Illicit Labour Research Articles

Resistentia feminarum in visionibus: Joint fantasizing as a practice of migrant women’s narrative resistance to the Caporalato system

The Caporalato system parallels the gangmaster framework, underlining illicit labor practices mediated by intermediaries. This system is entrenched in master narratives—culturally ingrained stories that dictate behaviors and perpetuate power disparities, safeguarding the privileges of the elite. Within this oppressive framework, women face heightened challenges, including increased vulnerability to human trafficking and exploitation. This study explores the counter-narratives developed by women in response to Caporalato’s master narratives. It gathers empirical data from naturally occurring meetings with 11 women from diverse African nations, conducted between January 2023 and July 2023. Using the joint fantasizing approach, which focuses on collaboratively constructed stories with potential future impacts, the study unveils three prominent themes of resistance: ‘My son will make me a queen’, ‘My body will set me free’, and ‘I want to stay at home!’. This analysis reveals that effective resistance through counter-narratives does not rely on forming a single, unified story opposing the master narrative. Rather, these narratives selectively challenge and sometimes adopt aspects of the dominant stories they confront.

“To Work Her Grounds”: Provision Grounds, Gardens, and Subsistence in Late-Slavery Trinidad, 1824–1833

As scholars have long shown, provision grounds and dooryard gardens were crucial to enslaved people’s survival and economic lives in many slave societies in the greater Caribbean. This article draws on both old and new evidence to explore the British colony of Trinidad’s late-slavery provision ground system from below. It analyses plantation records, the Port of Spain Gazette, government slave punishment returns, planter and imperial correspondence, slave codes, and enslaved people’s legal complaints from the nineteenth century to provide a more detailed portrait of the challenges of food cultivation under slavery in the years leading to abolition. Foregrounding scarcity as the common experience in the island’s provision ground system, it argues that enslaved labourers risked punishment to deploy a range of adaptive and sometimes illicit labour and land management strategies to properly cultivate their grounds under the constraints imposed upon them by plantation authorities. Furthermore, it shows how in the amelioration era, despite the odds being stacked against them, enslaved people found ways to strategically negotiate the office of The Protector of Slaves to retain rightful access to productive land and to protect their cultivation time and produce.

Overtime: The Cultural Political Economy of Illicit Labor in the Electronics Industry

This article investigates the relationship between overtime and corporate codes of conduct in the global electronics industry through a cultural political economy perspective. First, drawing on examples from China, it considers how the changing political economy of global production has contributed to the emergence of illicit overtime in the electronics industry. The article examines the endemic use of excessive working hours at the first-tier supplier level and explains it as a systemic method to sustain competitive accumulation in a sector characterized by tight production cycles. Second, the article analyzes the economic imaginary that supports the use of overtime and the accompanying mechanisms that institutionalize it as a material practice. It shows that the Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct plays a crucial role in reproducing illicit conditions. Conclusions explore the potential of reorienting geographic understandings of illicit practices within the mainstream economy.

Niños, niñas y adolescentes de circuito: entre la precariedad y la frontera, México

Analizamos los factores que promueven la incursión de menores de edad a mercados laborales ilícitos en la frontera norte de México. Se analiza el caso de los niños, niñas y adolescentes de circuito. Lleva-mos a cabo una revisión bibliográfica, hemerográfica, así como desarrollamos y aplicamos indicadores de desarrollo social en una de las regiones de mayor incidencia del fenómeno y realizamos en-trevistas a actores clave en la atención institucional a esta población. Concluimos que este fenómeno tiene un origen multifactorial, pero con un trasfondo geográfico y de deficiencias en desarrollo social con una visión incluyente de la niñez y la adolescencia

Review of “Thiefing a Chance. Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad” by Rebecca Prentice (2015)

The ethnography Thiefing a Chance analyzes the daily reality of the workers of a textile company in Trinidad, influenced by the processes of restructuring and global relocation like many other peripheral Fordist sites. The ethnography describes the internal labor relations and the contradictions and tensions they face in their daily work. In particular, the text focuses on the illicit ways workers use to gain extra benefits. The author questions, first, whether these workers are passive victims of the neoliberal expansion or they are actives agents of their own destiny. And, second, whether these illicit activities should be taken either as acts of complicity with the capitalist logic or acts of resistance. The theoretical themes touch upon current economic anthropological debates.

