Globalisation Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective on Control,Conflict and Response among Workers in Kerala

Abstract: Supported by the labour geography framework, I analyse how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism, by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organisation and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organised at global or extra‐local scales. Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalisation, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the very process of globalisation and the expansion of capital, empirically demonstrating the relevance of this in the globalisation literature. I deal with one region—Kerala—and processes in its labour markets, taking the case of apparel workers in an export‐promoting industrial park.     

Labour in Global Value Chains: Work Conditions in Football Manufacturing in China,India and Pakistan

A critical challenge facing developing country producers is to meet international labour standards and codes of conduct in order to engage in global value chains. Evidence of gains for workers from compliance with such standards and codes remains limited and patchy. This article focuses on the global football industry, a sector dominated by leading global brands that manage dispersed global value chains. It assesses the working conditions for football stitchers engaged in different forms of work organization, factories, stitching centres and home‐based settings in Pakistan, India and China. It draws on detailed qualitative primary field research with football‐stitching workers and producers in these three countries. The article explains how and why work conditions of football stitchers differ across these locations through an analytical framework that interweaves both global and local production contexts that influence work conditions. In doing so, it argues that current debates on the role of labour in global value chains have to go beyond a narrow focus on labour standards and corporate social responsibility compliance and engage with economic, technological and social upgrading as factors that could generate sustained improvements in real wages and workers’ conditions.     

How do Migrant Workers Respond to Labour Abuses in “Local Sweatshops”?

This article aims to provide empirical evidence on understanding how migrant workers’ responses to labour exploitation in low‐wage economies are articulated. Inspired by the low levels of conflict among workers in small urban sweatshops in Italy and Argentina, we ask ourselves what contextual and subjective factors prevent workers from organising collectively. Here we argue that in order to understand the nature of their responses, it is necessary to consider not only the organisation of the labour process, but also the class divisions within migrant communities. We also bring in briefly the role of the state in (mis)regulating migrant labour exploitation. We conclude by showing that workers’ responses are highly individualised and that community leaders with economic interests in sweatshop economies may play a role in securing their continuation by channelling the workers’ responses towards the defence of the “ethnic economy”.     

Embodied negotiations: identity,space and livelihood after trade zones in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse shaped by inter-related gender and racial ideologies of labor as well as the uneven transnationalization of rural and urban localities. I show how the negotiation of social position by subjects marked by race, gender and class is always also a negotiation of spatial position in and between localities structured through raced, gendered and class relations. Men's efforts to remain in urban areas as a form of social ‘whitening’ are compared to women's resistance to rural return as an attempt to stay in circulation as paid labor. Overall, I argue that feminist research on global production should be ‘spatialized’ by attending to livelihoods and practices of subject-making that emerge in parallel to export restructuring.     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

‘Life is War’: Informal Transport Workers and Neoliberalism in Tanzania 1998–2009

This article analyses how informal labourers fare under flexible labour markets and economic liberalization, through a case study of transport workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It highlights the mainstream conceptualization of urban informality as self‐employment and its influence on policy. The article stresses the importance of class differentiation in the Dar es Salaam transport sector and the predominance of informal wage employment, the uneven degree of power commanded by bus owners vis‐à‐vis informal unskilled wage workers and the pernicious consequences of the lack of regulation of the employment relationship on the workforce itself and on society. It then interrogates the criminalization of the workforce and shows how labour over‐supply, its fragmentation and geographical dispersion explain workers’ lack of response to their plight. The longitudinal study of the rise and fall (1998–2005) of a labour association within the sector further highlights the tensions among the workforce and the forms and limits of their solidarity. The conclusion of this study suggests some policy implications.     

Constrained Labour Agency and the Changing Regulatory Regime in China

Using the concept of ‘constrained agency’ introduced by Neil Coe and David Jordhus‐Lier, this article attempts to evaluate the possibilities and constraints facing labour agency in the Pearl River Delta in China. By reviewing the social, economic and political background of the changing labour market and labour regulations in China, and through an intensive case study of a workers’ strike and its consequences, the author argues that Chinese migrant workers have begun to challenge the state's regulatory regime on labour, which is based on individual rights. However, the introduction of a regulatory framework based on collective rights is being impeded by the party‐state's manipulation of trade unions and the strong influence of global capital on local labour policy.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

