exercised by the United States in terms of innovation at the global level—which makes Silicon Valley an Imperial Innovation System—not only manifests itself by the volume and pace of patents generated, but also by the fact that: seven of the top 10 and 36 of the main 100 innovative companies in the world are based in the United States; (ii) forty-six of the 100 most innovative universities in the world are located in the United States; and (iii) seven of the 10 most successful startups on the planet are located in the United States (Delgado Wise, 2020). (i)
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 553 In the context of a prevailing extractive/rentier logic laying on the basis of the Imperial Innovation System, the patenting rate of foreign citizens in the United States rose from 18 percent in 1963 to 53.1 percent in 2018. This increase has been favored by the role that the United States government has played to maintain, strengthen and deepen its scientific and technological leadership on a planetary scale through specific and clearly targeted public policies. Hence, in addition to the notable support for public investment in basic and applied science (equivalent to 2.74 percent of GDP in 2016), the US government has distinguished itself—especially since the 1990s—by deploying an aggressive policy promoted by the National Science Foundation seeking to attract foreign talent accompanied by a vigorous encouragement to a highly selective immigration policy. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that skilled migration (undergraduate) and highly-skilled migration (postgraduate) coming into the United States has grown at a rate that doubles the one corresponding to low-skilled migration, as shown clearly in Figure 46.3.
Source: SIMDE-UAZ. Estimations based on the U.S. Census Bureau, Samples Census 1990 and American Community Survey (ACS), 2017.
Figure 46.3
Annual growth rate (percent) of immigrant and native population aged 22 and above in the United States by level of education, 1990–2017
Figure 46.3 shows that the participation of qualified and highly-qualified immigrant labor force in the US tends to supplement and complement the relatively slower pace in the growth of scientists and technologists born in the United States. It is not just a corresponding relationship, but a dialectical connection of increasing dependence on the innovative capacity of the qualified and highly-qualified labor force coming from abroad, so much so that, as we pointed out above, 53.1 percent of the patents registered in the United States were generated by immigrants. Significant data is also shown in Figure 46.4, which illustrates that the most
554 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work dynamic segment in the growth rate of qualified immigrants is the one with the highest level of education.
Source: years.
SIMDE-UAZ. Estimations based on U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), various
Figure 46.4
Annual growth rate of the qualified immigrant population in the United States (percent)
A revealing part of this trend, another fundamental feature in the configuration of highlyskilled immigration in the US, relates to the fact that the bulk of it comes from peripheral regions or emerging countries, as shown in Figure 46.5. In fact, eight of the ten countries supplying the US with qualified labor force are part of the peripheral or emerging world. This increase occurs mainly, as one might expect, with immigrants trained in STEM areas directly related to innovation (see Figure 46.6). It is worth mentioning that there is a strong correlation between immigrants trained in STEM areas and the field in which they work, particularly in professional activities (89.6 percent) and in areas related to innovation (50.5 percent). Another significant fact is that 75 percent of the highest occupational levels obtained by immigrant founders of engineering and technology companies (startups) in the United States are precisely in STEM areas. Considering these facts, it is clear that the restructuring of innovation ecosystems led by the United States—based on the new legal and institutional regulatory framework promoted by WIPO in conjunction with the WTO—has given rise to a trend of increasingly qualified migration resourced mainly by scientists and technologists trained in STEM areas from peripheral regions or emerging countries, which is growing at a faster rate than migration in general.
CONCLUSION With scientific and technological advances arising from the advent in ICT and the so-called techno-science revolution, “knowledge and technological change [are] at the core of capital
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 555
Source: SIMDE-UAZ. Estimations based on U.S. Census Bureau, Samples Census 1990 and American Community Survey (ACS), 2017.
Figure 46.5
Immigrants with postgraduate studies residing in the United States
Source: SIMDE-UAZ. Estimations based on data gathered from U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS), 2017.
Figure 46.6
Percentage of postgraduates in STEM areas residing in the United States. Main countries of origin (2017)
appreciation processes” (Míguez, 2013: 27). Given the undeniable relevance of knowledge as a driving force behind the dynamics of capital accumulation and the growing production of knowledge-intensive goods, contemporary capitalism is often referred to by using adjectives related to cognitive modalities of production. However, this does not mean that the motive of the system is knowledge, but rather that it becomes a powerful means to increase extraordinary profit in the hands of monopoly capital. With this consideration, the figure of intellectual property, existing for centuries, emerges with more relevance than ever, objectifying knowledge and enclosing it as private property. In Bolívar Echeverría’s opinion, “the first task that the
556 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work capitalist economy fulfils is the reproduction of the condition of existence in its own way: to incessantly build and rebuild an artificial scarcity, just starting from the renewed possibilities of abundance” (2011: 85). The legal form of intellectual property, as the exclusive right over an invention through the figure of patents, allows the limitation, the division of knowledge, its commercialization and, undoubtedly, its artificial scarcity. In this context, the growth of international migration and its increasing selectivity can only be understood in terms of the dynamics and contradictions that define contemporary capitalism. Hence, the newly-skilled and highly-skilled migrant labor force cannot be separated from the profound metamorphosis brought about or associated with monopoly capital, both in terms of the geographical redistribution of manufacturing activities and in the restructuring of innovation ecosystems. This metamorphosis is based on the possibilities opened up by the third and fourth industrial revolutions, while it simultaneously gives way to the consolidation of a new international division of labor on a North-South horizon: the direct and indirect exportation of labor power, which acquires its broader connotation with the inclusion of qualified and highly-qualified labor force segments. This, in turn, gives way to new modalities of unequal exchange (Delgado Wise and Martin, 2015). Given the importance of scientific and technological labor in the development of the general intellect, the fact that a growing contingent of intellectual workers in the North comes from peripheral or emerging countries presents a paradox that was unimaginable until recently: innovation in the Core/Northern economies as an engine for the development of the productive forces depends more and more on the participation of scientists and technologists from the Periphery/Southern countries. In this sense, when projected from a North-South perspective, this paradox reflects a potential transformation of traditional dependency relationships in the sphere of scientific and technological labor. This, in turn, leads us to rethink the development process under a new plot line between progress and rentierism circumscribed in the contradiction of progress and barbarism that defines capitalist modernity. Faced with this scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic acquires particular relevance. Due to its magnitude and significance, it represents a crossroads of civilizational or epochal dimensions in the history of capitalism. As Mike Davis (2020) points out: [t]he civilizational crisis of our age, in my view, is defined by capitalism’s inability to generate incomes for the majority of humanity, to provide jobs and meaningful social roles, end fossil fuel emissions, and translate revolutionary biological advances into public health. These are convergent crises, inseparable from one another, and need to be seen in their complex ensemble, not as separate issues. But to put it in more classical language, the super-capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive forces necessary for our species survival.
In addition to incubating a neo-authoritarian tendency that entails the possible establishment of a globalized state of exception, the current global scenario opens, against the grain, a window of opportunity for potential transformation or reconfiguration of the capitalist system. If neoliberalism was mortally wounded, even before this sanitary emergency, its death certificate has now been signed with the pandemic. It is undeniable, in this sense, that we have reached a phase of exacerbated capitalist contradictions that renders unfeasible any solution arising from the same bases of capitalist accumulation. The signs of capitalist reproduction in times of COVID-19 are filled with a trail of uncertainty. On the global scale, the scene is marked by the bitter inter-imperialist dispute between the United States and China, where the route that the world’s leading capitalist power will
Skilled migration, productive forces and the development question 557 follow in the face of Trump’s administration is still unknown. However, above these and other uncertainties, the truth is that the current situation also incubates unprecedented possibilities for social transformation, which are outlined through the very way of social organization facing the virus and its consequences. The possibility of countering the Imperial Innovation System currently controlling global scientific and technological development through the appropriation of patents and the subsumption of highly-skilled labor force—mainly from peripheral and emerging countries— necessarily implies a profound transformation of the prevailing paradigm of capitalist modernity. In this regard, Latin America has provided valuable examples that help visualize possible horizons of new social organization essentially based on the socialization of intangible goods’ production and distribution. Cuba’s longstanding socialist experience, Venezuela’s 21st-century socialism, the Andean experiences of Buen Vivir (Sumak Kawsay in Quechua) or the radical experience of resistance through Zapatista autonomy in Mexico are only some of the many cases that, by questioning the very base of capitalist social relations, offer new paths for the organization and re-appropriation of social knowledge and the reorientation of the development of the productive forces of society. These experiences are the seed of what Bolivar Echeverría (2011) conceived of as an alternative modernity, i.e. a type of modernity that has been denied by capital and that remains as a potentiality for the construction of a new society, a society capable of transcending the realm of necessity and thus making the promises of modernity a reality.
REFERENCES Amin, S. (2013). The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chesbrough, H. (2008). “Open innovation: A new paradigm for understanding industrial innovation”. In H. Chesbrough, W. Vanhaverbeke and J. West (eds.), Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm (pp. 1–14). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crossa, M. and Delgado Wise, R. (2021). “Innovation in the era of generalized monopolies: the case of the US–Mexico automotive industrial complex”. Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731 .2021.1882818 Czaika, M. (ed.) (2018). High-Skilled Migration: Drivers and Policies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, M. (2020, March). Interview with Mike Davis, MADAMASR, https://www.madamasr.com/en/ 2020/03/30/feature/politics/mike-davis-on-pandemics-super-capitalism-and-the-struggles-of-tomorrow/ Delgado Wise, R. (2020). “Unravelling monopoly capital in the 21st century and the role of the imperial innovation system. Silicon Valley and counter-hegemonies”. In H. Hosseini, J. Goodman, S. C. Motta, B. K. Gills (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies (pp. 331–342). Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group. Delgado Wise, R. and Chávez, M. (2016). “Patentad: Apuntes Sobre la Apropiación”. Observatorio del Desarrollo, 4(15), 22–30. Delgado Wise, R. and Martin, D. (2015). “The political economy of global labour arbitrage”. In K. van der Pijl (ed.), The International Political Economy of Production (pp. 59–75). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Echeverría, B. (2011). Antología. Crítica de la modernidad capitalista. La Paz: Oxfam, Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia. Míguez, P. (2013). “Del General Intellect a las tesis del Capitalismo Cognitivo: aportes para el estudio del capitalismo del siglo XXI”. Bajo el Volcán, 13(21), 27–59. Rikap, C. (2021). Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered. London and New York: Routledge. Saxenian, A. L. (2006). The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
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KEY READING Amin, S. (2013). The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Czaika, M. (ed.) (2018). High-Skilled Migration: Drivers and Policies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delgado Wise, R. (2015). “Unraveling Mexican highly-skilled migration in the context of neoliberal globalization”. In S. Castles, M. Arias Cubas, and D. Ozkul (eds.), Social Transformation and Migration: National and Local Experiences in South Korea, Turkey, Mexico and Australia (pp. 201–218). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Delgado Wise, R. and Crossa, M. (2021). “Capital, science, technology and development of productive forces in contemporary capitalism”, Monthly Review, 72(10), ISSN:0027-0520 Echeverría, B. (2011). Antología. Crítica de la modernidad capitalista. La Paz: Oxfam, Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia. Rikap, C. (2021). Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered. London and New York: Routledge.
47. Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour Jörn Boewe
INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATED VIEW OF THE MARITIME WORKING WORLD “Earthrise” is the name of the NASA photo AS8-14-2383HR taken on December 24, 1968 by astronaut William Anders during the Apollo flight. It is undoubtedly one of the photos that has profoundly changed and shaped our perception of our planet and our place in the universe. Anders’ photo taken with a Hasselblad-500 camera makes it immediately sensually clear that the Earth is a blue planet. The world’s oceans cover 71 per cent of the planet’s surface, and are essential to the global climate and ecological balance, to the habitability and existence of life on the planet. At the same time, the oceans are the largest and one of the most important fields in which “man’s metabolism with nature is mediated, regulated, and controlled by his own actions” (Marx and Engels 1968: 192). The sea is much more than an “economic factor”. It is a transport route for people and goods, a reservoir for food (fishing), a source of raw materials (offshore mining), energy (both fossil fuels and renewables, such as wind and tidal power), a place of military conflict, human recreation (or the illusion that the modern tourism industry sells for that purpose) and, last but not least, a place of human contemplation and inspiration. The ocean is the fluid that enables and holds together the economic and cultural existence of humanity as a global species. Maritime trade, transportation and warfare were essential to the formation of modern capitalism (Campling and Colás 2021). A developed intercontinental seafaring was the prerequisite for what we nowadays call globalization – both in the long-term meaning of the word and in the narrower sense that describes the rise of the neoliberal model. And at the same time, as this model has unfolded over the past three or four decades, the conditions under which people work in the maritime economy have themselves been drawn into this turbo-capitalist maelstrom. Since the 1990s, the conditions under which workers in the maritime or ocean-related economy perform their work have been subject to similar or even identical trends: the financialization of the industry, precarization of labour relations, increased de-unionization and the pitting of workers against each other in both highly fragmented and globalized labour markets. New technological possibilities have not mitigated the socially destructive consequences of these developments, but rather exacerbated them. A cross-sectoral, integrated theoretical and political approach to maritime work is therefore more necessary than ever. The practice of trade unions, in which maritime workers may be organized, is still far from a holistic, cross-sectoral and intersectional approach. For example, in the ports: in the course of the progressive division of labour and the splitting, deregulation and privatization of port operations, dockworkers in the classic sense – the workers directly involved in loading and unloading at the quayside – in many places make up only a minority of those employed in larger seaports. However, if one wants to understand the economic and social function of 559
560 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work a port, one must also take into account the employees of ferry terminals, logistics companies, maintenance companies, etc. Among the seafarers in merchant shipping, the most important continuing trend is probably the enormous rationalization of navigation, the resulting extreme reduction of crews and the rapid globalization of the labour market. Today, the states that are home to the main shipowners, the main recruitment countries for seafarers, and finally the flag states of the ships are radically changing. All this has far-reaching consequences for trade union and labour resistance strategies. A cross-sectoral trade union practice needs a theoretical basis in the form of an analytical view that takes into account the complexity and diversity of the maritime economy as a whole. Recently, there seems to be a growing interest in such a holistic maritime perspective, unmistakably in the context of increasing attention to the issues of global logistical supply chains. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable not to anchor the questions of seaborne work in the broader concept of “logistic capitalism”. Although undoubtedly situated in this context, all saltwater activities remain bound to and shaped by a specific geographical and historical-cultural space. But what essentially constitutes this space and this imprint? What workplace trends are emerging at the beginning of the 21st century? And what possibilities for action do workers and their organizations have to counter maritime capitalism with their own needs and goals? Let us first sketch the field we are talking about here, in order to look at the next step at which strategic approaches to organizing workers in the various subsectors of the maritime economy have been developed and tested in recent years and could play a role in the medium term.
GLOBAL MERCHANT SHIPPING Global merchant shipping is the backbone of the maritime economy. Its importance has grown rapidly over the last decades. While the transport capacity (tonnage) of the global merchant fleet was still declining in the 1980s (1980: 672 million tdw – 1990: 630 million tdw), it has tripled since 1990 (2018: 1.98 billion tdw1). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, assumes that, regardless of risk factors such as the trade disputes between the USA and China or the consequences of Brexit, geopolitical tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and climate change, it will continue to grow by about 3.5 per cent annually in the coming years (UNCTAD 2019: 15). Hardly any other industry is as highly globalized as merchant shipping. It recruits its personnel on a worldwide labour market. According to the International Chamber of Shipping, the worldwide merchant fleet – including cruise ships, ferries and supply ships for offshore infrastructures – today employs around 1,647,500 seafarers. This means that the number of seafarers has grown by around a third since the turn of the millennium. Today, officers make up not much less than half of the total, at 774,000, compared with 873,500 crew members. (ICS 2020). At the turn of the millennium, the ratio between officers and ratings was still around 1:2 – at that time, 404,000 officers came to 823,000 ratings (Leggate 2004). This trend reflects the ongoing rationalization and associated reduction in the size of ship crews – especially when one considers that, according to UNCTAD statistics, transport capacities in maritime trade more than doubled in the same period (2000: 784,000 tdw). This goes hand in hand with an increasing concentration of work with negative consequences for the health of seafarers and the safety of shipping. Experts estimate that 25 per cent of marine casualties are caused by fatigue. A European cross-country study has shown
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 561 that one in four seafarers had fallen asleep while on watch. This is not surprising, almost half of all seafarers have working weeks of 85 hours or more. Also, about half of the respondents said that their working hours had increased over the past ten years, although during this period rules came into force that were intended to combat precisely these conditions. Almost 50 per cent of seafarers surveyed considered their working hours presented a danger to their personal safety, while 37 per cent indicated that their workload sometimes posed a danger to the safe operations of their ship (Project Horizon 2012). According to the ICS, the trend towards the reduction of the simple guard will continue. While the demand for officers continues to grow rapidly, the demand for ordinary seafarers is decreasing. The current supply-demand situation highlights a shortage of approximately 16,500 officers and a surplus of around 119,000 ratings. These figures should not be misunderstood as suggesting that marine work as a whole is becoming a highly skilled activity. Simple, hard physical labour remains a component of seafaring that can hardly be replaced. However, automation and rationalization have led to a densification of these “simple” activities and a significant reduction in the size of crews. China, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and Ukraine are now the five most important countries of origin for seafarers (officers and ratings). While at the turn of the millennium it seemed that in the medium to long term, ratings would come mainly from the global South while officers would be mainly recruited from the West, the situation is now much more complex. While simple ranks have practically disappeared in the classic Western seafaring nations, the majority of nautical officers now also come from non-Western economies: the most important country of origin for officers is now China, followed by the Philippines, India, Indonesia and Russia. Crew ranks are recruited primarily from the Philippines, China, Indonesia, Russia and Ukraine (ICS 2020). The majority of shipowners are not located in these recruiting states. The largest merchant fleets are operated by Shipping Companies in Greece and hold a market share of 18 per cent, followed by Japan (11 per cent), China (11 per cent), Singapore (6 per cent) and Hong Kong SAR (5 per cent). These five economies control more than half of the world merchant fleet (by tonnage). The rise of Asian capital is illustrated even more impressively by the fact that Asian companies own about half of the tonnage, while European shipowners still control 41 per cent and North American six per cent (UNCTAD 2019). A particularly rapidly growing subsector is the cruise line industry. It employs around a quarter of a million crew members. From 2009 to 2019, the number of passengers on cruise ships worldwide increased from 17.8 million to 30 million (CLIA 2020: 12). The trend towards “out-flagging” continues is almost unbroken: shipowners register their ships in so-called low-cost states, where less tax is due and labour laws are weak and little controlled. More than 70 per cent of the world merchant fleet (by tonnage) is now registered under a flag that has no direct connection with the operation of the ship. The six leading flags of convenience states Panama, the Marshall Islands, Liberia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malta alone account for 64 per cent of fleet capacity. A minority of seafaring nations, however, operate most of their fleets under their own flags – the most important of these is undoubtedly China, which has 72 per cent of its fleet registered in its own country. Since 2020, the minimum wage recommended by the International Labour Organization (ILO) for the “able seaman” – the most common team service grade – has been USD 20.80 per day. Since these minimum wages are not binding, they are, in reality, rather unattainable maximum wages for many seafarers (Dickinson 2018).
562 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Problems for seafarers who bring claims against shipowners often arise from the widespread practice of commissioning crewing agencies as personnel service providers with the recruitment of maritime personnel. Some of these agencies are purely placement agencies, but some are also temporary employment agencies. In the latter case, there is legally no employment contract between the shipping company and the seafarer (ITF 2020a). Women make up only an estimated 2 per cent of ship crews worldwide, according to maritime unions. Female seafarers work mainly in cruise shipping and on ferries, and are often on flag of convenience (FOC) vessels. Women’s jobs are often among the lowest paid and least protected at sea. Women are particularly vulnerable to discrimination and harassment at sea. This sometimes starts when they take up a seafaring job: for example, in some countries maritime training institutions are not allowed to recruit women for nautical courses. After training, women often face prejudice from ship operators who do not want to hire women. Women seafarers may be paid less than their male colleagues for the same jobs. There is a growing awareness among maritime unions of the issues and efforts to provide special support to women workers at sea. The number of women members in maritime unions affiliated to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) is reported to be around 23,000.
FISHING INDUSTRY However, if we look at the numbers of workers involved, merchant shipping is far from being the largest sector of the maritime economy. Fishery – the most archaic form of interaction between man and the sea provides jobs for many times more people. It employs nearly 60 million people worldwide, two thirds of them in fishing and one third in fish farming. The centre is located in Asia: 50 million people here live from the fishing industry – 30 million from fishing, 20 million from aquaculture. (FAO 2020). The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) estimates that “about 200 million people work directly or indirectly in fish and seafood farming (aquaculture), and production along the value chain” and “livelihoods of 880 million people depend on the sector” (IUF 2015). Most of the people who work in fishing and fish farming are located in the global South. The majority are small, artisanal fishermen and aquaculture workers. Precarious forms of employment are widespread, including forced labour and slavery. While artisanal forms of work remain widespread in fishery, at the same time the influence of multinational corporations is growing. As Tickler et al. (2018) show, thirteen corporations control 11–16 per cent of the global sea catch (9–13 million tons) and 19–40 per cent of the largest and most valuable fish populations. More than any other sector of the maritime economy, the fishing industry shows the direct connection between economy and ecology and the ecological disaster into which the capitalist exploitation of man and nature has led over recent decades. According to FAO estimates in 1974, 90 per cent of the fish stocks were considered to be unendangered in their ability to reproduce, but by 2017 this figure had fallen to 65.8 per cent. In contrast, the proportion of overfished populations rose from 10 to 34.2 per cent during the same period. Continuing overfishing has in turn accelerated the need to upgrade fleets technologically. To catch the same quantity of fish as in 1950, twice as much effort is required today. One
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 563 consequence of the declining yields is an increase in serious violations of basic labour rights, including modern slavery, simply because of increasing competition (Tickler et al. 2018).
SEAPORTS The seaports in Western Europe and the United States were traditional strongholds of union organization. This organizing power has been undermined by various trends for some time now. Containerization, automation and digitalization have meant that most ports can now manage with far fewer employees. This increases the pressure on workers and unions. Although many ports are publicly owned infrastructure, outsourcing or concessions are increasingly being used: large port areas – from container terminals to logistics links and port-related industries – are awarded to private companies, which in turn outsource certain activities themselves. Just-in-time production and delivery requires a constantly growing number of temporary workers, most of whom are employed under extremely precarious working conditions. The majority of unions have so far failed to respond appropriately to these trends, which is also a reason for the declining union density in many ports. At the same time, the market power of the large shipping companies is growing, which in turn are forming ever more powerful alliances and playing off competing ports against each other. Today, three major container ship alliances dominate the market worldwide – 2M, Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance – they control 80 per cent of the global volume of containerized maritime traffic. This process of capital concentration and centralization in the port sector is subtly intertwined with the development and widespread application of new, capital-intensive technologies like large-scale container handling, digitalization of port operations, paperless billing, 5G connectivity, etc. At the same time the growing market power of the “Big 3” allows the use of ever larger mega ships – large-capacity container ships that individual shipping companies could not order from shipyards. This trend has led to a reduction in transport costs per unit, but has also favoured the development of overcapacity. The growing pressure of alliances has influenced the structural development of the ports themselves. Mega ships make special demands on port facilities, fairways and terminals, which has led to a wave of – usually publicly funded – infrastructure investments. At the same time, the shipping alliances themselves have entered the terminals with direct investments. For example, the market share of terminal operators controlled by the alliances has increased from 18 per cent in 2001 to 38 per cent in 2017 (Marinelli 2019). Simultaneously, technological and organizational changes have generally led to a shortening of the ships’ lay times. In 2018, ships spent an average of 23.5 hours in port – container ships spent even less, while dry bulk carriers generally still spent 2.05 days in port (UNCTAD 2019) Ports, authorities and political decision-makers around the world are working towards optimizing port access. For seafarers, the short berthing times are usually associated with a loss or extreme shortening of shore leave and thus means a significant deterioration in quality of life.
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SHIPBUILDING INDUSTRY, SHIPBREAKING AND OFFSHORE OIL AND GAS PLATFORMS The shipbuilding industry as an enormously capital-intensive industry with high investments has completely shifted geographically over the last half century. The decline of the European and US shipbuilders began in the 1960s with the rise of Japan as a shipbuilding nation. In the meantime, Japan has been caught up by China and South Korea. In 2018 a total of 90 per cent of all newly built ships were completed in these countries. China alone accounted for 40 per cent of the activity, while Japan and Korea each accounted for 25 per cent of the market. Despite the growing importance of container shipping, the most ordered vessels are still bulk carriers, representing 26.7 per cent of total gross tonnage built in 2018, followed by oil tankers (25 per cent), container ships (23.5 per cent) and gas carriers (13 per cent) (UNCTAD 2019). While most merchant ships are built in Asia today, the construction of cruise ships and ferries is still the domain of European shipyards. Overall, the situation of many European shipyards is unstable in the face of growing competitive pressure and market fluctuations. For their part, companies are passing this pressure on to employees by gradually increasing the proportion of temporary workers and contract workers employed by subcontractors. A relevant proportion of these workers are migrant workers, often recruited from southern and eastern European countries and employed under semi- and illegal conditions. Research carried out in 2014–15 by the author in cooperation with Johannes Schulten on behalf of the German metalworkers’ union IG Metall at several German shipyards revealed that undocumented employment, social security and wage fraud, and inhumane housing of foreign contracted workers were widespread practices in the industry and despite all union efforts to contain them they are likely to continue (IG Metall Küste 2015). According to IndustriALL’s action group on shipbuilding-shipbreaking, in some countries up to 30 per cent of the workforce are migrant workers, predominately from China, Vietnam, Philippines, Poland and Romania (IndustriALL 2019). Worldwide, the shipbuilding industry employs nearly 800,000 people – about one third of them in China. The rest are distributed in comparable numbers among South Korea, Japan, the USA and Europe. Just like the construction of ships, shipbreaking is a segment of the maritime value chain. A total of 18.93 million tdw were scrapped in 2018, the majority of them oil tankers, bulk carriers and container ships. Of them, 96 per cent were scrapped in the four countries Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Turkey. After China, which was recently among the top four ship dismantling countries, banned the demolition of foreign vessels in 2019, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Turkey are expected to expand their leadership in this segment in the foreseeable future (UNCTAD 2019). “Shipbreaking is one of the most dangerous professions in the world”, writes the action group on shipbuilding-shipbreaking of the global union IndustriALL. Work on maritime scrap yards is characterized by low wages, a lack of safety measures such as gloves and helmets, and often poor access to clean drinking water. In addition, workers are further exploited by inflated prices for accommodation, canteen and medical care. Shipbreaking leads to numerous, mostly informal jobs downstream of the shipyards. In India, women who recycle plastics and metal scrap downstream have been organized by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) (IndustriALL 2019). According to cautious estimates by UN experts, more than 200,000 people work on offshore oil and gas platforms worldwide, of which around 24,000 are in the North Sea and about
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 565 121,000 in the Gulf of Mexico. Not included in this estimate are the associated onshore personnel. Wages vary widely. The core staff are highly paid specialists. Also, rather well-paid specialists are usually those employed in the expanding offshore wind energy sector. Exact statistics are not available here. Self-assessments of the industry estimate that up to one million jobs could be created by 2024 (GWEC 2020).
BUILDING UP WORKERS’ POWER FROM BELOW: CROSS-BORDER AND CROSS-SECTORIAL UNIONISM Cooperation across national, but also professional or industry boundaries was one of the decisive formulas for success in the history of the maritime labour movement. When dockworkers went on strike in Rotterdam in 1896, English shipowners called on their crews to unload the cargo themselves. But they refused to stab in the back their striking colleagues ashore. This gave birth to the ITF. The ITF emerged as an organization to promote practical assistance between transport workers. The ITF soon grew from its maritime and port roots into a union for workers in rail and road transport, and later in air transport. One of its central tasks is the campaign against FOC shipping, which began in 1948. In 1948, one year after the US Secretary of State and Liberia’s President had founded the international Liberian shipping register in New York, the ITF launched its worldwide FOC campaign. It has now been running for over 70 years – longer than the historical campaign of the 1st and 2nd International for the eight-hour workday. Their central means of exerting pressure to force the owners of FOC ships to enter into collective bargaining is the dockworkers’ boycott. It is in the nature of things that a ship is more difficult to strike than a factory. Nevertheless, at the turn of the millennium, the ITF was the first global union ever to succeed in concluding a collective bargaining agreement valid worldwide. The minimum wage for seafarers is now around USD 1,700 a month. The agreement is of particular benefit to workers from countries where unions were unable to reach better agreements at the national level. Sailors on FOC ships without a collective agreement sometimes sail for USD 400 to 600, with considerable disparities between different flag states. According to the ITF research department (as of June 2021), the organization estimates that there are around 24,000 FOC ships worldwide, of which around 11,900 are currently covered by an ITF collective agreement, with a higher level of collective bargaining coverage in the merchant shipping sector than in cruise ships and ferries. The ITF enforced this minimum standard not with strikes by seafarers but mainly by the threat of dockworkers’ boycotts. Every additional hour that a ship lies at the quay hurts the shipowners financially. There is a flip side to the ongoing globalization with its just-in-time-logistics which, if properly addressed, can strengthen the power of organized labour. A key role in the enforcement of collective agreements is played by the international Flag of Convenience Inspectorate, established in 1971, with full-time ITF inspectors employed by seafarers’ and dockers’ unions in major ports. The inspectors have direct contact to crews of FOC ships, they help conclude agreements on ships not covered by collective agreements, and inspect ships that have such agreements. They inform the owners of FOC ships entering a port without a collective agreement that they will receive a guarantee of unhindered passage – the
566 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Blue ITF Certificate – if they conclude a collective agreement acceptable to the ITF. If a shipowner refuses, they runs the risk that their ship will be boycotted. One of the main points of conflict between dockworkers’ unions and container ship companies has been the issue of so-called lashing – the fastening of containers on board the ship. Due to the pressure for shorter berthing times, shipowners try to have the lashing done by the ship’s crew as soon as the container enters or leaves the port. This meets with resistance from the dockworkers’ unions, especially in North America and Western Europe, where many collective agreements prohibit the transfer of dockworker activities to seafarers. The ITF is addressing the issue in a transnational campaign (ITF 2020b). Traditionally grounded in the joint action of dockworkers and seafarers, over the last decade the ITF has developed the joint struggle between transport workers from different professional groups as an organizing strategy. In 2014, at its world congress, the organization adopted its “Industrial hubs programme”. The idea is simply connecting workers and union shop-floor activists who are part of the same supply chains, exactly on the nodes where these chains converge. Seaports are such hubs – but the concept can also be applied to airports, logistic centres and railway freight yards. Workers from road transportation, railroad, maritime, dockworkers, refineries, power plants, steel, food, oil and gas, and warehousing industries operate around a geographic focal point, transforming it into a neuralgic node. The industrial hubs strategy aims to unite workers across sectors so that they can take collective action and support each other rather than allowing companies to pit worker against worker. (ITF n.d.) The approach was tested in 2013 by the British trade union UNITE in Grangemouth, the most important oil port in Scotland. At the time port owner Ineos threatened to close a large part of the port complex if workers did not accept drastic cuts in wages, pensions and working conditions. The attempt was defeated by cross-sectoral joint action. Since then, this has been considered a blueprint for other ITF-affiliated unions worldwide (ITF 2015 and 2015a). In practice, however, the dissemination and implementation of this experience requires a lot of time and resources and is proceeding rather slowly. Despite the ITF’s impressive historical record, its ability to run long-term global campaigns and to establish its inspectorate as an effective monitoring body for the enforcement of minimum standards in the maritime sector, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the organization, like other global union federations, is constantly exposed to bureaucratization tendencies. This is precisely because of the need to reconcile a wide variety of partisan interests and national problems. The organization has repeatedly paid the price of split-offs in recent years. In the area of port work in Europe the most significant of these developments is the International Dockworkers Council (IDC). The IDC was founded in 2000 after several years of industrial action in the port of Liverpool, because the union traditionally responsible for the dockworkers had refused to support the struggle. The Liverpool dockers, drawing on the industry’s deep-rooted tradition of ad hoc internationalism, decided to form their own organization with a stronger focus on horizontal networking. The model for this was the Spanish grassroots union La Coordinadora, which still plays a central role in the IDC today. As Katy Fox-Hodess has convincingly shown in her field studies, this form of self-organization has had an invigorating effect on workplace union activity (Fox-Hodess 2017 and 2020). At the same time, however, horizontal shop-floor networking is also shown to have its weaknesses vis-à-vis the global union federation model, particularly when it comes to sustaining strategic campaigns over the long term. In the medium to longer term, there is unlikely to be a simple solution to this dilemma, which is ultimately as old as the labour movement as a whole. The
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 567 oscillation between bureaucratization on the one hand and spontaneous ad hoc activism on the other should perhaps rather be regarded as the normal mode of existence of the labour movement and a symptom for its persisting vitality in the long run. The political solution to the difficulties involved is probably best found in a non-sectarian search for unity in action. A further step towards intersectoral cooperation was the inclusion of shipbreaking into the Action Group of IndustriALL in 2011. Against the background that only a small fraction of the often informally employed shipbreaking workers are unionized (Iqbal and Heidegger 2013) the efforts of the action group should not be underestimated: coordination and exchange of information on organizing and educational activities, medical camps, political lobbying and public relations, such as its global “campaign to clean up shipbreaking”. Future priorities include improving the participation of women in industry, expanding existing trade union networks, research on multinational companies and their supply chains and an in-depth survey of precarious and migrant workers (IndustriALL 2019). In the fishing industry, the IUF and ITF Fisheries Section have launched a joint “From Catcher to Counter” campaign in 2011. The aim is to implement a support chain oriented organizing programme “to bring seafood workers to the frontline of the struggle for justice, rights and respect” (IUF 2015). As the theme document of the 43rd ITF World Congress states: “Transport workers occupy a strategic position in the global economy in which goods and commodities are moved within and between global corporations in their global supply chains” (ITF 2014). On several occasions, European port workers rejected the plans of the EU Commission to liberalize and deregulate the European port operations. Even the UN Maritime Labour Convention, which came into force in 2013, would not have come about without this pressure. All in all, these experiences show that employees in the maritime industry are not completely helplessly exposed to the demands of globalization. Nevertheless, the development of workers’ power in the maritime industry remains a long process and is threatened by temporary setbacks. The only thing that is certain is that in the 21st century it will play a key role more than ever before for the future prospects of the blue planet.
NOTE 1
The deadweight tonnage, given in tons deadweight (tdw) or deadweight tons (dwt), is a measure of how much weight a ship can carry and includes cargo, fuel, fresh water, ballast water, provisions, passengers and crew.
REFERENCES Campling, Liam and Alejandro Colás (2021), Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. London: Verso Books. CLIA (2020), Cruise Lines International Association, 2020 state of the cruise line industry outlook, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://cruising.org/-/media/research-updates/research/state-of-the -cruise-industry.pdf. Dickinson, Mark (2018), ‘The wages of seafarers’, speech at the ILO sub-committee of the Joint Maritime Commission, on the wages of seafarers, 19–20 November 2018 at https://www.ilo.org/ sector/Resources/publications/WCMS_676174/lang--en/index.htm.
568 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work FAO (2020), The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2020 at http://www.fao.org/3/ca9229en/ ca9229en.pdf. Fox-Hodess, Katy (2017), ‘(Re-)Locating the Local and National in the Global: Multi-Scalar Political Alignment in Transnational European Dockworker Union Campaigns’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 55 (3), 626–647. Fox-Hodess, Katy (2020), ‘Building Labour Internationalism “from Below”: Lessons from the International Dockworkers Council’s European Working Group’, Work, Employment and Society, 34 (1), 91–108. GWEC (2020), Global Wind Energy Council, Global Offshore Wind Report 2020, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://gwec.net/global-offshore-wind-report-2020/. ICS (2020), International Chamber of Shipping: Global Supply and Demand for Seafarers, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://www.ics-shipping.org/shipping-facts/shipping-and-world-trade/global -supply-and-demand-for-seafarers. IG Metall Küste (2015), ‘Dossier Werkverträge. Herausforderungen für Mitbestimmung und gewerkschaftliche Interessenvertretung’ at https://www.igmetall-kueste.de/aktuell/presseartikel/arbeitgeber -und-politik-in-die-verantwortung-nehmen-2230. IndustriALL (2019), ‘Action in shipbuilding and shipbreaking’, accessed 10 September 2020 at http:// www.industriall-union.org/action-in-shipbuilding-and-shipbreaking. Iqbal, Kanwar Muhammad Javed and Patrizia Heidegger (2013), Pakistan Shipbreaking Outlook: The Way Forward for a Green Ship Recycling Industry–Environmental, Health and Safety, Brussels/ Islamabad: Sustainable Development Policy Institute and the NGO Shipbreaking Platform. ITF (2014), ‘From global crisis to global justice – transport workers fighting back’, Theme document of the 43rd Congress, Sofia, August 10–16. ITF (2015), ‘Global unions gather in Scotland for seminar on uniting workers across industrial sectors’, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://www.itfglobal.org/de/node/1114. ITF (2015a), ‘The industrial hub. Unite the union building workers’ power through the Industrial Hub Programme’, accessed 30 April 2021 at https://itfhubs.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/7222 _industrialhub_a5_finalweb.pdf. ITF (2020a), Seafarers Bulletin 34/2020. ITF (2020b), ‘Unions to continue lashing battle to achieve compliance with Non-seafarers’ Work Clause’, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://itfseafarers.org/en/news/unions-continue-lashing -battle-achieve-compliance-non-seafarers-work-clause. ITF (n.d.), Industrial Hubs Programme, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://www.itfglobal.org/ja/ node/9380. IUF (2015), ‘Organising Globally to Fight Exploitation in Fisheries and Aquaculture’, Oslo. Leggate, Heather (2004), ‘The future shortage of seafarers: will it become a reality?’, Maritime Policy & Management, 31 (1), 3–13. Marinelli, Michele (2019), ‘The Impact of the Container Shipping Alliances’, accessed 10 September 2020 at https://www.morethanshipping.com/the-impact-of-the-container-shipping-alliances/. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1968), Werke, Volume 23, Das Kapital, Vol. I, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Project Horizon (2012), ‘Fatigue at sea, final report 2012’, accessed 10 September 2020 at https:// www.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.410317.1542102719!/menu/standard/file/Project%20HORIZON%20the %20final%20report.pdf. Tickler, David, Jessica J. Meeuwig, Katharine Bryant, Fiona David, John A.H. Forrest, Elise Gordon, Jacqueline Joudo Larsen, Beverly Oh, Daniel Pauly, Ussif R. Sumaila and Dirk Zeller (2018), ‘Modern Slavery and the Race to Fish’, Nature Communications, 9 (1), 1–9. UNCTAD (2019), Review of Maritime Transport 2019, Geneva.
KEY READING Campling, Liam and Alejandro Colás (2021), Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. London: Verso Books.
Major trends in work at sea: outline of a political economy of maritime labour 569 Gerstenberger, Heide and Ulrich Welke (2004), Arbeit auf See. Zur Ökonomie und Ethnologie der Globalisierung. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot. Gorski, Richard (2007), Maritime Labour: Contributions to the History of Work at Sea, 1500–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ITF (1996), Solidarity: The First 100 Years of the International Transport Workers’ Federation. London. Oyaro Gekara, Victor and Helen Sampson (2021), The World of the Seafarer. Qualitative Accounts of Working in the Global Shipping Industry. Malmö. Uno, Barista (2018), Close Encounters in Maritime Manila. Manila: Marine Café Blog.
48. Counter-logistics in Po valley region Niccolò Cuppini
INTRODUCTION Planetary corridors, supply chains, global value chains, hubs, circulation struggles, just in time capitalism … . In the last decade the awareness of the strategic importance of logistics for capital reproduction has increased both from the viewpoint of governance managerial techniques and for critical theory and social movements more broadly. A logistical lexicon and imaginary are shaping the very ways in which we are accustomed to think about contemporary capitalism. Logistics is then rapidly emerging as a crucial systemic logic, as a set of necessary infrastructures and assemblages of labour force for capital reproduction and as a site of contestation and struggles. More specifically, two key aspects of logistics have emerged in recent years. On one hand, logistics has come to be understood as a set of techniques applied to production and circulation in the economic sector with the goal of connecting on a planetary scale. In this sense, logistics is increasingly framed by many as a strategic and decisive part of contemporary capitalist economy (Tsing, 2009; Cowen, 2014; Into the Black Box, 2019). On the other hand, with the series of strikes that have occurred worldwide in ports, logistical hubs and logistical warehouses, the series of struggles and protests within the biggest logistics company (Amazon), and the conflicts within the new metropolitan logistics (led by riders and drivers of digital platforms like Uber and the food delivery companies), logistics has become a key node of action for alternative counter-politics. Logistics is nowadays a productive critical lens because it makes possible an analysis that considers processes of capitalist innovation and processes of antagonistic subjectivation at the same time. Logistics, in the first instance to be understood as logic and as a set of techniques, knowledge and disciplines, is in fact one of the vectors that has contributed most to shaping the contemporary world (Grappi, 2016). The interconnectedness that accompanies globalisation and the identification of the current economic system in the form of supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009) and the correlated hierarchical dimension (Suwandi, 2019) shows the importance of managing mobility across space. In the wake of this, the attention of scholars from the most diverse disciplinary fields has in recent years been directed towards expanding the concept of logistics, taking it out of the “technical” spheres in which it had previously been confined. Logistics is the domain of circulation time (given by the investment time to transform the initial money into means of production and labour power and the sales time). When added to the production time, the whole constitutes the turnover time of capital, which measures how long it takes for some money advanced to production to be transformed into more money capable of starting another cycle of valorisation. The length of the turnover time conditions the number of times a capital can repeat its valorisation cycle within a certain unit of time (measured by Marx in a year, today a day would be a more appropriate reference). The mass of surplus-value that can be realised, let us suppose annually, depends on this speed, which is measured by the rotation coefficient. Building a timeless circulation (Rosdolsky, 1977) is 570
Counter-logistics in Po valley region 571 a kind of capitalist dream historically promoted through the development of communication technologies and the credit system. The current era of financialisation and extreme diffusion of communication technologies has made logistics a central aspect. However, the labour dimension has very rarely been taken into account in the theoretical production on logistics, favouring the analysis of management or real estate. Since the so-called logistics revolution (Allen, 1997; Bonacich and Wilson, 2008) of the 1960s, logistics has rather become an organisational paradigm, a pervasive logic for shaping the global present. In this sense, adopting logistics as a lens through which to investigate the tensional currents that redefine our time is a useful critical exercise (Holmes, 2011; Neilson, 2012), in particular, by observing its sites of frictions and deviations from the normal procedures through which it is usually defined.