Cultivating Violence: Trade Liberalization, Illicit Labor, and the Mexican Drug Trade

ABSTRACTThis article asks whether economic liberalization, under certain institutional conditions, is indirectly related to drug violence. Focusing on Mexico’s drug trade, where violence was historically limited by politicoinstitutional arrangements, this study examines how trade liberalization shapes social exclusion in key trafficking regions and, in turn, shapes the industry. It argues that the change in development strategy has increased the flow of workers into the drug trade by reconfiguring the agricultural sector in regions where drugs are produced while failing to absorb surplus labor in manufacturing centers containing key smuggling routes. Through both mechanisms, workers enter an illicit market with new institutional settings that allow for fierce competition and the use of violence. Using panel data on drug violence from 2007 to 2011, the study finds that exposure to trade is associated with violence in both drug-producing and -smuggling regions, but with a more sizable effect in the former.

Problematic aspects of the regulatory and legislative framework for calculating pensions in Ukraine

Introduction. In order to further move towards the European Economic Area, Ukraine needs to take pension reform measures. Pension provision in Ukraine has to be profoundly reformed in terms of regulatory and legislative framework for calculating pensions in Ukraine. What is of particular importance is improving Ukraine’s laws and methods for calculation and pension payments to citizens. Another important focus of the reform agenda is to define categories of people eligible for old-age pensions, disability pensions, and long- service pensions.Purpose. The purpose of the article is to interpret the regulatory and legislative framework for calculating pensions in Ukraine; to describe changes in pension payments before and after the reform was implemented; to highlight ways of improving pension payments in terms of regulations and legislation.Methods. The research methods used in the article include: analysis; comparison; historical method to consider the legislative framework for calculating pensions at different periods of time.Results. The regulatory and legal framework for calculating pensions in Ukraine is a complex system comprising the Constitution of Ukraine, the Laws of Ukraine, the Labour Code of Ukraine, decrees, Presidential decrees, International agreements and laws of the USSR. Some of these regulations and legislation need to be revised and amended in order to bring them in line with contemporary practices and modern standards.It is claimed that since 2017, Ukraine’s government has been implementing the pension reform aimed at relieving the pressure on the working-age population and improving living standards for retired people. In particular, the retirement age has been raised, eligibility criteria for preferential pensions have been revised, and methods for calculating pensions have been changed.The Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine argues that the new pension reform is expected to enhance social, labour and post-retirement relations, to increase tax revenues through reporting real salaries, to develop a framework of social justice when calculating pensions. The author points out that the regulatory and legislative framework for calculating pensions is outdated at this stage and it requires changes. The considered changes are as follows: the establishment of a working group for entitlement of preferential pensions; the introduction of wage differentials by industries and occupations; the increase of pensions in line with inflation and age; the implementation of notional defined contribution pension system; the introduction of the new Labour Code and Pension Code, which are expected to regulate labour and post-retirement relations and meet modern standards.It is also indicated that continued employment should be enforced by legislation and a system of granting advantages and social security benefits to those who retire later needs to be developed.In terms of legislation, sufficient regard should be given to non-state pension schemes, defined contribution pension systems, and the principle of fairness when it comes to pension entitlements. It is also crucial to adjust pension amounts and retirement age to align with the sustainability ratio and the average life expectancy.Discussion. Further research of regulatory and legal framework for calculating pensions in Ukraine should be focused on the development of the Pension Code and improvement of the existing laws relative to pension calculation and payment. The author also suggests differentiating minimum wages by industries and regions and countering the illicit labour market and campaigning against payments ‘in envelope’, because official wages are the basis for calculating pensions.