The Moral Politics of Gendered Labour in Artisanal Mining in Sierra Leone

Drawing on current anthropological approaches to labour, this article examines some of the moral politics mobilized around women and artisanal mining in policy-inflected scholarship with reference to particular gold mining zones in Tonkolili district, Sierra Leone. In so doing, the article proposes that such a focus on labour not only allows one to appreciate how sentiments concerning (im)proper behaviour infuse wider policy proposals to amend social arrangements in regard to what is called ‘artisanal mining’, but it also offers insight into some of the enduring moral politics helping to constitute women as ‘family workers’ in the actual artisanal gold mining zones. The article suggests that examining the overlapping moral politics constituting women's labour practices provides a more supple understanding of the contested economic possibilities for women in this livelihood practice.     

Locating Neoliberalism in Dubai: Migrant Workers and Class Struggle in the Autocratic City

Abstract: In recent years, portrayals of neoliberalism in Dubai have often hinged on narratives about the hyper‐exploitation of migrant workers in the city. In this paper I interrogate these narratives by exploring the governance of lower‐waged construction migrants and their recent role in market‐led processes of urbanization. Through a focus on the recent growth of private worker welfare initiatives and dozens of illegal labour strikes led by migrant builders, I draw attention to the fraught and contradictory character of autocratic neoliberalism that operates in the governance of these workers, and point to workers’ bodily capital and the construction labour camp as two emergent sites in which these labour politics are unfolding. I argue that these social reproductive realms of the body and the mass‐worker household have offered a temporary spatial fix to the limitations of autocratic rule in a neoliberalizing city, while also conjuring moments of political possibility for construction migrants.     

“We Make it Work”: The Cultural Transformation of Hotel Workers in the City

This article explores the “cultural project” of a hotel workers’ union in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is an examination of the efforts of HERE (now UNITE‐HERE) Local 75 to transform the identity and image of hotel workers through the promotion of cultural activities involving rank‐and‐file members. Part of a larger union renewal project, the cultural project attempts to build solidarity by connecting with members’ lives beyond the workplace. Furthermore, the union's cultural strategies are linked to the development of the city's tourism sector, situating the union's efforts in broader processes of place promotion. The investigation seeks to identify how worker engagement with the cultural implicates organized labour in contradictory processes producing both emancipatory and oppressive economic landscapes.     

‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

This article deploys the concept of ‘classes of labour’ to map and compare non‐factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of ‘adverse incorporation’ of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re‐appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.     

The Emergence of a Working Poor: Labour Markets,Neoliberalisation and Diverse Economies in Post‐Socialist Cities

Abstract: This paper examines the transformations of urban labour markets in two central European cities: Bratislava, Slovakia and Kraków, Poland. It highlights the emergence of in‐work poverty and labour market segmentation, which together are leading to a reconfiguration of the livelihoods and economic practices of urban households. The focus of the paper is on the growing phenomenon of insecure, poor‐quality, contingent labour. It examines the ways in which those who find themselves in, or on the margins of, contingent and insecure labour markets sustain their livelihoods. We ask how such workers and their households negotiate the segmentation of the labour market, the erosion of employment security and the emergence of in‐work poverty and explore the diverse economic practices of those who cannot rely solely on formal employment to ensure social reproduction. Further, we assess the articulations between labour market participation and exclusion, and other spheres of economic life, including informal and illegal labour, household social networks, state benefits and the use of material assets. We argue that post‐socialist cities are seeing a reconfiguration of class processes, as the materialities and subjectivities of class are remade and as the meaning of work and the livelihoods different forms of labour can sustain are changing.     

CULTURAL ECONOMY AND THE CREATIVE FIELD OF THE CITY

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity, and an attempt is made to show how this can be understood in terms of a series of localized field effects. The creative field of the city is broken down (relative to the cultural economy) into four major components, namely, (a) intra‐urban webs of specialized and complementary producers, (b) the local labour market and the social networks that bind workers together in urban space, (c) the wider urban environment, including various sites of memory, leisure, and social reproduction, and (d) institutions of governance and collective action. I also briefly describe some of the path‐dependent dynamics of the creative field. The article ends with a reference to some issues of geographic scale. Here, I argue that the urban is but one (albeit important) spatial articulation of an overall creative field whose extent is ultimately nothing less than global.     