HITTING THE GROUND – THE LOGISTICAL PLAIN In the last decade the Po valley region (Northern Italy) has become an interesting laboratory of logistical forces. On one hand, huge infrastructural investments and the process of mergers of multi-utilities in the services and energy sectors has taken place, determining concentrations of capital that attract each other according to the logic of the vast area regardless of administrative borders. One hypothesis to put forward, following Deborah Cowen’s argument (2010), is that logistics has played a decisive role in the new territorial conformation that this region has assumed. From an urban galaxy of cities with clear boundaries with the countryside and a definite centre-periphery relationship, to a new geography that tends to disrupt these polar oppositions, building a territory in which urbanisation is diffuse and the centres are scattered. On the other hand, the Po valley region is an epicentre of strikes and workers’ struggles investing in this Italian supply chain. The territory in which the disputes have developed is a strategic area for the movement of goods, defined not by chance in the main Italian newspaper as the “Valley of logistics” (Di Vico, 2014). This area is at the centre of logistics due to geographical reasons, being located at the crossing of the two most important commodity chains in Europe (North-South and West-East). A high percentage of the infrastructure connections between the Mediterranean and continental Europe pass through here, and Italy is the second country in terms of container export volumes from Europe. Moreover, the West-East commodity chain Valencia-Romania passes through Italy and the project of the Belt and Road Initiative has many focal points in Italy. A complex weave of communication routes has emerged, linking ports, motorways, railways and airports, capable of disrupting traditional regional geographies. This is true both from a strictly morphological point of view and from a political/ economic, but above all social, point of view. In the logistics sector, in fact, works an essentially migrant labour force, showing a juxtaposition of a double mobility paradigm (of people and goods). This labour force is always under the blackmail of the residence permit (with a consequent greater “availability” for physically demanding jobs and low wages) and this tension on citizenship obviously also affects the broader territorial composition (Mometti and Ricciardi, 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Logistics thus becomes central to understanding emerging social configurations as well as their implied technologies and labour regimes. When connected, as it usually is, to the movement of people and goods in and out of territorial spaces, logistics also crosses the global regime of border management, and consequently holds broader implications around the transformations of sovereign power and the governance of
572 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work transnational worlds. Just as flows of goods illustrate the intertwining of global and local, so too the workforce employed in this sector bears the mark of this constitutive mobility. If one reconstructs a map of the places where strikes took place in the logistics warehouses, traces and grids come to light that highlight the changes that have taken place in the Northern Italian scenario (Cuppini, Frapporti and Pirone, 2015). They range from the Esselunga (a major supermarket chain) warehouses in Cinesello Balsamo in the Milan peripheral area to the freight villages of Bologna and Padua, from the food hub markets in Turin to the Ikea warehouses in Piacenza, from big logistics companies (TNT, FedEx, Amazon, etc.) to small local businesses. It passes through a dense network of small, medium-sized, and huge multi-national warehouses dotting Romagna and the entire Lombardy region and many areas of Veneto and Piedmont. We come to the metropolitan perimeters of many cities, where a myriad of small companies, transport hubs, transport authorities, etc. have been affected by strikes and disputes. Here, then, is a peculiar and unexpected map that tells a new story of the area, the dense urban sprawl that characterises it today and the networks that run through it. The first protest of logistics workers that made national headlines was in Milan on 7 October 2011. Hundreds of people gathered in front of the gates of the warehouses of Esselunga to protest against the dismissal of some colleagues. Since then, strikes in the sector have followed one another. In Piacenza, in the summer of 2012, workers in the logistics sector of the Swedish furniture multinational Ikea were protesting, with accusations of extreme and exploitative working conditions. In Turin, on 15 May 2013, the gates of the Mercati Generali, the heart of the city’s food trade, were blocked. And then Bologna, Padua, Modena, Brescia, Treviso and many other cities. Territories crossed by conflicts and protests that have continued in subsequent periods until today. On 22 March 2013, hundreds of porters, grassroots trade unionists and militants from the city’s social centres blocked the main entrance from the early hours of the morning: it was the first general strike for logistics. Here, as in dozens of other Italian cities, the warehouses of TNT, DHL, SDA and other major and minor logistics companies remain closed. The strike lasts twenty-four hours and workers move from warehouse to warehouse to support the various other pickets. “If they touch one, they touch us all”: this is the slogan that circulates, echoing the phrase used a century earlier by the American Industrial Workers of the World. In the same years, other distribution sectors in many parts of the world went on strike. Many of the world’s main hubs have been crossed, without any organisational coordination, by forms of conflict. On 20 October 2013, Europe’s largest container terminal, Maasvlakte 2 in Rotterdam, run by the port operations arm of the world’s largest company, Maersk, went on a wild strike. The same thing happened in December 2012 in Los Angeles; in Hong Kong, whose port was blocked for a month in May 2013; in Newcastle in Australia, the world’s largest coal terminal, where they went on for months with alternating and selective strikes; and in Vancouver, where they similarly held for three months. Or the struggles in Amazon’s warehouses in Germany, Walmart’s shopping malls in the US, and the dockers in Antwerp. Sergio Bologna (2013) hints at a common reading of this phenomenon, showing the truly transnational dimension of logistics (and its discontents), demonstrating that the common features on a global scale are a predominantly migrant workforce, with highly precarious contractual conditions, and the fact that these struggles did not take place where the crisis is explicitly manifested, but rather in areas where the crisis seems to have had no impact other than implementing profits.
Counter-logistics in Po valley region 573 Despite the greater risk involved in protest, due to their precarious status in Italy, migrant workers in the logistics sector have expectations that lead them not to accept certain conditions of exploitation. There is a general push to emerge from “subalternity” through struggle. At the beginning of this cycle of struggles, one reason for this trajectory of subjectivation was the “long wave” of the 2011 Maghreb and Mashreq insurrections that seemed to have crossed the Mediterranean shore. A new transnational space of struggle was created in front of the logistical cages known as warehouses. “This is our Tahrir square” was a common phrase. Migrant logistics workers felt they were part of something bigger than the “logistics strikes”. A feeling of being part of a larger movement allowed them to overcome fear of being alone and individualised. However, we are facing a phenomenon that is still ongoing, and this is a peculiarity of the Po valley region. To grasp the reasons that made this happen it is necessary to deepen the working conditions from both the perspectives of the organisation of the labour force and the count-logistical organisation of workers.
WORKING CONDITIONS: COOPERATIVISM, FRAGMENTATION AND NEW CONCENTRATIONS Randstad Research (2020) estimates that in 2018, more than 2.5 million people are employed in the various logistics functions in all economic sectors (trade, hotels and restaurants, construction, industry, logistics itself and other services) in Italy. Of these, 1,085,000 are employed in logistics as a service, another 800,000 are employed in supply chain logistics in industry. One in five logistics workers has a transversal function (with professions that are necessary and complementary to vertical ones, e.g., IT, management, etc.), the remainder has a purely logistics function (such as packer, forklift driver, etc.). Breaking down the employed into representative clusters, it can be seen that 51 per cent of the employed are blue collar workers, 29 per cent technicians, 9 per cent middle and top managers, 8 per cent service workers and 2 per cent digital and robotics. But looking at the employment dynamics, against an average growth of 4.87 per cent of those employed in the sector from 2014 to 2018, we discover a 27.7 per cent reduction in workers in “services”, those most exposed to digitalisation, and a 32.5 per cent growth in “digital and robots” (blue collars +5.7 per cent, technicians +13.3 per cent, managers +15 per cent). Even if there are no satisfactory disaggregated data on the colour line dividing the logistics workforce, rank-and-file unions’ inquiries show that the lowest levels of the employed are mostly migrant workers (SI Cobas, 2018). Racialised labour regimes in logistics are a global characteristic (Wilson, 2021), and Po valley is not an exception. Coming from North African, Eastern Europe, South Asia and Sub-Saharan and East Africa, this workforce is also highly blackmailable due to the Italian migration law (called Bossi-Fini, 2002) establishing the tie between the labour contract and the right to stay in Italy. This favours a systemic process of racialisation on the basis of the hierarchical construction of the labour market. Moreover, a peculiarity of the labour-force organisation in the Po valley region is the extensive use of the cooperatives as a tool for employing and organising it. This is due to a specific history of this territory, that has had a strong presence of the Communist Party and its associated trade union, the CGIL. In recent years, the cooperative form has also become the most common way for employing in the logistics sector in the Po valley. This has led to the creation of a pyramid system at the top of which are the client companies, at the centre a chain of cooperatives and
574 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work at the bottom the workers, mostly migrants, hired as socio-workers (Benvegnù, 2018). This is what has been called the cooperative system, a network of power within which the chain of command of capital over labour is dispersed and production and circulation costs are lowered at the expense of wages. In fact, the pyramid architecture provides for such a multiplicity of levels of responsibility and contracts that the worker loses sight of a single reference point and cannot immediately identify the causes of his or her condition of subjection. Very often the commissioning companies put the responsibility of warehouse management on the contracting cooperatives, while the latter refer to the former for the conditions of economic relations. In this way, there is no clear relationship between roles and competences. Cooperatives also present themselves as a highly democratic form of production within which there is no distinction between those who command and those who execute. This type of “ideology” is used to argue that within companies there is no opposition of interests between employer and employee but only different roles between members on an equal footing, just as it was in the original logic of the cooperative system (Cuppini and Pallavicini, 2015). In the field of labour law and industrial relations there are historical differences between the cooperative movement and the trade unions, which originate from the different vision of worker protection: for the cooperative organisations this is to be found in the instruments of ownership and association; for the trade unions, on the contrary, the main instrument is contracts. This difference is all the more pronounced today in the logistics sector, due to a number of peculiarities of the workforce and cooperatives (among other things, they are very often “spurious”, i.e., not affiliated to leagues and not bound by any codes of ethics to the point of being fully entitled to the status of so-called “cooperatives of convenience”). This mutual distrust should not, however, be misunderstood: Italy’s largest cooperative league and the largest trade union among the “confederal” ones are organisations that have historically been very close to the Italian Communist Party and its subsequent transformations, up to the current Democratic Party. We can therefore say that divergent views have often been attributable to the physiological dialectic between different poles forming part of the same complex system. The reference law on cooperation is now 142/2001, which establishes the mutualistic relationship between members of cooperatives and the provision of work activities. According to the law, members: (a) contribute to the management of the enterprise by taking part in the formation of the corporate bodies and the management structure; (b) take part in the elaboration of development programmes; (c) contribute to the formation of the share capital and participate in the enterprise risk as well as in the economic results. The law clarifies that the member has both an associative and an employment relationship with the cooperative. The only constraints on the latter are essentially the non-occasional nature of the service and the compatibility of the employment relationship with the position of the working member (Bernardi, 2011). However, in the world of porterage-logistics 142/2001 is often violated: in almost all cooperatives, assemblies of members to elect management bodies are not even held (Benvegnù and Iannuzzi, 2016). The very few cooperatives that do hold assemblies frequently convene them at times or places that are impossible for their members. But the violations do not end there. On the contrary, in almost all labour contracts in the sector under analysis, there is no entrepreneurial autonomy or even entrepreneurial risk. The working members of these cooperatives are often managed and organised by the staff of the commissioning company. It is often the employers, or their managers and department heads, who regulate the hiring and dismissal of the contracting cooperative’s worker members, thus encouraging, among other things, the emergence of real “caporalato” phenomena. Moreover, “the problem is that many
Counter-logistics in Po valley region 575 cooperatives are born and then dissolved, once the contract they were awarded through consortia or directly is over. So, the ‘safe’ employment […] is probably less than 7%, otherwise the very high turnover would not be explained” (Bologna, 2010). “The immigrant workers felt abandoned, many of them had come into contact with the confederal trade unions for residence permits or as an intermediary of the employment office, as service agencies. We gave them what they call dignity, which then paid off also from the point of view of the agreements reached through the struggles.” This is what is stated by the national secretary of SI Cobas (SI Cobas, 2018), one of the main rank-and-file unions that have organised logistics workers in the last decade. The confederal union was therefore felt as a “part of the problem” from the point of view of the workforce. This perception was functional to the “enemy-building” work exercised by rank-and-file unions during the development of the disputes, providing a further element of contestation against which to build, in oppositional terms, a common identity within an otherwise highly fragmented technical composition of labour.
COUNTER-LOGISTICAL ORGANISATION Some factors that made possible the cycle of struggles from the point of view of the organisation of the labour force are the positionality and the concentration. Positionality means that logistics workers are located in an “essential” position in the value chain (as the pandemic has clearly enlightened), and this makes more powerful their power of interruption of the work process (Ceccagno and Sacchetto, 2020). Moreover, the tendency of the logistics sector is to create large concentrations of people in warehouses far from urban centres, intent on performing repetitive and standardised tasks, with a strong integration of the human body with the machine body. From this perspective, the almost entirely outsourced labour force employed by cooperatives finds a sort of “neo-Fordist” playground for their action that is able to contrast the extreme fragmentation of the contractual forms (Delfanti, 2021). Furthermore, it is necessary to remark how the racialisation of the labour force has been reversed upside down: from a tool for discipline and government to a source of resistance and counter-action. In the logistics sector of Po valley region, the element of class is deeply intertwined with that of race. A huge heterogeneity of the geographical origin of the labour force is evident not only from the labour statistics, but also in the ways in which workers frequently identify themselves: “Africans”, “Moroccans”, “Bengalis”, “Indians”: this is how one is categorised, appointed by the diffuse command (because it is exercised not in one point but in a network of points) of capital over labour. The uprooting of these people is often countered by the creation of national communities in the places of arrival, which recreate certain elements of the original context elsewhere (e.g., people who speak the same language get together). Through the identification of different nationalities, the labour force is segmented into various groups and specific racialised labour functions. This fragments it and sometimes isolates it into a number of different formations. If “horizontal” segmentation is the first guideline, hierarchisation is the second: a “vertical” organisation of the same labour force, divided and subdivided into different tasks, roles and powers according to lines of identity. This creates a hierarchy both between and within groups. Each group is usually entrusted with certain specific types of tasks, and this differential division also expresses the degree of consideration each group has according to a distinction of prestige, workload and remuneration. This is also true within the groups themselves, where the phenomena of caporalato are very frequent,
576 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work according to a dynamic whereby inclusion/exclusion/repartition is entrusted to certain bosses – who perform a function of direct government of the labour force, points of implementation of multiple mechanisms of subjugation. Another element to highlight is the severe exploitation of the labour force, which in some cases prior to the start of the cycle of struggles came close to slavery: logistics requires efficiency, speed, continuity and therefore exhausting work rhythms, cost cutting through outsourcing to cooperatives, direct and authoritarian command over work. The body-worker is assimilated into a machine, the “human” is converted into a variable within productivity algorithms. However, this can also be turned on its head: what was used to discipline labour power can become a factor of resistance to command at work (Into the Black Box, 2021). Identity processes do not only create division, verticalisation and competition among the workforce – they can also give rise to solidaristic behaviour among workers themselves. Fragmentation is replaced by the recomposition of labour through the unveiling of the functioning of certain dynamics of control and exploitation on a national or racial basis. In some cases, solidarity on the basis of identity even turned into a cross-fertilisation of the different groups, which no longer identified with a community of origin but with a common working condition and struggle (Cuppini and Peano, 2019). This was possible because the very mechanisms of hierarchy and subordination were called into question through demands made for all workers and through the unveiling of the actual power relations that brought responsibility for working conditions first to the cooperatives and then to the principals themselves. In this way, the conflict between the labour force was transformed into a renewed conflict between capital and labour (Bottalico, 2018). While these are, broadly speaking, the material conditions of work that define a specific subjectivity, one has to ask whether these conditions in themselves are sufficient to transform devices of subjugation into processes of subjectivation, reversing the direction of command and the relations of force. Many other sectors have some of the elements mentioned above, but this does not mean that resistance to the command of capital has been generated and spread. The specificity of the logistics sector undoubtedly counts, where the global dimension to which it is anchored and the strategic position within the production process increase the power of the worker at the time of a strike, unlike in other areas of production. However, it is worth mentioning the role of the rank-and-file unions that organised and directed the struggles of the porters. So, what are the multiple elements of union intervention that characterise the actions of these unions? Some of them can be highlighted: (1) use of knowledge and practices, both linguistic-legal and of struggle: the blockades in front of the warehouse gates constitute a strong break with the “familiarism” of the cooperatives; (2) networking: through the connection between the various disputes and solidarity with workers affected by redundancies, a recomposition of the different segmentations of the production chain has been made; (3) general perspective of improving working conditions: they have built, starting from material needs and forms of assembly, platforms for demands that go well beyond the collective agreement. To summarise, we could say that the social cooperation already present within this segment of the workforce (based on informality and on the sharing of similar feelings resulting from the same working conditions) found a common purpose in acting to improve their living conditions within forms of workers’ organisation. This gave a new identity to those who had lost their original identity and had not yet found one at the end, and generated a fighting subjectivity based on the commonality of objectives, passions and watchwords.
Counter-logistics in Po valley region 577 After ten years of mobilisation and organisation of logistics workers in the warehouses of the Po valley region a new political generation of migrants is emerging, apparently not willing to undergo “extreme” forms of exploitation. How come? There are three main factors: (1) it is a composition that on average has had access to the education system, therefore less docile according to the scheme of “rising expectations” that interested, for example, Italy in the 1960s and 1970s; (2) the long wave of the so-called “Arab springs”, which provided elements of imaginary resistance brought back beyond the Mediterranean shore; (3) the theme of the crisis played in the opposite direction to how it acted in other labour compositions. Where there were cuts in working hours and salaries “because of the crisis”, the spontaneous response was “we have always been in crisis”. This defuses the “we are all in the same boat” argument that is often used in other contexts. The rapid territorial spread and the consolidation of the disputes can be attributed to three elements: (1) an almost entirely migrant social composition favours a communicative expansion that is not based on ideological affinity but on common living conditions and community relations: word of mouth within the immigrant communities helps to extend knowledge of the disputes and encourages contact with the union. This is the point on which the existence of a process of subjectification is most evident: if the first mobilisations in the Milanese-Piacentine area were almost exclusively the prerogative of the Arab communities, the last years and the related disputes that have spread to the Emilia-Romagna area have seen the emergence of a self-perception of the porters as a subject “in itself”, which we can deduct from the great variety of countries of origin and different cultures that intersect and collaborate in the mobilisations; (2) the use of social networks. For example, it was the echo of the first mobilisations in the Milan area, which travelled via Twitter and Facebook, that suggested to the Egyptian component of TNT in Piacenza, predominant in the plant, to make contact with the union; (3) the participation of political realities such as social centres and student collectives in the protests, which provided an important support in the implementation of the strikes and in the ability to give visibility and dissemination. The logistics sector presents apparently classic characteristics of a Fordist-type industrial workforce, but on the advanced level of capitalist development. Blocking goods at the gates and striking against the companies define complex forms of initiative capable of delineating a counter-logistics designing the coordinates of new assemblages of territoriality and its social composition. From 2016 to 2021 the struggle has increasingly become harder and harder (with two workers dead during strikes, many unionists jailed, hundreds of trials related to logistics struggles and so on). However, for the future of this decennial process of workers’ organisation, the set of dynamics and contradictions at stake in the Po valley logistics sector annotated in this chapter induce us to hypothesise that it is far from being concluded.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, William Bruce (1997), ‘The logistics revolution and transportation’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 553(1), 106–116. Benvegnù, Carlotta (2018), ‘Nelle officine della circolazione’, PhD thesis. Benvegnù, Carlotta and Iannuzzi, Francesco (ed.) (2016), Figure del lavoro contemporaneo, Verona: Ombecorte. Bernardi, Andrea, Treu, Tiziano, Tridico, Pasquale (2011), Lavoro e impresa cooperativa in Italia, Perugia: Passigli editori.
578 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Bologna, Sergio (2010), Le multinazionali del mare, Milano: Egea. Bologna, Sergio (2013), ‘Labour and capital in Italian logistics’, accessed at www.interportopd.it/cms/ files/2eb181d3-711e-4225-a8df-be8d01475b43. Bonacich, Edna and Wilson, Jake (2008), Getting the Goods. Ports, Labour, and the Logistics Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bottalico, Andrea (2018), ‘Lavoro e conflitti nella catena logistica del trasporto’, Sociologia del lavoro, 149, 185–200. Ceccagno, Antonella and Sacchetto, Devi (2020), ‘The mobility of workers living at work in Europe’, Current Sociology, 68(3), 299–315. Cowen, Deborah (2010), ‘A geography of logistics: market, authority and the security of supply chains’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100(3), 600–620. Cowen, Deborah (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cuppini, Niccolò, Frapporti, Mattia and Pirone, Maurilio (2015), ‘Logistics struggles in the Po Valley region. Territorial transformations and processes of antagonistic subjectivation’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(1), 119–134. Cuppini, Niccolò and Pallavicini, Carlo (2015), ‘The struggles in logistics in the Po valley’, Sociologia del lavoro, 138, 210–224. Cuppini, Niccolò and Peano, Irene (ed.) (2019), Un mondo logistico, Roma: Ledizioni. Delfanti, Alessando (2021), The Warehouse Workers and Robots at Amazon, London: Pluto Press. Grappi, Giorgio (2016), Logistica, Roma: Ediesse. Di Vico, D. (2014), ‘Una guerra nella valle della logistica’. Corriere della sera, January 27. Holmes, Brian (2011), ‘Do containers dream of electric people?’, Open, 21, 30–44. Into the Black Box (ed.) (2019), ‘Logistical gazes: spaces, labour and struggles in global capitalism’, Work, Organization, Labour & Globalization, 13(1). Into the Black Box (2021), Capitalismo 4.0. Genealogia della rivoluzione digitale, Milano: Meltemi. Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett (2013), Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Duke: Duke University Press. Mometti, Felice and Ricciardi, Maurizio (2011), La normale eccezione. Lotte migranti in Italia, Roma: Alegre. Neilson, Brett (2012), ‘Five theses on understanding logistics as power’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13(3), 322–339. Rosdolsky, Roman (1977), The Making of Marx’s “Capital”, London: Pluto Press. SI Cobas (2018), Carne da macello, Roma: Red Star Press. Suwandi, Intan (2019), Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. Tsing, Anna (2009), ‘Supply Chains and the human condition’, Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–176. Wilson, Jake (2021), ‘The world is a warehouse: racialised labour regimes and the rise of Amazon’s global logistics empire’, in Baglioni, Elena, Campling, Liam, Coe, Neil M. and Smith, Adrian (eds.), Labour Regimes and Global Production, Agenda Publishing, pp. 269–284.
KEY READING Allen, William Bruce (1997), ‘The logistics revolution and transportation’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 553(1), 106–116. Bonacich, Edna and Wilson, Jake (2008), Getting the Goods. Ports, Labour, and the Logistics Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cowen, Deborah (2014), The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cuppini, Niccolò, Frapporti, Mattia and Pirone, Maurilio (2015), ‘Logistics struggles in the Po Valley region. Territorial transformations and processes of antagonistic subjectivation’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(1), 119–134. Delfanti, Alessando (2021), The Warehouse. Workers and Robots at Amazon, London: Pluto Press.
Counter-logistics in Po valley region 579 Holmes, Brian (2011), ‘Do containers dream of electric people?’, Open, 21, 30–44. Into the Black Box (ed.) (2019), ‘Logistical gazes: spaces, labour and struggles in global capitalism’, Work, Organization, Labour and Globalization, 13(1). Neilson, Brett (2012), ‘Five thesis on understanding logistics as power’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13(3), 322–339. Tsing, Anna (2009), ‘Supply chains and the human condition’, Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148–176.
PART III PERSPECTIVES ON THE WORKING CLASS FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH: LOCAL REALITIES AND GLOBAL DYNAMICS
Section A. Asia
49. The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics Supriya RoyChowdhury
1. INTRODUCTION In the post liberalization period, India’s developmental trajectory has been associated with multiple contradictions: high rates of economic growth combined with what could be called the crisis of work. Successive agrarian crises pushed people out of agriculture. At the same time, this growing workforce faced a stunted employment scenario in industries. The growth of the services sector expanded work opportunities, but its scope remained limited, and primarily confined to informal employment. Foregrounding the analysis in this broad political economy understanding of the working class in India, this paper will seek to address a related theme, of representation of the workforce in a context of rising informality. Informal work is often seen as the domain of the self-employed, of petty trade and small enterprises. However, in many parts of the global south, there is a rise in salaried wage labor, (construction, global supply chains, contract work in large corporations and in services) though in informal employment conditions, that is, with unregulated wages and working conditions, absence of tenurial security and job-related benefits. In this context, there is possibly a need to redefine labor-capital relations within the framework of the intersection of the formal and the informal, particularly in view of the emerging centrality of global capital and global supply chains. This conceptual platform may facilitate the crafting of a new politics of trade unionism drawing on the institutional and cultural reservoir of more than a century of the historical evolution of the trade union movement. It is generally acknowledged that the benefits of economic growth, which followed India’s economic liberalization in the early 1990s, have remained confined predominantly to upper classes, higher castes and communities (typically overlapping categories in the Indian case) with entrenched access to quality education and social capital. The growing presence of an upwardly mobile middle class provided the outward shine of the growth model, as also manifested itself in the attractiveness of fast changing urban landscapes, linked crucially to global capital and culture driven patterns of luxury consumption (Upadhya, 2016; Fernandes, 2011). Alongside the hegemonic celebration of a rising GDP, and the arrival of the Indian middle class, an undercurrent of criticism of the economic model remained as a minor chord, drawing attention to the exclusion of vast numbers of India’s working classes from the new wealth and rising incomes that technology, liberalization and private capital had brought. This disparity was seen in multiple domains: in large numbers of India’s rural population remaining tied to low-productivity agriculture, in the lack of growth of factory jobs, and that the share of services in employment had not grown commensurately with the rise in its share in GDP (see below). The growing sectors of the economy, such as the construction industry and the global supply chain driven apparels export sector, offered employment, but at highly disadvantageous terms and conditions (Roy, 2017; Mani et al., 2018); a fast growing services sector where, 581
582 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work again, work was unregulated (Gooptu, 2013; RoyChowdhury and Upadhya, 2020; Bardalal, 2021). The increasing informalization of work, defined as unregulated wages and working conditions and the lack of social security, was seen across sectors and categories of employment, but most negatively affected unskilled labor at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy (Srivastava, 2019, 2021). These emerging features that mark India’s working classes, particularly urban labor employed in industries and services, are rooted in the structure of the political economy, defined by a policy framework that has remained consistently indifferent and at times antagonistic to labor. In the following I present a discussion of some of these issues. Section 2 below is on debates over the nature of the structural transformation that is occurring, from rural/agrarian settings to industry and services in urban areas, and maps the increasing informalization of the so-called formal or organized sectors of employment. Section 3 presents brief highlights from the construction, automobiles and ready-made garments (RMG) industries to highlight both the complex structure of employment and challenges of unionization that beset the industrial workforce in the present scenario. These discussions are then drawn on in the concluding section 4 to briefly reflect on contemporary debates on informality.
2.
INDIA’S POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WORK
Emerging literature on India’s political economy highlights that while the contribution of agriculture to GDP has steadily declined, the proportion of the population dependent on agriculture has remained disproportionately high. From 23 percent in 1999–2000, the share of agriculture in GDP has remained around 14 to 15 percent in the decade 2011–2019, while its share in employment has declined very slowly, from 58 percent to 49 percent between 1999–2000 to 2011–2012 (GOI, 2014), and in 2019 stood at 42 percent (Nath and Basole, 2020). Why agriculture continues to harbor workers beyond its capacity is a complex problem, but one obviously related to the nature of industrial and urban growth, which has not produced decent jobs for those who would seek a livelihood by migrating to cities (Hashim, 2009). It should be noted that between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, around 35 million workers moved out of agriculture into non-agricultural occupations, and this was the first time in India’s post-independence history that there was a decline in the absolute numbers of workers engaged in agriculture. Large numbers leaving agriculture, combined with increasing numbers moving from rural to urban areas have been seen as a sign of structural transformation: “the Lewsian turning point took about half a century to arrive”;1 the doubling of internal migrants in the 2000s, relative to the 1990s, indicates that the rewards (prospective income and employment opportunities, as in the Harris Todaro model) have become greater than the costs and risks that migration might entail (Mehrotra, 2019). There were other significant indicators of a breakthrough. As compared to an overall low employment growth rate of only 0.5 percent, the non-agricultural workforce grew by 3.1 percent annually over this period. Moreover, the regularly employed wage/salaried workforce grew by 3.2 percent per year, as compared to an annual decline of 0.7 percent in the self-employed workforce, and a more modest increase of 1.1 percent per year in the casually employed workforce. While noting that these represent real and significant changes in the structure of employment, scholars have questioned whether these have major and positive implications for the conditions of employment of workers (Srivastava, 2020; Kannan, 2014).
The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics 583 With regard to the higher rates of rural-urban migration (the supposed take off to the Lewsian turning point referred to above) a closer look might reveal a somewhat different picture. As per the 2011 census, migration was predominantly between rural to rural areas (47 percent), followed by urban to urban areas (22.6 percent). Migration from rural to urban areas was 22.1 percent, rising marginally from 21.8 percent as recorded in the 2001 census. The share of rural-urban migrants in the population rose from 5.06 percent in 2001 to 6.5 percent in 2011 (GOI, 2017). This is also indicated by the slow rate of urbanization. Despite high economic growth, the rate of urbanization in India – the percentage of population living in urban areas, and the annual growth rate of urban population – has in fact been one of the lowest in the context of developing countries. The share of manufacturing in the Indian economy has stagnated at low levels of both output and employment – in 2011–2012 the sector accounted for only 14.4 percent of GDP and 12.6 percent of the workforce (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2014: 11). Manufacturing employment remained virtually stagnant between 1999 and 2010, and between 2004–2005 to 2009–2010 it showed a decline in absolute numbers of more than 5 million jobs (Sen and Das, 2015; Kapoor, 2018; Statista, 2020). The jobs available to the unskilled urban workforce are mainly in the construction sector. Between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, the share of construction in employment almost doubled, (from 6.5 percent to 10.5 percent). Between 2000–2001 and 2010–2011, the compound annual growth rate in the construction sector was 9.1 percent, and between 2010–2011 and 2015–2016, it went up to 9.5 percent, much higher than in the manufacturing sector (Nagraj, 2016). The rise in the number of construction workers may indicate a rise in non-agricultural, and mostly urban employment; however, work in this sector is marked by low wages and low security (discussed further in section 3). Although services contributed 57 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013–2014, the share of services in employment has not risen proportionately, increasing from 23.4 percent in 2004 to 30.2 percent in 2015 (Basole et al., 2018: 82). Moreover, most service sector employment remains in low-value-added services, with high-value-added services accounting for only about 7 percent of the workforce (Saraf, 2016: 17). When we look at the ‘organized services’ sector, the picture is even more alarming. The most rapidly expanding activities – finance, insurance and real estate sector and IT-related services and telecommunications – which now account for nearly 20 percent of GDP, employ less than 2 percent of the workforce (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2014: 11). As the Planning Commission itself acknowledged, “the process of structural change in employment that one would expect with a period of unprecedented growth in output in the economy outside of agriculture, is not occurring fast enough” (Saraf, 2016: 16–17). The discussion above would indicate that while workers may be leaving agriculture in large numbers, the structure of employment in both manufacturing and services has not grown to match the rising number of job seekers in urban areas. The following discussion on the nature of work shows that the increasing informalization of work further disadvantages workers at the bottom of the occupational pyramid. The formal sector has been defined variously, but a broadly acceptable and working definition could be one where there is a salaried, monthly wage, whereas the informal sector is frequently identified with petty commodity production/self-employment, or casual wage labor. However, the formal sector, as described above, can contain significant elements of precarity, thus to some extent, blurring the distinction between the formal and the informal, and signalling the emergence of the informal in the formal.
584 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work An analysis of the employment structure shows that employment in the formal sector increased at a significant rate over this period whereas the informal sector share declined. The share of workers in the formal sector increased from 11.6 percent in 2004–2005 to 14.3 percent in 2009–2010, and further, to 16.3 percent in 2011–2012. However, a closer look reveals that a salaried wage can incorporate elements of insecurity. In 2004–2005, in the category of those without a written contract (non-farm sector), 67 percent did not have social security, and this increased to 68 percent and 70 percent respectively in 2009–2010 and 2011–2012. Within the category of those who had a contract, the percentage of those with social security declined from 20 percent in 2004–2005 to 16 percent in 2009–2010 and further to 15 percent in 2011–2012. While employers may provide some social security, they may prefer to have the flexibility of not providing a written contract (thus facilitating easy dismissals, or the denial of leave). Therefore, a written contract is widely accepted as the sine qua non of formal/regular employment. The percentage of those in the non-farm sector with no contract increased from 75 percent to 79 percent from 2004–2005 to 2011–2012. In services, the proportion of total employment in organized activities increased from 11.5 percent in 2011 to 15 percent in 2015. In the services sector, the percentage of those with written contracts (tenable for three years) fell from 64 percent in 2004–2005 to 28 percent in 2011–2012. The percentage of those without any contract rose from 29 percent to 56 percent during the same period (Srivastava, 2019) Pointing to the creation of a ‘precariat’ within the corporate sector, Gooptu argues that precariousness refers to much more than job insecurity or informality of contractual arrangements – it includes “the lack of a secure niche in the labour market and the absence of steady occupational and employment opportunities relating to a particular set of skills, thus preventing upward social mobility and a stable career trajectory” (Gooptu, 2013: 11). The discussion above has highlighted the informal nature of employment in the so-called formal sector and the resultant precariousness of urban workers. In the following section, brief discussions of workers in three sectors – construction, automobiles and RMG – provide some insights into the ways in which informality frames the lives and livelihoods of workers, how formal-informal intersections work and the challenges facing unions.
3.
LABOR AND TRADE UNIONS AT THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN THE FORMAL AND THE INFORMAL
Trade unions have typically seen the self-employed as outside of their constituency. And informal wage earners have presented themselves as a diverse and challenging domain: construction workers as seasonal labor, contract workers with unclear and unwritten set of claims, the role of contractors or hiring agencies and footloose workers, particularly in services. Unions, as well as activist Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), attempt to incorporate informal/ self-employed workers in broadly articulated, (and involving larger constituencies), visions of urban social movements, around neighborhoods rather than the workplace, and campaigning for land rights, civic amenities or for welfare provisions, less for wages and conditions of work. This genre of trade unionism and activism has found an important place in the literature on rights, welfare and the poor’s activism. Briefly, the argument that has been put forward is that underprivileged sections of society, particularly informal workers, must now look to the state for welfare and social insurance, rather than to private employers for better wages
The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics 585 and social security, and the vehicle for this kind of activist endeavor could be either political society (Chatterjee, 2008), or new trade unions (Agarwala, 2013), or NGO/unions such as Self Employed Women’s Association (Kanbur, 2009). This literature has looked at civil society efforts to organize self-employed women, where there is an absence of an employer, or construction workers, who may have a changing set of employers. Below I discuss three distinct cases of informalization and the challenges they pose. 3a.
Construction Workers: The Bangalore Metro Rail Project
The case of construction workers is particularly interesting. The construction industry grew at an average annual growth rate of 10.6 percent between 2000–2001 and 2011–2012, and it was the third fastest growing sector during these years. The sector is second largest after agriculture and employs close to 10 percent of the total workforce. Employment in the construction sector as a percentage of the total non-agricultural employment is 20.3 percent (2011–2012) (Srivastava, 2016). Construction work represents a peculiar combination of the formal and the informal. Thus, a plethora of regulative enactments exist on paper, most notable amongst them being the Minimum Wages Act, the Contract Workers (Regulation and Abolition) Act, the Inter-state Migrant Workmen’s Act and the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Act (BOCWWA). Construction workers typically move from project to project, and thus lack a fixed employer. Their relationship to builders as employers is mediated by contractors or hiring agencies. The multi-layered and dense network of contracting agencies makes the implementation of wage and social security much more difficult than in other sectors. Estimates based on computation from the NSS 68th Round for 2011–2012 showed that 96.8 percent of paid employees in construction did not have any written contract, and 97.8 percent did not have any kind of social security (Srivastava and Jha, 2016). The following discussion on the Bangalore Metro Rail project highlights the flouting of rules and regulations by private companies involved in building the metro rail in Bangalore city. Karnataka is one of the industrially advanced states in India, the capital city Bangalore the fourth largest metropolitan city in the country, which has gained global recognition as India’s Silicon Valley. The Bangalore metro rail, opened in 2011, was a state initiative under the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation, with work contracted out to several large private-sector companies. In 2012, a public interest litigation regarding the poor working conditions of construction workers at metro sites, and an inspection report by the Chief Labor Commissioner highlighted that except in six worksites, all contractors employed migrant labor, without having a license to recruit migrant workers under the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act, or providing any of the mandated requirements, such as accommodation, canteens, crèches and paying displacement/journey allowances (CIVIDEP, 2015). The report also stated that there was improper maintenance of laborers’ registers, wage slips and employment cards. In 2013, the Union Ministry of Labor and Employment initiated criminal cases against 15 private construction and infrastructure companies associated with the Metro project in Bengaluru for various labor law violations. This brief narration shows that construction laborers, even those working for a public infrastructure project undertaken by the state, were subject to unregulated conditions of work. In the absence of a union, the violations came to light through the mediations of civil society groups and a public interest litigation. Mechanisms for spreading awareness of the BOCWWA amongst workers are weak, such that in most states the percentage of registered workers who
586 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work are aware of the scheme is low. In another case study of construction workers in the National Capital Region (NCR) region, 36 percent of the workers recorded that their wages were low and inadequate, 24 percent said that they were forced to work for very long hours. In the same study, 85 percent of the workers said that there was no union or labor organization at the workplace, and 99 percent recorded that they were not aware of any of the regulatory laws applicable to workers in this sector (Srivastava and Jha, 2016). 3b.
Automobile Workers in the NCR Region
The NCR region – comprising several districts of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan – contributes 30 percent of total vehicle production in India (Miglani, 2019). As economic liberalization opened up the country’s industrial space for multinational companies, automobile giants like Maruti Suzuki, Honda Motors, Toyota Kirloskar, Hyundai Motors, BMW and many others set up shop in the NCR region, with a strong export drive. With the emergence of a large component supplier system, the NCR region was transformed into an auto industry cluster, one of the several industrial clusters in the region. Labor from neighboring districts constitutes the industry’s workforce. The automotive industry in this region demonstrates that global capital, advanced manufacturing technologies and state-of-the-art industrial infrastructure co-exist with and thrive on the use of an unregulated and highly vulnerable labor force. The widely reported labor uprisings in the Maruti Suzuki factory in Manesar, Haryana, are a case in point (Barnes, 2018; Monaco, 2017). The Manesar factory employs 2,450 workers of which 1,100 are permanent workers, and the rest are either trainee/apprentices or contract workers. Wages vary from INR 25,000 per month for a permanent worker, to INR 4,600 – INR 18,000 per month for contract workers. The large presence of contract workers prevents regular revision of wages of the permanent workers, while contract workers are denied a decent wage or any other benefits. In the backdrop of labor discontent, wage negotiations had begun in April 2012, with the then recently formed Maruti Suzuki Workers Union. This process, however, was cut short by the violence in the factory leading to the death of a general manager, arrests of all union members and the final legal verdict of life imprisonment for thirteen workers and five years’ imprisonment for four workers. Following this, some 500 permanent workers were dismissed. While the constant supply of labor from the surrounding rural areas pushes down wages, the combination of global capital, the neo-liberal state’s developmental paradigm which refuses protection to labor, and the absence of unions frame the induction of first generation of workers from rural areas into global supply chains located in the global south. This is further illustrated in the case of export garment workers, discussed below. 3c.
Global Supply Chains: Women Workers in the Ready-Made Garments (RMG) Industry in Bangalore
The production of RMG for export grew rapidly in the global south following the movement of the industry from western industrial countries to East Asia, and finally to South Asia, China and the Middle East, in search for relatively cheap labor. Garment factories in developing countries produce for multinational brands, whose distribution and marketing channels remain in the west. World garment exports jumped from USD 412 billion in 2011 to USD 708 billion in 2014. India’s exports of RMG increased exponentially from USD 8.5 million in 2005–2006,
The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics 587 to USD 40 million in 2014. The RMG industry is predominantly labor intensive and informal: 96.57 percent of women and 86.39 percent of men work in the unorganized sector, concentrated predominantly in the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and in the NCR region in north India (Deshpande, 2015; Stotz and Keane, 2015). In Bangalore, one of the largest hubs of RMG production, garment factories employ close to half a million women workers. Several studies have found that over 25 percent of the workforce do not get paid even the minimum wage, working conditions are extremely coercive as shop floor supervisors drive workers to achieve maximum productivity within a given time, overtime work is frequently unpaid, and there are few avenues of occupational mobility (Mani et al., 2018; RoyChowdhury, 2019). Workers frequently quit work, to go into part-time or home-based work, as factory working conditions are perceived to be highly coercive. Thus, a footloose workforce is created, making the task of successful union activism hugely more difficult. Amongst first generation, semi-rural, unskilled and predominantly female workers, unionization remains at not more than 10 percent of the workforce (RoyChowdhury, 2010, 2019). The declining rates of female employment in India have generated much debate, beyond the scope of this paper. However, in this particular context it is interesting to note that while the garments export industry brings much needed employment to unskilled women, many of whom migrate from rural or semi-rural areas, their incorporation into this global supply chain happens on terms and conditions which are highly disadvantageous to them. To conclude this section, despite a plethora of welfare and protective legislation, construction workers remain casual, daily wage earners, frequently seasonal migrants, with little awareness or access to their claims to social security and other benefits. Both garment and automobiles represent supposedly formal or organized sectors, employing regular, salaried workers. However, a closer look reveals patterns of labor informalization: variation in wage packages between contract and regular workers, the absence of job security even for permanent workers, and the lack of grievance redressal mechanisms in the absence of effective unions. Even as industrial employment has stagnated during the period of liberalization-led growth, these sectors have provided expanding opportunities for blue-collar work; however, unfortunately in the absence of state regulation and union activism, a highly vulnerable labor force has been created.
4.
CONCLUSION: INFORMALITY AND EXCLUSION
Structural diversities, as well as complex social differentiations characterize the informal sector and informal employment. At the same time, the challenge remains of how best to theorize informality, with respect to its universal dimensions, both in relation to capitalism, and with regard to the question of mobilization and collective action of a highly disparate workforce. Within neo-classical economics, modernization theories, as well as Marxist/ dependency studies, informality, as a concept, has long been caught in binaries, represented as the ‘other’ of capitalism, which would in time dissolve into the broader framework of capitalism (Moser, 1978; Tokman, 1978). The impermanent binary was eventually replaced in contemporary theorizations of informality as structured exclusion. Saskia Sassen highlighted that technology and finance driven global cities are marked by disparities between very highand very low-income jobs (Sassen, 2005) Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes’ contribution was to show that informality is not merely a harking back to forms of production prevalent in
588 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the early stages of capitalism, but to see it as a function of global capitalism as it is emerging in the present era (Castells and Portes, 1987). Scholars in the global south similarly represented informality as an integral part of capitalism; in such theorizations, surplus labor cannot even be the reserve army; it must be permanently relegated to the structural exclusion of petty production (Sanyal, 2007). More recently, the structured binary thesis has been critiqued by scholars who highlight interlinkages between the formal and the informal or between capital and non-capital (Gidwani and Wainwright, 2014). The self-employed become central to these theories, as petty commodity producers (Roy, 2017), or as a highly diverse and complex structure of non-factory labor in global supply chains, producing in small workshops, as individual home workers, or as a family unit (Mezzadri and Fan, 2018). Highlighting these diversities within informal work, Mezzadri and Fan (also Pattenden, 2012; Lerche, 2010) deployed the concept of ‘classes of labor’ moving away from the monistic capital-labor framework. In the domains of petty production and disguised wage work, the fault lines of class conflict often remain concealed, and bringing this hugely varied world of labor under unifying umbrellas of activism provides a formidable challenge. But perhaps more crucially, what is being overlooked to some extent is the large and ever-expanding world of wage labor, now in the domain of the informal and unregulated. In India, as has been highlighted in section 2, there is a steady rise in the percentage of salaried wage earners (as compared to the self-employed and casual wage earners), and much of this domain is informal in nature. As the brief case studies revealed, wage earners are marked with the classic features of informal work: the absence of regulated income, benefits, security of tenure and collective organizations. The task of developing a common language and grammar of worker activism could perhaps start at the level of informal wage earners, spread across sectors, employed under different terms and conditions, spanning salaried and casual earners, but with the commonality offered by a wage relationship which provides an anchor for imagining new forms of state regulation and collective organizing around bargaining, negotiations and resistance. Given the fluidity of lines between wage earners and self-employed workers, across economic and social identities, the eventual task of addressing the issues of self-employed workers would perhaps be defined by the dynamics of organisation of informal wage earners and the gains thereof.