Civil Society Activism under US Free Trade Agreements: The Effects of Actorness on Decent Work

US free trade agreements comprise unique provisions that enable civil society to present public complaints against labor rights violations occurring in the US or its trade partners. To date, a variety of complainants have used these mechanisms, including (inter)national trade unions, human rights organizations, and a priest. And yet, little is known about the submissions’ nature of agency and the effects it has on the procedural continuations to address illicit labor practices. To fill this research lacuna, this article employs a multidisciplinary framework of ‘actorness’ that measures the submitters’ diversity (professionalism/non-professionalism, collectivism/individualism, transnationalism/nationalism) and their effectiveness (rejection/acceptance of submissions and further procedural follow-ups). Combining quantitative examination with in-depth analysis of two diverse cases of actorness, and drawing on expert interviews, public reports, and minutes of meetings, the study reveals that the majority of public submissions were of professional, collective, and transnational nature. However, contrary to what extant literature suggests, this is not a guarantee that they achieve more far-reaching procedural steps in the protection of workers. Non-professional, individual, and national actorness can compensate for the advantages of professionalism, collectivism, and transnationalism.

Hyenas of the Limpopo: “Illicit Labour Recruiting,” Assisted Border Crossings, and the Social Politics of Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the negotiation of undocumented cross-border movement, or assisted border crossings, at Beitbridge, South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe. By reading border practices as arising from a complex synthesis of state regulatory norms with social relations that shape everyday encounters with the Beitbridge border space, the article argues that assisted border crossings are temporally, structurally and experientially determined. The article proposes the local concept of ukutshokotsha as a way of understanding “border struggles” that shape this “morphogenesis.” Located in historical, regional, political-economic, as well as experiential contexts, assisted border crossings are analyzed as rooted in everyday encounters with a fraught border space, as opposed solely to the border’s official institutional norms. The article argues that a focus on border practices is important in as far as it privileges the complex agency of disparate border actors, of the border, and of the shifting meanings of borders that emerge from everyday practices. By describing the colonial style “illicit labour recruiting” and post-independence “assisted border crossings” as a socio-historical, phenomenological, and political process, the article emphasizes the active role of middlemen in shaping the nature and meaning of the Beitbridge border and of the political economic organization of cross-border movement in contemporary Southern Africa. The article argues that the social politics of movement across the Beitbridge border is as much a contingency of history, a material, social and existential aspect of contemporary border practices, and a characteristic of everyday forms of Southern African state formation in a general context of socio-economic crisis.

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice

<i>Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad</i> by Rebecca Prentice

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

El acoso en el trabajo: algunos aspectos doctrinarios, jurisprudenciales y legales del acoso moral y sexual en Chile

The conduct of enforcement or persecution can call it "Conduct of harassment", which is of particular interest for the right to work in the cases in which a siege within the employment relationship and harassment occurs and during its term, distinguishing between harassment or workplace harassment and harassment or sexual harassment, hypothesis prejudicial for those involved in the relationship of work and in particular of fundamental rights. While attitudes in both institutions have sorne overlap (siege of the hechor, absence of consent ofthe victim and the prejudice in employment or occupation), relevant differences are recognized. Thus, in the workplace harassment, harassment not aims to obtain a sexual favor, and must also have a certain regularity or more or less extended duration in time. lnstead, in the sexual harassment a single fact that magazine sufficient severity can satisfy the illicit labour, without requiring a repeated or more or less prolonged duration. The work develops both hypotheses of harassment labour, referring to its regulation, concept, violation of fundamental rights and other violations, element, features and reception of these institutions in the jurisprudence and doctrine.