Graduated sovereignty and global governance gaps: Special economic zones and the illicit trade in tobacco products

Illicit trade in tobacco products has been a significant problem globally for many years. It allows cigarettes to be sold far below their legal price and thus contributes to higher consumption, morbidity and mortality, and deprives state treasuries of a substantial amount of revenue. This article identifies special economic zones (SEZs), particularly free trade zones, as a key conduit for this illicit trade. The development of SEZs as weak points in the global governance architecture is explained with reference to the concept of ‘graduated sovereignty’, whereby the uniform management of territory by modern states has given way to a more spatially selective form of territorial governance, in which some slices of territory are more fully integrated into the world economy than others via various forms of differential regulation. Attempts to comprehensively (re)regulate SEZs, in the face of growing evidence of the dysfunctionalities that they can engender, have so far been unsuccessful. It is concluded that the neo-liberal global economy has facilitated a regulatory ‘race to the bottom’, a problem that can only ultimately be overcome by international negotiation and agreement.     

Many Chains to Break: The Multi‐dimensional Concept of Slave Labour in Brazil

This article examines the concept of slave labour through two case studies from Brazil. One involves internal migrant workers and the other cross‐border migrant workers. There have been accusations of slave labour in both cases. I argue that slave labour is a multi‐dimensional concept and that cognate notions (eg forced and unfree labour) could also be reconceived as multi‐dimensional. Recent works have proposed that a continuum viewing labour relations as more or less free should replace dichotomies such as free vs unfree. I argue for taking this further to recognise, first, that workers may be more or less free in different ways, and second, that the resulting conditions of employment can be characterised as more or less degrading, also in different ways. This multi‐dimensional approach allows for a better understanding of the heterogeneity of apparently unfree labour relations and for greater recognition of the agency of workers labelled as slaves.     

The periphery revisited: Polish post-war historiography on the working class and the new global labour history

This paper explores the characteristics of post-war Polish historiography on the working class and relates it to current trends in global labour history. Although, in Poland, labour history never existed as a separate field, many historians focused their studies on either working-class history or the history of the workers’ movement. After 1945, Polish historiography was circumscribed by political and ideological considerations; however – except during the brief Stalinist period (1951–56) – Marxist methodology was not imposed or applied uncritically. In fact, discussions about the role of the working class in history that began after 1956 generated research interest in new groups of workers and labour relations. Much of this research concerns recently highlighted aspects of labour history, such as marginal groups of workers or free versus unfree labour. Polish historians’ reinterpretation of Marxist orthodoxy proceeded from their empirical studies of nineteenth-century Polish lands – at the periphery of Western capitalist development – as well as from their theoretical influences. This article argues that some aspects of the Polish historiography on the working class qualify it as part of labour history’s heritage, despite the historiography’s significant limitations.     

Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia

Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which labourers became debt‐bonded, thus situating them within the country’s broader agrarian transition and recasting peasants as rural labour. It then explores workers’ perceptions of rural life, suggesting that the unfreedom of kiln work, contrasted with the fixedness and potential for mobility in rural life, makes workers aspire to return to their land. The article ultimately highlights how the persistence of smallholder farmers can be understood as an issue of poor work under neoliberalism in Cambodia, and draws light on the agency of labour in understanding this.     

(Re)constructing borders through the governance of tourism and trade in Ladakh,India

This paper analyses how everyday life, the state and nationhood are regulated and organised in a conflict-affected borderland space through economic activities. It focuses on two elements that are often overlooked when scholars discuss spatial governmentality: tourism and trade. Both are commonly declared to be elements of peace, peacebuilding and cosmopolitism. However, the spatial governance of tourism and trade can also profoundly shape how national belonging and the limits of territory are perceived and experienced by borderland populations and visitors. These dynamics can be acute in conflict-affected border zones, where state sovereignty may be under existential or territorial threat. This paper exposes such dynamics in the Indian conflict borderland area of Ladakh, a part of Jammu and Kashmir State until October 2019. Building on scholarship that has analysed cultural and social dynamics of “bordering” in the region, this paper argues that it is possible to read (socio-)economic boundary-making in Ladakh through the state's influence in the organisation and experience of trade and tourism for Ladakhis and visitors. The paper highlights how their spatial organisation, in part, underwrites difference and separation, and aids in framing the contested territory as ‘Indian’.