NOTE 1
Named after the Economist Arthur Lewis, briefly, the turning point represents the conjuncture at which surplus rural labor dwindles (due to movement to urban areas) and wages start to rise.
REFERENCES Agarwala, R. (2013) Informal Labour, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Baradalal, K. (2021) “Professional Identities and Servile Realities: Aspirational Labour in Delhi Malls”, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 55(2). Barnes, T. (2018) Making Cars in the New India: Precarity and Informality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Basole, A., Shrivastava, A., Abraham, R. and Jayadev, A. (2018) State of Working India Report 2018. Azim Premji University. https://cse.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/state-of-working-india/
The political economy of labor informality in India: trends, theories and politics 589 Castells, M. and Portes, A. (1987) “The World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy”, in Castells, M. and Portes, A. (eds.), The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Chandrasekhar, C.P. and Ghosh, J. (2014) Growth, Employment Patterns and Inequality in Asia: A Case Study of India. ILO Working Papers 994869853402676, International Labour Organization. https:// ideas.repec.org/p/ilo/ilowps/994869853402676.html (last accessed 09-09-19). Chatterjee, P. (2008) “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India”, Economic and Political Weekly, April 19. CIVIDEP, India (2015) Study on Labour Rights Violations and the Availability and Effectiveness of Grievance Mechanism in the Construction Sector in Bangalore. Deshpande, P. (2015) “Garments Export Industry in India: A Comparison of Pre- and Post- Liberalization Performance”, Arts and Social Science Journal, 6(2). Ferenandes, L. (2011) “Hegemony and Inequality: Theoretical Reflections on India’s ‘New’ Middle Class”, in Ray, R. and Baviskar, A. (eds.), Elite and Everyman, New Delhi: Routledge. Gidwani, V. and Wainwright, J. (2014) “On Capital, Non-Capital and Development: After Kalyan Sanyal”, Economic and Political Weekly, 49(34), (August), 40–47. Gooptu, N. (2013) (ed) Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media, London: Routledge. Government of India (GoI) (2014) Economic Survey of India 2013–14. Ministry of Finance. Retrieved from: https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/budget2014-2015/survey.asp. Government of India (GoI) (2017) Report of the Working Group on Migration. Hashim, S. (2009) India Urban Poverty Report, UNDP and Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India. Kanbur, R. (2009) “Conceptualizing Informality: Regulation and Enforcement”, IZA Discussion Paper No. 4186, Cornell University, Centre for Economic Policy Research. Kannan, K. (2014) “Workers Leave Agriculture, but Where Are They Headed”, India Together, 14 November. Kapoor, R. (2018) Understanding the Performance of India’s Manufacturing Sector: Evidence from Firm Level Data, Working Paper, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University. Lerche, J. (2010) From Rural Labour to Classes of Labour: Class Fragmentation, Caste and Class Struggle at the Bottom of the Indian Labour Hierarchy, pp. 66–87, London: Routledge. Mani, M., Matthew, B. and Bhattacharya, D. (2018) “Critiquing the Statutory Minimum Wage: A Case of the Export Garments Sector”, Bangalore: Institute for Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Occasional Paper Series 5/18. Mehrotra, S. (2019) “Mega Challenges of Rural-Urban Migration”, Business Line, October 3, 2019. Mezzadri, A. and Fan L. (2018) “Classes of Labour at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China”, Development and Change, 48(4), 1036–1063. Miglani, S. (2019) “The Growth of the Indian Automobile Industry: Analysis of the Role of Government Policy and other Enabling Factors”, in Liu, K.C. and Racheria, U.S. (eds.), Innovation, Economic Development and Intellectual Property in India and China, ARCIALA Series on Intellectual Assets and Law in Asia, Singapore: Springer. Monaco, L. (2017) “Where Lean May Shake: Challenges to Casualisation in the Indian Auto Industry”, Global Labour Journal, 8(2). Moser, C. (1978) “Informal Sector or Petty Commodity Production: Dualism or Dependence in Urban Development”, World Development, 6(9–10), September–October, 1040–1064. Nagraj, R. (2016) “Employment Boom in Construction: A Tentative Explanation”, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Report. Nath, P. and Basole, A. (2020) “Did Employment Rise or fall in India Between 2011 and 2017: Estimating Absolute changes in the Workforce”, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Working Paper 29, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Pattenden, J. (2012) “Migrating Between Rural Raichur and Boomtown Bangalore: Class Relations and the Circulation of Labour in South India”, Global Labour Journal, 3(1). Roy, S. (2017) “Informality and New Liberalism: Changing Norms and Capital’s Control”, in Kannan, K.P., Mamgain, R.P. and Rustagi, P. (eds.), Labour and Development: Essays in Honour of Prof. T.S. Papola, New Delhi: Academic Foundation.
590 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work RoyChowdhury, S. (2010) “Women in the Unorganized Sector”, in Oomen, T.K. (ed), Social Movements II, Concerns of Equity and Security, (Oxford in India Readings in Sociology and Social Anthropology), India: OUP. RoyChowdhury, S. (2019) Women Workers in the Export Ready-Made Garment Industry, Working Paper No 12, CWDS and ILO, New Delhi. RoyChowdhury, S. and Upadhya, C. (2020) India’s Changing City Scapes: Work, Migration and Livelihoods, unpublished report, ISEC and NIAS, Bangalore. Sanyal, K. (2007) Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, New Delhi: Routledge India. Saraf, R. (2016) “Skill training or Nipping Potential in the Bud?” Economic and Political Weekly, 51(18), 16–19. Sassen, S. (2005) “The Global City: Introducing a Concept”, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11(2), 27–43. Sen, K. and Das, D. and (2015) “Where Have All the Workers Gone? Puzzle of Declining Labour Intensity in Indian Organized Manufacturing”, Economic and Political Weekly, 50(23). Srivastava, R. (2019) “Emerging Dynamics of Labour Market Inequality in India: Migration, Inequality, Segmentation and Discrimination”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, (62), 147–171. Srivastava, R. (2020) Understanding Circular Migration in India: Its Nature and Dimensions, the Crisis Under Lockdown and the Response of the State, Working Paper 04/2020, Centre for Employment Studies, Working Paper Series, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. Srivastava, R. (2021) “Labour Migration, Vulnerability and Development Policy: the Pandemic as Inflexion Point?”, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 18 January, http://doi.org/10.1007/341627 -020-00301 (last accessed 20/6/22). Srivastava, R. and Jha, A. (2016) Capital and Labour Standards in the Organized Construction Industry in India, CSRD, JNU. Srivastava, R. and Sutradhar, R. (2016) “Labour Migration to the Construction Sector and its Impact on Rural Poverty”, The Indian Journal of Human Development, 10(1), 27–48. Statista (2020) India: Distribution of the Workforce Across Economic Sectors from 2010 to 2020, https:// www.statista.com/statistics/271320/distribution-of-the-workforce-across-economic-sectors-in-india/ Stotz, L. and Keane, G. (2015) “Facts on the Global Garments Industry”, Clean Clothes Campaign (Report). Tokman, V. (1978) “An Exploration into the Nature of Informal-Formal Sector Relationships”, World Development, 6(9–10), 1065–1075. Upadhya, C. (2016) Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
FURTHER READING Ghose, A. (2016) India Employment Report, Institute for Human Development, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, p. XXIII. Gopalakrishnan, R. (2020) “The Industrial Relations Code, 2020: Implications for Workers Rights”, LiveLaw.in, 24 October. Kapoor, R. (2016) Technology, Jobs and Inequality: Evidence from India’s Manufacturing Sector, ICRIER Working Paper 313. Kapoor, R. (2020) COVID-19 and the State of India’s Labour Market, ICRIER Policy Series 18, 2020 http://icrier.org/pdf/Policy_Series_18.pdf Mezzadri, A. (2017) The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India, London: Cambridge University Press. Standing, G. (2018) “The Precariat: Today’s Transformative Class” http://www.greattransition.org/ publication/precariat-trasnformative class.
50. Informalization of labor in contemporary China Jenny Chan
1. INTRODUCTION Labor informality is not a remnant of pre-capitalist society but is central to the organization of developed and developing modern economies. Informal work arrangements are also functional to both capitalist and socialist processes of wealth accumulation (Tilly and Tilly 1998; Agarwala 2013; Lee 2019). From the 1980s, when China opened to the world, the post-socialist state took a series of gradual but profound measures that facilitated flexible employment, which had a far-reaching impact on workers’ incomes, employment security, and the social reproduction of labor power (Kuruvilla, Lee, and Gallagher 2011; Blecher 2016). Deregulation and re-regulation by the contemporary Chinese state, as well as managerial control by global and domestic corporations, have resulted in multiple forms of informalization of labor. China has the world’s largest population and today hundreds of millions work in the informal economy. In urban manufacturing, construction, and services, the magnitude of informal employment (including locals and rural migrants) increased from 55 million in 2004 to 227 million in 2017, in tandem with enterprise restructuring and economic diversification. During the same period, formal or standard employment as a share of total urban employment fell from 66.8 percent to 43.8 percent (Rozelle et al. 2020: 563). This chapter aims to delve more deeply into this trend to analyze how informalization is taking place within and beyond the formal sector. It also seeks to explain the growth of the informal sector over the course of China’s transformation through state-guided market reforms and corporate-led globalization. The author further reflects on how labor politics, in its changing historical and political-economic context, has shaped employee relations and state policies, challenging structures of inequality. The next section reviews the literature on the informalization of work and employment. The chapter then describes the reintegration of China into an international economic system; the reemergence of a labor market within it; and the trends toward labor informalization. In particular, the analysis explores the general features of formal and informal labor; it maps working conditions and how temporary workers (including agency laborers and student interns) resist and acquiesce to these conditions; and draws on recent research of diverse sectors including homeworking, construction, service, and the “gig” economy. The discussion section considers the role of the state in regulating informal employment. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the consequences of China’s market transformation and reflects on the prospects of stronger labor and social protections.
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2.
INFORMALIZATION OF LABOR, CAPITAL, AND THE STATE
Economic liberalization and internationalization have vastly changed the nature of jobs and employment relations in Western economies since the 1970s. While early discussions viewed informal work simply as an absence of formal employment arrangements, later studies explored the social composition and organization of informal labor, as well as the interdependent relationship between informal and formal economic sectors (Standing 2011; Weil 2014; Kalleberg and Vallas 2018). Castells and Portes (1989: 31) argue that there is “no clear-cut duality between a formal and an informal sector, but a series of complex interactions that establish distinct relationships between the economy and the state.” In competitive markets, employers compete for less costly and less organized laborers who are unprotected by the state or trade unions. Across time and space, multinational corporations from the US and Europe have streamlined their operations to outsource low value-added jobs offshore. Industrial capital has massively relocated to Japan, the “East Asian Tigers” (including Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) and later, China and Southeast Asian countries (Kalleberg, Hewison and Shin 2022). In newly industrializing states such as Taiwan and South Korea, the governments maintained a “friendly” business environment by suppressing wages and repressing labor organizations to attract foreign investment, facilitating rapid industrial growth in their economies (Deyo 1989; Chang 2009). During the 1980s and 1990s, Asian as well as Western multinationals accelerated their move to China to tap into even lower-cost labor and acquired land in coastal and interior provinces for investment (Hung 2009; Hung and Selden 2017). As companies from capitalist economies seek to increase profitability by moving over longer distances to employ less expensive workforces or relying on the availability of migrants to reduce expenses, it is tempting to envision the expansion of informal employment as merely an outcome of the labor-capital battle. But we must also consider the state’s regulatory intent and capacity in the process of informalization (Basile and Harriss-White 2010). State-initiated labor policies and laws often determine how workers are hired with different terms and conditions and how some find themselves excluded from formal, government-sponsored grievance mechanisms and welfare provisions (Gallagher 2017). The development of some of the most modern forms of employment underlines the role of the state in defining the boundaries between formal and informal employment and the differences between them. The state’s tolerance and tacit legitimization of “agency workers” (deployed by temporary staffing agencies) and “student interns” (coordinated by vocational schools through their internship programs) has systematically produced a large pool of subcontracted laborers (Zhang 2015; Chan, Selden and Pun 2020). In this nexus of the state and capital, employers’ costs are drastically reduced and organizational flexibility greatly enhanced. In the past decade, with the rise of the “gig” economy, critical scholars debunk how business interests profit from new technologies (Srnicek 2017; Woodcock and Graham 2020). Outside of the formal, state-defined labor relations framework, technological innovators recruited workers through digital platforms to establish a system of on-demand labor services. Online labor platforms of ride-hailing, food delivery, and parcel express delivery have created numerous part-time and full-time jobs across rural and urban spaces. But except for a very few, an overwhelming majority of the app-based labor force is classified as “independent contractors,”
Informalization of labor in contemporary China 593 who are not legally recognized as employees and receive no standard employment benefits (Wood et al. 2019). Thus, not only capital, but also the state (including labor laws and policies, courts, and other institutions), plays a pivotal role in shaping the intricately linked formal and informal economies. Labor, of course, also plays a part. In some cases, access to informal employment makes it possible to maintain low salaries in formal employment (Zhang and Friedman 2019). An exploration of the links between formal and informal work, as well as production and social reproduction, is useful for assessing questions of worker activism and acquiescence. Formal or informal workers’ struggles over work status and remuneration, sometimes with support from non-governmental organizations, have sought comprehensive reforms centering on employment, healthcare, housing, education, and other essential human needs. Even when precarious workers cannot legally or effectively engage in collective bargaining through trade unions, they have sought diverse ways to make collective demands. Multiple forms of workers’ self-organization have emerged to resist precarity (Breman and van der Linden 2014; Atzeni and Ness 2018).
3.
CHINESE STATE, MARKET, AND WORKERS IN ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
In a span of forty years, China’s state-society relations have drastically changed. Joel Andreas (2019) in his book Disenfranchised analyzed the loss of “industrial citizenship rights” enjoyed by urban workers during the market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Under the auspices of the Beijing state, human resource policies were reoriented from full employment to increased productivity and competitiveness in state-owned and collective enterprises. Managers were delegated greater decision-making power vis-à-vis rank-and-file workers in production scheduling, discipline, and punishment, and wage-and-bonus levels were tied to work performance. With the influx of foreign capital, state-owned factories were struggling to survive and grow in the market (Gallagher 2005). Inefficient and loss-making state industries no longer received bank loans or government subsidies. Amid successive enterprise reforms, bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions, tens of millions of state sector employees were laid off. By 2002, with China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and further opening to the world economy, over 60 million urban workers had lost their state sector jobs; that is, there was “a 44 percent reduction of the 1993 state sector workforce within a 10-year period” (Hurst 2009: 16). Critically, in the mid-to-late 1990s, the legalization and signing of fixed-term contracts signaled the end of a system of lifetime employment. The “iron rice bowl” tenure, enshrined in the socialist entitlement of cradle-to-grave benefits, was smashed (Solinger 2009). In the northeastern rustbelt and central regions notable for old heavy industrial complexes, massive worker resistance to privatization eventually led the state to provide a social insurance scheme including unemployment benefits to tame widespread anger (Lee 2007; Hurst 2009). Meanwhile, as the state loosened social and geographical restrictions to facilitate labor mobility, particularly rural to urban migration, it simultaneously set severe limits to the permanent settlement for this “floating population” in large cities (Whyte 2010). A state-sanctioned socio-political classification of “locals” and “internal migrants” with differential labor, welfare, and even citizenship rights, deeply segmented the changing Chinese labor market.
594 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Young people migrating from villages and towns to large cities were recruited by private and foreign firms, as well as restructured state-owned enterprises, driving the rapid growth of China’s export-oriented, labor-intensive industrialization. From the 1990s to 2000s, with the seemingly inexhaustible supply of labor, many employers in both the state and private sectors felt free to hire and fire workers quickly. State monitoring of workplace conditions remains weak. Aggravated by the urban-biased development policy that has resulted in a great rural-urban disparity, the spheres of production (wage employment centered in the city) and social reproduction (childcare in the village) are spatially separated for many low-income rural migrants (Pun 2005). A despotic labor regime sustained by a low minimum-wage state policy and perpetuated by an unequal household registration system that jeopardizes the rural laboring classes is characteristic of China’s rise to become the “world factory” (Chan 2001). Various forms of worker resistance can be “distinguished by the varying level of pressure that they bring to bear on the state” (Elfström 2021: 21). Aggrieved workers and their supporters are engaging in contained, boundary-spanning, or transgressive contention, while three approaches are sometimes combined to strengthen grassroots pressures. In response to waves of labor strikes and protests, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions—the only official trade union organization in China—has advocated pro-labor legislative reforms, such as higher incomes and better benefits (Chen 2009; Chan and Hui 2017; Howell and Pringle 2019). The Chinese Labor Contract Law, which came into force in January 2008, raised hopes of strengthened employment security and labor protection. The law guaranteed employees the right to an open-ended labor contract after signing two consecutive fixed-term contracts. However, both state and non-state enterprises frequently circumvent the law by outsourcing labor to cut costs and enhance flexibility by terminating labor contracts with long-term employees or replacing them through temp agencies (Xu 2014; Feng 2019). Employers have repeatedly used the distinction between formal and informal to avoid the expenses of protected employment. As discussed below, informalization has intensified, generating greater opportunities for some workers but deepening economic and social hardships for many. 3.1
Agency Workers and Student Interns
Subcontracted workers often risk having lower wages, lower social insurance, and less security than direct employees. At surveyed state-owned and joint-venture automobile plants, in 2011, agency laborers and student interns constituted 33 percent to 60 percent of the workforce, who were paid only half to two-thirds the wages of regular workers, even when they “had to shoulder heavier workloads and perform less desirable tasks” (Zhang 2015: 150). In 2014 and 2015, agency workers from various industries filed over 1,000 lawsuits each year, contesting unequal payment of wages and benefits as well as illegal termination of employment contracts (Huang 2017a, 2017b). In China, maintaining that student interns are not employees—even when they perform work identical to that of production workers—is a core concept of the system of internships. The state and employers use the formal/informal distinction to justify not enrolling interns in state-administered social security, such as pensions, healthcare benefits, and insurance against accidents and diseases. It was not until 2016 that the government set out criteria to distinguish student internships (Chan 2017). Internship programs should have substantial educational content and work-skill training provisions on an eight-hour workday with no overtime and no night shifts. At any given facility, no more than 10 percent of the labor force should consist
Informalization of labor in contemporary China 595 of student interns at any point in time. Despite tightened legal requirements, the state simultaneously allowed wage payments of interns at just 80 percent of that of employees. Abuses of student interns have also remained rampant (Chan, Selden, and Pun 2020). 3.2
Homeworkers and Nannies
Outside of formal enterprises, self-employed manufacturing workers are incorporated in global production circuits at the margins. The “home” doubles as the workplace at the bottom-tier of the multi-layered production networks. Women, in their roles as grandmothers and mothers, often shoulder production and social reproduction (such as cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elderly care) burdens in working-class families. Besides homes, unregistered workspaces also serve to accommodate peripheral workers at the lowest possible cost, “blending productive and reproductive time” (Mezzadri and Fan 2018: 1042). In peri-urban areas of Shanghai, with the exception of groups of highly skilled local women who have formed cooperative teams to bargain for a better deal for garment work, most others toil in substandard workshops. In everyday management, contractors organize and discipline low-skilled rural migrant workers through existing kinship and neighborhood relations. These unorganized wage earners lack job autonomy and economic security. They receive low piece-rate payments and may be exposed to under-employment or unemployment during slow seasons. Informalization lowers employers’ costs by shifting the burdens of social reproduction to workers’ households. Interestingly, from the lived experience of some homeworkers, even when informalization leaves many bereft of various benefits associated with employment, they find new paid work opportunities in a dynamic economy. With the rise of Chinese consumerism and e-commerce, localized apparel production in small batches (ranging from only a few dozen to hundreds of pieces per order) has formed a market niche. Husband-and-wife teams, with their informally assembled day laborers, made direct deals with online store owners, thereby participating in hyper-flexible, just-in-time clothing sourcing chains (Fan 2021). The relatively skillful, entrepreneurial homeworkers enjoyed higher incomes and greater freedom than when they worked for the boss. The growth of such informal, specialized production activities is in turn dependent on the growth of formal, internet-based retail trade. From manufacturing to service work, middle-aged urban women spinners quit their posts in a privatized mill to become nannies for prosperous households (Dong 2020). Many of them received far higher pay in the thriving domestic service market. Their childcare and domestic work skills were valued by urban households, particularly when the state withdrew from providing subsidized childcare at the workplace level as in many former state-owned enterprises. Individually, the nannies were not heavily constrained by their own family care responsibilities. By contrast, rural women migrants could only take up low-status, hourly paid cleaning and cooking tasks at the bottom stratum of the hierarchical care market. 3.3
Gig Workers (Mediated by Digital Labor Service Platforms)
The momentum of China’s platform economy is strong and may even involve emotional rewards for some flexible workers. In transport services, for instance, part-time drivers working for Uber or Didi report enjoying socializing with passengers while making some money. Their laboring experience, compared to full-time drivers, may be freer or less coercive. Normative expressions such as share, task, help, and service are now frequently used
596 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work by governments and businesses to replace more clearly defined terms like work, job, and employee in the digitalized service economy (Wu et al. 2019: 576). Gender preferences intersect with independent service contracting. Male rural migrants are concentrated in food delivery dominated by a duopoly of Meituan (owned by Tencent) and Ele.me (owned by Alibaba). Their payment is calculated by piece rates. When food takeaway platforms reduce the pay and speed up delivery, conflicts targeting management and its algorithmic control are sometimes triggered (Chan 2021; Liu and Friedman 2021; Sun and Chen 2021). Through mediation, food-delivery riders may reach private settlements over wage disputes, work schedules, and injury compensation (as a result of road accidents) with the concerned parties (Lei 2021). In courier parcel services, giant firms like Amazon and Alibaba have likewise classified last-mile delivery workers as independent contractors to lower labor costs (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese 2020). Deliverymen rely on assistance from family members to meet delivery requirements, especially during the online shopping festivals. This kind of informal work arrangement is obscured from logistics service chain governance (Chan 2023). The fragmented lives of family members, notably the sacrifices of parenting even when their children have migrated with them, are among the hidden costs behind “free delivery.” 3.4
Construction Workers
Manufacturing and services aside, tens of millions of menial workers toil at construction sites, fueling the property boom. In Building China, Sarah Swider (2015) explains how male rural construction workers were guaranteed a one-year verbal contract before being brought to work in the city by labor contractors. Under this form of “mediated employment configuration,” construction workers enjoy some degree of job security. However, as they will not get paid until the very end of the year-long contract, their work mobility or turnover is restricted. In some cases, they fail to receive any of the agreed pay. This might happen when labor contractors are corrupt or when they themselves are victims of their clients’ non-payment of project fees. In multi-tier subcontracting chains, only licensed labor service contractors have legal standing as employers. Critics have accused the Chinese state of allowing “illicit practices of subcontracting to continue” (Pang 2019: 560). Hired by unregistered labor subcontractors, some construction workers still seek to resolve their disputes through legal avenues but many find that laws “do not work to the protection of workers” (Pang 2019: 553). Day laborers, who are recruited in street-side open markets, report problems with the non-payment or underpayment of their wages (with daily wages bargained down to below-subsistence levels). In fact, they are often not protected by kinship and family networks or other social groups, and therefore more vulnerable to slave-like labor conditions (Swider 2015). Some have contracted fatal occupational diseases and suffered deadly injuries (Fan and Ng 2019). Without establishing formal labor relations, aggrieved construction workers staged public actions such as threats to die by suicide to disrupt production, drawing media and public attention to their plight (Halegua 2008; Pun and Lu 2010). More contentious cases of labor conflicts have evolved into large-scale protests, work stoppages, and traffic blockades. In the course of state-led urbanization (such as building a hi-tech industrial park or a university town), landless rural migrants, who lost family lands previously bound to them through their registered household, risk losing their employability in the construction sector (Chuang
Informalization of labor in contemporary China 597 2020). Small contractors are reluctant to hire dispossessed rural migrants because they themselves have to pay upfront to sustain the migrant workers’ livelihoods before getting paid following completion of the project. The cost of social reproduction for laborers who have lost land will be higher than average migrants who can fall back on their rural land and families in times of crisis. This underclass are double losers, who no longer possess their means of production (e.g., farmland) and their employment in construction work. Without access to relief, some lived difficult lives; a few took their own lives.
4.
REGULATING THE INFORMAL ECONOMY
If, the informalization process of the Chinese economy is a broad trend, the connections between informality and precarity are multiple and not linear. Women local workers who have succeeded in organizing cooperatively experience newfound freedom and greater control over their labor in contrast to their previous experience in a factory regime. They can also care for their families while working from home (Mezzadri and Fan 2018). Male rural migrants who successfully pick up parcels from recurrent customers have similarly shared independence as micro-entrepreneurs (Chan 2023). Such income-generating activities, though unstable and shaped by market conditions, contribute to a better livelihood for some. Still, without state protection, a large segment of informal workers lives on the margins. Social security, in essence, represents part of the cost of the reproduction of labor in that it supports workers through times of illness, injury, and old age. Workers with more secure forms of employment enjoy this benefit partially underwritten by the government. In comparison, workers outside of this institutional protective system rely exclusively on their own earnings and savings, or family assistance, if any. The concept of “precarious work” refers to the nature of “uncertain, unstable and insecure” work in which “employees bear the risks of work” (Kalleberg, Hewison and Shin 2022: 2). There are different levels of state involvement in structuring precarious employment and labor segmentation. In an active way, the Beijing government excludes tens of millions of teenage student interns from the rank of “employees” under the current internship regulations. The making of a large pool of student labor reduces employer costs and undermines worker interests as workers are compelled to compete with lower-cost and less protected interns. In a passive, or possibly unintended way, the rollout of new legal requirements—such as restrictions over firings of long-serving employees and limitations on the overuse of agency workers—has nevertheless given rise to various types of labor outsourcing and subcontracting. Countervailing strategies by employers have frequently defeated government attempts to re-regulate the market by mandating secure employment. In the digital economy, platform-hired laborers are classified as independent service contractors, who do not possess formal labor relations or employment status. Facing a growing public outcry, the authorities have begun to attend to the plight of food-delivery workers and parcel express couriers, among others. Officials pledged to grant trade union membership rights to those who wish to join, thereby monitoring the work relations dominated by platform firms (Chan 2021). But it is too soon to tell how new forms of state oversight might influence this newer form of employment. Recently, gig workers have built online forums and social groups to share tips on job search, negotiations with private insurance companies, and access to cheap accommodation, among other problems. Such grassroots, low-profile
598 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work self-organization can nurture working-class cultures and solidarity, although it may be vulnerable to state crackdown. The Chinese state has sought to accelerate labor migration and urbanization through more inclusive development plans. Yet, the provision of basic public services such as education, healthcare, and housing remains severely limited and highly selective to the detriment of most rural migrants who are prevented from sinking their roots in large cities (Gallagher 2020). With very low income and insecure employment, marginalized migrant workers may entirely lose their ability to marry and care for children.
5. CONCLUSION This chapter sketched in broad strokes major transformations of the Chinese economy and its impact on the lives of workers through the intertwined realms of production and social reproduction. In four decades or so, the rigid boundary marked by decades-old rural/urban household registration has somewhat been relaxed to fill the enormous demand for labor. While both locals and rural migrants are more mobile between jobs than under the previous state socialist system, they experience unprecedented changes in an era of marketization and corporate-driven globalization. From the bottom-up, labor informalization shapes contentious new forces and resistance. Laid-off state sector workers, for the first time in their lives, were pitted against rural migrants to find jobs in successive waves of market reforms. In the recruiting processes, categorical or institutional differences based on gender, migration, and citizenship status often influence the outcomes. In navigating their own paths, some workers land on digital platforms to undertake deliveries and customer service work, while others choose homeworking tied to global supply chains and contingent on the formal economy. Many others are employed at factories or construction sites through agencies. As a result, a large pool of flexible workers, along with interning students, are fueling China’s growth in a competitive and volatile environment. The state, through legislation and economic development policies, has been deeply involved in defining the limits of, and incentivizing, informalization. Workers, particularly those who are dispersed geographically and experience work in individualized ways, are prone to abuses and super-exploitation (instances in which workers are paid below their subsistence costs). Against all odds, some have stood up to fight poverty wages and inhumane and precarious conditions. In a slowing economy, and particularly in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic since 2019, the struggle for redistributing resources and creating greater social protections for all workers assumes yet greater importance.
FUNDING This research is supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (RGC No. 25602517) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (P0041395; P0042704).
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REFERENCES Agarwala, Rina. 2013. Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alimahomed-Wilson, Jake and Ellen Reese, eds. 2020. The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy. London: Pluto Press. Andreas, Joel. 2019. Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Atzeni, Maurizio and Immanuel Ness, eds. 2018. Global Perspectives on Workers’ and Labour Organisations. Singapore: Springer Nature. Basile, Elisabetta and Barbara Harriss-White. 2010. “India’s Informal Capitalism and Its Regulation.” International Review of Sociology 20(3): 457–71. Blecher, Marc. 2016. “Working Class Re-Formation and De-Formation in the PRC,” pp. 335–61 in Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China, edited by Yingjie Guo. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Breman, Jan and Marcel van der Linden. 2014. “Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level.” Development and Change 45(5): 920–40. Castells, Manuel and Alejandro Portes. 1989. “World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy,” pp. 11–37 in The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, edited by Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells and Lauren A. Benton. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chan, Anita. 2001. China’s Workers under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Chan, Chris King-Chi and Elaine Sio-ieng Hui. 2017. “Bringing Class Struggles Back: A Marxian Analysis of the State and Class Relations in China.” Globalizations 14(2): 232–44. Chan, Jenny. 2017. “Intern Labor in China.” Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science 14(1): 82–100. Chan, Jenny. 2021. “Hunger for Profit: How Food Delivery Platforms Manage Couriers in China.” Sociologias 23(57): 58–82. Chan, Jenny. 2023. “Buy with 1-Click: Independent Contracting and Migrant Workers in China’s Last-Mile Parcel Delivery.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 21(2): 1–18. Chan, Jenny, Mark Selden and Ngai Pun. 2020. Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of China’s Workers. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books & London: Pluto Press. Chang, Dae-oup. 2009. “Informalising Labour in Asia’s Global Factory.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 39(2): 161–79. Chen, Feng. 2009. “Union Power in China: Source, Operation, and Constraints.” Modern China 35(6): 662–89. Chuang, Julia. 2020. Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market. California: University of California Press. Deyo, Frederic C. 1989. Beneath the Miracle: Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dong, Yige. 2020. “Spinners or Sitters? Regimes of Social Reproduction and Urban Chinese Workers’ Employment Choices.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 61(2–3): 200–16. Elfström, Manfred. 2021. Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fan, Lulu. 2021. “The Forming of E-platform-driven Flexible Specialisation: How E-commerce Platforms Have Changed China’s Garment Industry Supply Chains and Labour Relations.” China Perspectives 1(124): 29–37. Fan, Lulu and Kenneth Tsz Fung Ng. 2019. “Non-Legalistic Activism from the Social Margin: Informal Workers with Pneumoconiosis in Shenzhen.” China Information 33(2): 185–209. Feng, Xiaojun. 2019. “Regulating Labour Dispatch in China: A Cat-and-Mouse Game.” China Information 33(1): 88–109. Gallagher, Mary E. 2005. Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
600 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Gallagher, Mary E. 2017. Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Mary E. 2020. “Can China Achieve Inclusive Urbanization?” pp. 180–99 in Fateful Decisions: Choices that Will Shape China’s Future, edited by Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Halegua, Aaron. 2008. “Getting Paid: Processing the Labor Disputes of China’s Migrant Workers.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 26(1): 254–322. Howell, Jude and Tim Pringle. 2019. “Shades of Authoritarianism and State-Labour Relations in China.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 57(2): 223–46. Huang, Philip C. C. 2017a. “Dispatch Work in China: A Study from Case Records, Part I.” Modern China 43(3): 247–87. Huang, Philip C. C. 2017b. “Dispatch Work in China: A Study from Case Records, Part II.” Modern China 43(4): 355–96. Hung, Ho-fung, ed. 2009. China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hung, Ho-fung and Mark Selden. 2017. “China’s Postsocialist Transformation and Global Resurgence: Political Economy and Geopolitics,” pp. 502–28 in The Cambridge History of Communism, Volume III, Endgames? Late Communism in Global Perspective, 1968 to the Present, edited by Juliane Fürst, Silvio Pons and Mark Selden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurst, William. 2009. The Chinese Worker after Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kalleberg, Arne L. and Stephen P. Vallas. 2018. “Probing Precarious Work: Theory, Research, and Politics.” Research in the Sociology of Work 31: 1–30. Kalleberg, Arne L., Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin. 2022. Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kuruvilla, Sarosh, Ching Kwan Lee and Mary E. Gallagher, eds. 2011. From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lee, Ching Kwan. 2007. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, Ching Kwan. 2019. “The Social Question as the Struggle over Precarity: The Case of China,” pp. 58–76 in The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View, edited by Jan Breman, Kevan Harris, Ching Kwan Lee and Marcel van der Linden. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Lei, Ya-Wen. 2021. “Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China’s Platform Economy.” American Sociological Review 86(2): 279–309. Liu, Chuxuan and Eli Friedman. 2021. “Resistance under the Radar: Organization of Work and Collective Action in China’s Food Delivery Industry.” The China Journal 86(1): 68–89. Mezzadri, Alessandra and Lulu Fan. 2018. “‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China.” Development and Change 49(4): 1034–63. Pang, Irene. 2019. “The Legal Construction of Precarity: Lessons from the Construction Sectors in Beijing and Delhi.” Critical Sociology 45(4–5): 549–64. Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pun, Ngai and Huilin Lu. 2010. “A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Action by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist China.” The China Journal 64 (July): 143–58. Rozelle, Scott, Yiran Xia, Dimitris Friesen, Bronson Vanderjack and Nourya Cohen. 2020. “Moving Beyond Lewis: Employment and Wage Trends in China’s High- and Low-Skilled Industries and the Emergence of an Era of Polarization.” Comparative Economic Studies 62: 555–89. Solinger, Dorothy J. 2009. States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980–2000. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sun, Ping and Julie Yujie Chen. 2021. “Platform Labour and Contingent Agency in China.” China Perspectives 1(124): 19–27.
Informalization of labor in contemporary China 601 Swider, Sarah. 2015. Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tilly, Chris and Charles Tilly. 1998. Work Under Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Weil, David. 2014. The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whyte, Martin King, ed. 2010. One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, Alex J., Mark Graham, Vili Lehdonvirta and Isis Hjorth. 2019. “Good Gig, Bad Gig: Autonomy and Algorithmic Control in the Global Gig Economy.” Work, Employment and Society 33(1): 56–75. Woodcock, Jamie and Mark Graham. 2020. The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity. Wu, Qingjun, Hao Zhang, Zhen Li and Kai Liu. 2019. “Labor Control in the Gig Economy: Evidence from Uber in China.” Journal of Industrial Relations 61(4): 574–96. Xu, Feng. 2014. “Temporary Work in China: Precarity in an Emerging Labor Market,” pp. 143–63 in Temporary Work, Agencies, and Unfree Labor: Insecurity in the New World of Work, edited by Judy Fudge and Kendra Strauss. New York, NY: Routledge. Zhang, Hao and Eli Friedman. 2019. “Informality and Working Conditions in China’s Sanitation Sector.” The China Quarterly 238 (June): 375–95. Zhang, Lu. 2015. Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
FURTHER READING Franceschini, Ivan and Christian Sorace, eds. 2022. Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. London: Verso Books. Fu, Diana. 2018. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurst, William. 2018. Ruling before the Law: The Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, Ching Kwan. 2018. The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Solinger, Dorothy J. 2022. Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Section B. Africa
51. Precariousness and push-back: capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa Bridget Kenny
INTRODUCTION South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world.1 Inequality has increased under democracy, which began with the first democratic elections in 1994. This chapter outlines the shape of these structural divergences, with particular attention to the effects on the labour market and working-class movements and actions. Unemployment has increased dramatically and has continued to rise in the last few years (exacerbated recently by the economic slowdown resulting from Covid-19). Official (narrow) rates of unemployment in 2020 stood at 30.8 per cent (with expanded measures which include also ‘discouraged work-seekers’ at 43.1 per cent) (Statistics South Africa, 2020). It is notoriously difficult to find accurate statistics of the labour market in South Africa, partly because of the complexity of income sources and range of precarious work upon which most households rely. Scully (2016, p. 303) reports (from 2012 data) that of those in regular wage work, some 42 per cent can be classified as being in some form of precarious work, including unregulated, no contracts of employment and sub-legal conditions. Informal and subsistence work has grown to fill income gaps, and these activities are important for both household survival and also to working-class and poor consumers, who often buy food and basic needs from informal trades people. A social welfare system assists poor families, through old age, child support and disability grants, most prominently, yet these forms of redistribution are thinly stretched among household members. Poverty and hunger have increased, particularly over the past decade. The poverty rate in 2017 was 52.23 per cent with food poor households accounting for 24.71 per cent (Zizzamia et al., 2019, p. 10).2 This chapter seeks to understand the significance of these changes within the labour market and economy and to working-class life and politics. It will do so through focusing on three conjunctures. First, it reviews changes to the economy through the financialisation of capital. The minerals-energy complex founding South Africa’s economy has shifted over the past two decades through increasing financial investment (Mohamed, 2017). The chapter examines recent trends toward financialisation and the effects on labour. Second, it outlines how state policy continues to direct neoliberal solutions despite increased pressure to deliver broad based economic and ‘developmentalist’ outcomes to South Africa’s majority. Finally, it explores the shifting terrain of working-class politics (broadly understood) over the past ten years. It outlines the complexity of the geography of capital flows, waged and non-waged labour and household reproduction and working-class mobilisation. While the trade union movement in South Africa is well-known for its strength and militancy historically, it has changed significantly. Splits have altered the character of the 603
604 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work major federation. Changes to the labour market have meant that union memberships have declined,3 and trade unions have been unable to mobilise and organise precarious workers. Nevertheless, trade unions remain an important dimension to explain working-class politics, albeit fragmented across a new landscape. Social movements have alternatively emerged around state services provisioning, organised by community residents who are more likely to be unemployed. These movements ebb and flow but often offer a measurement of immediate grievances, an indication of frustrations on the ground. Finally, there are new organising efforts that appear to be place-specific, but suggest several divergent directions, including new efforts to represent waged workers, informal worker organising efforts, a nascent movement around food distribution and hunger and movements around housing and access to land. This fragmentation within working-class politics, then, maps the contradictions of financialisation, state commitment to neoliberal frameworks and deepening austerity, and global-local articulations of social relations of survival.
FINANCIALISATION OF CAPITAL South Africa’s economy has been and still is defined by the ‘minerals-energy complex’ (MEC). The MEC describes the foundation of the economy in mining and coal-based energy production, the ways in which South Africa’s industrialisation developed to support mining and intertwined with the state to buttress measures to maintain an accumulation regime based on cheap black labour supplying these ventures (Fine and Rustomjee, 1996; Ashman et al., 2011). How the MEC has restructured explains the shape of the post-apartheid economy. While mining has declined as a share of GDP from 20 per cent in 1980 to 8 per cent in 2017, as many have explained, the sector remains deeply embedded within the economy, and in the post-apartheid context, more integrated globally into financial circuits (Ashman et al., 2010; Bowman, 2018, p. 389). Notably, 60 per cent of export revenues come from mining, minerals and chemicals (Bowman, 2019, p. 226). Finance accounts for just over 20 per cent of the GDP, up from 10 per cent in the 1960s. Manufacturing has steadily declined, down from 25 per cent of GDP in the early 1980s, to now less than 10 per cent of the GDP (Karwowski et al., 2018, p. 385).4 With 1990s unbundling, mergers and acquisitions, the domestic economy nevertheless remains highly concentrated, notwithstanding the generation of a new layer of black elite facilitated by ‘black economic empowerment’ (Bowman, 2019). The MEC has meant continued low investment in diversified industries while concentrating investment in capital-intensive core sectors. This has been imbricated with financialisation and partly explains low employment growth. Finance capital investment increased through the internationalisation of South African capital after apartheid-era sanctions ended (Ashman et al., 2010; Mohamed, 2017). Financialisation describes both the expansion of financial services and products as well as the financialisation of capital across firms (Fine, 2013). Of course, South Africa had a highly integrated financialised economy historically precisely because of large investments required for mining, but with apartheid sanctions domestic capital became internally bound, which intensified concentration. In the post-apartheid context, as the economy re-opened, core firms globalised in all the ways that the 1990s enabled. As Karwowski (2018, p. 415) puts it, South Africa “‘exemplifies’ the financialized emerging economy”.
Capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa 605 South African companies have been said to withhold investment in the country (termed an ‘investment strike’), or indeed to exit the country with ‘capital flight’ (Ashman et al., 2011). Massive cash reserves of non-finance companies have been linked to financialisation, having two ill-effects on South Africa’s economy: “First, it leads to subdued corporate investment, exacerbating domestic unemployment. Second, it contributes towards the build-up of financial fragility in the economy more broadly because it fuels house price inflation” (Karwowski, 2018, p. 419). The liquidity of non-financial firms kept with domestic banks further links to increased mortgage lending and has led to housing price volatility and to credit expansion. Indeed, household debt has increased and is high for an emerging economy (Bond, 2013, p. 582; James, 2015).5 Financialisation within the South African mining sector, driven in particular by the 2000s commodity boom, and pressures to increase shareholder value, has increased the sector’s volatility as well, with consequences (Bowman, 2018). Mining remains South Africa’s largest contributor to export earnings, as noted above. South Africa’s platinum mining sector is the world’s largest producer (Bowman, 2018, p. 389). With mining firms dedicated to shareholder returns, including through share buy-back schemes, with the end of the commodities boom, firms were pressured to cut labour costs. Strikes, including the deadly Marikana Massacre, when South African police killed 34 striking mineworkers at Lonmin in 2012, and a five-month platinum strike in 2014, exhibit the deep tensions in the sector (Chinguno, 2013; Sinwell, 2015; Benya, 2015). As Bowman (2018) argues, these were caused in part by financialisation of firms in the sector. Shifting capital accumulation affects employment and labour markets. As noted above, financialisation has explained firm cost-cutting to maintain shareholder value levels, affecting jobs. Furthermore, ‘shareholder value’ as an ideology has explained disciplinary logics within firm labour processes (e.g., Kenny, 2018, pp. 119–151). Further, finance capital directly links to the expansion of precarious and low wage labour, for instance in the construction industry which has grown with increasing investment in real estate and relies on labour brokers (Bernards, 2020, pp. 721–722), and in retailing as property portfolio investment through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITS) has encouraged expansion of mall development and by consequence contingent service sector jobs (Kenny, 2019). The circulation of financial capital has restructured firms, globally and domestically, and reshaped productive and reproductive relations in South Africa. As Bernards notes, the “realization of returns to ‘interest-bearing capital’ is ultimately dependent on processes of production and reproduction, and indeed often tied to workers’ revenues” through risking future earnings and repayment of debts (Bernards, 2020, p. 719). While a complex set of relations, Bernards makes the important point that financial capital is not separate from productive capital, but relies on concrete labour as well as its social reproduction. These moments, while separated in space and time, are nevertheless “integral to the articulation and realization of financial capital” (Bernards, 2020, p. 719). In short, understanding the relationship of capital accumulation through financialisation to forms of labour and social reproduction offers a conjunctural analysis which can bring different forms of working-class struggle into the same frame. I consider these below after first explaining the deepening of neoliberal state governance.