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice

Reviewed by: Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice Samantha King Rebecca Prentice, Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015. 248 pp. There has been growing recognition in recent years that the pressures associated with neoliberal governance models are actually promoting and expanding participation in alternative, illicit, and informal economic practice in a variety of social contexts. This dynamic has raised new and reinvigorated enduring anthropological questions related to the cultural meanings of economic practice and the role of hegemonic formations in both shaping and being shaped by local livelihoods. Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice offers a significant and nuanced contribution to these debates. This book presents an engaging ethnographic exploration of how women garment workers are negotiating neoliberal economic restructuring from the particular cultural and historical perspective of the Caribbean—a region often characterized as being on the losing side of globalization. In Trinidad, IMF-backed restructuring began opening protected national markets to intense global competition in the 1990s, a process that substantially reconfigured production requirements and employment opportunities in the local garment industry. As production became more unstable and demanding, a significant portion of garment work shifted to the informal sector. Today, Trinidad’s garment industry is comprised of a variety of dispersed, heterogeneous sites including factories, illegal sweatshops, independent workshops, and home-based enterprises. In Thiefing a Chance, Prentice demonstrates how the agency and flexibility of women has facilitated these transitions and in many ways enabled the local garment industry to endure. Her conclusions and analysis [End Page 975] are based upon 15 months of ethnographic research in Trinidad, which included nine months working on the shop floor at Signature Fashions, a pseudonym for a local garment factory that produces high-end fashions for the regional clothing market. What Prentice uncovers in the factory is a hidden world of productive labor through which illicit and informal practices have become integral, yet unacknowledged, aspects of the neoliberal order of work. Through such practices, known collectively by workers as “thiefing a chance,” women utilize the factory as a resource to surreptitiously engage in entrepreneurial activities such as training themselves on new machines, professionally finishing homemade garments, and copying Signature Fashions patterns for outside use. These types of covert strategies reference a cultural discourse common throughout the Black Atlantic that valorizes opportunistic and flexible economic practice as an expression of individual independence and creativity. Such endogenously derived forms of economic self-expression are intimately informed by the persistent need for Caribbean people to continually negotiate and adapt to capitalism’s enduring influence in the region—from plantation slavery through neoliberal economic restructuring. Yet recent anthropological work has also noted a substantial overlap between this historically informed subaltern expression of flexible self-reliance and the entrepreneurial ethos venerated by the contemporary neoliberal order. In this important book, Prentice seeks to ethnographically document this convergence and consider what it means. Thiefing a chance, she argues, represents a metaphor for local life under neoliberalism as the “expression of an individualistic, enterprising subjectivity” embraced and embodied by workers that “both subverts and con-firms” contemporary capitalist discipline (90). The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which draws upon rich ethnographic detail to further the anthropological analysis. The introduction highlights the main arguments of the text (as described briefly above) and outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the Signature Fashions factory and brand. Prentice begins by situating Signature Fashions within the political economic history of the garment industry in Trinidad and then moves to an analysis of the relations of production in the factory. This discussion interrogates the nature and practice of industrial flexibility, or the ability of production to respond to dynamic market conditions. While this has generally been theorized as a crucial achievement of the neoliberal [End Page 976] firm, Prentice convincingly demonstrates how, at Signature, flexibility is a complex and contested process that is often facilitated by the coordinated, covert actions of workers as opposed to the formal structure and deliberate planning...

“I Was in Crisis”

This article explores the illicit labor and imprisonment of two women, Cynthia and Dinah, in the Santa Monica prison in Lima, Peru through the lens of gendered motherwork. Because the unequal distribution of care places the burden of this labor on women, Cynthia and Dinah were primarily responsible for the care of their adult children who were diagnosed with AIDS. Both women entered the transnational cocaine commodity chain in order to provide their children with medication that was not administered by the state. Neoliberal healthcare in the form of cuts to national health systems makes the motherwork of poor women more difficult to perform. In order to afford care for their children's health, Cynthia and Dinah entered a labor market that is criminalized by punitive war on drug policies and they were subsequently imprisoned. Illicit labor was therefore an extension of their motherwork and the removal of this care from their children resulted in tragic health consequences. This article is based on ethnographic dissertation fieldwork in 2008–09 in the largest women's prison in Peru.

Illicit drug use and labour market participation: evidence of simultaneity

Empirical research into the relationship between illicit drug use and labour market success has been found to have mixed results in the literature. The relevant sources of variability are the methods used to account for the potential endogeneity of drug use. This article utilizes clinical data for drug use and a recursive simultaneous equations approach as an alternative method for estimating the effect of consumption on labour participation and as a means for controlling for the endogeneity problem. Our results confirm that drug use is endogenously determined, and provide evidence to support the thesis that frequent use of dependency drugs greatly decreases the likelihood of being employed.

One counter and your own account: redefining illicit labour in early modern Antwerp

ABSTRACT:This article examines the problem of illicit labour from the perspective of transformations in the (local) distribution channels. Rather than large masters circumventing the guilds’ rules regarding labour market entry or large merchants shifting from aKaufto aVerlagsystem, early modern manufacturing guilds in Antwerp confronted mercers and wholesalers who entered into production without being masters. In response, the guilds extended their rules, so that their regulations actually matured in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than (labour market) deregulation and proto-industrialization, the issue was the disappearance of the straightforward link between production and retailing, tied together by mastership.

