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”.     

Gender performances as spatial acts: (fe)male Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark

The objective of this article is to investigate how Thai migrant sex workers in Denmark understand normative heterosexuality and femininity/masculinity as they are reproduced in the Danish sex industry. To do so I analyse the ways that gender plays a part in sex work and the ways in which sex work plays a significant role in how Thai migrant sex workers understand their gendered subject positions in the spaces away from their sex work. Whether Thai migrant sex workers become intelligible gendered subjects depends on different spaces. Based on two case stories I focus on the space of domesticity, the space of sexual consumption and the quasi-public space of leisure.     

Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

Our article explores how migrant food delivery couriers work around platform algorithmic control to argue that gaming the system is a form of everyday resistance. Drawing on data collected in Turin, Italy, between August 2020 and June 2021, we examine how, on the one hand, through gamification, food delivery platforms construct the couriers as entrepreneurial and productive subjects; on the other hand, we show that the disarticulation and repurposing of these management mechanisms both address survival needs and signal a still fledgling, but potentially vibrant, space of labour activism. By conceptualising gamification as another weapon in capital's arsenal to control labour, we acknowledge the entanglement of workers’ agency and subjectivity. We thus bring a two-fold contribution to radical geography: we link gamification to the “production of subjectivity”, drawing on the Italian Operaista intellectual tradition; and we posit the subversive and generative potential of migrant couriers’ everyday geographies.     

Rock Stars and Bad Apples: Moral Economies of Alternative Food Networks and Precarious Farm Work Regimes

Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find that alternative food actors often normalize a precarious work regime using a moral economy frame. This framing describes precarious farm employment as either a necessary challenge in the transition to sustainability, or merely involving a few individual “bad apple” farmers. Further, this framing involves an aversion to “one‐size‐fits‐all” regulation by the state in favor of consumer‐driven regulation of labor standards. Our analysis suggests that a moral economy framing can obscure systemic inequities in precarious farm employment and dampen the impetus for structural change through collective food movement organizing.     

Migrant workers,self‐reliance,and the propensity to hold income protection insurance by country of residence

Utilising a large comparative survey across 11 countries, it is shown that country effects condition the individual uptake of income protection insurance and that shared attributes, including labour market status, are important factors in determining the take‐up of income protection insurance, whatever the respondents' country of residence. We observed differences in the respondents' coping strategies, including self‐reliance, and were able to distinguish between migrant workers and those who work in their country of origin, along with the “special” case of the Australian respondents. These findings have implications for the ongoing debate on the labour market effects of globalisation and the significance of national institutions and regulatory practices.     

The Bureaucratic Capture of Child Migrants: Effects of In/visibility on Children On the Move

This article investigates the “bureaucratic capture” of migrant children through three technologies of the state: labelling, data production and social services, illuminating the ways visibility and invisibility are constructed and managed in the context of restrictionist immigration regimes. Using the case of unaccompanied asylum‐seeking children, Roma children and undocumented children, we examine how in/visibility is produced; for what purposes, and with what consequences. We demonstrate through the simultaneous broadcasting and disappearance of migrant children, bordering is reconstituted through various performances, rationalities and technologies of immigration governance. The article argues the notion of “best interests” is drawn on when the state can define these interests in accordance with their political aims and resources. The set of cases taken together provide novel insights into how states reconcile conflicting logics and reveals how the implementation of the child rights regime prevents some children from actualising their rights.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Experimentalist Governance with Interactive Central–Local Relations: Making New Pension Policies in China

Although regional policy experimentation has become a global trend, the distinct features of experimentalist governance in a given country, such as China, remains to be investigated. This article extends policy process theory by proposing the framework of experimentalist governance with interactive central–local relations or Chinese‐style experimentalist governance, which combines three features. First, policy goals and instruments are formed separately and interactively by the central and local governments. Second, the central government is burdened with its own concerns about policy performance for maintaining authority and legitimacy. Third, the evaluation of policy pilots relies primarily on the responses of local governments. We further conceptualize three new patterns of experimentalist governance in China, namely, “comparative trial,” “selective recognition,” and “adaptive reconciliation,” in addition to “hierarchical experimentation.” These patterns are illustrated with case studies on four pension policies in China, which are for public sector employees, urban employees, rural residents, and migrant workers.     

The Humanitarian War Against Migrant Smugglers at Sea

This paper engages with the military‐humanitarian technology of migration management from the vantage point of the European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) “Operation Sophia”, the naval and air force intervention deployed by the EU in the Central Southern Mediterranean to disrupt “the business model of human smuggling and trafficking” while “protecting life at sea”. We look at the military‐humanitarian mode of migration management that this operation performs from three vantage points: logistics, with a focus on the infrastructure of migrant travels; subjectivity, looking at the migrant profiles this operation works through; and epistemology, building on the mission's first stage of intelligence and data gathering. Through this multi‐focal approach, we illuminate the productivity of this military‐humanitarian approach to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.     

THE FORMATION OF “TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES”

This article will explore the multicultural challenges resulting from increasing numbers of migrant workers and foreign (non‐Chinese) brides in Taiwan, and discuss how such outside cultural influences create new forms of cultural expression, identity and citizenship. It will further describe experiences and present theories specific to Taiwan’s experience. Research on “transnational communities” is fairly advanced in Taiwan. “Transnational communities” in Taiwan are expected to “assimilate” quickly into mainstream Taiwanese society, and personal cultural needs and influences are largely ignored. These communities continue to remain isolated from mainstream Taiwanese society, thus making them “invisible” to society as a whole. Therefore, this research hopes to encourage research into “transnational communities” within the field of cultural policy studies and provide a basic picture of the cultural influence and development of these communities in Taiwan.     