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NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE The neoliberalism of African National Congress (ANC) policy under Mbeki has been outlined in great detail (see Marais, 2011; Freund, 2013). By 1993, the ANC had decisively chosen an export-oriented growth strategy, opened up to privatisation and committed itself to fiscal restraint (Segatti and Pons-Vignon, 2013, p. 544). In post-apartheid South Africa, macroeconomic policy developed around a ‘home spun structural adjustment program’, known as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) framework (Marais, 2011). In the period leading up to 2007, South Africa maintained increases in rates of economic growth (although not as high as expected),6 kept inflation within its target of 3–6 per cent (for the most part) and controlled the budget deficit. Yet, this period also coincided with job loss and a declining wage share of national income (Marais, 2020). The global financial crisis affected South Africa. By 2009, the economy fell into recession. Since then, it has limped along going into and out of recession. In 2019 on the eve of the global coronavirus pandemic the state introduced austerity measures. In early 2020 even before the pandemic and lockdown, the economy had contracted by 2 per cent.7 The IMF approved a 4.3 billion dollar emergency loan to South Africa in late July.8 By September of 2020 the economy was in ‘severe recession’.9 Local political dynamics intertwined in the wake of global financial crisis to make the national terrain complex. This period coincided with the shift in ANC factions in power from the explicit neoliberals of the Thabo Mbeki era to Jacob Zuma, elected as ANC president nominally by the left within the governing party’s Alliance, including the trade union federation the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Communist Party, to oust Mbeki.10 Zuma ended up representing a kleptocratic elite, which used state-owned enterprises for personal gain, siphoning billions of Rands from state coffers. At the same time, the finance policy continued along the same path, reconstituted as the National Development Plan (NDP) in 2012. Indeed, Segatti and Pons-Vignon (2013, p. 538) argue that there was a “neoliberal deepening” in the transition from Mbeki to Zuma. Policy for instance, did not offer any further controls over financial capital (and capital flight) that had defined a structural shift in South Africa’s economy in the post-apartheid period (Ashman et al., 2011; Segatti and Pons-Vignon, 2013, p. 546). The NDP rearticulated a trickle-down macroeconomic framework, focused on export-led growth and foreign direct investment. It continued to emphasise deficit control and inflation targeting (Karwowski et al., 2018, p. 384). Zuma was eventually replaced in ANC party structures in late 2018 with Cyril Ramaphosa, the former deputy president, after another bruising political battle, which still plays itself out in the state and as elite interests reconfigure, austerity measures ratchet up, and in the face of deepening economic crisis (von Holdt, 2019). The state has compensated for some of the economic effects of increasing poverty and inequality through expanding state welfare through social grants to the poorest households, especially through pensions and childcare grants (Marais, 2020). Yet as Greg Ruiters (2020, p. 12) so eloquently puts it, the “racial redress” of extended service provision and welfare to ‘poor’ (black) people is “highly circumscribed and largely secondary to the dominant legal form” of the state. That is, the liberal market state has relied on ‘non-racialism’ in post-apartheid South Africa to obscure the reproduction of deeply entrenched race-class relations. The “neoliberal racial state”, as Ruiters (2020) calls it, thus has exacerbated apartheid inequalities, now using the language and sentiment of legal equality. Formerly segregated black ‘townships’ and expanding informal settlements remain labour reserves and holding areas for surplus populations, where “majority-white-owned businesses”,
Capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa 607 such as malls and national corporate retail outlets, conveying consumer status and signifying ‘inclusion’, find new markets: “These companies want to get their annual slice of the more than R120 billion in social grants that flow through townships” (Ruiters, 2020, p. 11; and see Kenny, 2018, pp. 214–219; 2019). The gap in property prices between these residential areas and formerly ‘white’ suburbs, which we saw above, has increased in value with speculative property investment, and means that mobility to middle-class residential areas is prohibitive for many who cannot even afford basic housing now. Furthermore, efforts at state provisioning, for instance, of temporary housing, produces forms of ‘dispossession’ through its very delivery; public spending on housing for the poor, in the example of temporary relocation areas, reproduces forms of spatial segregation which ultimately exacerbate isolation, unemployment and violence (Levenson, 2018). In short, apartheid spatial divisions have rigidified (Ruiters, 2020). The state manages the poor (or ‘indigent’, as called in policy) through surveillance and punitive measures even as it delivers social welfare (Naidoo, 2010), highlighting the “crucial tension” between the “imperatives of accumulation and legitimation” (Nilsen and von Holdt, 2019, p. 123). Splits within the ANC mean that Ramaphosa governs over an extremely fractured state and party; he attempts to keep operational a neoliberal economy in serious crisis, and only made more so by the pandemic, as his government has introduced further austerity cuts to public budgets. In this context, the rule of law (the constitution) becomes the best-option bulwark against further corrupt ‘eating’ of state coffers. Yet as Ruiters suggests, the government has done little to alleviate the obscene divisions of articulated race-class inequalities. In short, the forms of neoliberalism in South Africa have meant that the race-class project of post-apartheid South Africa has played out through deep contradictions (Hart, 2013; von Holdt, 2019). These contradictions help to explain the fragmented terrain of working-class politics.
WORKING-CLASS AND WORKER ORGANISATION It is often noted that South Africa is the ‘protest capital of the world’ (Alexander et al., 2018). This refers to the numbers and size of protests and to ‘person-days’ lost to protest. What is certain is that the fragmented terrain generated by financial capital circulation and enduring state neoliberalism has taken its toll on the (broadly understood) working-classes of the country. The relatively strong trade union movement, which ushered in the democratic government, forming part of the Congress Alliance with the ruling ANC, has fractured. Divisions and ruptures within the largest trade union federation, the COSATU, have altered the terrain of trade union organisation. In 2014 COSATU expelled one of its founding unions, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). This itself was a symptom of deepening tensions from political divisions within the ANC and within the Alliance, exacerbated by the Marikana Massacre (Satgar and Southall, 2015; Bezuidenhout and Tshoaedi, 2017). This was followed in 2015 with the suspension of the General Secretary of COSATU Zwelinzima Vavi and his eventual exit. The expulsion of NUMSA from the federation marked a watershed moment in the history of organised labour in South Africa. NUMSA went on to form a new federation, the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) in 2017, on the principle of independent socialism, with Vavi at its helm, and with other unions that left COSATU in the wake of NUMSA’s expulsion. The once dominant trade union federation
608 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work COSATU lost members and legitimacy in these political battles (Satgar and Southall, 2015; Bezuidenthout and Tshoaedi, 2017). The left split from COSATU with the creation of SAFTU for a time held some hope of union political renewal, but sectarianism in the context of ongoing national factional politics has plagued these structures too (Luckett and Munshi, 2017). Sakhela Buhlungu (2010) had already warned COSATU of tensions between winning democratic labour rights, trade union bureaucratisation and the effects of neoliberalism, in what he called a “paradox of victory”. Under apartheid, the black working-class organised into unions at the workplace, which also confronted authoritarian rule of the apartheid state. This unified workers into a larger political struggle and made for a militant labour movement (Seidman, 1994). Gaining institutional hold through labour rights in post-apartheid South Africa offered protections to some workers (see Adler and Webster, 1995), especially those most secure, but also has meant many unions lost connection to the shop floor (Buhlungu, 2010; Buhlungu and Tshoaedi, 2012). Generalised poor servicing of members, including long-term inability to represent the interests of precarious workers, has also led to disaffection with unions (Buhlungu and Tshoaedi, 2012; Webster and Englert, 2020). Changes to the economy and labour market since 1994 have also posed stark challenges to the labour movement. Some divisions, for instance, between urban and rural workers have persisted (Xulu, 2012), and new divisions within the labour market have created new fissures among workers (Kenny and Webster, 1998; Kenny, 2018). First, categories of precarious labour have increased, and trade unions have been unable or unwilling to organise and represent them. As an indication of the changes to class composition of the unions, the majority of federation members shifted from the private sector to the public sector over the past twenty years and from lower-skilled to higher-skilled workers. They are more likely to be fulltime workers, as well (Bezuidenhout and Tshoaedi, 2017). Contrasting the membership to labour market trends thus indicates the incapacities of unions to organise contract, casual, flexitime workers, as many have shown (Kenny and Webster, 1998; Theron, 2005; Barchiesi, 2011; Kenny, 2018; Webster and Englert, 2020). Changes to working-class composition wrought through decades of capital restructuring, without generative rethinking by unions, have altered the political terrain in ways that many argue make old union structures obsolete. It should be noted, nevertheless, that trade union membership remains significant in global comparison. Overall trade union membership went from 2.6 million members in 1997 to 3.26 million in 2013 (van der Walt, 2019, p. 24). Thus, at the COSATU congress in 2018, while its membership dropped to 1.56 million, these losses were accounted for mainly by splits to form SAFTU. Other smaller federations account for another million members (van der Walt, 2019, p. 24). There have been declines due to precariousness, retrenchments and increasing unemployment within the economy, but overall membership figures suggest an enduring presence of trade unions. As noted above, organised labour has faced serious contradictions in its Alliance with the ruling party, which is in turn, embedded within South Africa’s particular structural relations of racial capitalism and made more contradictory by the entrance of a black nascent bourgeoisie as global capital expanded. These are the particularities of the contradictions facing South Africa. Critique of COSATU from working-class South Africans outside of its membership as well as ordinary workers within its membership nevertheless has been vocal, and at times has indeed spurned mass action, splits and new organisations in what Sinwell (2015) calls in the context of the platinum sector “insurgent trade unionism”.
Capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa 609 A sustained critique of trade unions and models of organising has dominated activist and academic discussion in South Africa. In fact, working-class people continue to organise collectively both inside and outside union structures where unions have been less than responsive to worker demands. For instance, community health-care workers, many of whom are women, organised outside of public sector health unions and with the assistance of left NGOs to push legal cases, to establish their status as ‘employees’, and to improve wages and conditions (Hlatshwayo, 2018). Informal waste reclaimers have organised work teams, access to city dumps and protocols and supplies complying with Covid-19 regulations in ways that kept their work going when the city restricted them from operating under lockdown (Samson et al., 2021). Subcontracted workers have used organising strategies embedded in longer union traditions, through newer formations coordinated through an advice office to demand incorporation into permanent contracts with equitable wages and conditions (Webster and Englert, 2020). Workers’ committees, relating to but independent of unions, sustained the platinum mining strikes in 2014 (Sinwell, 2015). Retail workers with whom I worked for more than two decades regularly challenged their union and formed other structures at shop floor level to contest conditions as well as union politics (Kenny, 2018). Beyond labour politics and marking changing working-class composition, social movements around issues of social reproduction, such as commodification of public services, housing and land occupation, the national student movement #FeesMustFall, and most recently social grants, also explain the terrain (Alexander, 2010; Levenson, 2018; Paret, 2020; Von Holdt and Naidoo, 2019; Scully, forthcoming). The ‘movement landscape’ has in itself become more complex since an earlier round of ‘new social movements’ in the early 2000s. Social movements contesting various aspects of precariousness at the locus of ‘community’ and at the interface with local government are also bound into and deeply conditioned by traditions of organising and the discourses and repertoires of the ANC/Congress Alliance. As a result, this active ground means that the ANC itself also reabsorbs the critiques and, indeed, often the people (Von Holdt and Naidoo, 2019). Still, struggles continue along specific axes related to the forms of capital restructuring and state response. At the moment, housing struggles, particularly in Cape Town, where property speculation has been the most extreme, have seen activists protest evictions and organise new land occupations. As Levenson (2019, p. 442) writes, regular municipality-led evictions of residents, “do not dissipate the conflicts inherent in land occupations; instead, they precipitate new ones”. Even as precariousness defines conditions on the ground for most South Africans, made so much worse by the pandemic, new organising continues. For instance, the C19 (Covid-19) Coalition began early in the lockdown to organise regionally around hunger and food distribution. While much of these networks have changed shape, what remains is on-the-ground organising to link working-class consumers to small producers, and to facilitate expansion of sustainable food systems, in recognition of increasing household hunger.11 In these Covid-19 contexts, activists pressured the state to introduce and renew emergency temporary social assistance through top-ups of existing social grants and through the introduction of the Social Relief of Distress grant covering for the first time unemployed people with no access to other forms of state assistance. Furthermore, some see this activist pressure building to sustain a movement for a universal basic income, which holds for the first time a chance of policy possibilities (Webb and Vally, 2020; Scully, forthcoming). While this chapter offers a grim view of the current conjuncture of South African political economy of work, it shows very clearly the articulations of changes to capital accumulation,
610 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work state rule and working-class movements. While the sites of struggle of wage labour and social reproduction in South Africa are often separated from each other, the social relations constituting these mobilisations are tightly bound together. The current moment of global pandemic has made these conditions and relations only that much more visible.
NOTES 1 2
In 2015 South Africa’s Gini coefficient was 0.63 (The World Bank, 2018, p. xii). Poverty levels are measured at R1503 (South African Rands) per person per month by March 2017 (approximately $120 per month). The extreme (food) poverty levels for households is pegged at R515 per month (or $41 per month) (Zizzamia et al., 2019, p. 10). 3 Trade union density rates have generally declined from a high in the immediate post-apartheid period. To give some sense, density rates went from 29.7 per cent in 2013 to 27.4 per cent in 2015 (StatsSA, 2015). In the private sector, rates have declined from 35.6 per cent in 1997 to 24.4 per cent in 2013 (Bhorat et al., 2014, p. 5). As unemployment and precarious work increased, density rates declined to an overall rate of 23 per cent according to some sources (Cloete, 2021). 4 The manufacturing sector accounted for 11 per cent of employment in 2018, declining from 14 per cent in 2008 (DTI, 2019, p. 8). 5 Household debt to income was 77.1 per cent in 2020, up from 72.8 per cent in 2019, https:// tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/households-debt-to-income, accessed November 8, 2021. 6 The average per annum growth rate in the period from 2001 to 2007 was 4.3 per cent, https://data .worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=ZA, accessed November 8, 2021. 7 “South Africa’s recession deepens as first quarter GDP sinks 2 percent,” BusinessTech, June 30, 2020, https://businesstech.co.za/news/finance/412009/south-africas-recession-deepens-as-first -quarter-gdp-sinks-2/, accessed August 11, 2020. 8 The loan was granted under its Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI). Danny Bradlow, “The IMF’s $4bn loan for South Africa: the pros, cons and potential pitfalls,” Daily Maverick, July 30, 2020, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-07-30-the-imfs-4bn-loan-for-south-africa-the-pros -cons-and-potential-pitfalls/, accessed August 11, 2020. 9 Tshegofatso Mathe, “South Africa’s economy is in a severe recession,” September 8, 2020, Mail & Guardian, https://mg.co.za/business/2020-09-08-south-africas-economy-is-in-a-severe-recession/, accessed February 17, 2021. 10 Zuma took over as state president in late 2008. 11 Stephen Greenberg, personal communication, February 17, 2021.
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Capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa 611 Bernards, Nick. 2020. “Centring labour in financialization,” Globalizations 17(4): 714–729. Bezuidenhout, Andries and Malehoko Tshoaedi, eds. 2017. Labour Beyond Cosatu: Mapping the Rupture in South Africa’s Labour Landscape. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Bhorat, Haroon, Karmen Naidoo and Derek Yu. 2014. Trade unions in an emerging economy: The case of South Africa. World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) Working Paper No 2014/055, Helsinki: UNU-WIDER. Bond, Patrick. 2013. “Debt, uneven development and capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas,” Third World Quarterly 34(4): 569–592. Bowman, Andrew. 2018. “Financialization and the extractive industries: the case of South African platinum mining,” Competition & Change 22(4): 388–412. Bowman, Andrew. 2019. “Black economic empowerment policy and state–business relations in South Africa: the case of mining,” Review of African Political Economy 46(160): 223–245. Buhlungu, Sakhela. 2010. A Paradox of Victory: COSATU and the Democratic Transformation in South Africa. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Buhlungu, Sakhela, and Malehoko Tshoaedi, eds. 2012. COSATU’S Contested Legacy: South African Trade Unions in the Second Decade of Democracy. Pretoria: HSRC. Chinguno, Crispin. 2013. “Marikana: fragmentation, precariousness, strike violence and solidarity,” Review of African Political Economy 40(138): 639–646. Cloete, Carl. 2021. “Labour pains: Trade union membership has declined badly and bosses are calling the shots,” Daily Maverick, March 2, 2021, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2021-03 -02-labour-pains-trade-union-membership-has-declined-badly-and-bosses-are-calling-the-shots/, accessed November 8, 2021. DTI (Department of Trade and Industry). 2019. Facts and Figures on Skills in Manufacturing, 2019. Pretoria: The DTI. Fine, Ben. 2013. “Financialization from a Marxist perspective,” International Journal of Political Economy 42(4): 47–66. Fine, B. and Zavareh Rustomjee. 1997. South Africa’s Political Economy: From Minerals-Energy Complex to Industrialisation. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Freund, William. 2013. “Swimming against the tide: the macro-economic research group in the South African transition 1991–94,” Review of African Political Economy 40(138): 519–536. Hart, Gillian. 2013. Rethinking the South African Crisis: National, Populism, Hegemony. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Hlatshwayo, Mondli. 2018. “The new struggles of precarious workers in South Africa: nascent organisational responses of community health workers,” Review of African Political Economy, DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2018.1483907 James, Deborah. 2015. Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Karwowski, Ewa. 2018. “Corporate financialization in South Africa: from investment strike to housing bubble,” Competition & Change 22(4): 413–436. Karwowski, Ewa, Ben Fine and Samantha Ashman. 2018. “Introduction to the special section ‘Financialization in South Africa’,” Competition & Change 22(4): 383–387. Kenny, Bridget. 2018. Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kenny, Bridget. 2019. “The sprawl of malls: financialisation, service work and inequality in Johannesburg's urban geography,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 101: 36–60. Kenny, Bridget and Edward Webster. 1998. “Eroding the Core: Flexibility and the Re-segmentation of the South African Labour Market,” Critical Sociology 24(3): 216–243. Levenson, Zachary. 2018. “The road to TRAs is paved with good intentions: Dispossession through delivery in post-apartheid Cape Town,” Urban Studies 55(14): 3218–3233. Levenson, Zachary. 2019. “‘Such elements do not belong in an ordered society’: managing rural–urban resettlement in democratic South Africa,” Journal of Agrarian Change 19: 427–446. Luckett, Thembi and Naadira Munshi. 2017. “Rebuilding and Workers’ Movement,” Jacobin Magazine, May 15, 2017, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/south-africa-trade-unions-saftu-numsa-anc-zuma, accessed 12 December 2020.
612 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Marais, Hein. 2011. South Africa Pushed to the Limit: The Political Economy of Change. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Marais, Hein. 2020. “The crisis of waged work and the option of a universal basic income grant for South Africa,” Globalizations 17: 352–379. Mohamed, Seeraj. 2017. “Financialization of the South African economy,” Development 59(1): 137–142. Naidoo, Prishani. 2010. “Indigent management: a strategic response to the struggles of the poor in post-apartheid South Africa,” Development or Decline 156–159. Nilsen, Alf Gunvald and Karl von Holdt. 2019. “Rising powers, people rising: neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries,” Globalizations 16(2): 121–136. Paret, Marcel. 2020. “The community strike: from precarity to militant organizing,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 61(2–3): 159–177. Ruiters, Greg. 2020. “Non-Racialism: The New Form of Racial Inequality in a Neo-Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 1–16. DOI: 10. 107.171.00219062094900 Samson, Melanie, Tanya Zack and Zoe Postman. 2021. “Reclaimer Integration Training and Capacity Building Needs Status Quo Report”. UNDP and CSIR. Pretoria: CSIR. Satgar, Vishwas and Roger Southall, eds. 2015. Cosatu in Crisis: The Fragmentation of an African Trade Union Federation. Sandton: The Forum for Public Dialogue. Scully, Ben. 2016. “From the shop floor to the kitchen table: the shifting centre of precarious workers’ politics in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 43(148): 295–311. Scully, Ben. forthcoming. “The Pandemic-Era Politics of Social Policy: The possibilities and pitfalls of basic income’s reemergence in South Africa,” Presentation to Global Labour University, online workshop, February 2021. Segatti, Aurelia and Nicolas Pons-Vignon. 2013. “Stuck in stabilisation? South Africa's post-apartheid macro-economic policy between ideological conversion and technocratic capture,” Review of African Political Economy 40(138): 537–555. Seidman, Gay W. 1994. Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sinwell, Luke. 2015. “‘AMCU by day, workers’ committee by night’: insurgent trade unionism at Anglo Platinum (Amplats) mine, 2012–2014,” Review of African Political Economy 42(146): 591–605. Statistics South Africa. 2015. Labour market dynamics in South Africa, 2015. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Statistics South Africa. 2020. Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Quarter 3, 2020. November 12, 2020. Pretoria: Statistics South Africa. Theron, Jan. 2005. “Employment is not what it used to be: the nature and impact of restructuring of work in South Africa.” In Beyond the Apartheid Workplace: Studies in Transition, eds. Eddie Webster and Karl von Hold, pp. 293–316. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. van der Walt, Lucien. 2019. “Rebuilding the workers’ movement for counter-power, justice and self-management: a contribution to the debate,” Amandla! 63: 24–25. Von Holdt, Karl. 2019. “The political economy of corruption: elite-formation, factions and violence.” SWOP Working Paper 10. Johannesburg: SWOP Institute. Von Holdt, Karl and Prishani Naidoo. 2019. “Mapping movement landscapes in South Africa,” Globalizations 16(2): 170–185. Webb, Christopher and Natasha Vally. 2020. “South Africa has raised social grants: why this shouldn’t be a stop‑gap measure,” The Conversation. Accessed September 20, 2020. https://theconversation .com/south‑africa‑has‑raised‑social‑grants‑why‑this‑shouldnt-be-a-stop-gap-measure-138023. Webster, Edward and Thomas Englert. 2020. “New dawn or end of labour?: from South Africa’s East Rand to Ekurhuleni,” Globalizations 17. World Bank. 2018. Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in South Africa: An Assessment of Drivers, Constraints and Opportunities, March 2018. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. Xulu, Nomkhosi. 2012. “COSATU and internal migrant workers: old fault lines, new dilemmas.” In COSATU’S Contested Legacy: South African Trade Unions in the Second Decade of Democracy, eds. S. Buhlungu, and M. Tshoaedi, pp. 212–227. Pretoria: HSRC. Zizzamia, Rocco, Simone Schotte and Murray Leibbrandt. 2019. “Snakes and Ladders and Loaded Dice: Poverty dynamics and inequality in South Africa between 2008–2017,” Working Paper Series
Capital circuits, labour markets and working-class politics in South Africa 613 Number 235, NIDS Discussion Paper 2019/2 Version 1. Cape Town: Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, UCT.
KEY TEXTS Barchiesi, Franco. 2011. Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bowman, Andrew. 2018. “Financialization and the extractive industries: The case of South African platinum mining,” Competition & Change 22(4): 388–412. Fine, Ben and Zavareh Rustomjee. 1997. South Africa’s Political Economy: From Minerals-Energy Complex to Industrialisation. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Hart, Gillian. 2013. Rethinking the South African Crisis: National, Populism, Hegemony. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press. Kenny, Bridget. 2018. Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
52. Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond Samuel Andreas Admasie
INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the political economy of labour in Ethiopia from a recent historical perspective, with the aim of describing the changing world of work as it appears to Ethiopian toilers. It does so by centring on the contested process of surplus generation and appropriation across economic sectors and geographical spaces. The chapter argues that harsh exploitation is engendering unsustainable imbalances and repressive practices. Ethiopian workers are not merely exploited, but often super-exploited: meaning that incomes, and therefore generally consumption, of workers are reduced beyond the limit of what is required for upkeep and reproduction.1 The mode of insertion of the Ethiopian economy – as a provider of cheap labour – within global value chains is the key factor in explaining this. For wages as low as in Ethiopia to prevail, facilitating processes are required. Two such processes are identified. First, the chapter discusses subsidisation of wage labour in exporting sectors by means of transfers from workers engaged in other sectors and geographical spaces. Second, it discusses the repressive practices that are required to underpin such a labour regime. But repression only constitutes one side of the equation, and the chapter also discusses the manifold examples of the growing resistance that Ethiopian workers engage in. It is asserted that although the massive political convulsions that have occurred in Ethiopia in the last few years are partly conditioned by the imbalances inherent in the landscape of exploitation, the outcomes have offered no resolution to the tensions. It is argued that a fundamental restructuring and transformation of the Ethiopian economy and its exploitative relationship with the global economy is required to do so. The chapter is structured in the following way. First, it provides a descriptive outline of the dominant modes of exploitation in contemporary Ethiopia, as they have shifted and are emerging. Second, it discusses how the relationship between the Ethiopian economy and imperialism has developed and impacted the modes of exploitation described above. Third, it examines the connections between work in different economic sectors that make super-exploitation in emerging sectors possible, and the political processes that facilitate it. Such connections include the flow of subsidies between workers engaged in one sector to another; and remittances between workers engaged in different geographical spaces. Finally, the chapter discusses the pattern of resistance to these exploitative processes, which offers a way forward.
SHIFTING SURPLUSES AND EMERGING MODES OF EXPLOITATION Work, for most Ethiopians, means agriculture. However, the share of the population working in agriculture has declined substantially over the past decades – from 96 per cent in 1962 to 73 614
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond 615 per cent in 2012 (Taffesse 2019: 468), and only 64 per cent in 2021.2 Between the same years the contribution of agriculture to GDP has declined from 84 per cent to 40 per cent, according to official accounts (ibid: 469). In recent years, two contradictory trends have affected those living off of agricultural work. On the one hand, productivity has been on a steady rise, and agriculture has enjoyed improving terms of trade with urban Ethiopia. This has led to declining rural poverty rates and increased rural consumption. But at the same time population pressure and encroachment by growing urban settlements and commercial farms has led to diminishing plot sizes and dislocations. Plots were tiny at the outset, and so rural Ethiopia remains largely inhabited by what Rahmato (2009: 321) described as ‘a mass of poverty-stricken micro-holders’. Largely, this rural structure is the outcome of the 1975 land reform that nationalised all land, abolished landlordism and ushered in redistribution of use rights over land to the tillers. But because of miniscule plot sizes,3 poor technology and related constraints, the returns on agricultural work – whether subsistence or waged – remain relatively low. Surpluses in the agrarian sector have been extracted through a range of historically evolving means and degrees. Up until the 1974 revolution, landlordism was predominant, although it took slightly different forms in the northern provinces that constituted the historical core of Ethiopia and the southern provinces that were only incorporated into Ethiopia much more recently. Whereas the peasantry in the North enjoyed hereditary rights over land, in the Southern provinces land dispossession had resulted from the forced incorporation. As a result, exploitation was harsher in the Southern provinces, where it also patterned national inequalities. During the long decade that followed the nationalisation of land in 1975, the main method of extraction was forced purchases of quotas of various commodities for below-market value by the state monopoly. Since the early 1990s, peasant smallholders can again trade at market prices. The degree of direct surplus extraction from peasant agriculture has progressively tended to diminish over the past five decades; from extracting around 60 per cent of the domestic market value of total peasant production, to somewhere around or slightly below 30 per cent (Rahmato 2009: 335–336). Before crops reach global, or even local markets, however, they are subject to exploitative mediating practices – which involve monopoly situations – of a chain of merchants, who indirectly capture a significantly higher share of the value of agricultural commodities. Think, for instance, of the example of coffee – a significant Ethiopian export crop – made by Smith (2012), where cultivators and harvesters receive less than 2 per cent of the final retail price on North American and European markets, and where some 86 per cent of that retail value is accounted for as ‘value added’ in the importing countries. In contemporary times, Ethiopian agriculture is subject to an ongoing broadening and deepening of commoditised relations, with an increasing share of output being marketed. Commoditisation of the rural economy also encompasses labour. Wage labour plays an increasingly important role in rural Ethiopia, and smallholders are both buyers and sellers of labour. But wage labour is not coming to rural Ethiopia within smallholder production alone. Growing large-scale commercial farms, entirely reliant on wage labour, are both pushing and pulling rural labour into waged relations, by competing with, encroaching on and attracting smallholders (Makki 2014). There are significant differences between highland and lowland political economies. In the Northern and Eastern lowlands, pastoralism is the dominant mode of work, and on Southern and Western lowlands shifting cultivation, rather than sedimentary agriculture, is often practised. In these regions, surplus generation, appropriation and distribution takes quite different forms from those in the highland core – its extent being far lower. But the proliferation of large
616 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work commercial farms – a process that picked up pace again in the late 2000s – has also begun to shift patterns, and put pressure on pastoral and marginal lands. Work in the loosely defined and regulated, but increasingly swollen service sector is another source contributing to the growth of the ranks of wage workers. The service sector has been one the fastest growing sectors in the economy over the last decades, particularly in urban Ethiopia: in the capital it provides employment for nearly half of the population (Gebre-Egziabher and Yemeru 2019: 792). But it generally does not provide quality employment. Only a small share of service sector workers is engaged by modern enterprises in subsectors such as finance and telecom. By contrast, the overwhelming majority are self-employed or work in rudimentary establishments in trade and retail, hospitality, construction and transport, where contracts and payments are typically informal. Large numbers of shoe shiners, hawkers, guards and commercial sex workers are included here. Exploitation is particularly harsh in parts of the sector and working conditions tend to be quite abysmal. Domestic work is another significant example. Whereas more attention has been given to Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in Gulf economies and the Levant, domestic workers that remain in Ethiopia are more plenty (CSA 2021b). The conditions of work for the latter category are appalling. In many cases live-in domestic workers are not paid wages at all – and if they are, they range as low as the equivalent of a handful of USD monthly (Biadegilegn 2011). If the future of the Ethiopian economy lies in the continued growth of the service sector, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that work in Ethiopia will continue to be marked by such conditions. Partly because of inflows of foreign capital and partly because of a concerted state-led effort to boost manufacturing, and despite still comprising only around 10 per cent of the total workforce (CSA 2021b), employment in industry has been growing relatively rapidly over the past decade. The Ethiopian government is currently pursuing an export-oriented model based on very low wages – quite typically starting around or below 30 USD monthly.4 It does not constitute Ethiopia’s first major effort to industrialise, but in the past such efforts have been based on import-substituting strategies and state capital has played a more central role. Much has been said about the poor working conditions in Ethiopia’s newly constructed plants and plantations,5 and this will be discussed in more detail below. Suffice to say here that the Ethiopian wage labour regime is extremely harsh – even by historical comparison. Real wages are today far below what they were in 1975, malnutrition in the workforce is a serious problem, abuse is rampant, harassment of outspoken workers and activists is the rule and union-busting practices are widespread. It is important to recognise that the miserable wages that characterise Ethiopia’s waged sector are not coincidental. They are rather entirely intentional, and the different components of the wage labour regime – including laws, policies and practices – reinforce each other to this end. Neither are low wages determined by productivity levels. Historical data of labour productivity and real wages in Ethiopia demonstrates no correlation.6 Rather, these wage levels are contingent only historically, and upon the class struggle – which is precisely why they reached their highest level during the massive wave of workers’ mobilisation around the time of the 1974 revolution. One of the largest emerging subsectors of industry is textile and apparel production, which employs some 100,000 workers. They are split between the older state-owned or re-privatised Ethiopian-owned plants, where conditions and wages are relatively better, and the more recently established foreign-owned plants are often located in industrial parks, where conditions are generally worse. Other subsectors that have emerged out of recent Ethiopian export-oriented efforts include floriculture, which now employs some 40,000 people, and
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond 617 a struggling sugar plantation sector – which nevertheless employ tens of thousands of wage workers and out-growers. Conditions are harsh and massively exploitative in these subsectors too.7 It is not possible to ascertain where the largest surpluses are generated in the Ethiopian economy with any greater precision. This is particularly because a significant amount of such surpluses is only realised once commodities have left Ethiopia, with the value of Ethiopian-made commodities appearing in the balance sheets of retailing firms abroad and in the GDP charts of importing countries. What appears to be certain is that the super-exploitation that occurs in the waged sectors, and particularly in the exporting sectors, generates high profits; but that rentier and merchant interests have a multi-scalar and profound predatory role through the greater parts of the economy. These interests take many different expressions: the multinational firms that source production from Ethiopian plants in the textile industry; the real estate moguls; and the ubiquitous rural merchants and urban brokers who prey on every aspect of the economy – but they have their high rates of return on invested capital in common. Finally, state monopolies in, for example, telecom and energy; and large state corporations in sectors such as banking and insurance regularly generate what appear to be super-profits. The class structure of Ethiopia thus consists of a multitude of labouring millions at the one end. They work in agriculture, as peasant smallholders or wage workers on farms; in the service sector as self-employed agents, as waged workers in one of a myriad of micro-establishments, or as one of the few privileged employees in the relatively small, but growing, ranks of professionals; in state administration; as pastoralists eking out a living on increasingly scarce resources; or in industry, facing super-exploitation. At the upper end of the class structure sits an amalgamation of bureaucratic, propertied, rentier and merchant interests. The defeat of the Ethiopian proletariat – hardly surprising given the class balance of forces that prevailed, but nevertheless momentous for subsequent events – which had attempted to acquire control over workplaces across the country in the years following the 1974 Ethiopian revolution; and the concomitant land reform that established the structure of the rural economy is the key moment that produced this outcome. The class structure that was established at that point has since further evolved, but it has done so within its internal logic and in great continuity in terms of dominant class interests. At the apex of the contemporary Ethiopian economy, bureaucratic categories and means of surplus extraction, which were dominant during the period of military rule in the late 1970s and the 1980s, has gradually given way to private propertied, rentier and merchant interests emerging out of, or in amalgamation with, such bureaucratic interests. This category of private owners and traders is taking its place as a peripheral but properly emerging bourgeoisie, pilfering the working people of Ethiopia and facilitating the exploitation of their labour on a further global scale.
ETHIOPIA AND IMPERIALISM In the 1970s and 1980s imperialism was a category frequently used by Ethiopian scholars to analyse Ethiopia’s relationship with the outside world, and the perception that Ethiopian labour was being exploited by imperialist interests which permeated both the arts – take, for example, Haile Gerima’s acclaimed film Harvest: 3000 years from 1975 – and politics. In fact, one can argue that the 1974 revolution to a significant extent was inspired by this view. In contemporary times, however, exploitation in general, and imperialist exploitation in particu-
618 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work lar, are categories and themes glaringly absent from Ethiopian academic, political and cultural discussions. There is a great irony involved here, for whereas foreign capital’s penetration of the Ethiopian economy was superficial in the early 1970s, it is today unprecedented in both depth and extent.8 By the late 1960s, foreign ownership had begun to make a mark on particularly the small modern urban sectors. However, foreign owners were frequently individual residents in Ethiopia, who considered the country their home and who had raised the capital domestically. There were also some larger establishments, such as the Dutch firm HVA’s sugar plantations, but the stock of foreign capital in Ethiopia was still negligible. Neither was the Ethiopian market a significant outlet for foreign exports, and not much of a prize to such interests – because of the destitution of the overwhelming majority of peasants, it was simply too small and undeveloped. Finally, since Ethiopia had few exploitable natural resource commodities, resource imperialism was never a feature. Imperialist exploitation of Ethiopia occurred, but on a very limited scale, and mostly through the unequal exchange of primary commodities such as coffee. The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 largely put an end to what foreign ownership of Ethiopian assets that had prevailed. Given that average wages and incomes fell rapidly during the period of military rule that followed, and given the country’s declining terms of trade, Ethiopia was obviously still being exploited on international markets. But with no foreign owners or managers in Ethiopia, these exploitative relations were never as glaring. While small investments began to drip in again once the ban on private and foreign ownership was overturned in the early 1990s, the pace by which foreign capital has poured into the Ethiopian economy has become spectacularly rapid since the beginning of the 2000s – resulting in more than a tenfold expansion of the USD value of foreign claims on assets in Ethiopia in those years (Schaefer and Oya 2019: 18). By this time, the Ethiopian government had largely abandoned attempts to kindle the formation of significant domestic private industrial capital in exchange for the hope of having foreign capital rapidly transform the economy. This has expressed itself in several ways: massive swaths of land being cleared and leased out at nominal fees to foreign investors in floriculture and commercial farming; investment regulations – considered among the most liberal in Africa – being made more favourable to new entrants benefitting from tax and duty exemptions; the establishment of facilitating agencies, with the role of attending to every need of individual foreign investors; infrastructure investments geared towards providing cheap rate and logistical services to exporting firms; and, in the last decade, the foundation of a string of industrial parks. These parks now host firms employing some 80,000 workers. What occurs in these parks and on the plantations established with this wave of foreign investments is nothing short of super-exploitation: meaning that workers – who are overwhelmingly female in both the textile sector and in floriculture – are generally not sufficiently remunerated to cover the costs of the social reproduction of labour, or even the basic living costs of individual workers. Wages in, for example, the textile industry are among the lowest in the world. A recent report found them to average at 0.18 USD/hour but reaching as low of 0.12 USD/hour and thus constituting ‘the lowest wages by far’ that the reporting consortium had observed in any garment-exporting country in recent years (Workers Rights Consortium 2018: 6). Plenty of other reports and studies in the last few years have pointed to this state of things, and the deleterious effects it has.9 They include workers collapsing on the job due to overwork and malnourishment, and a notoriously high turnover rate of the workforce. The
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond 619 flip-side of super-exploitation, however, are super-profits. Because of the structure of the global production networks at operation, such super-profits generally do not accrue to firms operating in Ethiopia, but the sourcing firms abroad. In Ethiopia, most producing firms do not come from the major imperialist economies, but from second-tier emerging ones, including Turkey, India, Saudi Arabia and China. The exception here is floriculture – where Dutch capital remains dominant in production and distribution. In textiles and apparel, however, sourcing firms – some of the major ones active in Ethiopia include Walmart and H&M – typically force relatively low prices on the producing firms, and thereby capture the substantial part of the super-profits made possible. But although the Ethiopian state’s effort to attract foreign capital occurs on the back of the working people, and the type of high-quality employment that it was supposed to generate has been glaringly absent, it is nevertheless frequently argued that such investments benefit the Ethiopian economy in the longer run. Even though this proposition is dubious, given how the benefits are being distributed, it also disregards the manner in which the Ethiopian economy is being inserted into global value chains. There is already ample evidence that the type of technological transfer to domestic firms that was expected to occur has not been forthcoming to any meaningful degree. Neither has foreign investment done much to boost demand for domestic input, as the parks and plantations have the character of processing enclaves importing the lions’ share of inputs – including, frequently, primary commodities such as cotton. Strategically, Ethiopia’s export- and foreign capital-oriented strategy has come at the opportunity cost of abandoning inward-oriented strategies of import-substitution, which had been practised since the 1960s, and an agricultural development-led industrialisation strategy, which the former government practised well into the 2000s. This means that domestic industry – typically older, less capital-intensive, but entailing better working conditions – is now forced to compete with, and increasingly lose out to, the new foreign entrants and cheap commodities from abroad which are flooding the Ethiopian market as barriers are coming down. Expansion of export value has not remotely matched the growth of imports, and the balance of payment and external debt situation is worsening at such an alarming rate that Ethiopia is currently considered at high risk of debt distress by international financial institutions. In this situation the response has been to deregulate and privatise further – exposing Ethiopian workers to yet further tribulations, and reinforcing Ethiopia’s disadvantageous mode of insertion into the global economy.
FACILITATION OF AND PATHWAYS TO SUPER-EXPLOITATION One curious aspect of wage labour in the sectors discussed is the degree to which it exhibits signs of requiring subsidisation from other sectors of work – a point which has also been made by Mains and Mulat (2021) and Chinigò (2020). However one calculates, it appears that the wages mentioned are far below what is required to ensure the social reproduction of wage labour, or even, in many cases, the ability of the individual worker to afford the costs of shelter and a minimally required diet. Several reports have found evidence of this.10 How can wages that cannot support the reproduction of labour then persist? For Ethiopian workers to be paid salaries that low, the cost of the preservation and reproduction of labour has to be borne by other sectors and entities.
620 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work One form of such subsidisation takes place when wage workers are supported by family members in the peasant agrarian sector. This appears to be the case with regards to many young rural migrants who take up employment in the industrial parks, and typically takes the expression of transfers of food. Schaefer and Oya (2019: 34) have noted that 70 per cent of textile workers surveyed in the country’s largest industrial park ‘rely on additional income from other household members’, whereas Demeke et al. (2020) have reasoned that incoming remittances could explain the fact ‘that average basic food and rent expenditures are higher than the average monthly salary’ of surveyed workers in the park. Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019: 4) found that young migrant female workers who take up work in the same park rarely are in a position to neither save nor support relatives in rural areas, and Mains and Mulat (2021) noted that parents of those workers instead of receiving transfers ‘were often buying phone credits for them and sending them to Hawassa with dried food and spices’. Mains and Mulat added that the provision of free housing and meals to live-in family members working in the park constituted another form of subsidisation – something that has been highlighted by the COVID-19-crisis, where a recent report found that no less than a fifth of workers relied on family members to cover expenses or provide accommodation as a result of reduced incomes (ILO 2020). Similar processes have been observed on floricultural plantations. Melese (2019: 551) has noted that some workers surveyed received support from their family, while a fifth of workers were found to ‘receive cereal from their family farm in return for their cash support’. Although it is difficult to assess the magnitude of subsidisation, such transfers indicate the prevalence of indirect subsidies from the agrarian sector to foreign investors in the waged sectors, who are thus capable of paying below-subsistence wages. Another form of subsidisation takes place when cash remittances are transferred from abroad. This is an important aspect of the contemporary Ethiopian economy, with the total value of incoming remittances outweighing the total value of Ethiopian exports. Quite a significant share of such remittances come from the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, where around half a million Ethiopians live and work (Fernandez 2020: 30). A significant share of them are female domestic workers. Working conditions are often harsh for these workers, who have to struggle with a legal regime – the kafala system which assigns custodian rights over workers to their employers – as inhospitable as the work is unrelenting. The exploitation of these workers is certainly an important phenomenon in its own right, and one cannot grasp the importance of wage labour in the Ethiopian political economy without including the role of Ethiopian migrant workers abroad. One aspect of this role is that transfers from migrant workers provide the economy with scarce foreign exchange, needed to keep the balance of payment gaps from widening further. In doing so, transfers from migrant workers assure that consumption of imported goods are not brought to a halt, and thus stabilise the national political economy by shielding it from the impact such a shock would have. Yet, these migrant workers still fill another important function: exploitation abroad subsidises super-exploitation at home. As parts of the migrant workers’ meagre wages make their way back, they contribute to the cost of the social reproduction of labour and enable family members to take up work that pays less than such costs. Because while migrant domestic workers’ wages are low, they are incomparably higher than the rock-bottom wages in Ethiopia. Indeed, as Fernandez (2020: 4–5) has found, ‘a common profile of an Ethiopian migrant woman is the eldest daughter from a low-income family, who has migrated to support her parent/s and dependent younger siblings’. Since the recruitment of workers to industrial parks include a large share of young people coming in and out of school, or who are ‘in transit’
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond 621 while waiting for a chance for themselves to go abroad,11 such dependent siblings supported by migrant workers are thus enabled to take up employment for wages which would not otherwise have been possible. And even where the subsidy is not direct – i.e. cash contributions to a working family member to top up wages – migrant workers indirectly subsidise the social reproduction of wage labour in Ethiopia. As Fernandez (2020: 125) has argued, they do so by ‘support[ing] their families’ survival by financing household consumption expenditure [and contributing] to human capital by supporting the education of their siblings or of their own children’. Given how widespread labour migration out of Ethiopia is – in 2011 a cross-regional survey found that 41 per cent of households surveyed reported to have a household member abroad (ibid: 28) – and given the importance of remittances to the Ethiopian economy, it is reasonable to assume that these remittances play a significant role in facilitating the ability of employers to pay wages below the costs of social reproduction and upkeep of labour. But subsidies are not sufficient to uphold a wage labour regime as harsh as Ethiopia’s. For that to be possible, repression is a central ingredient. Investors have deployed a range of different union-busting measures – in fact, in the largest industrial park, unions have been outright but illegally banned by employers.12 They were tacitly supported by state institutions in doing so, since the authority responsible for access to the parks reinforces the ban by refusing to issue organisers entry-passes (Admasie 2021). The ban was further reinforced by measures against outspoken workers and aspiring labour activists within the workforce, as attempts to organise are met with dismissals. Such harassment and abuse of workers’ freedom of association are not confined to the industrial parks. On the plantations and commercial farms, abuse of workers’ rights in general, and refusal to permit workers to exercise their legal right to unionise in particular is commonplace. Neither are white-collar workers spared: in the last few years there have been mass dismissals of both air traffic controllers and workers of an international hotel chain who attempted to exercise collective rights, and there are ongoing efforts to put a lid on Ethiopian Airlines pilots’ attempts to do the same. What these cases have in common is that the state has either turned a blind eye to egregious violations of workers’ rights, or actively intervened to suppress them. However, in the older factories and firms – despite their typically lesser degree of profitability – unions are typically stronger, working conditions and wages are better and employers are less likely to be willing or capable of violating rights. Partly, this can be explained by past waves of class struggle, which have seen the workers in such establishments capture and entrench certain rights. A phenomenon we shall turn to in the next section.
