Precarity's reach: intersections of history, life, and labour in the Australian horticultural industry

Abstract

AbstractThe temporary labour migrations of Pacific Islanders to work in the orchards and packing sheds of the Australian horticultural industry feed the demands for flexible labour that are marks of the precarious present. At the same time, their labour experiences call attention to the diverse, historically situated, and racialized configurations of power and risk that converge in the present moment within particular places and within the intersecting lives and bodies of differently positioned others. Focused on a fruit packing shed in north‐central Victoria, and on the ni‐Vanuatu workers, farmers, managers, and mediating agents who meet there, this article seeks to develop an ethnography of precarity's intersections. Here, the insecurities and fraying reciprocities widely theorized in the context of post‐Fordist, neoliberal precarity articulate with the hierarchies and imaginaries of development regimes, the colonial co‐production of Global North and South, and the always‐precarious rhythms of horticultural production. Precarity, I argue, is neither particular to the post‐Fordist relations of Western Europe, nor an all‐consuming leveller of historical, cultural, and place‐based difference. Rather, it emerges out of the situated convergences of diverse people and histories, and practices of both mobility and containment, producing intersecting but ultimately unequal distributions of risk.