Theorizing Labour Mobility Power

Abstract

This chapter takes a journey across different literature streams to review the study of labour turnover since the modern factory of the early 20th century, to then move to approaches to turnover and mobility power across labour process theory, comparative political economy, and critical migration scholarship. The authors explore the ambivalent efforts of capital at both facilitating and constraining mobility in the history of ‘labour capture’ and in relation to the movement of capital. The relatively unfree nature of labour in capitalism, showing elements of continuity with pre-capitalist forms of labour bondage and controls, helps in understanding why workers have always engaged with mobility strategies in the forms of desertion, migration, and quitting to counter or diminish exploitation. The theoretical literature surrounding labour migration shows how we need to promote interdisciplinary dialogue to unpack the moments of tensions that mobility engenders for management, and the opportunities it opens for workers to build forms of resistance both individually and collectively. The authors thus elaborate a compositional and transnational approach to labour migration and its autonomy that highlights the historical entrapment of such mobilities and workers’ ongoing attempts at overcoming it, in the labour process and beyond.