A CONCLUSION FOR A NEW BEGINNING? PATTERNS OF RESISTANCE AND SITES OF CLASS CONTENTION There is a discernable historical and contemporary pattern of resistance to the exploitative processes discussed above. This includes impromptu resistance against dispossession in the agrarian sector, including physical attacks on plantations; resistance against exploitation in the waged sector, expressed by growing industrial unrest and by a high rate of workforce turnover; and resistance against a political system that facilitates this exploitation. Such resistance is expressed in manners that do not always make the class content of grievances visible, but it is nevertheless partly fuelled by such grievances. The cases of attacks on foreign investors’ property13 elucidates this relationship between political protests and economic grievances.
622 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Class struggle has most definitely been an important driving factor of recent Ethiopian history. Prime examples of this are the mass mobilisation – including a successful general strike – that led to the 1974 revolution; the land reform and nationalisations that the revolution ushered in; and the resultant reconfiguration of the class structure of Ethiopian society. But there are important precursors of class struggle on workplace levels leading to shifts in aggregate labour relations too. During the 1960s and 1970s, for example, a protracted mobilisation of the waged workforce, expressed in ceaseless examples of wild-cat strikes, led to an impressive surge of average real wages in productive sectors (Admasie 2019). This was a straightforward outcome of struggle, and the subsequent defeat of the proletariat in the years following the revolution – amid heavy repression – in turn triggered a collapse of such wages. There have been attempts by workers to reacquire capacities and forward momentum in the decades that followed, but none have been successful for very long. Over the second half of the 2010s, however, wild-cat strikes have become a serious problem facing capital in Ethiopia – inside and outside industrial parks; in plants as well as plantations; and among blue- as well as white-collar workers. The difficulties this poses to investors and capitalists have been discussed in a number of recent accounts;14 and they are compounded by the fact that workers have become increasingly prone to vote with their feet, and simply leave their jobs at a rate that seriously undercuts productivity. Meanwhile, Ethiopian trade unions have become increasingly assertive in the last decade, and this has led to new ranks of workers joining them – membership in the unions more than tripled between 2007 and 2020. As Oya and Schaefer (2020: 20) have written, investors came to Ethiopia expecting ‘to find a large and pliant labour force willing to work for low wages’ – but they found nothing of the sort. What they have found is an increasingly restive workforce, willing to vigorously challenge the mode of their subordination and exploitation. In rural Ethiopia, moreover, there have been multiple conflicts reported related to the expansion of commercial farms, which are both exploiting wage labour and displacing and dispossessing local communities. Other investments have also faced attacks. In this context, one needs to note that Ethiopia has experienced severe political convulsions in the last few years,15 partly triggered by sustained protest movements. Such protest may appear narrowly political at first sight and focused predominantly on the question of national inequalities, but they must be viewed through the lens of an exploitative political economy that is not capable of providing employment of reasonable quality; in which inequality is rapidly rising; where farmers and local communities are disposed by investors; where rentier and comprador interest dominate; and where repression is required to shore it up. If this is the case, it is unlikely that reconfigurations of the political superstructure – such as the structure of the federation, or which party controls the reins of state power – alone will be sufficient to resolve underlying tensions in the long run: a fundamental restructuring and transformation of the Ethiopian economy and of its exploitative relationship with the global economy is probably, at the very least, as necessary. But this is an assertion that can only be tested with time.
NOTES 1 2
The concept of super-exploitation can be explored in the works of Ruy Mauro Marini, Andy Higginbottom and John Smith. That same year, about 30 per cent of the workforce were engaged in a broad range of services and trade, and 10 per cent in industry. Whereas roughly half of working Ethiopians were self-employed,
Work and exploitation in Ethiopia and beyond 623
3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
slightly above a third were categorised as unpaid family members, and some 6 per cent were public employees (CSA 2021b). World Bank modelled ILOSTATS data suggests that wage workers constituted around 16 per cent of the workforce in 2019. Typically, around one hectare or less, but in many places as low as a quarter of a hectare (CSA 2021a). See, for example, Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019), documenting uniform incoming base wages of 26 USD in the flagship Hawassa Industrial Park. Oya and Schaefer (2020) document rising take-home wages across several industrial parks in the aftermath of serious contention, but the cuts in bonuses and overtime payments in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic has again revealed that base wages remain abysmally low: Demeke et al. (2020) found the mean wage of surveyed female workers in the Hawassa Industrial Park to be only 32 USD, and the median wage to be even lower than that. Furthermore, because the average surveyed worker had been employed in the park for more than a year, those base wages can be assumed to be somewhat higher than the wages of newly hired workers. See, for example, Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019); Workers Rights Consortium (2018). See Admasie (2018) for a measurement of this. See, for example, Melese (2019). In 2017, total foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in Ethiopia had reached over 18.5 billion USD (Schaefer and Oya 2019: 18). See, for example, Mains and Mulat (2021); Melese (2019); Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019); Mitta (2019); Schaefer and Oya (2019); Workers Rights Consortium (2018). See, for example, Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019); Workers Rights Consortium (2018). Author’s field notes from Ayka Addis Textile Factory, 2015. There are indications in 2021 that the ban is being overturned, but only following years of restiveness within the workforce, including recurring wild-cat strikes. Dozens of such attacks have occurred in Oromia regional state alone since 2016, but several other regional states, such as Gambela, Amhara and Southern regional states, have been affected too. See, for example, Oya and Schaefer (2020); Schaefer and Oya (2019); Barrett and Baumann-Pauly (2019). The Ethiopian civil war, that began in late 2020, constitutes the heaviest of those convulsions. Whereas the protest movement that emerged in different parts of the country in the mid-2010s was fuelled by legitimate popular grievances, the descent into civil war is the outcome of a strategic attempt by one faction of the ruling coalition to retain power in this context. By stoking chauvinist sentiments and pitting masses against masses, it has endeavoured to manipulate, redirect and dilute those grievances that were largely directed against its own corruption and authoritarianism. In waging war on the regional state of Tigray, moreover, it is supported by those very same aspiring powers that have invested heavily in predation on Ethiopian working people – UAE, Turkey and China are among those countries that have flooded Ethiopia with armaments and filled Tigrayan skies with drones. The cost of this cynical strategy has been a humanitarian catastrophe.
REFERENCES Admasie, S.A. (2018) ‘Dynamics of Assertive Labour Movementism: Organised Labour, Unrest and Wages in a Socio-Historical Perspective’. PhD Dissertation. University of Pavia and University of Basel. Admasie, S.A. (2019) ‘Cycles of Mobilisation, Waves of Unrest: Ethiopian Labour Movement History’. Africa N.S. 1(1). Admasie, S.A. (2021) Mapping Social Dialogue in Apparel: Ethiopia. Social Dialogue in the 21st Century project Report. Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and The Strategic Partnership for Garment Supply Chain Transformation. Barrett, P.M. and D. Baumann-Pauly (2019) ‘Made in Ethiopia: Challenges in the Garment Industry’s New Frontier’. NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
624 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Biadegilegn, E. (2011) ‘Conditions of Work for Adult Female Live-in Paid Domestic Workers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’. Research and Perspectives on Development Practice Paper. Kimmage Development Studies Centre, Dublin. Chinigò. D. (2020) ‘Manufacturing and Labour Mobilisation in EPRDF Ethiopia. A Household Perspective on the Rise and Uncertain Prospects of the Textile Industry in Tigray’, Afriche o Oriente 22(2): 69–88. CSA (2021a) Agricultural Sample Survey, Volume IV, Report on Land Utilization (Private Peasant Holdings, Meher Season) 2020/21 (2013 E.C.). Addis Ababa: Central Statistics Agency. CSA (2021b) Ethiopia 2021 Labour Force and Migration Survey Key Findings. Addis Ababa: Central Statistics Agency. Demeke, E., M. Hardy, G. Kagy, C.J. Meyer and M. Witte (2020) ‘The Impact of COVID-19 on the Lives of Women in the Garment Industry: Evidence from Ethiopia’. Living Paper Version 1, Washington D.C.: World Bank. Fernandez, B. (2020) Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers: Migrant Agency and Social Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gebre-Egziabher, T. and E. Abera Yemeru (2019) ‘Urbanisation and industrial development in Ethiopia’, in F. Cheru, C. Cramer and A. Oqubay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy, pp 785–803. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ILO (2020) COVID-19 and the Garment and Textile Sector in Ethiopia: Workers’ Perspectives on COVID-19 Response. Addis Ababa: International Labour Organization. Mains, D. and R. Mulat (2021) ‘The Ethiopian developmental state and struggles over the reproduction of young migrant women’s labor at the Hawassa Industrial Park’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 15(3): 359–377. Makki, F. (2014) ‘Development by Dispossession: Terra Nullius and the Social-Ecology of New Enclosures in Ethiopia’, Rural Sociology (79)1: 79–103. Melese, Ayelech Tiruwha (2019) ‘Constraints on the Ethiopian Floriculture Industry’, in F. Cheru, C. Cramer and A. Oqubay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy, pp 537–555. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitta, G.M. (2019) ‘Labor Rights, Working Conditions, and Workers’ Power in the Emerging Textile and Apparel Industries in Ethiopia: The Case of Hawassa Industrial Park’. New Research in GPE Working Paper No. 01/2019. Kassel, University of Kassel. Oya, C. and F. Schaefer (2020) ‘The Politics of Labour Relations in Global Production Networks: Collective Action, Industrial Parks, and Local Conflict in the Ethiopian Apparel Sector’. IDCEA Working Paper 7, SOAS, University of London. Rahmato, D. (2009) The Peasant and the State: Studies in Agrarian Change in Ethiopia 1950s–2000s. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press. Schaefer, F. and C. Oya (2019) ‘Employment Patterns and Conditions in Construction and Manufacturing in Ethiopia: A Comparative Analysis of the Road Building and Light Manufacturing Sectors’. IDCEA Research Report, SOAS, University of London. Smith, J. (2012) ‘The GDP Illusion: Value Added versus Value Capture’, Monthly Review July–August, 2012: 86–102. Taffesse, A.S. (2019) ‘The Transformation of Smallholder Crop Production in Ethiopia, 1994–2016’, in F. Cheru, C. Cramer and A. Oqubay (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Ethiopian Economy, pp 468–486. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Workers Rights Consortium (2018) ‘Ethiopia is a North Star: Grim Conditions and Miserable Wages Guide Apparel Brands in their Race to the Bottom’. Report. Washington DC, Workers’ Rights Consortium.
Section C. South America
53. Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina Lucila D’Urso and Clara Marticorena
1. INTRODUCTION This chapter analyses the working-class conditions and characteristics in Argentina beginning with the conservative turn configured during the government of Mauricio Macri at the end of 2015, considering the conditions under which workers face the current crisis, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The working class is conceptualized as those who need to sell its workforce to survive. In this regard, the differences according to the insertion in the labour market (unemployment, precarious and informal workers, formal workers) became prominent to the analysis of the power relationships between capital and labour but, it does not involve the existence of different social classes, as have been interpreted, for example, from the conceptualization of precariat developed by Standing (2011). Instead, precariousness is not a new phenomenon under capitalism, at least not when considering the whole history of capitalist accumulation, not just the golden age in the 20th century (Eskenazi and Marticorena, 2010). As Atzeni and Ness (2018, p. 9) point out, “…when we take this broader historical and geographical perspective, precarious work appears as the norm within capitalism”. From this perspective, the impact of technological, organizational and political change configured in recent decades is not denied, which has spread precarious living and working conditions to ever larger portions of the world’s population. In this context, “…precarity as a material condition is today crossing the divide between previously clear demarcations: the formal/informal; citizens/non-citizens; North/South; workplace/community” (Atzeni and Ness, 2018, p. 9). While labour informality has initially been linked to the existence of a modern and dynamic sector and a traditional, low-productivity sector in underdeveloped countries, where the formal and informal sectors were analysed as two segmented labour spheres, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are different interconnections between the two sectors (see for Argentina Giosa Zuazua and Fernández Massi, 2020). Outsourcing strategies are illustrative of this trend: companies in the formal sector benefit from different forms of precarious work through intermediary companies operating informally, or they even benefit from forms of precarious work legally established through labour legislation. Nowadays, both in the so-called “global south” and “global north”, precariousness and informality have become a pervasive condition for large majorities of workers. Wilson (2020, p. 475) emphasizes that “precarization and informalization are both aspects of the drive for capitalist accumulation based on the super-exploitation of labour, or an increase in absolute surplus value…”. The author links precarity and informality with the different forms of relative surplus population in Marx and the pressure, as a labour reserve army, on wages and labour conditions. In this respect, not only is the rate of unemployment important to explain 626
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 627 the evolution of real wages, labour rights and working conditions, but also the extent of informality and precariousness. In Argentina, informality and labour precariousness are structural conditions of the labour market. This trend was consolidated during the last decades of the 20th century as a result of changes in labour processes and labour regulation in a context marked by economic liberalization. These modalities operate as a mechanism to reduce labour costs if we consider the differences in wages and social benefits between formal and informal workers (Marticorena, 2014), as will be developed in the section below. Nevertheless, informal and precarious labour is both a mechanism for reducing labour costs as well as disciplining the labour force, as it fragments the working population. To overcome this fragmentation, the working class needs to build class-solidarity and, as Elbert (2020) points out, to develop trade union strategies beyond the different working-class conditions and resources. Following this perspective, this article considers the structural characteristics of the Argentinian working class with the aim to give an account of its situation in a (re)actualization context of the neoliberal offensive. In this way, socioeconomic indicators are analysed, as well as labour and social conflicts and collective bargaining to approach the conditions of the class struggle since 2015. As was developed in previous works (Marticorena, 2014; Marticorena and D’Urso, 2018), the informality and precariousness that have characterized labour and life conditions since the last decades of the 20th century persisted during the kirchnerist governments (2003–2007/2007–2010/2010–2015). However, the adoption of policies of commercial and financial liberalization, as well as the significant increase in the external debt during Macri’s government, deepened the trends configured in the previous years. These conditions, in a context of accelerating domestic prices, impacted on the main indicators of the labour market, expressed in a decrease in real wages and the rise in unemployment and underemployment rate. Likewise, the change in the labour policy of Macri’s administration in relation to the previous kirchnerist governments, promoted pro-business policies inside and outside the workplaces, and displayed a capitalist offensive on the individual and collective labour rights. In this sense, contents of labour flexibility in different sectoral collective bargaining were extended with the collaboration of traditional union leaders, expressed, for example, in the union confederations’ delay to call for a general strike in a context marked by the dismissals and loss of wages purchasing power. After the victory for the ruling Cambiemos alliance in the 2017 legislative elections, the government felt strengthened to advance in a labour reform, which failed, and in the pension reform, voted in a context of strong mobilizations savagely repressed (Marticorena and D’Urso, 2018). Notwithstanding the changes configured in the working-class conditions, outstanding resistance experiences arose. In these experiences non-traditional sectors, such as popular economy workers and women’s movement, claimed with formal workers for a more combative strategy on the part of conservative trade unions and union confederations. The chapter is structured in four sections. First, the wage and employment conditions since 2015 are presented; second, the dynamics of labour and social conflict are analysed, considering both formal and informal workers and their different levels of representations; the characteristics of collective bargaining as an expression of the balance of power between capital and labour are studied next. Finally, in the conclusions, the importance of the autonomous workers’ organization from the employers and the State to preserve historical labour and social conquers and to resist the current capitalist offensive is highlighted.
628 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
2.
THE ARGENTINIAN WORKING CLASS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Cambiemos victory in the 2015 presidential elections produced a highly conservative turn in economic and political terms. It was expressed in an offensive on labour rights and working conditions in a context marked by the decline in economic growth (Wahren, Harracá and Cappa, 2017; Wainer, 2017). Yet, despite these changes, workers and, more generally, the popular sectors’ resistances, have pushed back some government initiatives as occurred with the bill of labour reform (Marticorena, 2018). The nature of the measures adopted by Cambiemos immediately after their victory, showed the government’s neoliberal orientation, made up largely of senior managers from large companies and an expression of wide fractions of the bourgeoisie as opposition to the previous government policies (Canelo and Castellani, 2016). The elimination of export taxes to diverse agro-industrial crops and products and the reduction of export duties to soy were some of the first policies adopted by the government. Likewise, the devaluation and elimination of the exchange control had a strong inflationary impact and meant a plunge in the real wages (CIFRA, 2016; Varesi, 2018). The rate increase in the public utility services deepened the drop in purchasing power and it strongly impacted on income distribution. At the same time, the government achieved the support of different oppositional sectors – especially from the peronism – in Congress to reach an agreement with the holdouts and restart a new cycle of external debt (Barrera and Bona, 2018; Manzanelli, González and Basualdo, 2017). As a result of the economic and productive policies, the real wage experienced a significant drop (Figure 53.1): between December 2015 and December 2019, it was down 16.4 percent, being more significant in the public sector (down 17.9 percent) than in the private (down 15.5 percent). The depreciation of the income was also dramatic in the case of informal workers: in the private informal sector, wages dropped 21.7 percent, considering the variation between October 2016 and October 2019, and the minimum wage was $10,700 (USD 277 approx.) in 2018, the lowest level in real terms since 2004. It should be noted that the depreciation of the minimum wage started in 2012 – since 2011 it has experienced a drop of 24 percent. The minimum wage was raised by 35 percent in 2019 in comparison with the previous year, but this level (USD 322 approx.) was still far below the poverty line (USD 609 approx.). It is important to consider that the real-wage deterioration started at least in 2011–2012, when the income distribution policies of the last kirchnerist government started to show their constraints. In addition to these policies, the loss of jobs was emphasized and, as its outcome, the rise in unemployment. At the beginning, this trend was more prominent in the public sector, where the government stipulated the dismissal of thousands of public workers, both at the national, provincial and municipal levels (D’Urso, 2017). These layoffs were produced through discontinuing programmes, the non-renewal of precarious contracts and the design of a new state structure aiming for a more efficient management of the public issues, via public spending reduction that was associated with the workers’ salaries. In effect, a loss of public jobs is observed at the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016 (Figure 53.2), which started a recovery in the following years but with less dynamism than in previous years. Employment went from growing at a rate of almost 5 percent per year between 2013 and 2015 to little more than 1 percent between 2016 and 2019 (ODS-CTA-A, 2020a, p. 4).
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 629
Source:
INDEC and General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses CABA.
Figure 53.1
Real wage (Dec. 2015–Dec. 2020). Index 100: Dec. 2015
In the private sector, the Ministry of Labour – that in the previous years had mediated in labour conflicts to contain the rise in unemployment – had an important role in the austerity plan implementation. In this way, it changed its orientation through the validation of the enterprise’s policies and “letting go” in the case of dismissals. In fact, private employment decreased from 6,223,351 in December 2015 to 6,006,396 in the same month of 2019 (Figure 53.2). This drop is explained by the prominent loss of jobs that started in the third quarter of 2018 and has continued in the following years. Furthermore, one relevant trend was the change in the private formal employment composition since 2015. According to the Ministry of Labour (SIPA, November 2019), the loss of jobs was stronger in goods producing activities than in service sectors, which has effects in terms of work quality because the sectors that lost more jobs are, on average, higher paid than the sectors that have lost fewer. For example, the highest loss was in industry (a loss of 166,800 jobs between December 2015 and December 2019), which was harshly affected due to trade liberalization policies; in the trade sector, where the average pay was 33 percent less than in the industrial sector, 35,500 jobs were lost. After the austerity policies applied since 2015, the unemployment rate moved from 5.9 percent in the third quarter of 2015 to 9.7 percent in the same period of 2019 (EPH-INDEC, Table 53.1). In a similar fashion, the underemployment rate increased from 8.6 percent to 12.8 percent and the informality – taking into account the wage rate without retirement discount – increased by approximately two percentage points, from 33.1 percent in the third quarter of 2015 to 35 percent in 2019 (EPH-INDEC, Table 53.1). In relation to labour hiring modalities, the fixed-term contracts increased (32 percent) between the third quarter of 2015 while the
630 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
Source:
SIPA-Ministry of Labour.
Figure 53.2
Registered workers (s.e.) In thousands
contracts for an undetermined period fell by 0.9 percent in the same period of 2019 (EIL, November 20191). In like manner, identifying the Argentinian labour cost as the main inflationary cause, the government oriented its actions to modify income distribution through wage reduction and sought to advance social disciplining through contention and the repression of the labour and social protest, as will be seen in the following sections. This scenario was aggravated by the health and economic COVID-19 pandemic context (Marticorena and D’Urso, 2020). As a result of the lockdown starting in March 2020 the economic activities were suspended and, despite the employment and productive measures taken, the pandemic had a strong impact on the labour market: in the private sector, the government gave wage subsidies through the Emergency Assistance Program for Work and Production (ATP) and decreed the prohibition of dismissals and suspensions without cause. However, as will be discussed in the last section, different agreements at branch level allowed the negotiation of suspensions and wage cuts – just in April 2020, 287,302 jobs were lost in the private formal sector. The unemployment rate jumped from 9.7 percent in the third quarter of 2019 to 11.7 percent in the same period of 2020. The informal workers’ situation was even more pressing. In their case, the government applied the Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia (IFE) (Emergency Family Income), a direct monetary transfer policy equivalent to $10,000 (around USD 105 considering the 2020 exchange rate). The IFE was suspended after three payments in April, May and June 2020 despite the claims of social organizations which denounced the deterioration in the standard of living for informal workers and their families. The limited scope of this measure was reflected in the
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 631 Table 53.1
Economy and labour force indicators, Argentina (2003–2020)
GDP Year
(Annual variation) (%)
Labour force participation rate* (%)
Employment
Unemployment
Underemployment
rate (%)
rate (%)
rate (%)
Workers without social protection benefits (%)
2003
-
45.7
38.2
16,3
16.6
49.5
2004
0.0
46.2
40.1
13,2
15.2
47.7
2005
7.0
46.2
41.1
11,1
13.1
46.1
2006
9.4
46.3
41.6
10,2
11
43.2
2007
8.4
46.2
42.4
8,1
9.3
39.8
2008
6.0
45.7
42.1
7,8
9.2
36.3
2009
5.7
46.1
41.9
9,1
10.5
36.0
2010
9.5
45.9
42.5
7,5
8.8
35.8
2011
6.4
46.7
43.4
7,2
8.8
34.3
2012
-1.1
46.9
43.3
7,6
8.9
35.5
2013
2.6
46.1
42.9
6,8
8.7
34.6
2014
-4.2
44.7
41.3
7,5
9.2
33.6
2015
4.0-
44.8
42.2
5,9
8.6
33.1
2016
3.3
46
42.1
8,5
10.2
33.8
2017
3.9
46.3
42.4
8,3
10.8
34.4
2018
-3.4
46.7
42.5
9.0
11.8
34.3
2019
-1.8
47.2
42.6
9.7
12.8
35.0
2020
-10.2
42.3
37.4
11.7
13.4
28.7
Note: * Employed workers + unemployed workers over total population Source: INDEC. 3rd quarter of each year.
fall of the informality rate (see Table 53.1, workers without social protection benefits), due to the increase in inactivity: workers who did not seek employment, but were available for work, reached 3.3 percent in the third quarter of 2020, while in the same period of the previous year this group represented 0.7 percent (EPH-INDEC). It shows the impossibility of a large number of workers to continue carrying out their activities of survival. Street vendors, and building and domestic workers, are some examples in this way. Likewise, it should be noted that the impact of the pandemic increased the existing gender inequality gaps. A higher proportion of women were unemployed at the end of 2020 (up 2.44 percentage points versus a rise of 1.8 percentage points for men), which brought the female unemployment rate to 11.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, with a gap of 1.7 percentage points when compared to the masculine unemployment rate (OCEPP, 2021, p. 4).
3.
RESISTING AUSTERITY POLICIES: LABOUR CONFLICTS AND SOCIAL PROTEST
The workers’ resistance to austerity policies have been heterogeneous. In this way, it is possible to identify strategies configured according to the different union traditions and, particularly, in relation to the union renewal process that had taken place post-2001 crisis (Etchemendy and Collier, 2007, p. 364; Atzeni and Ghigliani, 2013, pp. 66–67; Marticorena and D’Urso, 2018, pp. 238–242). It was marked by tensions between traditional union leaders linked to Peronism and the rank-and-file, which gave rise to diverse union strategies driven by anti-bureaucratic,
632 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work combative and left sectors (Schneider, 2013; Varela, 2015; D’Urso and Longo, 2018). Notwithstanding, the union reorganizational processes also involved experiences inside the traditional Peronist unionism, both at the grassroots and at the union leadership level. In some cases, this path crystalized in new organizations as in the case of the Corriente Federal de Trabajadores (CFT) in the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), created in 2016 by the banker’s union and unions from the Movimiento de Trabajadores Argentinos (MTA). These reconfigurations in the union map showed particularities since 2015 among which one of the most important was the CGT reunification in August 2016 (see endnote 3). In addition, the dynamic of labour conflict and social protest shows important changes in terms of union and social organization: on the one hand, the relevance of conflicts driven by informal and unemployed workers represented by social movement is highlighted (Silva Mariños, 2020) and, on the other hand, the coordination of these actions with those mobilized by unionized and formal workers is identified (Natalucci, 2017; Varela, 2017). This coordination was important in terms of associative power as well as the wide spectrum of claims that were mobilized: dismissals, job creation, improving social assistance, labour reform, pension reform, social protest criminalization, among others (ODS-CTA-A, 2020a). Labour conflicts and social protests took place in a context determined by the impact of austerity policies on workers’ labour and life conditions during the Macri administration. In practice, protests were related to the damage to wage purchasing power and dismissals. At the beginning of the period, the labour conflict dynamic was signed by actions located in the public sector, where the government developed an offensive oriented to showing the importance of reducing public spending and avoiding allocating State resources to maintaining public jobs, considered unnecessary by Cambiemos. In that context, labour conflicts broke out early in the public sector when, at the end of 2015, the government did not renew the contracts of thousands of workers, which triggered collective actions (D’Urso, 2017). The highest level of labour conflicts in the public sector during the Cambiemos administration was in 2016 (Table 53.2) when workers carried out actions to defend their jobs, including, it is worth mentioning, a massive mobilization that ended in Plaza de Mayo called by the Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado (ATE) in February 2016. That mobilization was the starting point of a move towards the centralization of labour conflicts, especially in the public sector between 2016 and 2018 (Table 53.1). In the private sector, labour conflicts were located primarily at the workplace level, continuing the trend configured in the previous years (Table 53.3). According to Eskenazi (2011), a labour conflict institutionalization is identified from mid-2005, signalled by the leadership strengthening of the traditional unionism, linked to the Peronist party in government, and the combative unionism displacement which had been driving the labour protest since the beginning of the 21st century. In this process, collective bargaining was a key element as a mechanism of labour conflict institutionalization and regulation (Marticorena, 2014 and 2020). The union confederations started to participate in mobilizations and even called general strikes but only after pressure from the rank and file. The first mobilization driven by the union confederations was in April 2016, when all the CGTs’ and Central de Trabajadores de la Argentinas’ (CTAs’) trends2 called a mobilization to the “Monument to Work” (Monumento al Trabajo). Thus, despite the immediacy with which Macri’s austerity policies were applied, it was not until four months had gone by that the five union confederations had a unified act with the slogan “Against the dismissals and Macri’s adjustment policy”, which gathered around 350,000 protesters.
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 633 Table 53.2
Strikes in the public sector (2006–2020)
Year
Total
Workplace (%)
2006
487
51.3
48.7
2007
561
53.3
46.7 50.2
Branch (%)
2008
544
49.8
2009
574
44.1
55.9
2010
579
55.1
44.9
2011
615
59.2
40.8
2012
805
56.0
44.0
2013
792
61.7
38.3
2014
870
51.5
48.5
2015
807
56.0
44.0
2016
862
46.9
53.1 51.5
2017
686
48.5
2018
547
47.5
52.5
2019
516
52.1
47.9
2020
468
37.0
63.0
Source: Ministry of Labour.
Table 53.3
Strikes in the private sector (2006–2020)
Year
Total
Workplace (%)
Branch (%)
2006
313
69.6
30.4
2007
298
75.5
24.5
2008
326
71.8
28.2
2009
338
77.5
22.5
2010
394
80.2
19.8
2011
357
84.3
15.7
2012
434
82.9
17.1
2013
439
83.4
16.6
2014
483
85.5
14.5
2015
442
86.9
13.1
2016
484
83.7
16.3
2017
334
85.0
15.0
2018
306
80.7
19.3
2019
370
84.3
15.7
2020
389
69.9
30.1
Source: Ministry of Labour.
While that collective action showed the union confederations’ mobilization power, the speeches pronounced by the leaders of each union confederation revealed their different positions (Lenguita, 2017). The two CTA leaders were more critical regarding the political orientation of the new government, and the CGT leaders chose to wait and call for a change in the economic scene, offering a truce to Cambiemos. This strategy resulted in some clashes within the union movement, especially from sectors that represented a more combative and autonomous stance, like the CFT. Informal workers have also staged massive actions conducted by social organizations, some of them with the support of union confederations. Different social movements grouped in the Confederación de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (CTEP), the Corriente Clasista y
634 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Combativa (CCC) and Barrios de Pie called a mobilization supported by the CGT leaders and the two CTA leaders in August 2016. The action gathered together more than 150,000 informal and unemployed workers that mobilized from the church of San Cayetano to Plaza de Mayo, where the government house is located. That mobilization took place in a context of increased social conflict, a trend that marks a counterpoint in relation to the previous period, characterized by the prevalence of labour conflicts represented, mainly, by trade unions3 (Spaltenberg, 2012). The Marcha Federal, called in September 2016 by the two CTA and the CFT, is another compelling example. That mobilization had the support of social organizations like the CTEP and included claims such as the universal social wage, the approval of the social emergency and the prohibition of dismissals in the private and public sectors. Within this framework, the platform economy workers stand out. Their participation in a series of labour conflicts impacted on the press and shed light on the claims related to labour conditions of informal and precarious workers as well as the disputes around union representation.4 The role played by these workers grew in importance in the general dynamic of labour conflict in 2016, when enterprises like Rappi, Glovo and Pedidos Ya began to develop their activities in the country. As recent studies pointed out (López Mourelo and Pereyra, 2020; Nava, 2021), the experiences of collective organization configured by these workers are fertile terrain, considering that it is a sector highly inclined to participate in collective actions. Furthermore, the jobs mediated by digital technologies endorsed by the precarization of the labour conditions are configured as a means of employability in a context of unemployment and the degradation of the labour relationships. Despite the existence of heterogeneous working-class situations, the demands around the lack of a unified organization strategy became more noticeable. The tensions inside the traditional union movement heightened in March 2017 at the end of a massive mobilization when the CGT leaders gave an unclear speech in relation to their intentions to call a general and national strike. This event generated an atmosphere of discontent led, mainly, by industrial unions, expressing their rejection of the union confederation’s strategy claiming for the date of the general strike. That intra-union crisis was read by the CGT triumvirate, who called the first of five general and national strikes against Macri’s government in April 2017. Although the strike was called without mobilizations, there were a lot of roadblocks, led by combative unions, delegates and internal commissions. The mobilizations against the pension reform that took place in December 2017 also had an important impact in political terms. Those massive actions affected the government and intensified the crisis inside the CGT in relation to their position on the economic and labour policies. The high level of discontent that was expressed during the mobilizations against the pension reform led to a reaction from the CGT, which called a general strike against the bill that was passed by the Congress. However, the mobilizations in opposition to the pension reform were soon channelled by the traditional unions, which, from then on, oriented their strategy towards the 2019 presidential elections, deactivating actions that exceeded the institutionalized frameworks. The union confederations just called two more general strikes against the policies of “Cambiemos”: against the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (September 25, 2018) and to denounce the deterioration of the economic and social situation (May 29, 2019). Social organizations played a more central role in this period. The women’s movement, for instance, stood out among others for leading massive mobilizations and succeeding in achieving the legalization of abortion and, as a result, put gender issues on the agenda by
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 635 showing the intrinsic relationship between the productive and reproductive realms (Goren and Prieto, 2020). It should be noted that the first general strike during this period was led by this women’s movement, which on March 8, 2017 took part in the international strike called in different countries around the world (Gago, 2019). In Argentina, this action involved different demands among which it is worth highlighting the centrality of all paid and unpaid work performed by women; against sexist violence; the claiming for the abortion legalization (conquered in December 2020); and against Mauricio Macri’s government attacks (Varela, 2020). The beginning of 2020 was marked by the assumption of a new government that had the support of social organizations and a large part of the trade union movement. Notwithstanding, the COVID-19 pandemic broke in a critical economic context and in a labour market affected by austerity policies. Within this framework, the conditions imposed by the pandemic had different expressions according to the workers’ grade of labour formality, collective organization, qualification and gender, among other characteristics, but in all cases entailed a deepening of precarious employment conditions. Thus, despite the lockdown enacted by the government and the difficulties that it implied for the social and labour protest, the collective claims were expressed in different ways: institutional demands, press conferences, social media and even some mobilization represented mainly by the union activism. The collective actions were led, mainly, by trade unions (Nava and Grigera, 2020). The social organizations of informal workers had a low level of mobilization during 2020 which represents a turn in comparison with the previous years. This trend is associated by different studies with the role played by social leaders and referents inside the government structure, mostly in key areas in the Ministry of Social Development, which operated as a path to channel some of the social organizations’ demands (Natalucci et al., 2020). Even though social organizations linked to the government, such as CTEP, did not mobilize during 2020, other organizations independent of the government like Frente Popular Darío Santillán – Corriente Nacional (FPDS-CN), Frente de Organizaciones en Lucha (FOL) and Polo Obrero, organized social protests in the public space. In these cases, as in the mobilizations that have started to be more prominent since 2021, even involving social organizations that support the government, the main demand has been centred around the difficulties of maintaining a minimum income to avoid starvation. In the case of trade unions, during March and April 2020, the collective demands were related to the pandemic’s damage consequences in terms of dismissals, suspensions, wage cuts and labour risk linked to non-compliance of the measures of occupational safety and hygiene. The conflicts related to the essentiality of some activities and production lines were also an area of tension at the workplace level (Marticorena and D’Urso, 2020). The measures carried out by the government like the prohibition of dismissals and suspensions and wage subsidies (for instance the ATP) provoked content strikes, pickets, camps and among other collective actions, oriented to reverse dismissals and wage cuts. Thus, since August 2020 the labour conflict became more intense and some strategic unions from sectors including oil seed products and banks, started to claim for salary improvements (ODS-CTA-A, 2020b).
636 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
4.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
The Cambiemos government sought to consolidate a process of social discipline, which, although it did not fully achieve its objectives, meant a deepening of the deterioration of the living and working conditions of the labouring class. In terms of collective bargaining, despite the support that the government received in the first years of its administration from most of the traditional trade union leaderships grouped in the CGT, it did not manage to move forward with a general labour reform but achieved some advances in labour flexibility through sectoral agreements. During the period 2003–2015, collective bargaining was eminently wage-oriented, focused on the recovery of the purchasing power lost after the devaluation adjustment of January 2002, and the subsequent inflationary dynamics. In several studies we have pointed out the continuities in terms of labour flexibility with respect to the contents introduced during the 1990s within the framework of the neoliberal governments of C. Menem and F. De La Rúa, as well as the tendencies towards the decentralization of collective bargaining (Marticorena, 2014). It is impossible to understand these continuities without analysing the strategies and perspectives developed by most union leaders and the delimitation of demands to the economic struggle, without questioning the conditions of productive consumption/use of labour power by capital. Figure 53.3 shows that during the Cambiemos government, the number of collective bargaining negotiations decreased compared to previous years, and the levels of decentralization tended to remain the same. On the other hand, negotiations continued to be mainly wage agreements, expressed in the persistent prominence of acuerdos (partial agreements) over convenios colectivos (extended agreements) (Figure 53.4). Wage agreements were characterized by their lagging behind inflation in the period, though wage losses differed according to the strategic position (Womack, 2008) and the union strategy of each sector: key elements in the configuration of union bargaining power (Marticorena and D’Urso, 2021). In this sense, strategic sectors such as oil (oil seeds products) and banking, whose union leadership had a confrontational position vis-à-vis the government, achieved lower wage falls and a lower impact on employment conditions. According to data from the ODS-CTA-A (2020b, p. 17), the variation in real wages between the fourth quarter of 2015 and the same period of 2019 was 0.1 percent in the case of oil workers and 2.2 percent in the case of bankers, while public administration workers showed a fall of 35 percent, press workers 35.9 percent and textile workers 38.7 percent. While the government’s aim was not only to lower wages but also to lower labour costs and to increase labour productivity, it did not achieve a generalized modification of labour law or a modification of collective bargaining agreements as a whole. Towards the end of 2016, different officials, and even former President Macri himself, began to argue that it was necessary to “update” collective bargaining agreements in what was the beginning of systematic attacks on labour rights and trade union organisations. Trade union leaderships have played the role of validating the loss of rights and conditions previously established in many sectors. One example was the modification of working conditions signed by the crude oil Trade Union of La Pampa, Neuquén and Río Negro and the trade union of the hierarchical and professional staff in the same sector, which, among other points, provided for the hiring of fixed-term workers as a “general” modality, the reduction of resting time and the elimination of the payment of commuting time (horas taxi). However, it is
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 637
Source: MTESS.
Figure 53.3
Collective bargaining in Argentina (2002–2020)
Source: MTESS.
Figure 53.4
Collective agreements (2002–2020)
638 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work important to note that previous negotiations in the sector already contained flexible conditions (see CCT 644/20125). Flexible conditions were also introduced in agreements of the automotive, textile and dairy sectors. In the public sector, for its part, the state workers’ union UPCN (Unión del Personal Civil de la Nación) signed an agreement in 2017 which, in addition to lowering workers’ real wages, introduced a bonus for attendance and enabled the provision of payment mechanisms for productivity, aspects that were not included in the sector’s collective bargaining agreement. The opposition and social mobilization against the pension reform that took place in December 2017 was a limit to the progress of the labour reform project. The subsequent loss of social and political support by Macri’s government defined the inability to move towards new changes in labour law. However, the crisis scenario pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic marked a further deepening and extension of precariousness and labour flexibility. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, collective bargaining expressed the capitalist offensive over labour and living conditions. Although the government forbade dismissals and suspensions without cause, it allowed the negotiation of suspensions and wage cuts. The agreement between the Argentinian Industrial Union (UIA), the main industrial chamber in the country, and the CGT signed in April 2020 and the resolution number 397/2020 of the Ministry of Labour allowed the negotiation of those conditions through collective bargaining. Therefore, during the first months of the lockdown, the main contents negotiated were suspensions and salary reductions, clauses related to telework and remote work and social peace clauses (Marticorena and D’Urso, 2020). Nominal wage increases were postponed, gaining prominence in the second half of the year. Wage negotiations tended to result in the retreat of the workers in the balance of power, since, in general, they did not compensate for inflation, and were negotiated in various installments.
6.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Working-class conditions worsened since 2015, in a context signed by the (re)actualization of the neoliberal offensive represented by Cambiemos. In this sense, the points to highlight were wage depreciation, unemployment increase and the flexibilization and precarization of labour conditions. Although these trends are not a new feature in the Argentinian labour market, as has been pointed out throughout the article, they represent structural characteristics configured along the last quarter of the 20th century and intensified by the austerity policies applied during Macri’s government. Within this framework, the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the pre-existing economic crisis, impacting even more on precarious working conditions and on the deterioration of the working-class’ living conditions. In this context, the role played by the union confederations and traditional union leaders was oriented to contain the conflict, generally, driven by grassroots workers. Thus, this new context sheds light on the limits of the traditional union strategies and poses new reflections on the ways to resist in the event of crisis and austerity. The crisis triggered the emergence of struggle actions led by the most vulnerable sectors (precarious and informal workers, women, unemployed workers) and, in effect, it enabled a wide spectrum of claims (dismissals, social assistance, labour reform, gender issues). Nonetheless, despite the experiences of coordination between union confederation and social and women movements observed during Macri’s administration, the traditional unions have
Working-class conditions and resistances in the context of austerity in Argentina 639 maintained a partnership and corporativist strategy, which, nowadays, is growing stronger due to its alignment with the national government of Alberto Fernández. At the level of collective bargaining, it is possible to identify different achievements according to the strategic position and the political orientation of the union leaders. In some cases, the sectoral strategies were able to protect the wage and to avoid changes in labour conditions. Yet, there are other experiences in more vulnerable sectors and/or in sectors led by more bureaucratic unions, where a setback in terms of labour rights is clearly observed. The analysis developed in this article raises reflections around the way labour conditions will be configured in the post-pandemic scenario. In this way, the research warns about the importance of union organization autonomous from the employers and the State to resist the current capitalist offensive and to prevent austerity from materializing into labour regulations and working-class life conditions.
NOTES 1 2
See https://www.argentina.gob.ar/trabajo/estadisticas/encuesta-de-indicadores-laborales-eil. Union confederations were fragmented in 2015. There were three CGT: “Azul y Blanca”, created in 2008, and “Azopardo” and “Balcarce”, from 2012. In the case of the CTA, there were two confederations: Argentinians’ CTA and Autonomous CTA. However, the different fractions of the CGT were reunited in a triumvirate in August 2016, at the beginning of Macri’s government. 3 According to the Centro de Economía Política Argentina (CEPA), during the first trimester of 2017 the social unrest registered an increase of 36.6 percent in relation to the last trimester of the previous year. In 25.5 percent of cases, the protests’ claims were centred around socioeconomic deterioration. 4 The platform workers’ organization led to the creation of the Asociación de Personal de Plataformas (APP), a union organization that disputed the representation of the platforms workers with the Asociación Sindical de Motociclistas, Mensajeros y Servicios (ASIMM), a more traditional trade union. 5 Available in the repository of the Ministry of Labour https://convenios.trabajo.gob.ar/ConsultaWeb/ Aviso.asp.