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control,Self‐valorisation,and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker “resistance” in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self‐governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of “self‐valorisation”, we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management’s control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments.     

Working the Waste Commodity Frontier: Metabolic Value and Informal Waste Work

Ambitions for a European “circular economy” imply waste is becoming an important “commodity frontier”. Increased recycling in Europe has been accompanied by a proliferation of informal waste work. “Southern” geographies of informal recyclers provide resources for interpreting this phenomenon but studies of a commodity frontier in urban waste have tended to focus on moments when informal waste workers are displaced by capital intensive waste management systems. I draw on concepts in world-ecology and materialist ecofeminism to explore the proliferation of informal waste workers in Barcelona and the way their (re)production produces “Metabolic Value”. Informal waste work is shown to emerge and persist as part of a commodity frontier process—where the appropriation of unpaid work from non-commodified spaces is the hallmark of how capitalism secures “Cheap Nature”. The study suggests that, rather than internalising ecological costs, recycling often rests on the appropriation of value from uncommodified spaces.     

Exploring creative class mobility: Hong Kong creative workers in Shanghai and Beijing

In 2008 a controversial essay was published in Hong Kong drawing attention to the increasing number of local creative workers who have allegedly responded to the limitations the city had to wrestle with and the opportunities brought forward by the “Rise of China” – they moved northwards. Taking cues from the mainland China–Hong Kong dynamics, this inquiry zooms in on 12 Hong Kong creative workers who have relocated to Shanghai and Beijing during the last 20 years. It supplements existing scholarship on creative class mobility, which is largely configured by concerns with work situations and place attractiveness and is situated in cities in Europe, the United States, and Australia. It does so in two ways. On the one hand, the empirical evidence delivered by this inquiry aligns with studies pointing to the limitation of Florida’s creative class thesis and wonders if “cool places” are indeed attracting talents. On the other hand, it is inadequate to posit that creative workers move only because of place or only because of work. It builds on the complexities of their subjective accounts to propose to include four dimensions – the geopolitical, the intersectional, the contingent, and the circuitous – to future explorations on creative class mobility.     

Maria's Burden: Contract Cleaning and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post‐apartheid South Africa

The life of Maria Dlamini, a contract cleaner at the University of the Witwatersrand, is used to explore continuities and discontinuities between the apartheid labour regime and the neoliberal, post‐apartheid order in South Africa. As South African institutions have adopted neoliberal market strategies, the growth in the contracting‐out of cleaning has intensified work and reduced wages and benefits for many workers. Significantly, as was the case with the migrant labor system under apartheid, it has also increasingly displaced the burden of social reproduction onto the households and communities of the working poor. Whereas the racial spatial order under apartheid was dictated by national‐level political decisions, through use of the concept of “boundary drawing”, we show how the language of the market justifies new exclusions based upon the micro‐politics of the “rational” restructuring of institutions such as universities.     

The Crisis of Social Reproduction among Migrant Workers: Interrogating the Role of Migrant Civil Society

Abstract:  Transformations in urban economies are leading to the growth of jobs where labor and employment laws are routinely violated. Workers in these jobs are subject to harsh conditions such as low wages, hazardous work sites, and retaliation for speaking up. Many of these workers are undocumented migrants who are in a weak position to make demands on their employers or to request government assistance. These workers often turn to migrant civil society organizations for help with the multiple conflicts they face at work. Drawing on case studies of nonprofit organizations in Chicago, this paper focuses on the role of such organizations in the social reproduction of the migrant workforce. I posit that such organizations are integral to the functioning of the informal economy because the wide range of programs and services that they provide are essential to the social reproduction of migrant workers.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

Vulnerabilities of Highly Skilled Immigrants in Canada and the United States

Despite similar permanent status immigration categories (Economic, Family, and Refugee), the experiences of skilled immigrants in Canada and the United States are quite different. The point system used to select applicants for the Economic Class in Canada makes skilled immigrants vulnerable to a number of perils after the migrant lands. Foreign credentials and work experience are discounted by Canadian employers, who also impose a discriminatory income penalty on minorities. While previous cohorts of Economic Class migrants may have been warned of these perils via reliable migrant networks, new Canadian research suggests that recent cohorts have no such safety net. This article examines the economic integration experiences of Economic Class migrants in the United States in light of the Canadian experiences. The vulnerabilities reported in Canada do not appear to be transferable to the United States, because immigration policy in the US stresses pre-landing employment commitments via employer sponsorship. Accordingly, prospective Economic Class migrants to the United States do not migrate without first knowing how their credentials and “minority status” will affect employment opportunities. However, for the 85,000 skilled workers admitted to the United States on H-1B temporary visas each year, the perils noted in the Canadian experience are relevant, as are a number of additional concerns.     

Urban Villages in China: A 2008 Survey of Migrant Settlements in Beijing

A team of Beijing-based urban planning specialists is joined by a noted American geographer to present the results and analyze their 2008 survey of migrant settlements in China's capital city. The paper examines the living and work conditions as well as housing consumption behavior of migrants in Chinese cities, focusing on chengzhongcun or urban villages—rural settlements that have been transformed into poor living spaces for migrant workers. It finds that although migrant workers are willing to pay the same or higher rent per unit of space, they consume much smaller dwelling spaces than local residents. Estimations of the Mincerian wage equation and of a housing demand equation show that migrants' small space consumption is a function not only of low income but also of a reluctance to spend their earnings in the city. The findings reinforce the notion that migrant workers consider the city as a place to work rather than a home in which to live. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: J610, O150, R210, R230. 14 figures, 5 tables, 34 references, 1 appendix.     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.