Shades of difference: mythologies of skin color in early modern England

Sujata Iyengar. Shades of Difference. Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. 310pp. ISBN 0 8122 3832 X.1. Whether romance, lyric, masque, or narrative, Sujata Iyengar, in her book Shades of Difference, suggests that early modern literary affiliations entangle with variable concepts of skin color and emergent racial distinctions to produce specifically early modern ways of figuring difference (1). Historical and material contexts - bodily, gendered, religious, scientific, and social - here collude with literary genres, constructing different languages and traditions for negotiating human variation. Iyengar explores racializing discourse as structure of feeling, term she borrows from Raymond Williams and uses to point out the temporal complexity of ideological formations as well as the overlap of political institutions and private beliefs in discursive construction.2. Iyengar's book is divided into three parts. The first part, 'Ethiopian Histories', examines the Renaissance transmission and interpretation of classical and Biblical texts on blackness. She focuses on ambiguous heroines such as Chariclea of Heliodorus'Aethiopica or the Bride of the Song of Songs, figures whose beauty, rank, and ethnicity depended on, and changed according to, understanding of skin colour. She then concludes her chapter with juxtaposed representations of the Irish and the Ethiopians in Stuart court masques.3. In part two, 'Whiteness Visible', Iyengar reads early modern poetry and drama for white skin in its different variations, including blushing, pallor, and cosmetic colourings. Contextualizing epyllia with moral treatises, and stage plays with anti-cosmetic tracts, Iyengar shows that skin colour worked towards configuring not only ethnic prejudice, but also sexual difference.4. 'Travail Narratives', the third and final part of Shades of Difference, plays with the early modern double meaning of 'travail' as both hard work and travel. Iyengar first examines different constructions of gypsies whose skin colour, whether natural or artificial, linked with mythologies of illicit labor and stage performance. The travel section of the chapter examines English travelers' ethnographic accounts of Africa and African bodies, texts that can be seen as constructing an early version of racialism that hinges on both skin colour and labour, especially slavery. The book concludes by moving forward in time towards the Restoration and the scientific revolution, where the escapism of prose romance may have offered an alternative to the gradually stabilizing fictions of race.5. Iyengar consistently resists imposing a straightforward historical trajectory 'toward' racialism or 'toward' color-prejudice as an explanatory mechanism (1). Rather, she interprets early modern negotiations of skin color as an open-ended discussion, dynamic history unbound by necessary march towards race and racism. She follows the diverse and often contradictory ways in which her texts construct otherness, and demonstrates the complexity of the varying meanings of skin colour while also reading for intertextual references, influences, and paraphrases. For her, following the multiple literary networks in which skin colour emerges can account for change better than can history that views skin colour through the later prism of race. …

Illicit drug use and labour market achievement: evidence from the UK

This study, using data from the British Crime Survey (BCS), examines the effect of drug use on occupational achievement. It starts by attempting to overcome the identification problem that results from the limited set of drug use questions presented in the BCS. Taking this into account, and allowing for the endogeneity of drug use in equations for unemployment and labour market outcomes, that a mild positive association with ‘soft’ drugs and occupational achievement is observed that diminishes with age. This relationship holds for males but not for females. In contrast, it is also found that past use of ‘hard’ drugs significantly increases the likelihood of current unemployment, although it appears to be unrelated to occupational success, conditional on achieving employment.

‘Blackbirding’ at ‘Crooks’ corner’: illicit labour recruiting in the northeastern Transvaal, 1910–1940

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Africans in search of work were attracted to the wage‐paying employment opportunities on the Witwatersrand. These work‐seekers travelled great distances on foot, battling hunger, disease, and the harsh environment. For those Africans wishing to enter the Transvaal without benefit of official permission, the border presented little obstacle. These clandestine migrants easily bypassed police posts, but they experienced greater difficulty in evading predatory labour recruiters. Illicit labour recruiting took place all along the frontier, but assumed special significance at the far corner of the northeastern Transvaal. It was here where the borders of the Transvaal, Southern Rhodesia, and Portuguese East Africa met that labour pirating, or ‘blackbirding’ as it was sometimes called, careened out of control. Investigating the modus operandi of these unscrupulous labour recruiters sheds light on wider questions concerning the historical formation of labour markets i...