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54. Chile – between Pinochet’s neoliberal counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt1 Miguel Urrutia and Fernando Durán-Palma
INTRODUCTION On 18 October 2019, merely ten days after President Sebastián Piñera described Chile as ‘a genuine oasis, with a stable democracy and a growing economy in the midst of a convulsed Latin America’ (CNN, 2019), what had began as a coordinated evasion campaign against a minor fare increase in the Santiago metro by thousands of secondary school students, escalated into open confrontations with police and the vandalising of more than 80 metro stations, including 17 burned down, triggering the country’s most severe socio-political crisis since the coup d’état of 1973. As the government declared state of emergency and deployed the army to reinstate order, mass demonstrations, protests, and riots spread across the country and were met, as ever, with brutal repression. A few days later, on 25 October, more than 1.2 million people marched defiantly through the capital protesting against social inequality and demanding Piñera’s resignation. On 12 November, a general strike called by unions and other social organisations led to negotiations among the government, Congress, and the opposition that culminated on 15 November with the unprecedented ‘Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution’ (BCN, 2019). After three years of political, economic and social turmoil, Chile’s image as ‘one of the great economic miracles of our time’ (Hayek, 1981 cited in Ebenstein, 2003: 598), the ‘only success story of Latin American development’ (Castells, 2007), and the ‘blueprint for emerging economies’ (Columbia Business School, 2019) remains in question. How did the poster child of neoliberal globalisation end up like this? While the initial narratives of the government talked about a largely spontaneous, unjustified, and unprecedented ‘social outbreak’ (estallido social), and even of a nation ‘at war against a powerful, implacable enemy, who does not respect anything or anybody’ (S. Piñera quoted in BBC, 2019), the accounts shared by those at the bottom pointed at a long-overdue reaction against decades of repression, precarity, and lack of dignity: ‘it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years’ became one of the most repeated slogans of the protests. The emerging literature on what we prefer to call ‘anti-neoliberal revolt’ has offered more elaborate accounts. The most influential of these have been put forward by mainstream progressive commentators who, for all their differences, have generally explained it as a sudden ‘awakening of the masses’ after years of mounting discomfort with the multiple tensions created by the neoliberal model (e.g., Araujo, 2020; Peña, 2020; Tironi, 2020). These accounts have undoubtedly made an important contribution to our understanding of the crisis but, in our view, remain partial and incomplete. Indeed, and in line with ‘workerless’ mainstream analyses of the recent evolution of Chilean capitalism (e.g., Moulián, 1997; Lechner and Güell, 1998; Tironi, 1999; León and Martínez, 2001; Garretón, 2011; Ruiz and Boccardo, 642
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 643 2014), these explanations have consistently neglected or generally understated, the centrality for the neoliberal project of the thorough domination of labour by capital, the significance of industrial relations institutions for its production and reproduction, and the critical role that working classes have played in the construction of organised resistance against it. Our purpose in this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of contemporary developments from a perspective that places class actors and class conflict at the centre of the political economy, emphasises the significance of industrial relations institutions, and recognises the tensions and contradictions of historical capitalism (Hyman, 1975; Howell, 2003; Silver, 2003; Kotz, 2015). In so doing, we aim to make a modest contribution to alternative explanations of the crisis (e.g., Link et al., 2019; Stecher and Sisto, 2020; Pérez and Osorio, 2021) and evolution of Chilean capitalism more generally (e.g., Agacino et al., 1998; Rojas and Aravena, 1999; Agacino, 2001, 2007; Pinto and Salazar, 2002; Salazar, 2003; Winn, 2004; Abarzúa, 2008; Aravena and Núñez, 2009; Echeverría, 2010; Atzeni et al., 2011; Ponce et al., 2017; Campusano et al., 2017). In a nutshell, we contend that the events of 2019–20 and their aftermath represent not only the most critical socio-political juncture in the model’s long-drawn-out structural crisis, but also the highwater mark of a broad, prolonged, and complex bottom up countermovement for the protection of society, the origins of which can be traced back to the early 1980s, and whose main protagonists have been working classes through a combination of rising labour militancy and social conflict, of which ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism by precarious workers, and broader ‘Polanyian’ struggles with an important proletarian component, have been of special significance (after Silver, 2003). This chapter is in three sections. First, we briefly review some of the key socio-economic developments that have come to define the last few decades – including impressive economic growth, high-income inequality, low and very low wages, and declining union representation – and argue that, rather than demonstrating the failure of neoliberal institutions to deliver growth with equity, they show the model’s successful re-shaping of labour exploitation to deliver growth at the expense of equity. Next, we concisely examine the origins and some of the main features of Chilean neoliberalism understood as a particular social structure of accumulation based on the expansion of the self-regulating market and on the thorough domination of labour by capital (Kotz, 2015). We show how neoliberal institutions, particularly the industrial relations legal framework, were deliberately constructed to re-commodify and discipline labour by undermining its structural and associational power, and we explain current developments as their intended outcomes. Last, we present a preliminary analysis, explanation, and interpretation of the manner in which labour responses have developed during the neoliberal era. In contrast to ‘workerless’ mainstream narratives, we argue that working classes have played a critical role in the construction of organised resistance against neoliberalism. A brief conclusion will follow.
WHAT ARE THEY SHOUTING ABOUT?2 Chile has experienced undeniable economic progress over the past four decades. Until entering recession because of the Covid pandemic, the size of the economy as measured by GDP increased tenfold from US$ 28.8 bn to 297.4 bn between 1980 and 2018 (OECD, 2021). GDP per capita more than quadrupled between the same years – from US$ 3,441 to 15,862 – and is
644 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work currently the second highest in Latin America (OECD, 2021). Poverty was reduced from 38.6 per cent of the population in 1990 to 8.5 per cent in 2017, and extreme poverty from 13 per cent to 1.5 per cent (PNUD, 2020: 63–64). After becoming the first South American country to join the OECD in 2010, Chile is considered today a high-income economy as defined by the World Bank (2021), a country with ‘very high’ human development according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP, 2021), and the top Latin American country in terms of competitiveness (World Economic Forum, 2020), ‘ease of doing business’ (World Bank, 2019), and ‘economic freedom’ (Heritage Foundation, 2022). Impressive as these figures and accolades might be, they do not tell the whole story. Rather than a genuine model of socio-economic development – understood as involving social progress for the great majority of the population, a structural transformation of productive capacities, and a sustainable relationship with the environment (Matus, 2022) – the Chilean model remains unequal, dependent, and predatory. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus only on the first element. Despite its numerous achievements, Chile stands today as one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, a region notorious for its long history of social exclusion and profound inequalities of income, wealth, and privilege (Saad-Filho, 2005). Sehnbruch (2019) has eloquently described the ‘everyday inequalities and everyday indignities’ that Chileans face as permeating all aspects of social life: deep and multidimensional as well as material and intangible. A key dimension is income. Although income inequality as measured by the Gini index has fallen from 0.572 in 1990 to 0.466 in 2017, the richest 1 per cent and 20 per cent of households concentrate an astonishing 33 per cent and 52.9 per cent of total income respectively, while the poorest 20 per cent earn a mere 5.1 per cent (Fundación Sol, 2018; OECD, 2021). More importantly, most Chileans struggle to make ends meet despite decades of remarkable economic growth because of low and very low wages. Fifty per cent of all workers earn less than 1.28 times an already low minimum wage (set below the extreme poverty line for a four-person household), and 80 per cent earn less than 2.6 times the minimum wage (Durán and Kremerman, 2021). Even though real wages have risen continuously since the mid-1970s, they only recovered their 1968 value in 2009, and increased only slightly in the last decade (Matus, 2022). Low and very low wages are insufficient to cover essential living expenses, let alone access expensive privatised social services such as healthcare and higher education, which has pushed millions into debt and bad debt: 80 per cent of adults are in debt and 40 per cent of them have defaulted on their loans, the repayments of which represented 71.5 per cent of a household annual income in 2018 (Stecher and Sisto, 2020). Low wages have obvious implications for pensions, especially in private individual account systems like the Chilean one. Workers are retiring on 20 per cent to 30 per cent of their wages. In 2018, 80 per cent of pensioners received a pension below the minimum wage, the average pension paid to men was less than half the minimum wage, and, for women, it was a mere third (Heine, 2020). Predictably, more than half of working Chileans are considered ‘economically vulnerable’, or at risk of falling (back) into poverty ‘if they forgo three months of their income’ (OECD, 2020). Furthermore, if poverty is measured using relative instead of absolute methodologies, then it affected 16.5 per cent of the population in 2017 instead of the 8.5 per cent quoted above. In sum, more than 77 per cent of the population of ‘one of the great economic miracles of our time’ remains either poor or economically vulnerable (PNUD, 2020; OECD, 2021).
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 645 But low and very low wages do not capture fully the variety of ways in which millions of workers experience inequality and precarity in their working lives. In addition to the perennial class, gender, and racial inequalities that have always characterised the Chilean workplace, a broadening gap between a declining core employed in stable, secure, and protected ‘good jobs’ and an ever-growing, and increasingly diverse, periphery of ‘precarious’ workers employed in atypical, unstable, and insecure ‘bad jobs’ has become the new normal. Though not necessarily conterminous, good and bad jobs are usually correlated with standard and non-standard contracts and employment regimes. According to the latest National Labour Survey, the percentage of employees on standard employment contracts reached a historical low of 65.7 per cent in 2018 (ENCLA, 2019). Between 2010 and 2018, 61.5 per cent of all new jobs were either outsourced (27.5 per cent) or own-account jobs (33 per cent), and only 36 per cent were standard jobs. In the same period, the percentage of outsourced workers (subcontracting, labour supply, and enganche), increased from 11.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent of all workers (Fundación Sol, 2018). More broadly, 29 per cent of workers were employed in the informal sector in 2018 (ILO, 2019), and 40.4 per cent were not considered employees (e.g., own-account workers, independent contractors), hence not covered by labour legislation (Fundación Sol, 2018). The last few decades have also normalised what Gordon (1996) refers to as ‘stick strategy’ to managing employees, all too evident in the squeeze of workers’ wages, but also in employers’ harsh employment practices (see Stecher and Sisto, 2020), and aggressive approach to unions and collective bargaining. Indeed, ‘representation insecurity’, or the lack of an effective collective voice through independent union representation with collective bargaining and strike rights (Standing, 2011), has become a defining feature of Chile’s precarious world of work. From its historical peak of 30 per cent in 1973, and post-dictatorship peak of 18.2 per cent in 1991, union density bottomed at about 12 per cent around the year 2000, remained around that figure until 2006, at which point began to recover and stands today at about 17 per cent (Pérez Ahumada, 2020). However, this figure can be misleading, in part because no unions exist in 93.7 per cent of all companies, and no unions have ever existed in 95.3 per cent of the latter, making union representation an almost exclusively large-firm phenomenon (ENCLA, 2019). Collective bargaining coverage has followed a similar trajectory and is currently just under 20 per cent (Pérez Ahumada, 2020), but adjusted methodologies put actual coverage at a mere 9.1 per cent (Durán and Gamonal, 2019). Last, industrial conflict as measured by the incidence of legal strikes in the private sector has remained consistently low for decades (Pérez et al., 2017), but the argument that these figures reflect the cooperative nature of modern Chilean industrial relations crumbles when illegal strikes are taken into consideration. Though shorter and less frequent than legal strikes, illegal strikes have mobilised considerably more workers and caused significantly more disruption during the same period (Armstrong and Águila, 2002; Pérez et al., 2017). Unsurprisingly, mainstream accounts of Chile’s socio-economic development regularly describe it as involving seemingly contradictory, positive and negative, trends. Narrow interpretations of this apparent good news–bad news paradox, that is, removed from a consideration of the broader social structure of accumulation which produces it and reproduces it, typically point to the ‘failure’ of policy to deliver growth with equity. But simultaneous positive and negative trends do not necessarily imply logical contradiction or policy failure. On the contrary, these trends should be viewed as evidence of the ‘successful’ workings of neoliberal institutions purposedly designed to deliver growth at the expense of equity: transferring
646 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work wealth from the poor to the rich, and risk from the rich to the poor. It is our contention that the current crisis has been caused by the progressive exhaustion of this particular form of capitalist accumulation and its unfulfilled promises (e.g., ‘trickle-down economics’). Therefore, before advancing any further, it is necessary to examine the origins of the Chilean model, its main features, and the manner in which it has re-shaped the exploitation of labour.
PINOCHET’S NEOLIBERAL COUNTER-REVOLUTION The history of neoliberalism is indissolubly associated with General Pinochet and the military junta that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990. Brought to power by a threatened ruling class in a CIA-backed coup against Salvador Allende – the world’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state – the junta’s immediate and brutal repression of the left, the political and union labour movement, and other subordinate groups, demonstrated not only their deep-rooted Cold War anti-communism but also, their visceral rejection of the political, economic, and social adjustments that had evolved during Chile’s own short twentieth century (Remmer, 1980). Indeed, for many on the right, the model of inward-oriented development (1930s–1970s) – centred around the 1925 Constitution, import-substitution industrialisation, and the industrial relations system in place since the 1920s – had incentivised the ‘mass mobilisation of the lower classes and attempts to reform or even revolutionise Chile’s traditional structures of land holding, and economic, social and political organisation’ (Sznajder, 1996: 729), and had ultimately led to the collapse of Chilean democracy and the destruction of its economy (Junta de Gobierno, 1974: 7–10). A year after the coup, the junta formally announced that it was taking upon itself ‘the historic mission’ of giving Chile ‘new institutions that embody the profound changes occurring in modern times’ (Junta de Gobierno, 1974: 7–10). By 1975, a peculiar civic-military coalition between the military, Catholic-conservatives (the gremialistas), and neoliberal market fundamentalists (the ‘Chicago boys’) gradually began to take control of the state and turn their shared rejection of the past into building what has come to be seen as one of the boldest, most comprehensive, and internally consistent neoliberal models in the world (Kurtz, 1999; Agacino, 2007). Although commonly associated with policies that encourage free trade, fiscal austerity, privatisation, and deregulation among others, neoliberalism should not be viewed as a mere set of free-market economic ideas. As Harvey (2007) and many others have convincingly showed, neoliberalism is a political project, the ultimate end of which is the restoration of class power, and its real target the power of the working class, in particular, the power of organised labour. Following Kotz (2015), neoliberalism is thus better understood as a particular institutional form of capitalism, or social structure of accumulation, which is defined by ideas, institutions, and practices of economic policy, the unifying principle of which is the greatly expanded role for market relations and market forces, and which is based on a thorough domination of labour by capital. Viewed in this way, it is unsurprising that neoliberal ideas offered the military and the right an appealing ‘regime change’ solution to every perceived problem of inward-oriented development. Not only free markets, private initiative, and comparative advantage trade would replace protectionism, statism, and industrialisation, but also individualism, accommodation, and policy would take the place of collectivism, social mobilisation, and politics. While
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 647 Chile’s version of ‘organised capitalism’ was based on a (often idealised) cross-class compromise, neoliberal capitalism would be based on the thorough domination of labour by capital. A detailed examination of Pinochet’s counter-neoliberal revolution is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that, by the end of the 1970s, Chile’s industrialising economy was well on its way to being transformed into an open economy based on commodity exports; market logic and state subsidiarity had made profound inroads into most spheres of social life including work, pensions, taxation, education, healthcare, and finance; and marketisation and authoritarianism had achieved constitutional status in the 1980 ‘Protected Democracy’ Constitution (Durán-Palma et al., 2005). After a short period of uncertainty driven by the economic crisis of the early 1980s, free-market orthodoxy was tuned down, reforms were resumed and, with the return of democracy in 1990, adopted, legitimised, and reproduced by the democratic administrations that have been in power since. The transformation of industrial relations institutions was fundamental to advancing the neoliberal project, clear evidence of which is provided by the imposition of a legal framework deliberately designed to re-commodify and discipline labour by undermining its structural and associational power. Consequently, a brief review of some of its key features is necessary to contextualise the argument presented in the next section.3 The area of individual labour law was revamped in 1978. Traditional protective regulations were replaced by rules designed to cheapen and control labour by encouraging ‘labour market flexibility’ narrowly understood as an employer’s capacity for downward adjustment of terms of employment, quantitatively through wage cutting and substandard contracts, and qualitatively through the restoration of managerial authority (Streeck, 1987). New regulations lifted restrictions to hiring and firing, introduced non- and sub-substandard contracts (part-time, temporary, apprenticeship, etc.), and atypical employment regimes (subcontracting, labour supply, etc.), incentivising employers to deconstruct, cheapen, and remain in control of the employment relationship. Complementarily, the 1979 Labour Plan reintroduced fundamental labour rights but sought to weaken them in practice through market and freedom of choice mechanisms (Fischer, 2009). The regime’s ‘market-containment strategy for union control’ is typically described in terms of four pillars (Narbona, 2015; Valenzuela, 1989). First, the Plan encouraged union fragmentation and competition through statutory recognition with very low quora, and by allowing any number of employees to form a ‘bargaining group’ (grupo negociador) with the sole purpose of bargaining collectively, even in firms with recognised unions. It also sanctioned four types of unions with unequal rights (firm-level, inter-firm, of temporary workers, and of independent workers, out of which only firm-level unions were granted automatic recognition for collective bargaining and the right to strike). Second, the Plan redefined collective bargaining as ‘a mechanism for adjusting wages and labour productivity, which is functional to a market economy, (and not) as a mechanism for redistributing income’ (Piñera, 1990: 49). Consequently, it restricted it to the level of the firm or lower; limited the subjects of negotiation to wages only; and originally sanctioned two types of collective bargaining with unequal rights (regulated and non-regulated, out of which only the former permitted the right to strike). Third, strike action was restricted to firm-level unions negotiating a new contract under the regulated collective bargaining format, and only after a series of procedural provisions are met. All other forms of industrial action were criminalised. Furthermore, the Plan redefined the right to strike as the ‘right to refuse to work without being fired’, but not as one that necessarily involves the halting of productive activities i.e., as a ‘non-monopolistic’ labour right
648 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work which does not ‘suspend managerial prerogative or property rights’ (Piñera, 1990: 51) and, consequently, allowed strike-breakers and lockouts. Last, the Plan explicitly sought to replace ‘class struggle’ (workers against employers) with ‘competition between firms’ (workers and employers together against competitors) (Piñera, 1990: 108), by encouraging the ‘depoliticisation of union leaders’ and ‘restoring workers’ control over the leadership’ through mandating secret ballots for numerous decisions (Piñera, 1990: 70). The Plan did not forbid union leaders’ political activity directly, but the 1980 Constitution did, sanctioning leaders and unions that ‘abuse their autonomy by engaging in activities “far removed” from their lawful role’ (Ugarte et al., 2021: 8). Four decades after its imposition, three decades after returning to democratic rule, and despite several rounds of labour reform (1990–92, 2001, 2015), the bulk of the Plan remains firmly in place (e.g., Durán-Palma et al., 2005; Caamaño Rojo, 2016; Durán and Gamonal, 2019; Pérez Ahumada, 2020). Partly because of formidable conservative opposition and partly due to their own ideological convergence with neoliberal thought, centre-left governments have consistently, yet unconvincingly, pushed for labour reform and used eventual cosmetic labour law changes ‘as a tool for signalling policy change and legitimate democratic rule, but at the same time leaving the neoliberal model intact’ (Haagh, 2002: 86). Viewing Pinochet’s neoliberal counter-revolution as a social structure of accumulation based on the thorough domination of labour goes a long way in explaining the developments of the last four decades and the current crisis. It is not our objective to present such an account here but an indication of what we mean should suffice. Drawing liberally on Kotz (2015), it could be argued that the model was able to promote rising profitability by keeping labour costs down (especially wages) largely through union busting and the decimation of collective bargaining, thereby fuelling inequality. While solving for some time the resulting ‘conflict at work problem’ through the restoration of managerial authority, the ‘demand/livelihood problem’ through debt-financed consumer spending and government subsidies, and the wider ‘social discontent problem’ through a shallow democratic political system which, it should not be trivialised, represented a significant improvement over 16 years of military dictatorship. Since the latter part of the 2000s however, the ‘successful’ operation of neoliberal institutions has become increasingly ineffective at dealing with capitalism’s fundamental contradiction between the pursuit of profitability and the maintenance of social legitimacy (Silver, 2003). Although the model was able to withstand social challenges for some time thanks to state intervention and a booming international economy, its current crisis is structural because it cannot be resolved by ‘more of the same’ i.e., within the current structural form (Gaudichaud, 2015).
FOUR DECADES OF WORKING-CLASS RESISTANCE Mainstream narratives of the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt generally explain it as a sudden ‘awakening’ of the masses after years of mounting ‘discomfort’ with the multiple ‘tensions’ caused by the neoliberal model (e.g., Araujo, 2020; Peña, 2020; Tironi, 2020). Alternative explanations, in contrast, talk of a broad, prolonged, and escalating process of working-class resistance against the model (e.g., Link et al., 2019; Stecher and Sisto, 2020; Pérez and Osorio, 2021). These conflicting accounts of the current crisis are based, in turn, upon opposing understandings of the recent evolution of Chilean capitalism, and divergent assessments of the nature, development, and impact of labour responses during the neoliberal era. Indeed,
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 649 while mainstream narratives argue that ‘inevitable’ neoliberal transformations have caused profound structural and sociological changes in unions’ constituencies, weakened organised labour’s power and influence, and led to the ‘fading away’ of the labour movement ‘as a major source of social cohesion and workers’ representation’ (Castells, 2010: 419) (e.g., Moulián, 1997; Lechner and Güell, 1998; Tironi, 1999; León and Martínez, 2001; Garretón, 2011; Ruiz and Boccardo, 2014), alternative accounts view neoliberal transformations as challenging but also as contradictory i.e., not necessarily as labour weakening, and talk about scarred but resilient working classes who have played an important role in building resistance against neoliberalism (e.g., Agacino et al., 1998; Rojas and Aravena, 1999; Agacino, 2001, 2007; Pinto and Salazar, 2002; Salazar, 2003; Winn, 2004; Abarzúa, 2008; Aravena and Núñez, 2009; Echeverría, 2010; Atzeni et al., 2011; Ponce et al., 2017; Campusano et al., 2017). In what follows, we explore this admittedly oversimplified analytical distinction and argue that alternative accounts offer a necessary corrective to mainstream narratives. Mainstream narratives go something like this. During the dictatorship (1973–89), the ‘traditional’ labour movement (sindicalismo histórico or clásico) suffered harsh political repression and early responses were overwhelmingly oriented to survival. Following an important process of political rearticulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the labour movement went on to lead a vast popular protest movement against the dictatorship between 1983 and 1986. Although the 43 ‘National Days of Protest’, initially called by copper workers (CTC) and subsequently by the CNT (National Workers’ Command), seriously threatened the continuity of Pinochet in power, the labour movement demobilised at the end of the decade to facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy. Simultaneously, the pragmatic but not necessarily uncontested acceptance of the 1979 Labour Plan by firm-level unions, that is, including the ‘heroic defeats’ of historic metal, copper, and textile workers, not only helped to legitimise the ‘model’ in practice, but also led to the development of contained, market-oriented, and apolitical forms of ‘enterprise unionism’ (‘sindicalismo de empresa’) (Álvarez, 2012). Demobilisation and accommodation trends consolidated during the period of transition to democracy (1990–2006). While the traditional labour movement (CUT) engaged in social concertation with employers (CPC) and the government in exchange for meagre labour reform, enterprise unionism continued to consolidate at firm level. The iconic strikes of the mid-1990s by public sector workers – teachers, coal miners, and healthcare workers – though strictly speaking illegal, were de facto tolerated within the system, further legitimising the apparent capacity of the model to placate industrial conflict. These narratives go on to argue that the late April-early June 2006 mass mobilisations of secondary students (the ‘Penguin Revolution’) inaugurated a qualitatively different cycle of protest (2006–19) characterised by a general revival of social movements and, since 2011, a ‘third-generation’ of anti-neoliberal protest against the marketisation of education, pensions, and the environment among other issues (e.g., Donoso and von Bülow, 2017; Roberts, 2017). Mainstream narratives recognise that there has been a revival of labour in recent years, particularly since the ‘unprecedented’ 2006 mass mobilisations of hitherto ‘invisible’ subcontracted workers in strategic export sectors (e.g., copper mining, forestry and timber, and salmon farming workers) but tend to subsume it within the context of an increasingly mobilised society and view it as playing no distinctive role in the lead-up to the 2019–20 revolt. In our view, these narratives are partial and incomplete. Alternative accounts, in contrast, conceive of labour and labour action in much broader terms. First, they do not narrowly equate labour with unions as mainstream narratives tend to do, but conceive of labour as denoting
650 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work the working class as a whole. Second, they go beyond contained contention to include innovative contention, that is to say, ‘episodes of conflict in which at least some parties are newly self-identified actors who define and seek to advance their goals outside the existing system employing innovative collective action’ (McAdam et al., 2001: 8). Alternative accounts are thus able to recognise the facts underscored by mainstream narratives and integrate them with a variety of largely overlooked and/or misunderstood struggles by all manner of working classes exposed to the vagaries of the market, out of which two kinds have been of special significance: ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism by workers on the rough ends of labour markets, and broader ‘Polanyian’ struggles with an important proletarian component (after Silver, 2003). In what follows, our brief and selective account of the former will be biased towards the past in order to highlight the origins of the pivotal 2006 mobilisations of subcontracted workers, while our narrative of the latter will be biased towards the present so as to emphasise events that foreshadowed the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt. Rupturist Unionism Rather than conforming to the designs of the 1979 Labour Plan, hundreds of subcontracted and temporary construction workers employed in the building of the Colbún-Machicura hydro-electric dam went on a major three-month illegal strike against low wages and management abuse in 1982–83 (Álvarez, 2012). Although ultimately defeated, the strike was hailed at the time as a symbol of a labour movement ‘starting to break its legal chains’ (El Coordinador, 1982); a headline that, for all intents and purposes, would not have been out of place 25 years later in relation to the 2006 mass mobilisations of subcontracted workers. Although the 1983–86 National Days of Protest that came shortly after certainly stole the limelight, over the next 40 years, remarkable groups of ‘precarious’ workers have made sure that the ‘kamikaze’ experience of Colbún-Machicura did not go to waste. Chief among them were industrial engineering workers. Led by remarkable Communist activists who had cut their organising teeth during the harsh repression of the 1970s, their union, SINAMI, pioneered an innovative form of action and organisation that would allow them to obtain what the law did not provide for i.e., to bargain with their actual employer from a position of strength, while staying, for the most part, on the right side of the law. SINAMI ‘played on the outfield of the law’ by organising lawfully across legal employers as inter-firm union, but mobilising ‘extra-legally’ to disrupt the labour process at key choke points and force actual and legal employers to engage in multi-employer collective bargaining. In this way, SINAMI broke with every pillar of the Labour Plan, achieved remarkable gains and, more importantly, unwittingly set in motion the development of what would become known as ‘subcontracted unionism’ (e.g., Agacino 2007; Abarzúa, 2008; Echeverría, 2010) or, as we prefer to call it, ‘rupturist unionism’ (Durán-Palma and Urrutia, 2020; Durán-Palma et al., in preparation). As most industrial engineering projects of the 1980s took place in the newly ‘liberalised’ mining sector, it did not take long for subcontracted workers in copper mining to try to organise and mobilise along the same lines. SINAMI leaders established SITECO in 1988 to cater for subcontracted workers of state giant CODELCO’s El Teniente division but initial results were disappointing: low-skill local workers in roll-on contracts did not have the leverage of high-skill, itinerant, industrial engineering workers (Durán-Palma, 2011). In parallel, precarious workers in other flagship export sectors organised with more or less success, including
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 651 forestry and timber (Klubock, 2004), seafood processing (Schurman, 2004), and women agricultural workers (Tinsman, 2004). The latter were particularly notable. Temporeras, an icon of labour exploitation, assumed unprecedented leadership in activist struggles against employers, petitioning and carrying out illegal strikes at peak times, and successfully forcing them to give in. By the late 1980s, they had established the first union of temporary and permanent fruit workers in Chile with women comprising half of the union’s membership and executive (Falabella, 1993; Tinsman, 2004). During the 1990s, these and other organisations went through a protracted period of strategic adaptation, organisational articulation, and generational renewal. SITECO, for example, led the establishment of sister unions across CODELCO divisions in a bid to bargain at holding rather than divisional level but results were, at best, erratic (Agacino et al., 1998). After more than a decade of frustrating ‘toothless’ organisation, forestry workers grouped in the Confederación de trabajadores forestales (CTF) ‘understood that only extra-legal forms of organisation’ would allow them to rebuild their movement and looked at the Sindicato Araucaria, a regional union of temporary workers, as a model of action and organisation that ‘bypassed the limitations of the labour code by operating at sectoral and regional level and by placing pressure on the state (rather than on individual employers)’ (Klubock, 2004: 378). More broadly, Chile’s long tradition of autonomist, classist, and direct-action unionism (corriente autonomista) received a new impetus through the founding of a number of autonomist higher-level organisations to dispute the grip of traditional unions at national and sectoral level (Rojas and Aravena, 1999), e.g., the establishment of independent FETRACOMA in 1997 to represent construction workers disgruntled with their politically subordinated CNTC (Salazar and Salinas, 2021). The new millennium started with mass mobilisations of dockers in 2001 and 2003 (Santibáñez and Gaudichaud, 2017), and copper workers in 2003 and 2004 but, again, with limited results. These workers moved their targets up a crucial notch by establishing informal higher-level organisations (coordinadoras) to mobilise effectively against actual employers. Indeed, the coordinadora of subcontracted copper workers (later CTC) decided, as early as 2004, to disrupt the 2005–06 presidential elections to force CODELCO’s owner, the Chilean state, to engage in negotiations (Durán-Palma, 2011). Far from ‘unprecedented’ therefore, the crucial mass mobilisations of subcontracted copper workers of late December 2005 to early February 2006, not only resulted from long-term strategic planning, but also were preceded by decades of recurrent conflict in the mines and elsewhere (Calderón, 2008; Núñez, 2009; Ponce, 2017). The political establishment proved woefully ill prepared to neutralise such a challenge and, for the first time during the neoliberal era, social mobilisation led to legal reform (2006 Subcontracting Act), the contested substance and implementation of which was followed shortly after by further mobilisations by copper workers in 2007 and 2008. Workers in the forestry and timber, and salmon farming sectors mobilised in a similar manner in 2007, but while the former were able to force large private sector conglomerates to negotiate at sector level (Ruminot, 2009; Durán-Palma and López, 2009; Aravena, 2017), the latter’s ‘long strike’ failed to twist the arm of employers (Álvarez, 2009). The 2000s also saw the expansion of ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism onto non-strategic sectors. SINTRAC split from SINAMI in 2003 – when the legendary militant union abandoned mobilisation in favour of ‘non-conflictual’ direct negotiations with employers – and not only brought rupturism to town, organising all manner of urban subcontracted and temporary workers in construction (particularly, concessions for metro stations and urban highways), call
652 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work centres, and privatised public transport among others; but also innovated with participatory forms of union democracy (Durán-Palma, 2011). Rival SINTEC split from FETRACOMA in 2007 to fill the vacuum left by SINAMI in industrial engineering (Salazar and Salinas, 2021). Emblematic ‘weak’ and ‘unorganisable’ service sector workers managed to organise flagship anti-union multinationals such as Walmart (Bank Muñoz, 2017; Ratto, 2021) and, more than a decade before their North American counterparts, Starbucks in 2009 (El País, 2021; Giordano, 2022). During the 2010s, mass mobilisations in strategic sectors returned notably in copper mining, the docks (Santibáñez and Gaudichaud, 2017) and, with less intensity, in the southern forests (Canals, 2014). ‘Rupturist’ organisations played an important part in the long lead up to the 2019–20 revolt, by triggering, catalysing, and/or aiding broader manifestations of labour unrest, and by serving as a model for precarious core workers e.g., Starbucks union and the founding of the inter-firm union of McDonald’s and Burger King workers in 2019 (Páez, 2019). A comparative analysis of these and other experiences shows that their forms of action and organisation are sufficiently definable and distinct to set them apart from Chile’s mainstream traditional and enterprise union models and constitute a type of unionism in its own right. Rupturist unionism can be defined as an autonomist type of radical/oppositional unionism that purposely ‘breaks with’ the legal framework and institutionalised forms of unionism in terms of its choice of constituency typically, but not exclusively, periphery workers in triangular employment regimes; objectives including traditional bread-and-butter agendas but going beyond to articulate workers’ discontent against the re-commodification of life under neoliberalism; and methods of representation, involving, but not limited to, ‘extra-legal’ modes of action oriented to disrupt the labour process to force actual employers to engage in multi-employer negotiations; unified inter-firm organisational forms along vertical and/ or horizontal lines of inclusion; and ideologically motivated yet politically autonomous leaderships who are able to ensure coordination and encourage rank-and-file participation (after Hyman, 1997; Durán-Palma and Urrutia, 2020; Durán-Palma et al., in preparation). Polanyian Struggles with an Important Proletarian Component Labour’s contribution to what can be collectively described as countermovement for the protection of society also includes a variety of ‘Polanyian struggles with an important proletarian component’, the origin of which can be dated back to the 1983–86 National Days of Protest. By this we mean to refer to broader expressions of working-class resistance against re-commodification where workers organise themselves under banners other than labour to resist their proletarian condition (see Silver, 2003: 181–188). For reasons of space, we cannot review these experiences at any great length here so we will limit our account to highlighting some key struggles that have taken place during the latest cycle of protest (2006–19). As the 2006 mobilisations of subcontracted workers and secondary students extended well into 2008, a group of union leaders led by former CUT vice-president, Luis Mesina, started No+AFP, a popular campaign against Chile’s signature privatised pension system which would evolve into a more general denunciation of the lack of basic social citizenship rights to economic welfare and security. Only a year after Sebastián Piñera took office as the first democratically elected conservative president since 1958, a second wave of student protests began in early 2011 and extended well into 2013. On this occasion, students mobilised to
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 653 demand more participation of the state in secondary education and against the pursuit of profit in higher education, particularly among institutions subsided by the state, which has pushed working-class families to turn to debt for low-quality university education. The protests became known as the ‘Chilean winter’ because of the massive protests that took place in August 2011, including a two-day general strike called by CUT in support of students. But 2011 had started early with a social rebellion in Chile’s southernmost city, Punta Arenas, against a proposed 17 per cent rise in the price of natural gas. The so-called 2011 Magallanes protests saw working classes mobilise against what was seen as an insensitive assault by central government on an essential necessity of life in a cold climate. In 2012, protests continued in another remote region of the Chilean south. Cash-strapped working classes in Aysén demanded increases in wages and subsidies, as well as the ‘unconstitutional’ return to public and regional ownership of water, fisheries, and mineral resources. The protests were organised by the Movimiento Social por Aysén, an umbrella organisation that included worker organisations, unions, and CUT. After Michelle Bachelet returned to power in 2014, regional unrest continued in 2016 on the island of Chiloé, where the ‘red tide’ phenomenon threatened the livelihoods of fishing communities and central government’s indifference provoked the uprising of all major cities and towns. What is important about these territorial expressions of working-class discontent is not only that for weeks and months working classes took over these towns and regions, displacing the state and forcing the government to respond, but also that labour issues were present, not just as grievances but as threats of unemployment from employers and the state. In 2017, No+AFP led protests that were even more massive than those of students in 2011–13, but it was women who initiated a qualitatively new wave of social mobilisation with a major march against violence against women. Coinciding with Sebastián Piñera’s return to power for the period 2018–22, women called a second, much larger, march in March 2018, expanding their grievances to issues of gender equality at work and traditional feminist themes like wages for housework. After women took to the streets again in March 2019, numerous other mobilisations by subordinate groups took place during the year but with little political effect (e.g., secondary school students in some key state schools). Unusually, the government seemed in control. However, in August 2019, more than 50 unions and civil organisations (including many rupturist unions, No+AFP, and university and secondary students) formed Unidad Social and called a National Day of Protest for 5 September under the slogan ‘nos cansamos, nos unimos’ (‘we’ve had enough, we’ve united’) (Unidad Social, 2019). Although in and by itself the protest achieved little, indirectly it was crucial. The government’s victory-turned-over-confidence led to the catastrophic political error of hiking metro fares that sparked the anti-neoliberal revolt on 18 October. The events that followed are, of course, well known. After the National Strike called by Unidad Social for 23–24 October led to millions marching across the country on 25 October, Unidad Social’s ‘bloque sindical’ (its trade union arm) called another National Strike on 12 November 2019, which forced the government to open negotiations and led to the historical 15 November ‘Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution’. What we would like to emphasise, however, is that to appreciate the political significance of these events, they should not be understood as pure and simple ‘general strikes’ but as much broader ‘popular revolts’ that not only involved the great majority of the working class (Pérez and Osorio, 2021), but also, for which the broader working class did most of the legwork: from actions of popular
654 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work political violence to spontaneous statements that posed that such actions were indispensable for advancing the welfare of the majority. In sum, alternative accounts offer analytically the best means to make sense of labour responses during the neoliberal era and, as such, provide a necessary corrective to ‘workerless’ mainstream narratives. Alternative accounts’ attention to unions and the broader working class, and emphasis on contained and transgressive contention, allows them to go beyond contained ‘traditional’ and ‘enterprise’ types of unionism, to include ‘rupturist’ types of unionism and broader Polanyian struggles with an important proletarian component. Taken together, these experiences can be conceived of as the key elements of a broad, prolonged, and complex countermovement for the protection of society, the origins of which can be traced back to the early 1980s, and the highwater mark of which can be readily identified with the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt. To be sure, it is not that mainstream narratives deny the existence of these experiences but that they downplay the prevalence and significance of the former and the proletarian element of the latter, misjudge their apparent originality, and fail to explain their emergence and development. Alternative accounts, in contrast, view rupturist experiences as pervasive and highly significant largely because of their contribution to transgressive contention which, as is well known, leads more often to substantial political and social change than contained contention. Second, they conceive of struggles by allegedly non-class-based movements as expressions of working-class resistance which, although under banners other than labour, demonstrate the continuing emancipatory possibilities of worker collective action. Third, alternative accounts do not view these struggles as ‘new’ or ‘unprecedented’, but instead as ‘innovative’ and ‘historical’, that is to say, as involving forms of contention forbidden within a particular regime that show important continuities with historical logics of action and organisation (see, for example, Ponce, 2017). Last, alternative accounts can explain their emergence and form with reference to neoliberal transformations but in a non-deterministic manner. Drawing on Silver (2003), for example, it is possible to argue that ‘rupturist’ forms of unionism correspond to ‘Marx-type’ struggles by newly emerging working classes, made and (counter-intuitively) strengthened as an unintended outcome of the development of historical capitalism (e.g., precarious workers in tightly integrated subcontracting chains), whereas broader expressions of working-class action – from the 1980s National Days of Protest through ‘third-generation’ anti-neoliberal struggles to the 2019–20 revolt – can be seen as ‘Polanyi-type’ struggles against the spread of the self-regulating market by working classes weakened by historical capitalism.
CONCLUSIONS What characterised the Chilean oasis was not its sweet water or its lush palm trees, but the apparently unscalable fence that ringed it, made of a curious alloy of the basest metals: neoliberal economic policy, absence of civil rights, and repression. Chileans were on the right side of this fence (Luis Sepúlveda, 2020: 16).
The 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt and its aftermath not only put a dramatic end to the ‘Chile-the-oasis’ delusion, but also showed the inadequacy of mainstream interpretations of the recent evolution of Chilean capitalism and the nature, evolution, and impact of labour responses during the neoliberal era. In this chapter, we have tried to put work and workers back in their rightful place by, first, demonstrating the centrality of a re-commodified world
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 655 of work and a thoroughly dominated working class for the production and reproduction of the neoliberal project. Second, we have shown that working-class struggles against the structural class violence embedded in neoliberal institutions and their resulting ‘everyday inequalities and everyday indignities’ have been more prevalent and significant than mainstream narratives care to admit, and that class conflict, rather than social stability, has characterised the last four decades. Indeed, if the neoliberal era is a testament to anything it is not only to the perennial struggle for domination between class actors, but also to the ever-changing nature form, intensification, and extension of labour resistance. When exit polls on 25 October 2020 showed that more than 78 per cent of voters in a national referendum had chosen to ditch Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, Santiago’s ‘Dignity Square’ filled with thousands celebrating under the slogan ‘Chile reborn!’ (Renace Chile!). Whether the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt and its aftermath will prove to be a turning point in the history of Chile’s political economy, even from a ‘soft’ Polanyian perspective (Goodwin, 2018), remains an open question. What is certain is that, as ever, the ‘end of history’ has been postponed indefinitely.
NOTES 1
2 3
This chapter was written thanks to the support provided by Fondecyt Chile under grant Proyecto Regular 11131018 Repertoires of Union Action and the Transformation of the World of Work in Chile (1990–2014), and the University of Westminster under grant Strategic Research Investment Fund, Phase 4, 2017-18 Varieties of Collective Action and Organisation by Atypical and Precarious Workers in Latin America. This is the title of the first chapter of McAdam et al.’s (2001) Dynamics of Contention. Our emphasis on the law as backbone of the model should not be taken to mean that neoliberal industrial relations institutions are limited to individual and collective labour law, or that neoliberal institutions of labour domination are limited to industrial relations institutions. In other words, not only the ‘institutional order’ of industrial relations is much broader and deeply intertwined with other social spheres, but also ‘most, if not all, neoliberal institutions reinforce the thorough domination of capital over labour’ (Kotz, 2015: 43). In the Chilean case, this is evident across the board, e.g., from the disciplining effects of privatised social welfare – healthcare, pensions, education – through constitutional barriers to the exercise of popular sovereignty by the democratic majority, and beyond.
