Exploitation, Marginalization, and Disposability

Abstract

Abstract This chapter’s critique of sweatshop labour claims that sweatshop labour relations are relations of exploitation involving advantage-taking of the structural vulnerability of workers. The chapter begins by explaining the structural nature of sweatshop labour relations, then develops an understanding of how sweatshop workers are structurally vulnerable in virtue of their position as gendered, racialized, and migrant workers. The key concern with sweatshop labour exploitation is that the structurally embedded vulnerability of the workers is turned into a condition for profit in a way that reveals normative concerns with domination and oppression. This exploitation constitutes a particularly severe form of wage-labour exploitation and is non-accidentally linked to two further normative concerns, the marginalization of sweatshop workers and their treatment as disposable. These normative concerns become visible through theorizing the systematic relation between class, gender, race, and migrant status in sweatshop labour relations.