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Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 657 Durán-Palma, F. and Urrutia, M. (2020) ‘Opening the Great Avenues: Workers, Unions and Anti-neoliberal Struggles in Chile (1976–2019)’, Seminar ‘Popular Unity: The Lessons of Chile – 50 Years On’, BUIRA History of Industrial Relations Study Group, London, 22 September. Durán-Palma, F., Urrutia, M. and Wilkinson, A. Neoliberalism, Precarious Workers, and Collective Action: An Account of Chile’s Rupturist Unionism and its Founding Choices, in preparation. Durán-Palma, F., Wilkinson, A. and Korczynski, M. (2005) Labour Reform in a Neo-Liberal ‘Protected’ Democracy: Chile 1990–2001, International Journal of Human Resource Management, 16(1), 65–89. Ebenstein, A. (2003) Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Echeverría, M. (2010) La Historia Inconclusa de la Subcontratación: la Voz de los Trabajadores, Santiago: Dirección del Trabajo. El Coordinador (1982) The labour movement begins breaking its legal chains!!, December, available at: http://archivomuseodelamemoria.cl/uploads/3/1/319043/00001231000016000001.pdf El País (2021) Los empleados de Starbucks crean su primer sindicato en EE UU, 10 December, available at: https://elpais.com/economia/2021-12-10/los-empleados-de-starbucks-crean-su-primer-sindicato -en-ee-uu.html ENCLA (2019) Informe de resultados novena encuesta laboral 2019, Santiago: Dirección del trabajo. Falabella, G. (1993) Restructuración y Respuesta Sindical. La Experiencia en Santa María, Madre de la Fruta Chilena, Revista de Economía y Trabajo, 1(2), 239–260. Fischer, K. (2009) The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile before, during and after Pinochet, in Mirowski, P. and Plehwe, D. (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fundación Sol (2018) Informe Mensual de Calidad del Empleo (IMCE): Análisis de los microdatos liberados el 31 de mayo de 2018 correspondiente al trimestre móvil febrero–abril 2018 (FMA 2018), Mayo, Santiago: Fundación Sol. Garretón, M. A. (2011) La sociedad en que vivi(re)mos, Santiago: Lom. Gaudichaud, F. (2015) Las fisuras del neoliberalismo maduro chileno. Trabajo, democracia protegida y conflictos sociales, Buenos Aires, CLACSO. Giordano, A. (2022) ‘You have to be very persistent’: Lessons from the Starbucks union in Chile, Labournotes.org, available at: https://www.labornotes.org/2022/05/you-have-be-very-persistent -lessons-starbucks-union-chile Goodwin, G. (2018) Rethinking the double movement: expanding the frontiers of Polanyian analysis in the Global South. Development and Change, 49(5), 1268–1290. Gordon, D. M. (1996) Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial ‘Downsizing’, New York: Martin Kessler Books – The Free Press. Haagh, L. (2002) The Emperor’s New Clothes: Labor Reform and Social Democratization in Chile, Studies in Comparative International Development, 37(1), 86–115. Harvey, D. (2007) Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1). Heine, J. (2020) Solving Chile’s Crisis Starts with Fixing Its Pension System, Americas Quarterly, January. Available at: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/solving-chiles-crisis-starts-with -fixing-its-pension-system/ Heritage Foundation (2022) Index of Economic Freedom, available at: https://www.heritage.org/index/ ranking Howell, C. (2003) Varieties of Capitalism: And Then There Was One? Comparative Politics, 36(1), 103. Hyman, R. (1975) Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hyman, R. (1997) Trade Unions and Interest Representation in the Context of Globalisation, Transfer, 3(97), 515–533. ILO (2019) Formalization: The Case of Chile, Enterprise Formalization, Geneva: ILO. Junta de Gobierno (1974) Declaración de Principios del Gobierno de Chile, 11 March, available at: http://www.archivochile.com/Dictadura_militar/doc_jm_gob_pino8/DMdocjm0005.pdf Klubock, T. M. (2004) Labor, Land and Environmental Change in the Forestry Sector in Chile, 1973–1998, in Winn, P. (Ed.), Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kotz, D. M. (2015) The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
658 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Kurtz, M. (1999) Chile’s Neo-Liberal Revolution: Incremental Decisions and Structural Transformation, 1973–89, Journal of Latin American Studies, 31, 399–427. Lechner, N. and Güell, P. (1998) Desarrollo Humano en Chile, 1998: Las Paradojas de la Modernización, Santiago: PNUD. León, A. and Martínez, J. (2001) La estratificación social chilena a fines del siglo XX, Serie Políticas Sociales No. 52, Santiago: CEPAL. Link, S., Marconi, A. and Sandoval, I. (2019) Crisis of the neoliberal model: social malaise (discontent) or class struggle? Analysing the Chilean upsurge of 2019, Popular Power Platform, October, 1(1), 1–11. Matus, M. (2022) Viejos flagelos y nuevos obstáculos a los salarios chilenos, 1886–2021, unpublished. McAdam, D., Tarrow, S. and Tilly, C. (2001) Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moulián, T. (1997) Chile actual: anatomía de un mito, Santiago: Lom. Narbona, K. (2015) Antecedentes del Modelo de Relaciones Laborales Chileno. Observatorio Social del Proyecto Plataformas Teritoriales por los Derechos Económicos y Sociales: Previsión, Trabajo, Educación y Salud. February. Núñez, D. (2009) El Movimiento de trabajadores contratistas de CODELCO: una experiencia innovadora de negociación colectiva, in Aravena, A. and Núñez, D. (eds.), El renacer de la huelga obrera en Chile: El movimiento sindical en la primera década del siglo XXI, ICAL, Santiago: Lom. OECD (2020) How’s life? 2020: Measuring Well-being, Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD (2021) OECD Economic Surveys: Chile 2021, Paris: OECD Publishing. Páez, A. (2019) ‘Histórico: trabajadores de McDonalds y BurgerKing fundan sindicato unificado’, La Izquierda Diario, 17 December, available at: https://www.laizquierdadiario.cl/Historico-trabajadores -de-McDonalds-y-Burger-King-fundan-sindicato-unificado Peña, C. (2020) Pensar el malestar: la crisis de octubre y la cuestión constitucional, Santiago: Taurus. Pérez, D. and Osorio, S. (2021) Anti-Neoliberal Revolt and General Strike 2019, in Azzellini, D. (ed), If Not Us, Who? Workers Against Authoritarianism, Fascism and Dictatorship, pp. 48–54. Hamburg: VSA. Pérez, R., Medel, R. and Velásquez, D. (2017) Radiografía de las Huelgas Laborales en el Chile del Neoliberalismo Democrático (1990–2015), in Ponce, J., Santibáñez, C. and Pinto, J. (eds.), Trabajadores y trabajadoras: procesos y acción sindical en el neoliberalismo chileno (1979–2017), Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento. Pérez Ahumada, P. (2020) Why Is It So Difficult to Reform Collective Labour Law? Associational Power and Policy Continuity in Chile in Comparative Perspective, Journal of Latin American Studies, 53(1), 1–25. Piñera, J. (1990) La revolución laboral en Chile, Santiago: Zig-Zag. Pinto, J. and Salazar, G. (2002) Historia contemporánea de Chile (vol. 3): La economía: mercados, empresarios y trabajadores, Santiago: Lom. PNUD (2020) Evolución de la pobreza 1990–2017: Cómo ha cambiado Chile? Santiago: PNUD. Ponce, J. (2017) Vino Viejo en copas nuevas: los trabajadores subcontratados y la acción sindical cuprífera en la postdictadura chilena (2005–2008), in Ponce, J., Santibáñez, C. and Pinto, J. (eds.), Trabajadores y trabajadoras: procesos y acción sindical en el neoliberalismo chileno (1979–2017), Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento. Ponce, J., Santibáñez, C. and Pinto, J. (eds.) (2017) Trabajadores y trabajadoras: procesos y acción sindical en el neoliberalismo chileno (1979–2017), Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento. Ratto, N. (2021) La intensificación negociada: cambios en el regimen de trabajo de una gran empresa de retail en Chile (2006–2018), Scielo Brazil, 64(3). Remmer, K. L. (1980) Political Demobilization in Chile, 1973–1978, Comparative Politics, 12(3), 275–301. Roberts, K. M. (2017) Chilean Social Movements and Party Politics in Comparative Perspective: Conceptualizing Latin America’s “Third Generation” of Anti-Neoliberal Protest, in Donoso, S. and von Bülow M. (eds.), Social Movements in Chile: Organization, Trajectories, and Political Consequences, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojas, J. and Aravena, A. (1999) El mundo sindical y el trabajo asalariado en Chile, in Escobar, P. (ed), Trajadores y empleo en el Chile de los noventa, Santiago: Lom.
Chile – between Pinochet’s counter-revolution and the 2019–20 anti-neoliberal revolt 659 Ruíz, C. and Boccardo, G. (2014) Los chilenos bajo el neoliberalismo: clases y conflicto social, Santiago: Nodo XXI/El Desconcierto. Ruminot, N. (2009) La huelga en Forestal Arauco: de las acciones sindicales al forzamiento de la negociación colectiva inter-empresa, in Aravena, A. and Núñez, D. (eds.), El renacer de la huelga obrera en Chile: El movimiento sindical en la primera década del siglo XXI, ICAL, Santiago: Lom. Saad-Filho, A. (2005) The Political Economy of Neoliberalism in Latin America, in Saad-Filho, A. and Johnston, D. (eds.), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, London: Pluto Press. Salazar, G. (2003) Historia de la acumulación capitalista en Chile (Apuntes de Clase), Santiago: Lom. Salazar, G. and Salinas, I. (2021) Historia del trabajo y la lucha politico-sindical en Chile, Santiago: Lom/Sintec Chile. Santibáñez, C. and Gaudichaud, F. (2017) Los obreros portuarios y la idea de “posición estrateegica” en la post-dictadura chilena (2003–2014), in Ponce, J., Santibáñez, C. and Pinto, J. (eds.), Trabajadores y trabajadoras: procesos y acción sindical en el sindicalismo chileno (1979–2017), Valparaíso: Editorial América en Movimiento. Schurman, R. (2004) Shuckers, Sorters, Headers, and Gutters: Labor in the Fisheries Sector, in Winn, P. (ed.), Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Sehnbruch, K. (2019) ‘The cost of multidimensional inequalities in Chile underlines the need for a new social pact’, Blogs, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre, 29 October, available at: https://blogs .lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2019/10/29/the-cost-of-multidimensional-inequalities-in-chile-underlines -the-need-for-a-new-social-pact/ Sepúlveda, L. (2020) Chile, no peaceful oasis, Le Monde Diplomatique, January, No. 2001, pp. 16. Silver, B. (2003) Forces of Labor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Standing, G. (2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Stecher, A. and Sisto, V. (2020) Trabajo y precarización laboral en el Chile neoliberal. Apuntes para la comprensión del estallido social de octubre 2019, in Araujo, K. (ed.), Hilos tensados: Para leer el octubre chileno, Santiago: Editorial USACH. Streeck, W. (1987) The Uncertainties of Management in the Management of Uncertainty: Employers, Labor Relations and Industrial Adjustment in the 1980s, Work, Employment & Society, 1(3), 281–308. Sznajder, M. (1996) Dilemmas of Economic and Political Modernisation in Chile: A Jaguar that Wants to Be a Puma, Third World Quarterly, 17(4), 725–736. Tinsman, H. (2004) More than Victims: Women Agricultural Workers and Social Change in Rural Chile, in Winn, P. (ed.), Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tironi, E. (1999) La Irrupción de las Masas y el Malestar de las Élites, Santiago: Ediciones Grijalbo. Tironi, E. (2020) El Desborde: Vislumbres y Aprendizajes del 18-O, Santiago: Planeta. Ugarte, J. L., Toledo Corsi, C. and Marzi Muñoz, D. (2021) El Trabajo en la Nueva Constitución, Santiago: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. UNDP (2021) Chile, Available at: http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/CHL Unidad Social (2019) A los movimientos y organizaciones sociales de Chile: manifiesto convocatoria, available at: http://modatima.cl/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/MANIFIESTO-CONVOCATORIA-A -MVTOS-SOCIALES.pdf Valenzuela, J. S. (1989) Labor Movements in Transitions to Democracy: A Framework for Analysis. Comparative Politics, 21, 445–472. Winn, P. (ed.) (2004) Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002, Durham and London: Duke University Press. World Bank (2019) Doing Business 2020, Washington DC: World Bank Group, available at: https:// www.doingbusiness.org/en/reports/global-reports/doing-business-2020 World Bank (2021) World Bank Country and Lending Groups, available at: https:// datahelpdesk .worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups World Economic Forum (2020) The Global Competitive Report, Geneva: World Economic Forum, available at: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-competitiveness-report-2020
55. Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes Ludmila Costhek Abílio
INTRODUCTION Perspectives on Brazil’s working class involve analytical challenges regarding how elements that structure the national labour market are updated and reconfigured in dialogue with global work transformation processes. The Brazilian labour market is permeated by its slavery background, colonial origins and permanence, and profound inequalities. This has meant that universalizing labour rights and building a wage-earning society (Castel, 2017) has always been on the horizon rather than a reality in this market historically composed of high levels of informal work and a large army of low-skilled, low-wage workers. The analytical challenges involve recognizing the centrality of informal work for capitalist development and accumulation in the periphery; they involve breaking with dualist epistemological categories that historically draw the dividing lines between those who would be inserted and those who would occupy the margins of the formation and development of a typically capitalist workforce. The dichotomy between formal and informal work is the starting point for many perspectives on Brazil’s capitalist development. Analytical lines have been established between a structured labour market that is formal and associated to industrialization, urbanization, and a politically organized working class, and the margins of development that is made up of informal labour, small family businesses, gig jobs, and work that cannot even be recognized as such. This separation renders invisible a large portion of the Brazilian working class, which is then associated to unproductive work, underdevelopment, and social disposability. These dualities involve the social invisibility of a large part of Brazilian workers, which is also the invisibility of their centrality to different circuits of capitalist accumulation. This article discusses transformation and permanence in the world of work since the 2000s, looking at how different models of development experienced in the country in the last decades have brought different forms of worker management, without, however, revealing or recognizing the centrality of the working class – with its high rates of informal work, low-skill work, and low-paid work – for peripheral capitalist accumulation. Therefore, one of the objectives of this article is to analyse how this invisibility is present in data produced about the Brazilian labour market and in interpretations of the recent changes made to the Brazilian development model, and how it affects understandings about the political practices and perspectives of the Brazilian working class. One of the arguments that guides the present analysis is that processes of work informalization with global dimensions give new perspectives to informal work, its centrality, and its association with capitalist development. Beyond the periphery, informality today presents itself as a trend that crosses labour relations, reconfiguring not only the definition of informal work, but also the characterization of employment and formal work. The so-called flexibilization of work involves the loss of stable and contractual regulations that guarantee the 660
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes 661 distinction between what is and what is not working time; the loss of clear definitions of what employer costs and responsibilities are; in addition to the transfer of risks and costs to workers. These processes involve the informalization of work management and control, which become more difficult to recognize and map. Previously established distinctions between formal and informal work become increasingly blurred. In Brazil, recently implemented labour regulations evidence the role of the State in promoting this process of informalization, by legalizing the incorporation of elements historically associated to informal work into formal, standard employment. In this sense, the surge of new technology in recent decades, the centralized globalization of productive chains, financialization and its profound relationship with labour exploitation, new productive arrangements, the deindustrialization and expansion of agribusiness, neoliberal policies that financialize social rights, and the flexibilization of labour have all had a significant impact on labour relations that were already structurally flexible and permeated by super-exploitation. However, new forms of organization and management and new Brazilian labour regulations have made the discussion more complex, leading to what can be understood as a new type of informalization where informality is presented as a rule in labour relations (Abílio, 2023). In recent decades, changes in the world of work must be understood in relation to the long period of government of the Workers’ Party and the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro. The last 20 years have been marked by the Workers’ Party administration (2003–2016), the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, followed by the government of her vice president Michel Temer, and then the election of a militarized, extreme right government administration in 2018. The election of Jair Bolsonaro introduced an administration intent on new approaches (that still need to be better understood) that delegitimize democratic institutions, on defending extreme right positions, and on imposing new neoliberal reforms to social security, administration, and others. It has waged successful attacks on the social forces of labour and created new ways of deepening inequality and social injustices. The analysis takes place in three stages. The first analyses the changes in Brazilian social stratification, promoted by the Workers’ Party administration (2003–2016). It is argued that a poverty-reduction development model was adopted, without altering the concentration of income. In the world of work, there was an increase in the minimum wage, a reduction in unemployment, and a reduction in informality, while the extremely unequal structure in terms of race and income distribution remained practically unchanged. During this period, the working class gained visibility as a central target for expanding access to credit and consumption, and also for its importance as an electoral base. However, the exploitation of work and the recognition of the elements that organize daily life and forms of resistance by workers remained invisible. We then move on to the 2013 protests, which mobilized millions of people across the country and are related to the political instability that culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Roussef. The possibility of protests signalling the exhaustion of this development model is analysed. Changes in the direction of government policies are analysed which, since 2018, have been drawing a clear attack on the social forces of labour with new labour regulations. Finally, new processes of work informalization are analysed, associated to uberization and, more clearly, to work through digital platforms. How these processes give new visibility to informality, now recognized as an element that globally permeates new forms of work management and control is discussed.
662 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work
1.
THE WORKERS’ PARTY, SOCIAL INCLUSION, AND OBSCURING LABOUR EXPLOITATION
Significant changes to Brazil’s social stratification during the 13 years the Workers’ Party held power1 led to a government discourse that was closely tied to market discourse on the so-called new middle class in Brazil. The term referred to the significant reduction of people living below the line of poverty and their increased income and buying power. The main factors that fostered these changes were large-scale income distribution programmes, reduced unemployment rates, more formal labour and less informality, real increases in the minimum wage, and the mass extension of credit access to low-income people. Reducing poverty became the key focus of government policies, and thus the basis for the government’s official discourse on defining social classes strictly according to income and buying power. According to the economist Marcelo Neri – one of the main ideologists of the government discourse on the Brazilian ‘new middle class’ in 2003, 96.2 million Brazilians belonged to the D and E classes, made up of those who earned a household income of up to R$1734 (which in 2012 corresponded to less than 2.6 minimum wages). Class C, made up of those who earned a household income of between R$1734 and R$7475, included 65.9 million Brazilians. In 2011, after eight years of the Workers Party’ administration, Classes D and E dropped to 63.5 million, and Class C included 105.4 million. Similarly, Classes A and B rose from 13.3 million people in 2003 to 22.5 million in 2014.
Source:
Neri, 2012, p. 52. (Graph elaborated by the author)
Figure 55.1
Changes in Brazil’s social stratification according to economic classes
In addition to obscuring the relations between capital and labour in order to categorize social classes, the definition of new middle class included layers of the population that had occupa-
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes 663 tional trajectories and standards of living that were very different from those that characterized the middle class in the country (Quadros, 2008a, 2008b). Data indicates that almost all (over 95 per cent) of the new jobs generated between 2000 and 2010 earned up to 1.5 minimum wages (Pochmann, 2011). While most Brazilian workers remained in low-skilled, low-paying jobs, the racial inequality that structures the labour market continued practically unaltered. According to Adalberto Cardoso (2013), in 1996, 44.6 per cent of whites and 61 per cent of minority ethnic groups were employed in the 30 per cent most underpaid jobs; in 2010 we can see that the profound inequalities related both to racial/ethnicity income distribution persist almost the same: 44.2 per cent of whites and 60.2 per cent of minority ethnic groups were employed in the 30 per cent most underpaid jobs. Regarding the 20 per cent highest remunerated jobs, in 1996 they comprised 15.5 per cent of whites and 5.8 per cent of minority ethnic groups; in 2010, they comprised, respectively, 18 per cent and 6.4 per cent (Cardoso, 2013). Therefore, it is possible to conclude that despite expressive reductions in levels of poverty during the Workers’ Party administration, structuring the labour market according to wages in the first decade of the 2000s had little consequence in comparison to the 1990s. Changing Brazil’s social stratification by reducing poverty was at the core of the development model established by the Workers’ Party. Implemented throughout a decade of economic growth, these changes engendered what is commonly called Lulism (Singer, 2020): the government model for social inclusion touched neither the financial gains of the elite nor income concentration, while at the same time it achieved significant poverty reduction and improved the living conditions of workers. This pact, operating as a kind of class conciliation, cemented the administration’s ample voter base without altering income inequality (Medeiros et al., 2015), thus ensuring that the Workers’ Party remained in power for three consecutive terms. This movement gave visibility to, albeit also obscured, the working class in the political scenario by recognizing the importance of workers only as consumers and voters that guarantee the continuation and stability of this development model. Although understood as government strategy, this obscurement is part of broader, contemporary dilemmas when trying to understand the relation between capital and labour. These dilemmas are associated to global transformations in forms of control, work management, and in capitalist accumulation itself, which hamper definitions about the composition of the working class and its representation forms, its horizons, and its resistance instruments and practices. It is worth highlighting that while better living conditions were ensured for most Brazilian workers, their working conditions during that period continued to be structurally based on precarious and super-exploited labour (Abílio, 2012; Colombi and Krien, 2020). In this sense, when we refer to labour flexibilization processes that have been occurring around the globe in recent decades, it is necessary to understand that the Brazilian world of work is characterized by a structural flexibility that refers to formal and informal ways of intensifying work, extending work hours, transferring risks and costs to workers, and devaluing the labour force. As shown by Colombi and Krien (2020), this decade has seen a significant increase in hiring outsourced labour, a powerful vehicle for devaluing the labour force, intensifying and extending work hours, and disregarding rights. There has also been an increase in young people being hired as provisional interns and the creation of the individual micro-entrepreneur business category (commonly called MEI – that allows low-paid employees to be transformed into service providers and to no longer benefit from protected employment relationships). In terms of the relationship between financialization and labour exploitation, which is well demonstrated by Paulani (2010), the macroeconomic policy of maintaining high interest rates
664 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work seems to have perpetuated the country’s colonial condition, that now also refers to the subordinated role the country plays for international financial valorization and gain (Paulani, 2007, 2010). In the early 2000s, Francisco de Oliveira (2003a, 2003b, 2006) pointed out a new contradiction in the conflict between capital and labour, in what Christian Marazzi (2007) called the “silent revolution” in pension funds, when funds made of collective workers’ savings for social protection became central players in the financial market. Oliveira shows that the class formed by fund managers has a central role in defining the parameters for privatizing Brazilian state-owned companies, and that “well before 2002, this fund-management stratum had crystallized within the core leadership of the Workers Party” (Oliveira, 2006, p. 11). In this manner, the term new middle class synthesizes processes that conceal labour exploitation and obscure the central relationship between capital and labour for the understanding and definition of social classes. However, the events that occurred after 2016 reveal a change in direction in Brazil’s development. An economic crisis and social regression, new regulations that compounded labour exploitation, attacks against the social forces of labour, an increasing number of social movement leaders being murdered, the obscure and ongoing strengthening of the militia and its probable connections to the current federal administration, the expropriation of indigenous lands, increased land-clearing fires and deforestation, attacks against affirmative-action policies, and other issues expose a new level of conflict between capital and labour.
2.
CHANGES IN DIRECTION AND ATTACKS AGAINST THE SOCIAL FORCES OF LABOUR
In 2013, the development model employed by the Workers’ Party was seriously shaken. The June protests, following in the wake of other public manifestations emerging around the world in those years, involved millions of people across the country. In this same wake, issues that began in the circulation sphere and were related to urban mobility became fuses that triggered a conflict that was initially associated to working-class demands and organization, but that quickly lost focus, making their demands and motivations difficult to discern or safely locate on a political spectrum between left and right. The workers’ demands that revolved around price hikes for urban mobility dissipated amidst growing protests that rejected the participation of political parties and labour unions and brought multiple demands that were difficult to classify politically. Although segments of the middle class had significant participation in the protests, also a significant number of participants were low-skilled and low-paid workers that, until then, were considered part of the “new Brazilian middle class”. Thus, 2013 was a year that shook the long trajectory of the Workers’ Party at its core. The hypothesis assumed here is that the Lulista model for improving living conditions, which glossed over the conflict between capital and labour, had run out of popular support (Grigera et al., 2019). The impact of this opened the door for elite and middle-class sectors to realign themselves and paved the way for Dilma Rousseff’s administration to be disqualified, culminating in her impeachment followed by Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 (for different perspectives see Boito Jr. and Saad-Filho, 2016; Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco, 2020; Saad-Filho, 2015; Singer, 2020). Rousseff had been re-elected in 2014 by a small margin in the midst of an economic crisis. Although the crisis had begun in 2013, it only became visible in 2014. In the social regression that followed, the term new middle class disappeared, giving way to the
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes 665 new poor. After the impeachment in 2016, vice president Michel Temer assumed power and implemented a government plan that was clearly geared towards reforms that went against the general population. Law 13.467, better known as the Labour Reform law, was enacted in 2017, causing brutal changes to labour legislation, particularly to the role of the State in the capital-labour relationship. It gave the State legal authority to promote the informalization of formal labour, like a tractor demolishing workers’ rights and undermining collective negotiations. The State could now legally define labour contracts as free negotiations between supposedly equal parties and give individual negotiations the same importance as collective ones. The Reform was both refined and brutal and the range of changes it brought is so broad and deep that it is hard to summarize. It installed legal mechanisms that eliminated barriers against labour exploitation, offering a kind of menu with different ways for hiring and transferring risks and costs to workers. The approval of such significant changes without much resistance demonstrates how social movements, leftist parties, labour unions, and other collective organizations are still disoriented by the new strategies of government. In this context, a working class that already faces high turnaround rates, reduced labourforce value, and occupational trajectories interwoven by unstable transitions between formal and informal work and small family businesses is now legally submitted to one more step of labour exploitation. Even the minimum guarantees that defined formal work are in check and are being used to redefine employment itself, in that wages, working hours, and limits for extending and intensifying work are no longer publicly defined or regulated. Furthermore, this new labour legislation allows employees to be paid monthly wages that are less than the minimum salary. The recent context of economic crisis, decreased growth, and high informality and unemployment rates make it hard to measure the impacts of the reform. When we broaden our analysis, we can see there is a global tendency towards informalizing labour relations, like the tip of the iceberg built on decades of globally integrated productive chains, attacks against labour rights, and new ways of organizing and controlling work. The possibility of dispersing work without losing control over it (Harvey, 1989) can be recognized in the countless knots that make up the productive chains of corporations that outsource their production, distribution, and sales while maintaining control over labour and centralized profits. Controlled dispersion is also expressed in home office workers, toyotism arrangements, goal-based work, and in contemporary ways of paying by piecework. It is about the successful transfer of costs and risks as well as part of the management to the workers, who nevertheless are still subsumed. It is about the increasing elimination of rules and regulations related to work hours, what is and what is not work time, and what is paid and unpaid work. The globalization of productive chains and the clear integration of slave-like work, informal work, and extremely precarious working conditions have, to some extent, increasingly made it clear that informal work is far from being something residual or marginal for the contemporary forms of accumulation (Portes et al., 1989, 2002). Nevertheless, in today’s scenario of employment flexibilization, new regulations and new ways of control and management demonstrate that the structural elements of informal work are pervading labour relations. This perspective leads to a new understanding of the characteristics associated to the periphery and the visibility they achieve when reaching central countries and qualified workers, in that they are no longer restricted to typically peripheral workers. In this sense, the Brazilian State is in fact modernizing labour legislation by creating a series of mechanisms that allow these elements to operate in a legal and generalized manner. One
666 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work of the central elements of the Labour Reform, among other ongoing government initiatives to casualize and degrade work, is to transform formalized workers into just-in-time workers (Abílio, 2017; De Stefano, 2016). These types of workers are employed but have no guarantees over their working hours or wages. As will be concluded below, on-demand work is a historically constitutive and socially concealed element in Brazil’s peripheral way of life.
3.
INFORMALITY, TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, AND THE NEW SUBSUMPTION OF PERIPHERAL WAYS OF LIFE
In the 1970s, Francisco de Oliveira (2003a, 2003b) confronted the myths of marginality, of the “swollen” urban tertiary sector, and of the “backward” army of informal workers. He revealed the specificity of peripheral capitalist development, which, although apparently disordered and precarious, is in reality extremely successful at implementing ways to devalue the labour force, like transferring costs and social reproduction management to the workers themselves. The onset of urban and industrial centres in the mid 20th century did not bring ways to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class being formed. Thus, the costs of reproducing the labour force were transferred to the workers themselves. Transport, housing, and the distribution of consumer goods depend on the engagement and survival strategies of the workers, seen in their collective efforts to build houses and in running small family businesses such as small shops, home-based sewing, small restaurants, and others. The urban space considered collapsed and chaotic is revealed as a space that materializes class interests. Thus, informality and low-skilled, low-income self-employment are part of the daily survival strategies used to guarantee the social reproduction of the working class. These elements are then understood not as exceptions or backward, but as fully integrated into a specific development model where industrialization is interwoven with services that grow horizontally, based on the almost exclusive use of the work force and the organizational talent of thousands of pseudo-small owners who, in fact, are no more than selling their work force to the main units of the system mediated by a false appearance of property. In this way, the part that corresponds to services is eliminated from internal production costs (Oliveira, 2003b, p. 68).
In this manner, the periphery presents and perpetuates itself in successful and invisible ways of transferring costs and risks to the workers, decreasing the value of its labour force, and maintaining high exploitation rates. Recent empirical research with under-qualified, low-paid workers has shown that far from having a linear occupational trajectory formed by stable, successful professional identities, the Brazilian working class survives in permanent transition between formal and informal work, sporadic work, and different job combinations. In addition, in the same way as with the frontiers between formal and informal economy, the image of a stable separation between legal and illegal economy is very distant from its profoundly interconnected reality (Feltran, 2019). Empirical research with motorcycle delivery workers (Abílio, 2017, 2020) shows professional trajectories made by different occupations and professions and the combination of multiple jobs. For example, one interviewee, black, 38 years old, has already been a metal worker, a telephone technician, has run his own t-shirt businesses, and worked in supermarkets. Currently, at the same time he works with deliveries, and he resells imitation luxury goods. Another delivery worker works during the day for an outsourced company, at night as an infor-
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes 667 mal worker at a pizza shop, and then combines both with an app-based delivery job. The social reproduction of these workers involves permanent self-management and engagement, and an unstable and risky way of living in order to guarantee their survival. They have intermittent access to labour rights and guarantees, and they lack social protection networks. “Entrepreneurship” is a perverse term that currently expresses the effective transferal of labour risks and costs and the elimination of protection, guarantees, and rights in combination with permanent self-administration, which does not mean lack of subordination or labour control. Entrepreneurship has become part of the lexicon of unemployment management, public policies, market discourse, reforms, and the celebration that revolves around eliminating labour rights. By once again expanding our scale of analysis, today we can say that perspectives on digital work, on platform capitalism, and on the gig economy all involve recognizing that workers have been reduced to on-demand workers. Here we can use the definition of uberization, which refers to a new type of work informalization (Abílio, 2023). In this sense, while it refers to specific occupations in the contemporary world of work such as Uber drivers and app-based delivery workers, it primarily refers to a tendency that is currently affecting labour relations from a global perspective. It is a new type of labour organization, management, and control that subjects a multitude of informal workers deprived of labour rights and protection, who bear the risks and costs of their activities. We can say it is a new type of informalization due to the technical-political means involved. In other words, the possibility of new ways of controlling the entire labour process, including even the subsumed transfer of work decisions to the workers themselves, who become fully responsible for their survival in their activity. These workers can also be called just-in-time workers (Abílio, 2017, 2020; De Stefano, 2016), or workers that are reduced to pure labour force to be used according to the demand. They are available to work but have no guarantee as to wages or the work time necessary for their reproduction. It is about not having anything to ensure their own reproduction other than the daily income they get from work, albeit there is no guarantee as to how much they will earn, regardless of how engaged they are. They remain subsumed and powerless to negotiate their wages, responsibilities, or work hours. Nevertheless, part of the work management is transferred to them. This self-management can be understood as survival strategies in order to keep working. For example, when we look at delivery workers or uberized drivers, their supposed freedom and autonomy basically refer to strategies outlined by the workers themselves, such as determining the best period of the day to work, work location, rented or financed vehicle, etc. All these decisions are then processed and managed, or in other words, become administration data in the immense registry of just-in-time workers. In this way, these strategies become controlled and managed elements. It is necessary to understand how these ways of life that make up the specificities of peripheral capitalist development adapt and change. Uberization brings something very new: algorithmic management is used to centralize, rationalize, monopolize, and administrate this peripheral way of life (Abílio, 2020). In other words, peripheral ways of life are being incorporated as central elements into these new ways of controlling and organizing work. We could even venture to say that elements typically associated to peripheral ways of life are spreading in global processes that by different ways transform workers into just-in-time workers. In Brazil, the image of young, black bike couriers from the urban outskirts encapsulates the peripheral just-in-time worker. Working an average of 12 hours a day and earning less than a minimum wage per month, these workers pedal over 50km a day through São Paulo
668 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work traffic (Aliança Bike, 2019). Having been reduced to cheap physical force, they wander the streets and plazas of the city in between runs, waiting for the next call. They are responsible for dealing with any gaps in their workday and are only paid for what they produce, even though they are typically available 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The grand novelty of uberization indeed lies in the fact that workers are being reduced to just-in-time workers, but also in the productive enclosure of a typically peripheral way of life that today is transformed into data and that is privately appropriated in the control and subsumption of work through app-based companies.
CONCLUSION The world of work is undergoing profound changes globally, which challenge collective organizations, forms of resistance, and the recognition and analysis of the elements that weave the relationship between capital and labour today. Perspectives built from so-called peripheral countries face persistent dilemmas. The categories of analysis on the world of work in the periphery and its centrality for capitalist accumulation and development face persistent dualisms between margin and centre. These dualities result in the invisibility of a large part of the working class, which is easily associated to unproductive work, the industrial reserve army, and social disposability. Looking at the administrations of the Workers’ Party, we see the problematic shift from the recognition of social classes through the lens of capital-labour relationships to the recognition of economic classes, through the lens of consumption potential and access to credit. While poverty has been reduced, income inequality and labour exploitation have intensified. However, the scenario worsens and the profound change in the direction of the post-impeachment government of Dilma Rousseff shows new processes of deepening inequality, increasing poverty, unemployment, and informality. The State currently institutes, through labour reforms, instruments that promote not only the expansion of informality, but also a redefinition of the category of formal, standard employment itself. These processes cannot be understood in isolation, but in their relation to global financialization processes and neoliberal policies. The analytical challenges lie in understanding the specifics of these changes without relegating them to the margins, highlighting the centrality that processes that develop in the periphery have for contemporary capitalism. One of the central arguments of this article is that typically peripheral ways of life are being subordinated and managed by new means, which involve processes of monopolization at a global level and new technologies. In addition, elements that weave these ways of life seem to be becoming generalized by labour relations, as a present or possible future of labour relations not only in the periphery, but also in central countries. A central element is the transfer of not only the risks and costs, but also of part of the work management to the workers. A subordinated management, that is based on the processes of informalization of rules and mechanisms that operate in the control of work, in contexts of permanent uncertainty and instability. Soon after being elected, Brazil’s current president declared informality as the model for the labour market. His declaration is not banal, but rather clearly expresses the immediate future being outlined for Brazil’s world of work. Furthermore, with the COVID-19 pandemic, government policies transferred the responsibility of survival management to the people themselves. A line of separation was informally established between those who could self-isolate
Brazil: inequalities, labour exploitation and new informalization processes 669 and those who had to circulate. This line is clearly defined by the intersectionality that forms class, race, and gender inequalities. The lack of any State definitions on how citizens should proceed forced people to informally manage themselves in order to ensure their survival. Before the pandemic, this type of governing had already been seen in the wake of a massive environmental disaster that caused a gigantic oil spill on the Brazilian coastline. The way the government informally transferred the management of this disaster to workers left millions of people removing oil from the beaches with their own hands in order to try and restore the environment and save local economic activities. What appears to be chaos, backwardness, or peripheral ways of life can also be understood as new elements that today form the relationship between capital, work, and government technologies that are susceptible to becoming generalized.
NOTE 1
For filmed information on the founding of the Workers’ Party in the context of Brazil’s dictatorship and redemocratization, how it navigated labour transformations and contemporary ways of capitalist accumulation, all the way to the effects of its government administration, see ABC da Greve (1979, 1990, Brazil, directed by Leon Hirszman), Entreatos (2004, Brazil, directed by Walter Salles), Peões (2004, Brazil, directed by Eduardo Coutinho), and The Second Mother (Que Horas Ela Volta, 2015, Brazil, directed by Anna Muylaert).
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Index
2M 563 15M movement 447 Abílio, L.C. 28 abortion 156, 393, 503, 634–5 Accord on Fire and Building Safety 532–3 accumulation 83, 85, 137, 139, 201, 233, 247, 294 Ackroyd, S. 118 Adams-Prassl, J. 22 Admasie, S.A. 27 Afghanistan 181 African National Congress 491, 499, 606–7, 609 Agarwala, R. 472–5, 491–2 Agile Management System 374 aging societies 23, 377, 403, 412–19 Agrarian Question 137, 144 agribusiness 25, 513–18, 536, 538, 540–41, 543, 661 agriculture 20, 38, 45, 51, 56, 83, 132, 137, 201, 242, 245, 292–9, 302–9, 477–8, 536, 538, 581–2, 614–15, 617, 651 AI Act 324, 326, 328, 332–4, 336 Airbnb 353, 407, 478 Akbari, A. 315 Akbulut, B. 149 Alberti, G. 364 Algeria 422, 427, 501 algorithms 198, 200, 203, 323–4, 330–32, 334–5, 346, 354–5, 357, 360–61, 366, 373, 375, 380, 385, 388 Alibaba 353, 487, 596 All-China Federation of Trade Unions 594 Allende, S. 646 Alquati, R. 172, 174 Altenried, M. 317 Althusser, L. 103, 324, 328, 331 Amazon 69, 116–17, 332, 342, 346, 348, 365, 375, 382, 487, 596 Mechanical Turk 365, 375, 381–2, 478 Amazon Alliance 464 American Federation of Labor 217, 245–6 Amin, S. 143, 539, 547 Anagnostou, M. 154 Anders, W. 559 Anderson, B. 415 Anderson, P. 102 Andreas, J. 593 Anigstein, C. 24 Anner, M. 525, 530–32
anthropology 241–9 Anwar, M.A. 18 Apitzsch, U. 22 Appadurai, A. 473 Appen 179 Apple 128, 329, 332 Aradau, C. 313 Argentina 23, 25, 27–8, 47, 97, 152–6, 166–7, 202–4, 213, 298, 314, 367, 433–7, 439–40, 463, 503–11, 513, 516–17, 626–39 Armstrong, S. 392–3, 398 Arrighi, G. 539 artificial intelligence 21, 198, 323–6, 334–5, 340–49, 371–3, 407 artificial reproduction technologies 392–8, 407 Asia Floor Wage Alliance 527 Attias-Donfut, C. 423 Atwood, M. 392 Atzeni, M. 18, 201–2, 270, 626 augmemployment 21, 340, 346–7 austerity 27–8, 243, 404, 505, 604, 631–5, 638 Australia 36, 47, 162, 217, 270, 272, 296–7, 381 Austria 102, 497 automation 1, 21–2, 324, 331, 340, 345–8, 354, 371–5, 377, 407–8, 465, 563 autonomy 116–17, 120, 174–5, 200, 286, 298, 323, 336, 367, 371–7, 504, 516–17, 530, 557, 648, 651 auxiliaries, workers as 97–9 Azzellini, D. 17, 19, 149 Baccaro, L. 273 Baglioni, E. 16 Bair, J. 128–30, 532–3 Bakker, I. 402 Bales, K. 75 Banaji, J. 53, 57–8, 259 Bandl, S. 19 Bangladesh 139, 448, 525–6, 528, 532–3, 564 bankruptcy 149, 387, 504, 593 Barbrook, R. 353 bare life 243 bargaining power 10, 186–7, 190–91, 302, 347, 368, 374, 481, 487, 636 see also collective bargaining Barragan, R. 258 Barrett, P.M. 620 Basu, D. 58 Batstone, E. 271
671
672 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Baumann-Pauly, D. 620 Bechelet, M. 653 Belgium 163, 213, 479, 497, 537 Bellucci, S. 19 Belorussia 501 Belt and Road Initiative 571 Benanav, A. 15, 56–9 Benin 543 Benjamin, R. 315 Bennholdt-Thomsen, V. 403 Benton, G. 97 Bernardi, C. 20 Bernards, N. 605 Berners Lee, T. 341 Bernstein, H. 15 Bhat, E. 476 Bhattacharya, S. 60 Bhattacharya, T. 65 Bianchi, G. 258 Bielefeld School 16, 83, 90–91n3 big data 113, 121, 343, 376 biopolitics 243 BioTexCom 395 Black Lives Matter 246 Bloch, M. 263 Bloom, P. 324 Blyton, P. 529 Boatcă, M. 15–16 Boewe, J. 26 Bolivia 5, 101, 150, 154, 168, 258, 501 Bologna, S. 172, 572 Bolsonaro, J. 661, 664 Bond, P. 247 borders 280–88 Bosma, U. 254 Bourdieu, P. 23, 429 bourgeoisification 86–7, 89–90 Bowman, A. 605 Brass, T. 76–7 Braverman, H. 113, 115–18, 121, 373 Brazil 24–5, 28, 74, 83–4, 88, 150, 152–6, 164, 213, 258, 463, 477, 496, 499–501, 513–15, 660–69 Brazil, N. 387 Breman, J. 61 Brenner, J. 65 Brexit 560 bribes 203, 287 Briken, K. 16 Brinbaum, Y. 430 Brynjolfsson, E.A. 372–3 Buhlungu, S. 608 Building Workers International 214 Bulgaria 280, 305, 526 Burawoy, M. 113, 119–22, 143
Burger King 652 Butler, J. 323 Cabify 479 Cadioli, A. 258 Caille, J.-P. 422 Calo, R. 386 Cambodia 22, 395, 525–6, 528 Cameron, A. 353 Campling, L. 16 Canada 47, 162–3, 190, 211, 213, 217, 272, 296–7, 496, 498, 526, 555 Cant, C. 355–7 Capital 4–5, 16, 53–5, 59, 114, 542 caporalato 20–21, 303, 305–9, 575–6 Cardoso, A. 663 care extractivism 23, 395, 404, 406–10 care work 22–3, 165, 201, 284–5, 302, 375–6, 392–8, 401–9, 459 elderly care 23, 405–6, 412–19 surrogacy 22, 392–8, 407 unpaid see unpaid domestic/care work CARES Act 242 Caritas 315 Carlin, N. 97 Cash Assistance Programmes 21, 312, 314–15, 318 caste 61, 68, 79, 131, 139, 143, 284, 406, 481, 523, 529–30 Castells, M. 10, 37–8, 40, 472, 587–8, 592 Castro, F. 100 Cattaneo, O. 126 Cavallero, L. 24–5 Cavallo, D. 435 Ceccagno, A. 531 Césaire, A. 145 Chan, J. 26–7 Chávez, C. 298 Chen, J.Y. 366 Chen, M. 474 Cherry, M.A. 387 Chevalier, L. 258 Chile 5, 28, 37, 83, 501, 642–55 China 1, 26–7, 35, 38, 47, 68–9, 95, 101, 137, 139–41, 343, 366, 373, 496, 525–6, 528, 551, 555–6, 560–61, 564, 586, 591–8, 619 Chinigò, D. 619 Chun, J. 488–9 Cini, L. 22, 361, 363 citizenship rights 79–80, 103, 473–5, 481, 485–6, 488–9, 491–3, 593, 652 Clark, C. 138 Clarks, L. 18 class consciousness 35, 98, 118–19, 122, 173, 176, 259
Index 673 class struggle 4–5, 34–5, 40, 119, 121–2, 176, 198, 233, 622, 627 classes of labour 55, 60–62 Clean Clothes Campaign 464 Cleaver, H. 55 climate change 14, 18–19, 209–18, 560 Clover, J. 488 Coase, R. 381–2 Coddington, K. 318 coerced labour 9, 77, 83, 85, 199, 302 Collectif Livreurs Autonomes de Paris 368 collective action 3, 8, 10, 14, 18, 198–206, 266, 274, 360–62, 364–9, 440, 490–91, 515, 532, 633, 654 see also strikes collective bargaining 190, 238, 266, 269–70, 274, 347, 367–8, 446, 458, 460, 462–3, 466, 485, 525, 533, 565, 593, 627, 632, 636–9, 645, 647–8, 650 see also bargaining power collectivism 118–19, 122, 267, 270–71, 440, 646 Colombi, A. 663 Colombia 25, 213, 440, 477, 501, 536–43 colonialism 14–16, 36, 45, 47, 69, 83, 253, 256, 293–4, 397, 505, 536 Comelli, M. 514 commodification of reproduction 6–7 common pool resources institutions 154, 156 commoning labour power 17, 149–57 Communist Manifesto 4, 97, 199 comparative industrial relations 267, 271–5 Congreso Nacional Indígena 25, 513–14, 517–19 Congress of International Organizations 217, 246 Congress of South African Trade Unions 214–15, 606–8 Conlon, D. 318 Connolly, H. 19, 271, 447 consent 328–9 construction industry 74, 585–6, 596–7, 616 contract workers 188–90, 285–7, 564, 581, 584–6 convict labour 79, 95, 257 Cooper, M. 398 cooperatives 149, 162, 166 co-research 175 Cornell Legal Information Institute 325–6 corporate social responsibility 532 Corrado, A. 307 Costa Rica 23, 433, 437–40 counter-logistics 26, 570–77 COVID-19 pandemic 4–5, 10, 27–8, 51n6, 51n7, 65, 67–8, 198, 304–5, 307, 318, 337n1, 346, 366, 371, 377, 395, 407–8, 478, 486, 509–10, 531, 556, 598, 609–10, 620, 668 and care work 22, 418–19 see also essential workers
crisis triggered by 272, 275, 507, 603, 626, 630–31, 635, 638–9, 643 essential workers 4, 79, 241, 243, 245–7 and informal employment 474 and sex work 439–40 and worker struggles in the US 19, 241–9 Cowen, D. 313, 571 Craigslist 382 creative destruction 372, 387 Critical Political Economy Research Network 13 Crossa Niell, M. 25–6 Crowdflower 478 Cuba 100, 555, 557 Cuppini, N. 26 cyberbullying 331 Czech Republic 526 Dalla Costa, M.R. 70, 402 Darlington, R. 201, 271 Das, D. 58 Dash, A. 162 data extraction/mining 21, 312–19, 375 data labelling 341 data protection 21, 323–37 datafication 313, 315, 324–5, 332, 347 Davis, A. 398 Davis, M. 141, 556 De Angelis, M. 10 De La Rúa, F. 636 Deakin, S. 385–6 Defense Protection Act 246 Delcroix, C. 422 Deleuze, G. 325, 331 Delgado Wise, R. 25 Deliveroo 69, 356, 479 Delroix, C. 23 Demeke, E. 620 Denmark 215, 272, 367 Denning, M. 201, 318 dependency theory 83, 85 Desai, A. 247 deskilling of workforce 21–3, 116, 179, 198, 340, 346–8, 371–7, 416–17 Development Platform of the Americas 214 development studies 11–13, 64 Didi 595 digitalization 1, 13, 18, 21–2, 198, 377, 407–8, 563, 573 see also gig economy dignity 153, 156, 165, 198, 203, 219, 221, 223, 226, 334, 408, 488, 504–5, 527, 575, 642 division of labour 47, 55, 59, 85, 114, 120, 128, 132, 241–9, 254, 401–3, 409, 504 Doellgast, V. 273–4 Doezema, J. 75
674 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work domestic abuse 342, 348 domestic/care work see unpaid domestic/care work Dominican Republic 526 Donaghey, J. 448 dot-com bubble 49 Du Bois, W.E.B. 244–6 Dunlop, J.T. 268 Durán-Palma, F. 28 D’Urso, L. 27 Dyer-Witheford, N. 7, 149 Early Social Reproduction Analysis 15, 64–5, 67–8, 70–71 Echeverria, B. 555–7 economic growth 12, 57, 95, 138, 213, 225, 404–5, 419, 439, 464, 485–6, 581, 583, 606, 628, 643–4, 663 Ecuador 25, 536–43 education 23, 116, 424–30 Education International 460 Edwards, P. 269 Edwards Deming, W. 344 Egypt 185 Elbert, R. 627 elderly care 23, 405–6, 412–19 Elson, D. 2–3 employment law 22, 380–88 see also labour law employment relations see industrial relations Engels, F. 7, 16, 94, 143, 199 environmental issues 18–19, 41, 209–18, 219–28, 462–3, 515, 525, 543, 669 green jobs 212, 222–7, 229n4, 246, 465 Eritrea 74 Eskenazi, M. 632 Esping-Andersen, G. 220 essential workers 4, 79, 241, 243, 245–7 see also care work Ethiopia 27, 525, 614–22 ethnicity 4, 21, 79, 88, 143, 201, 205, 225, 273, 281, 303, 305, 403, 405–6, 449, 473, 490, 663 Eurocentrism 1, 8–9, 163, 256–8, 284 European Asylum Office 316 European Federation of Food, Agriculture and Tourism Trade Unions 214 European Green Deal 220, 224 European Parliament 326, 328 European Sociological Association 13 European Trade Union Confederation 460 European Union 211, 217, 220, 222, 224–8, 280, 298, 305, 308, 312, 314, 323, 327, 366, 393–4, 398, 413, 416, 462, 526, 532, 567 Evans, L. 323
Evans, P. 472–3 exchange value 2–3, 51n1, 84, 151, 179, 402, 539 exploitation 1, 3–4, 9, 14–15, 22, 25, 55, 64, 66–9, 75–6, 80, 113, 115, 117–18, 198–9, 201, 271, 297–9, 302–9, 398, 404, 492, 523, 527, 530–32, 576–7 in Brazil 660–69 coerced labour 9, 77, 83, 85, 199, 302 in Ethiopia 27, 614–22 forced labour 15, 40, 75, 77, 80, 201, 263, 302, 305, 415, 562 and global value chains 16–7, 126–34 indenture labour 3, 35, 47, 65–6, 78, 199, 201, 257, 285 migrant labour see migrant labour slavery see slavery social reproduction see social reproduction unfree labour 9, 14–15, 69, 74–81, 85, 257–8, 302, 523, 527, 531 extractivism 1, 22–3, 25, 401–9, 512–20 care 23, 395, 404, 406–10 extractive humanitarianism 21, 312–19 financial 506, 509 labour value extraction under AI 340–49 Facebook 180, 332, 343, 353, 365, 577 Fair Labors Standards Act 246, 387 Fairmondo 479 Familias Unidas por la Justicia 245 fascism 50–51 Febvre, L. 263 Federici, S. 10, 247, 313, 318, 342, 348, 402, 506 Feliz, M. 436 feminism 5–6, 16, 23, 56, 64–7, 69–70, 75, 78, 87, 89–90, 120, 149, 164, 214, 313–14, 333, 396, 398, 401–2, 451, 459, 465–6, 653 Marxist 64–7, 69–70, 120, 144, 248, 401–2 strikes 24–5, 503–11 Fernández, A. 639 Fernandez, B. 620–21 Ferrer, J.F. 437 Fevre, R. 180, 182–3, 190 financial crisis (2008) 10, 49, 226, 345, 353, 459, 489, 491, 606 financial extractivism 506, 509 financialization 27, 40, 127, 130–31, 295, 314, 405, 486–7, 509, 559, 571, 603–5, 661, 663, 668 First International 36 fishing 26, 74, 513, 536, 542, 559, 562–3, 567, 649, 653 Fiverr.com 180 Flanders, A. 269 Flaskô 155
Index 675 Fleischer, V. 382 Floyd, G. 241 Flusser, V. 342 Food and Agriculture Organization 296, 562 food production 20, 292–9, 302–9, 460, 464, 538 forced labour 15, 40, 75, 77, 80, 201, 263, 302, 305, 415, 562 Ford, M. 371–2 Fordism 103, 120, 172, 174, 177, 198, 270, 273, 296, 304, 373–4, 401, 446, 575 foreign direct investment 13 Fortunati, L. 2 Foucault, M. 243, 335 Fox, A. 268 Fox Piven, F. 200 Foxconn 343 Fox-Hodess, K. 566 France 23, 94, 97, 103, 126, 155, 163, 166, 223–4, 226, 258, 263, 271–2, 296–7, 368, 422–30, 496, 533 Frank, A.G. 83–4 Fraser, N. 6, 396, 404 free trade 36, 47, 459, 462–3, 646 Free Trade Agreement of Americas 462–3 Free Trade Agreements 550–51 Freelancer.com 179–80, 184, 189 Freie Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter Union 368 Frey, C.B. 354, 371 Fridays for Future 228 Friedman, A.L. 116–17 Friedman, T. 190 Frontex 315–16 full employment 48, 593 Gago, V. 24, 66, 314 Gall, G. 449 gamification 354, 361 garment industry 25, 66–7, 132–3, 302, 459, 464, 523–34, 595, 618–19 gender 4, 12, 15–16, 41, 65, 84, 90, 151, 176, 181, 205, 220, 225, 241, 244, 246, 252, 267, 285, 305, 314, 430, 449, 459, 465, 473, 476, 493, 523, 530–31 see also feminism in Argentina 631, 634–5 care work 22–3, 165, 201, 284–5, 302, 375–6, 392–8, 401–9, 459 in Chile 644, 653 feminist strikes 24–5, 503–11 gendered division of labour 22–3, 54, 56, 401–9 see also social reproduction gendered paternalism 132 sex work 23, 64, 66, 244, 257, 263, 305, 393, 433–40, 616
surrogacy 22, 392–8, 407 unpaid domestic/care work 3, 5, 15, 64–7, 69–70, 144, 201, 228, 302, 313–14, 348, 401–9, 414, 508, 653 see also social reproduction women in garment industry 586–7 women in group farming 477–8 women in maritime industry 485, 488, 562 women joining workforce 38 General Data Protection Regulation 323–9, 331–6 Gerima, H. 617 Germany 23, 50, 94, 102, 213, 215, 224, 227, 258, 271–2, 335, 368, 393–4, 405, 408–9, 412–19, 533, 539, 555, 564 Ghana 130, 180, 185, 187, 189–90 gig economy 14, 18, 20–21, 62, 80, 113, 122, 179–94, 205, 247, 267, 273, 341, 375, 478–9, 591–2, 595–7, 634, 660, 667 class composition in 351–7 economics of 22, 380–88 resistance and struggle in 22, 360–69 Gillespie, T. 353 Global Commodity Chain 254 global destruction networks 130 Global Framework Agreements 458, 461, 464 global labour history 19, 77–8, 252–63 global merchant shipping 560–62 Global Political Economy 13 global production networks 12, 16–17, 25, 126–34, 523–34, 619 Global Union Federations 41, 213, 460–61, 532 global value chains 4, 10, 12, 16–17, 27, 126–34, 198, 479–80, 527, 570, 614, 619 globalization 14, 17, 23, 34, 37–8, 43–51, 53–4, 121, 127–8, 182–3, 219, 259, 282–4, 348, 352, 461–3, 473, 559–60, 591, 598, 642, 665 global unions and labour movement 458–67 planetary labour market 179–94 González García, C. 518 Goodwin, T. 353 Google 332, 346, 376 Gooptu, N. 584 Gordon, D.M. 645 Gottlieb, B. 21 Gouldner, A. 97, 101 Grab 479 Graham, M. 18 Graham, S. 182 Gramsci, A. 328 Great Depression 36, 49 Greece 297, 304, 312–15, 561 green jobs 212, 222–7, 229n4, 246, 465 ‘green revolution’ 20, 296 Green Taxi Cooperative 479
676 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work gross domestic product 46–7, 214, 345, 401, 435, 542, 581, 583, 604, 615, 617, 643 ground rent 4, 550 group farming 477–8 Guattari, F. 325, 331 Guérin, D. 97, 99 guest workers 20, 74, 79–80, 280, 285, 287 Gumtree 382 H&M 619 Haiti 501 Hammer, N. 25 Hardt, M. 10, 149 Hardy, K. 23 Hardy, T. 180–81, 183, 190 Harvey, D. 3, 10, 149, 179, 233–4, 247, 281, 497, 512, 540, 646 Haupt, G. 100 Hayles, N.K. 329, 332–3 health and safety 81, 209, 213, 366, 383, 463, 531, 596, 635 Heeks, R. 180 Heery, E. 448 Heller, P. 473 Heras, A.I. 17 Herod, A. 19, 128–30, 498 Hess, M. 16, 94 hidden labour 312–14, 317–19 Hines, L. 537 Hochschild, A. 392 Hodder, A. 275 Hoerder, D. 97 Hofmeester, K. 254 Holgate, J. 201, 449 HomeJoy 387 Honduras 526 Hong Kong 39, 525–6, 561, 592 Horan, H. 383–4 Horton, J. 190 housewifization 86–90 housing bubble 43, 49 Howell, C. 273 Huang, Y. 373–4 Hudson, R. 237 human resource management 266, 275n1, 323, 330, 335, 593 human rights 41, 212, 307, 415, 464, 533 humanitarianism 312–19 Hungary 102, 526 hunger 296, 603–4, 609 Huxley, A. 392 Hyman, R. 205, 269, 450 hyperglobalization 128 IBM 346, 348
Ikea 572 imperialism 14, 25, 43–51, 54, 198, 204, 245, 536–43, 551, 617–19 modus operandi of 44–5 income compression 45–7 income inequality 28, 43, 48, 141, 154, 253, 268, 439, 507–8, 643–4, 663, 668 indenture labour 3, 35, 47, 65–6, 78, 199, 201, 257, 285 Independent Workers Union 356 India 22, 24, 26, 35, 46–7, 67–9, 78, 83, 132–3, 137, 139–40, 162, 168, 185, 252, 257, 341, 393–7, 440, 473–8, 485, 491–3, 498–500, 526, 528–30, 555, 564, 581–8, 619 indigenous peoples 80, 83, 150, 164, 513–14, 517–19, 664 Indonesia 341, 365–7, 496, 526, 528, 537–8, 561 industrial relations 8–10, 19–20, 204, 266–75, 361, 364, 367–8, 447, 559, 574, 643, 665 bargaining power 10, 186–7, 190–91, 302, 347, 368, 374, 481, 487, 636 see also collective bargaining collective action 3, 8, 10, 14, 18, 198–206, 266, 274, 360–62, 364–9, 440, 490–91, 515, 532, 633, 654 strikes 24, 69–70, 202, 245, 247–8, 254, 259, 273, 357, 364, 368, 488, 495–501, 503–11, 572–3, 577, 605, 622, 633–5, 645, 647–8, 650–54 trade unions see trade unions Industrial Workers of Great Britain 368 IndustriALL 216, 460, 564, 567 informal economy 12, 24, 26, 28, 39–40, 59–60, 62, 89, 205, 210, 260, 314, 471–81, 485–7, 493, 581–8, 591–8, 603–4, 626, 645, 661–2 Inheritance Law 413 Inowlocki, L. 422 intellectual property rights 546, 548–52 Interamerican Regional Labor Organization 462–3 see also Trade Union Confederation of the Americas Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 210, 218 International Chamber of Shipping 560–61 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions 211, 460 International Conference of Labour Statisticians 471 International Dockworkers Council 464, 566 International Federation of the Red Cross 315 International Institute of Social History see labour history 254, 260
Index 677 International Labour Organization 12, 18, 75, 142, 209, 212–14, 219–20, 260, 302, 336, 345–6, 408, 414–15, 459, 461–2, 466, 471–3, 476, 480, 532, 561 International Longshoremen’s Association 238 International Monetary Fund 436–7, 473, 634 International Trade Secretariats 460 International Trade Union Confederation 18, 41, 209–10, 212–14, 260, 460–61, 465, 479 International Transport Federation 26, 213–14, 460, 464, 562, 565–7 International Union of Food and Allied Workers 480, 562 International Workers of the World 368 Internet of Things 374, 376 internships 27, 592, 594–5, 597 Iran 100–101, 501, 555 Irani, L. 375 Iraq 501 Ireland 365, 408 Israel 395 Italy 20, 25–6, 95–7, 167, 172–5, 213, 216, 226, 258, 272, 297–8, 302–9, 317, 365–6, 368, 450, 526, 531, 570–77 Ivanov, S. 373 James, S. 70, 402 Japan 50, 97, 101, 270, 272, 296–7, 372–3, 375–6, 407, 499, 526, 561, 564, 592 Jenkins, J. 529 Jha, P. 17 Jhabvala, R. 476 job creation 38, 228, 345, 371, 632 Johnson, N.L. 353 Jones, A. 182–3 Joyce, S. 365–7 just transition 18–19, 209–18, 219, 222–7, 464–5, 467 just-in-time workers 376, 405, 595, 666–8 Kalb, D. 248 Kalleberg, A. 181 Kaminska, I. 384 Karatasli, S.S. 10 Karwowski, E. 604 Kasmir, S. 19 Katz, L.F. 345 Katznelson, I. 490 Kelly, J. 8, 201–3, 267, 270–71, 446, 449 Kempadoo, K. 434 Kenny, B. 27 Kenya 180, 185–8, 190, 257, 408, 477 Kerr, C. 272, 495 Key Indicators of Labour Markets 142 Keynes, J.M. 21, 44, 48–9, 340, 401
Keynesianism 48, 198, 246, 261 Kirchner, C. 436 Kirk, D. 387 Kirk, E. 201 Kitchin, R. 323 KKPKP 477, 481 Kleiner, D. 347 Kocka, J. 254, 258 Kondratiev cycles 292, 295, 496 Kontos, M. 23 Kotz, D.M. 646, 648 Krein, D. 663 Krueger, A.B. 345 Kumar, A. 525, 532 Kuttner, E. 97–8 Kuznets, S. 138 Kyoto Protocol 211 labour commoning 149–57 labour geography 19, 232–9 borders 280–88 labour history 19, 77–8, 252–63 labour law 11, 192–3, 266, 335, 341, 393, 493, 525, 561, 574, 585, 593, 636, 638, 647–8 see also employment law labour mobility 280–88, 302–9 see also migrant labour labour process 3, 16, 113–22 Labour Process Theory 117–22 labour productivity 14, 38, 43, 46–8, 87, 131, 340, 373, 377, 616, 636, 647 land-grabbing 56, 78, 403 Laos 395 Laslett, B. 65 Lazzarato, M. 336 Lebanon 5, 501 Lebowitz, M. 54 Leeds Index of Platform Labour Protest 364–5, 367 Lefebvre, H. 283 legal arbitrage 22, 380–88 Lei, Y.W. 366 Lenin, V. 538 Lesotho 525 Levenson, Z. 609 Lever, W. 537 Lewis, A. 12, 138 Li, T.M. 243 Liberia 565 Linebaugh, P. 10, 96, 258 LinkedIn 180 lithium mining 343, 518 Liu, W. 353 living conditions 28, 74, 308, 519, 531, 540, 542, 626, 638–9, 663–4
678 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work living wages 387, 447, 480, 525, 527–8, 530–31 logistics 26, 570–77 López Obrador, M. 518 Lucassen, J. 254 Luxemburg, R. 85, 247, 403, 497–8, 500–501, 512, 538 Maccarrone, V. 22 machine learning 179, 340, 342–4, 346–8 Macri, M. 27–8, 436, 506, 626–7, 632, 634–6, 638 Mafeje, A. 143 Mains, D. 619–20 Make the Road 242–3, 248 Malaysia 39, 88, 185, 537–8 malnutrition 437–8, 616 Malthusianism 56 Manning, B. 97 Marazzi, C. 664 Marikana massacre 500, 605 maritime labour 26, 131–2, 238–9, 559–67 Marticorena, C. 27 Martin, F. 512 Martin, L.L. 318 Martínez, E.Y. 25 Martínez Lucio, M. 23–4, 121, 275, 446–7, 451 Marx, K. 1–8, 94, 156, 172–3, 176–7, 198, 200–201, 204, 341 Capital 4–5, 16, 53–5, 59, 114, 542 on capitalism 11, 37, 57–9, 84, 87, 89, 126–9, 269, 354–5 Communist Manifesto 4, 97, 199 Critique of the Political Economy 114 on exploitation 67, 128 Grundrisse 7, 103 and industrial relations 269 on industrialization 34, 85–6 and labour geography 233–4, 237, 281 and labour history 252–4, 256–8, 262–3 on labour process 113–15, 118–19, 143, 151, 164, 181 on political economy 13, 15–16, 35, 143 on primitive accumulation 83, 85 on reproduction 392, 402 reserve army of labour 15, 53–4, 58, 62, 142, 186–7, 190, 293–4, 459, 588 surplus population 15, 17, 53–5, 58, 62, 142–4, 243, 487–8, 547, 626 on unfree labour 74, 76–8 Marx-Hess-Engels hypothesis 16, 94–7, 101–3 Marxist feminism 64–7, 69–70, 120, 144, 248, 401–2 Massari, M. 20 Massey, D. 183, 193, 232–3, 247 Masslo, J. 307
Mathers, A. 452 Matuschek, I. 19 Mazzocchi, T. 211 Mazzucato, M. 347 Mbeki, T. 606 Mbembé, J.A. 243 MBO Partners 479 McAfee, A. 372–3 McDonald’s 652 McGrath, S. 15 McGrath-Champ, S. 128–30 McMichael, P. 295 Meardi, G. 273 Mechanical Turk 365, 375, 381–2, 478 Medecines Sans Frontieres 308 medical tourism 407 Meillassoux, C. 143 Melese, A.T. 620 Menem, C. 636 MERCOSUR 462 Mesina, L. 652 Metzinger, T. 332 Mexico 25, 99, 150, 164, 282, 285, 296, 462, 464, 498, 513–14, 517–19, 526, 555, 557 Mezzadra, S. 39–40, 294, 297, 312 Mezzadri, A. 15–16, 314, 524, 529, 531, 533–4 Microsoft 332, 346, 348 Mies, M. 403 migrant labour 9–10, 15, 20–1, 23–4, 35–6, 39, 47, 68–9, 79, 143–4, 145n3, 181, 198, 201, 203, 205, 219, 241–2, 246, 282–7, 356, 405–6, 447, 459, 490, 564, 595, 597–8, 616, 620–21 citizenship rights 79–80, 103, 473–5, 481, 485–6, 488–9, 491–3, 593, 652 in elderly care 23, 406, 412–19 guest workers 20, 74, 79–80, 280, 285, 287 North African working-class migrants in France 422–30 periphery-core migrations 292–9, 543 and resistance in Italy 302–9, 573–7 skilled migration 25–6, 546–57 undocumented workers 79, 142, 285, 287, 302, 304–5, 309, 341, 348, 564 unpaid labour 312–19 Milberg, W. 130 Miles, R. 77 Millar, J. 95 Millennium Development Goals 12 minimum wage 54, 74, 190, 246–8, 295, 304, 309, 366, 382, 387, 425, 474–5, 492, 561, 565, 585, 587, 594, 628, 644, 661–3, 667 mining industry 41, 74, 98, 211, 233, 448, 495–9, 513–14, 516–18, 536, 559, 604–5, 609, 649–50, 652
Index 679 Mintz, S. 243 Mironov, B. 97 Mishra, A. 373 Mitter, S. 434 Miyamura, S. 16 Moazed, A. 353 mobilization theory 201–2, 267, 270–71, 449, 451 Modern Slavery Act (Australia) 76 Modern Slavery Act (UK) 76, 134, 134n1, 533 Molinero-Gerbeau, Y. 20 monopoly capital 26, 50, 115, 119, 546–7, 550, 555–6 Moody, K. 372 Moore, J.W. 295–6, 512 Moore, P.V. 21, 374, 376 Moorehouse, B. 103 Morocco 422, 427, 430, 526 Mouffe, C. 453 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra 25, 513–15, 519 Moyer-Lee, J. 356 Moyo, S. 59 Mulat, R. 619–20 Multi-Fibre Arrangement 525–6 Munck, R. 14 mutualism 11, 151, 154, 156, 308, 574 Myanmar 501 Nash, G.B. 98 Nash, J. 243 National Science Foundation 551 National Slum Dwellers Federation 473–4 National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa 607 Nedelkoska, L. 354 Neethi, P. 498 Negri, A. 10, 149 Neilson, B. 294, 297, 312, 314 neo-fascism 14, 50–51 Nepal 22, 213, 394–5 Neri, M. 662 Ness, I. 626 Netherlands 213, 222, 224, 227, 332, 367, 440 New Deal 80, 246 New Trade Union Initiative 479–80 New York Shipping Association 238–9 New Zealand 47, 297 Ngwane, T. 247 Nietzsche, F. 332 Niger 543 Nigeria 180, 185, 187, 189–90, 536–8 Noble, D. 116 North American Free Trade Agreement 462 Norway 216, 222–3, 226, 367 Notes from Below 122
Nowak, J. 24, 270, 274, 498–500 nuclear families 87–8 NursesCan 479 Ocean Alliance 563 O’Connell Davidson, J. 77 oDesk 478 offshore oil and gas 564–5 offshoring 192, 524, 550n4 Ola 478 Oliveira, F. de 39, 664, 666 operaismo 14, 17–18, 172–8 Örestad LS-IWA 368 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 326, 380, 462, 466 Osborne, M.A. 354, 371 Ostrom, E. 156 outsourcing/platform work 179–94, 266 see also gig economy over-production 14, 43, 48–50, 296, 299 Owen, R. 162 Oxfam 448 Oya, C. 620, 622 Pakistan 97, 185, 526, 528, 564 palm oil industry 25, 536–43 Palmisano, T. 25 Pande, A. 395, 397–8 Panitch, L. 4 parental aspirations 424–6 Paret, M. 24 Paris Agreement 211, 464 part-time employment 46, 345 Pascucci, E. 313 Pasquale, F. 353 Pasquinelli, M. 347 Passeron, J.-C. 23, 429 Patent Cooperation Treaty 548, 550–51 Patnaik, P. 14, 140 Patnaik, U. 14 patriarchy 6, 68, 90, 120, 132, 168, 199, 395, 401, 477, 492, 505–6, 508, 517, 530–31 Patricio, M. de J. 518 Pattenden, J. 16 Paulani, L. 663–4 pauperism 54 Peck, J. 181, 190 people analytics 336, 376 Peopleperhour.com 180 periphery-core migrations 292–9, 543 Però, D. 364 Peronism 631–2 Peru 440 petty commodity production 59–60, 62, 88–9, 139, 462, 473, 588
680 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Peuter, G. de 149 Philippines 185, 213, 406, 416, 526, 528, 555, 561, 564 Picchio, A. 2 Pickles, J. 128–30 Pickren, G. 128 piecework 190, 305, 365, 541, 595, 665 Piketty, T. 48 Piñera, S. 642, 652–3 Pingtai 353 Pinochet, A. 28, 37, 646–8, 655 Pissarides, C. 381 planetary labour market 179–94 platform economy see gig economy Poland 101, 215, 225, 227, 305, 407–8, 500, 503, 526, 564 Polanyi, K. 6, 396 Pons-Vignon, N. 606 population 56–7 aging 23, 377, 403, 412–19 growth 57 Portes, A. 472, 587–8, 592 Portugal 102, 223–4, 227, 496 post-capitalism 8, 377 post-Fordism 173, 303 Postmates 479 post-operaismo 173, 177 poverty 12, 198, 200, 214, 375, 435, 437, 439, 509, 542, 598, 603, 606, 644, 662–3, 668 power relations 20, 22–5, 44, 79–80, 83, 118, 122, 181, 189, 205, 266–7, 269, 271, 273–5, 281, 283–4, 330, 332, 347, 351, 354, 367, 373, 401, 404, 406, 458, 488–9, 491, 519, 523, 527, 530, 532, 626 precarity 27–8, 38–40, 113, 116–17, 201, 203, 243, 247, 260, 273–4, 340, 351–2, 368, 381, 398, 458, 462, 465, 507, 559, 593, 597, 603–10, 626–7, 643, 654, 663 precarious resistance 24, 360–69, 485–93 privacy 21, 323, 325–7, 331, 333–7, 397, 403, 414 privatization 46, 405, 559, 606 profitability 1, 86, 128, 214, 233, 340, 345–6, 372, 385, 387, 519, 543, 619 proletarianization 15–16, 38, 53, 58–9, 84, 86–7, 89, 120, 206 proletariat 15–16, 94–105, 198, 205, 246, 252–6, 293, 489, 542, 650 Marx-Hess-Engels hypothesis 94–7 prostitution see sex work protectionism 49, 646 Przeworski, A. 102–3 Public Services International 213–14 purchasing power 348, 627–8, 632, 636, 662 Purtova, N. 328
Qatar 74 quality of life 374, 563, 630–31, 663 Quintini, G. 354 Rabinowitch, A. 97 race 4–5, 12, 19, 21, 25, 39, 41, 65, 69, 77, 79–80, 88, 96, 128, 131–2, 143, 151, 176, 181, 205, 241, 244–7, 267, 307, 309, 315, 398, 403, 406, 409, 434, 449, 473, 485, 488, 491, 493, 505, 523, 536–43, 573, 576, 606–8, 663 Rahmato, D. 615 Rainnie, A. 128 Ramaphosa, C. 606–7 Rana Plaza collapse 532 Randstad Research 573 Ranis, P. 154 Razavi, S. 402 Reagan, R. 37 Real Estate Investment Trusts 605 real wages 48, 261, 616, 622, 627–9, 636, 638, 644 Recognition Act 416–17 Rediker, M. 96, 258 Rees, G. 497 regulatory arbitrage 380–87 Reinecke, J. 448 religion 36, 61, 104, 143, 162, 223, 261, 473, 514, 523, 529–30 remote work 195n9, 241, 318, 345, 361, 371, 638 renewable energy 209, 213–14, 222–3, 225 research and development 548 reserve army of labour 15, 53–4, 58, 62, 142, 186–7, 190, 293–4, 459, 588 revolutions 94–105 Rey, P.P. 143 Riders X Derechos 368 Rifkin, J. 10 risky data subjects 330–32 Rivers-Moore, M. 23 Roberts, M. 345 Robinson, C. 244–5, 247 robotics 38, 326, 372–3, 377, 407, 573 see also artificial intelligence Rockefeller Foundation 296 Rodney, W. 247, 263, 539 Roggero, G. 17–18 Romania 280, 305, 526, 564 Roosevelt, F.D. 387 Rosaldo, M. 472 Roseberry, W. 243 Rosenblat, A. 386 Rostow, W.W. 12, 138 Rousseff, D. 28, 661, 664, 668 Routh, S. 480
Index 681 Rowbotham, S. 434 Royal Niger Company 537 RoyChowdhury, S. 26 Rudrappa, S. 397 Ruiters, G. 606 Ruokonen-Engler, M.K. 23 rural-urban circuits of labour 17, 137–45 Russia 99–102, 395, 495, 497, 500, 555, 561 Sadler, D. 237 Sahin-Dikmen, M. 18 Saint Domingue 96–7 Salvini Decree 304–5 Santos, B. 461 Saudi Arabia 619 Saxenian, A. 549 Sayad, A. 293 Schaefer, F. 620, 622 Schulten, J. 564 Schultz, S. 398 Schumpeter, J. 372, 387 Screpanti, E. 496 Scully, B. 603 Sculos, B.W. 375 seaports 563 Seccombe, W. 56 Segatti, A. 606 Sehnbruch, K. 644 Self-Employed Women’s Association 476–7, 481, 492, 564, 585 self-employment 26, 61, 142, 210, 255–6, 260, 298, 354–5, 363, 366, 396, 472, 588, 595, 666 self-management 11, 14, 17, 153–4, 161–9, 331, 504, 667 Selwyn, B. 16 Senegal 132 serf labour 83–5, 90n2, 97, 256–9 sex tourism 434, 438–9 sex work 23, 64, 66, 244, 257, 263, 305, 393, 433–40, 616 sharecropping 83, 85, 95, 246, 257 Sharif, N. 373–4 Shibata, S. 22 shipbuilding 564–5 Siegel, A. 495 Silicon Valley 353, 384, 546, 548–52 Silver, B. 10, 24, 37, 200, 281, 487, 496–8, 654 Simms, M. 201 Singapore 39, 561, 592 Sinwell, L. 608 Sisson, K. 268–9 skilled migration 25–6, 546–57
slavery 3, 6, 15, 35, 47, 66, 74–7, 79–80, 84–5, 95–7, 114, 199, 244, 246, 252–3, 255–6, 258–9, 263, 297, 305, 307, 403, 415, 434, 524, 562–3, 576, 596, 665 see also unfree labour Slovakia 526 slums 141, 473–4 SMart 479 Smith, A. 21, 128–30, 340 Smith, C. 119 Smith, J. 88–9, 615 Smith, N. 247, 433–4 social and solidarity economy 11, 17, 161–9 social justice 198, 212–13, 217–18, 224, 226, 262, 333, 462, 467 social media 38, 180, 187, 242, 331–2, 353, 365, 407, 577, 635 social movements 9–11, 23, 39, 41, 241, 246, 267, 361, 363, 633–4 social reproduction 1, 5–6, 14–15, 17, 20, 23–4, 27, 56, 64–71, 78–9, 134, 137, 139, 144, 201, 313, 347, 401–7, 422–30, 503–11, 530–32, 591, 595, 597, 606 see also unpaid domestic/care work channels of value 67–8 Early Social Reproduction Analysis 15, 64–5, 67–8, 70–71 theories of 64–6 social security 17, 131, 133, 242, 307, 334, 382, 386, 401, 408, 437–8, 474, 476, 479, 481, 493, 507, 531, 541, 564, 582, 584–5, 587, 594, 597, 661 sociology of work 8–9 Soja, E. 233 Sorenson, A. 181 SOS Children’s Villages 414 Sosa, J. 436 Soul, J. 24 South Africa 24, 27, 35, 47, 143, 180, 185, 189, 213–14, 247, 257, 282, 285, 463, 477, 485, 491–3, 496–7, 499, 603–10 South African Federation of Trade Unions 607–8 South Initiative on Globalization and Union Rights 463 South Korea 272, 417, 463, 488–9, 496–7, 525–6, 555, 564, 592 Southall, H. 235 Spain 102, 223–4, 226–7, 296–8, 304, 368, 447, 451, 496 spatial dimensions of strikes 495–501 Special Economic Zones 141, 458 Spencer, D.A. 119 Sri Lanka 526, 528 Srnicek, N. 352–3 Standing, G. 39, 180, 489–90, 626
682 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work Starbucks 652 Steinberg, M. 353 STEM 546, 548, 551, 554 Stephenson, C. 448 Stewart, P. 121, 452 Stiglitz, J. 48 Stone, L. 97 Storper, M. 235–6 Strange, S. 13 Strauss, K. 78, 190 strikes 24, 69–70, 202, 245, 247–8, 254, 259, 273, 357, 364, 368, 488, 495–501, 503–11, 572–3, 577, 605, 622, 633–5, 645, 647–8, 650–54 Stuart, M. 366 subcontracting 27, 78, 564, 596, 649–52 subjective resources 422–30 subsistence labour 16, 84, 87–8, 95, 603, 620 Sudan 501 suicide 43, 46, 596–7 Summers, L. 386 Supiot, A. 385 supply chain capitalism 12–13, 78, 570 supply chains 12–13, 16, 75–6, 78, 117, 126, 133–4, 216, 222, 245–6, 275, 303, 307–8, 313, 342, 448, 460, 463–4, 466, 487, 498, 523–4, 527, 529, 533, 560, 566–7, 570–71, 573, 581, 586–8, 598 surplus population 15, 17, 53–5, 58, 62, 142–4, 243, 487–8, 547, 626 surplus value 16, 20, 58, 76, 84, 114–15, 117, 119, 127, 129, 133, 143, 151–3, 205, 234, 292, 295, 297, 299, 304, 345, 347–8, 354–5, 381, 439, 538–9, 542–3, 547, 550, 570, 626 surrogacy 22, 392–8, 407 Sustainable Development Goals 12, 162, 212, 214, 219, 221, 228, 464 sustainable work 19, 219–28 sweatshops 40, 66, 285, 533–4 Sweden 271, 367–8, 412, 497 Swider, S. 596 Taiwan 555, 592 Tapia, M. 201 TaskRabbit 382–3 Tassinari, A. 22 Tattersall, A. 448 taxation 48, 96, 287, 295, 386, 393, 516, 647 Taylor, F.W. 7–8, 118 Taylorism 7, 21, 172, 174, 177, 178n2, 340, 346, 348, 374, 405–6 Tazzioli, M. 21 technology 7–8, 21–2, 34, 38, 46, 113, 228, 407, 547, 554–5, 559
artificial intelligence 21, 198, 323–6, 334–5, 340–49, 371–3, 407 artificial reproduction technologies 392–8 automation 1, 21–2, 324, 331, 340, 345–8, 354, 371–5, 377, 407–8, 465, 563 data extraction/mining 21, 312–19, 375 digitalization 1, 13, 18, 21–2, 198, 377, 407–8, 563, 573 see also gig economy machine learning 179, 340, 342–4, 346–8 robotics 38, 326, 372–3, 377, 407, 573 see also artificial intelligence Temer, M. 661, 665 Tencent 596 Thailand 434 Thatcher, M. 37, 237 THE Alliance 563 Thelen, K.A. 273 Thompson, E.P. 34–5, 200, 233, 244, 258 Thompson, P. 113, 117–18 Tickler, D. 562 Tilly, C. 102, 449, 472–3, 480 Tomassetti, J. 382 Toomey, P. 242 tourism 23, 427, 438–9 medical 407 sex 434, 438–9 Trade Union Confederation of the Americas 214, 460, 462 trade unions 3, 9–11, 18, 20, 23–4, 28, 74, 102–3, 113, 115, 122, 201–6, 245–8, 254, 267, 269–71, 273–5, 281, 303, 333, 357, 362–3, 487–8 see also individual unions in Argentina 627, 631–6, 638–9 in Brazil 665 in Chile 642–3, 645, 647–52, 654 collective action/bargaining see bargaining power; collective action; collective bargaining in domestic/care industry 408, 415 and environmental issues 209–18, 223 in Ethiopia 621–2 feminist unionism 509–11 in garment industry 529–30, 586–7 in gig economy 367–9, 383 global unions and labour movement 458–67 and global working class 37–41 in informal employment 474–5, 581–2, 584–7, 592, 594, 604 in logistics industry 572–5, 577 in maritime industry 238, 559–60, 562–7 and sex work 440 and social movements 445–54 in South Africa 603–5, 607–10
Index 683 strikes 24, 69–70, 202, 245, 247–8, 254, 259, 273, 357, 364, 368, 488, 495–501, 503–11, 572–3, 577, 605, 622, 633–5, 645, 647–8, 650–54 weakening of 47, 187, 246, 260–62, 266, 485 Trade Unions for Energy Democracy 213–14 trafficking 15, 75, 77, 79–80, 415 transition dip 102–4 transnational labour movement 24, 458–67 Transparency in Supply Chains Act (California) 76 Tronti, M. 34, 40, 176 Tronto, J. 408 Trotsky, L. 99 Trump, D. 245–6, 556 Truong, T.D. 434 Trzaskowski, J. 328 Tsing, A. 121 Tunisia 422, 526 Turkey 149, 477, 526, 564, 619 Twitter 577 Uber 69, 341, 351, 353, 355–6, 382–4, 387, 478–9, 486, 595, 667 Uganda 180, 185–6, 189–90 Ukraine 22, 185, 394–5, 407, 561 underemployment 12, 45, 435, 627, 629, 631 undocumented workers 79, 142, 285, 287, 302, 304–5, 309, 341, 348, 564 unemployment 21, 27, 46, 49–50, 186–7, 226, 273, 294, 340, 345, 348, 372, 380, 435, 462, 486–7, 493, 504, 506, 510, 603, 609, 626–9, 631, 634, 653, 665, 667–8 unfree labour 9, 14–15, 69, 74–81, 85, 257–8, 302, 523, 527, 531 see also slavery UNI Global Union 460, 464 Unilever 537 Unión de Asambleas de Comunidades 25, 513, 516–17, 519 Unite 275, 566 United Automobile Workers 246 United Kingdom 25, 34, 54, 74, 86, 94–5, 97, 122, 126, 162, 166, 185, 200, 203, 213, 222–4, 227, 233, 237, 244, 258, 267, 271–2, 275, 356, 366, 368, 393, 409, 440, 448, 495, 497–8, 501, 533, 566 United Nations 75, 138, 211–12, 219–20, 304–5, 415, 564 FAO 296, 562 Maritime Labour Convention 567 Millennium Development Goals 12 Sustainable Development Goals 12, 162, 212, 214, 219, 221, 228, 464
UNCTAD 128, 560 UNDP 221, 226, 228, 478, 644 UNEP 212 UNFCCC 211, 217 UN-Habitat 141 UNHCR 315, 318 United States 19, 25, 34, 37, 47–9, 74, 80, 83, 98–9, 126, 139, 163, 181, 185, 190, 211, 213, 217, 238, 241–9, 267, 272, 285, 295–8, 313, 345, 347, 381, 393–4, 398, 405, 408, 438, 448, 458, 464, 486, 488–9, 496, 498, 524–6, 538–9, 550–56, 560, 563–5 United States, Mexico, Canada Free Trade Agreement 462 universal basic income 609 Universal Child Allowance 507 Unni, J. 24 unpaid domestic/care work 3, 5, 15, 64–7, 69–70, 144, 201, 228, 302, 313–14, 348, 401–9, 414, 508, 653 see also social reproduction unpaid migrant labour 312–19 Upwork 180, 184–5, 188, 190 urbanization 58, 571, 583, 596, 598, 660 Urrutia, M. 28 Uruguay 152, 154–6, 477 use value 2–3, 44, 51n1, 84, 151–2, 542 Vallet, L.-A. 422 value 2–3, 66–9, 71, 117, 119, 121, 151, 199–201, 205, 220, 229n1, 234, 269, 315, 401–2 exchange value 2–3, 51n1, 84, 151, 179, 402, 539 extraction under AI 340–49 GVCs see global value chains surplus value 16, 20, 58, 76, 84, 114–15, 117, 119, 127, 129, 133, 143, 151–3, 205, 234, 292, 295, 297, 299, 304, 345, 347–8, 354–5, 381, 439, 538–9, 542–3, 547, 550, 570, 626 use value 2–3, 44, 51n1, 84, 151–2, 542 van der Linden, M. 16, 253–4 Varieties of Capitalism 272 Vavi, Z. 607 Veale, M. 334 Venezuela 152, 154–6, 557 Viber 315, 317 Vieta, M. 17, 149 Vietnam 140–41, 185, 525–6, 528, 564 Visser, J. 452 Vogel, L. 65 Vora, K. 396–8
684 Handbook of research on the global political economy of work wage labour 4, 9, 12, 16, 26–7, 35, 57–8, 60, 62, 65, 76, 83, 85, 88–9, 95, 97, 115, 117, 139, 151, 199, 206, 210, 244, 253–5, 258, 260–61, 283, 298, 314, 402, 435, 503, 539, 581–3, 588, 610, 616, 621–2 Wainwright, H. 10, 149 Waldby, C. 398 Walder, A. 101 Walker, R. 235–6 Wallerstein, I. 85, 88–9, 151, 292, 295 Walmart 487, 619, 652 Walsh, S.N. 375 War on Want 448 Warhen, J. 25 waste picker organizations 477 Waterman, P. 450 Weber, M. 4, 176 Webster, C. 373 welfare boards 474–5 Werlhof, C. von 89, 403 Werner, M. 128–30 WhatsApp 315, 317, 356 Wichterich, C. 22, 395 Wilkinson, F. 385–6 Wilson, T.D. 626 Wolf, E. 243 Wolff, F.-C. 423 Wolpe, H. 143 Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing 476, 480 Woodcock, J. 21, 355–6 worker-recuperated enterprises 149–50, 152–7 Workers Observatory 122 working class, making of 35–6 working conditions 18, 22, 95, 113, 165, 226, 458, 464, 559–61 in Argentina 626–7 in China 95, 596 in domestic/care industry 413, 417–18 in Ethiopia 616–17, 620 in garment industry 67, 527, 531, 533
in gig economy 190, 351, 365, 479 in informal employment 69, 581–2 in Japan 499–500 in maritime industry 26, 563–4 of migrant labourers 23, 305, 307, 510, 573–6 in Portugal 224 precarious 28, 200, 204, 336, 341, 439, 493, 563 see also precarity racialized 132 in sex industry 438–9 in South Africa 499 and unfree labour 74, 78–9, 81 working hours 34, 561, 565, 586, 594, 663 World Bank 12, 162, 180, 435, 437, 473, 476, 644 World Confederation of Labor 460 World Economic Forum 371, 463, 479 World Federation of Trade Unions 460 World Health Organization 416 World Intellectual Property Organization 548, 550–52, 554 World Social Forum 163 World Trade Organization 12, 45, 458, 473, 525, 550–51, 554, 593 world-systems perspective 15–16, 83–90, 254, 293–4, 538, 540 Wray, D. 448 Yeros, P. 17 Zapatistas 150, 163–4, 458, 517–18, 557 Zéhraoui, A. 422 Zéroulou, Z. 422 Zuboff, S. 374, 376 Zuckerberg, M. 343 Zuiderveen Borgesius, F. 334 Zuma, J. 606