Hard Labor Research Articles

Prison and the Work Ethic

Despite persistent depictions to the contrary, coercion pervades the modern work experience and, in many significant respects, is underwritten by the power of the state. This article outlines some of the ways in which long-standing interventions by Canadian (and British) states continue to affect workplace relations today. To appreciate the scope of this effect, it is necessary to trespass across a number of disciplinary boundaries to include topics such as immigration, deportation, political policing, the legal foundations of employment law, the continuing influence of the British Poor Laws, and the role of prisons and prison labour in helping to regulate work standards. States acted to support proletarianization in a comprehensive way, but their tendency to favour large-scale, “labour-saving” building projects has often undermined the actual effectiveness of their efforts at social control. These patterns still haunt prison policy, as I will show toward the end of the article in discussing the Toronto South Detention Centre.

British Colonialism and Prison Labour in Inter-War Palestine

Great Britain ruled modern-day Israel and Palestine from 1917 to 1948. The exploitation of prison labour became a source to fund its colonial government. This study explicates the economic and legal rationale for prison labour, the living and working conditions and discipline of convicts, and public debates and controversies surrounding political prisoners in Mandatory Palestine. With specific references to forced labour in the colonised world, it evaluates the experience of Mandatory Palestine from a transnational perspective and makes a connection between global colonialism and prison labour. Using a rich trove of official documents and newspaper articles as its primary sources, this article links the proliferation of the prison labour system with the introduction and consolidation of British colonialism in Palestine and argues that colonial ideology and practices coloured and justified the use of prison labour.

The Colonial Ambiguities of Military Labour on the Penal Frontier: The Newcastle Penal Station 1804–24

This article examines ordinary soldiers garrisoned at the Penal Station of Newcastle, not merely as the discontented imperial captives of Linda Colley’s famous title, but as discontented imperial labour. At Newcastle they were deliberately reconstituted as such to manage periodic shortages in convict labour. Although military labour is one of the largest occupational groupings in the nineteenth century, it is also one of the most overlooked in the study of labour history. Colonial soldiers are traditionally excluded from the language of labour and its associated conflicts. They are, after all, deployed, but rarely, we assume, employed. This analysis pivots around the material history of a set of humble cedar boxes, intricately connected to the settlement’s function in the provision of valuable natural resources. The soldiers’ boxes also beg interesting questions about the political and subterranean economies of the settlement and the submerged working-class patterns of exchange and negotiation. Such questions reveal a defining conflict over the control of colonial labour, land and resources.

Forced Labour, Indenture and Convict Transportation: A Case Study of the Western Australian Pastoral Industry, 1830–50

This article analyses Western Australian pastoralists’ agitation for, and their expanding reliance upon, forced labour in the Avon valley in the 1830s and 1840s. I argue that coercive labour practices were already well established by the time the York Agricultural Society began lobbying for convict transportation in the late 1840s, and that this effort reflected a desire to intensify already existing patterns of unfree labour rather than a brand-new intervention. The shift to forced labour occurred soon after the settler conquest of Ballardong Noongar country facilitated the establishment of a profitable pastoral industry. Pastoralists struggled to hire sufficient numbers of free white workers to work their fields and stations, and to pay the exorbitant wages demanded by them; and they turned instead to Noongar workers, often using coercive methods to maintain labour discipline. Even so, it was clear by the mid-1840s that the settler and Aboriginal labour pool was too small to secure the pastoral industry’s long-term success; and initiatives to augment the colonial workforce by sending out juvenile offenders from Parkhurst prison, and by recruiting Chinese and Indian indentured labourers, were insufficient to meet demand. The Avon valley pastoralists therefore mounted a vigorous campaign to introduce convict labour to Western Australia.

The Fragility of Governmentality and Domination: The State, Carceral Labour and “(In)docile Resistance” in the Late Ottoman Empire

The “power relations” in the Ottoman Empire were gradually governmentalised and centralised through modernist reforms in the long nineteenth century. As part of this process, the practice of intramural and extramural carceral labour became an important element in the Ottoman penal system in the late empire. Despite the state’s emphasis on the rehabilitative effect of prison labour in legal regulations, particularly regarding intramural carceral labour, the expansion of the practice into extramural activities reveals that providing economic benefits was another driving force in the Ottoman case. In this line, extramural labour was used as a complement to free labour rather than a substitute for it. However, the adverse reactions of prisoners to carceral labour were just as important as the regulations, disciplinary practices, and the administrative and financial limits of the state in determining the success of the practice. By focusing on the resistance strategies of prisoners, including escapes, writing petitions, collective walkouts, slowdowns, strikes, and pilferage, this paper aims to amplify their voices. This prisoner-centred view enables us to take a Foucauldian perspective in the context of power relations and resistance to such practices and to illustrate how prisoners, as “indocile bodies,” weakened the governmentality and domination of the state through many forms of “indocile resistance.”

Like Animals Like Human Beings: An Ecocritical Metaphor Discourse of Leadership in Selected Poems of Niyi Osundare

Niyi Osundare extensively investigates the natural world, which is the habitat inhabited by nonhuman beings, in his poems. As a result, his poetry is referred to as eco-poetry. There have been a lot of studies of Niyi Osundare’s poetry that have focused on traditional aesthetics, political power, exile, and the African experience, but not enough studies that have looked at the leadership of animals in their natural habitats. The main sources of information for the study are Niyi Osundare’s The Leader and the Led and Random Blues. This study examined the animal metaphor in relation to leadership from the viewpoints of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Michael Halliday’s transitivity theory. Four main participant and process categories are identified by the data as being present in the poems, with the Material and Relational processes having the largest frequency distributions (62.98% and 22.22%, respectively). This large proportion indicates both the ongoing activity in the African continent and the significant demands that people are under in their desire to rule the biosphere. The the low occurrence of verbal and mental processes in followers (11.11% and 7.40%, respectively) suggests that both animal and human leadership aspirants are more interested in what followers do than followers are. Also, the findings revealed the metaphorical representation of each animal thus: serpent(complacence), leeches and lice (parasite), orangutans (class), beasts (hard labor), crocodile (betrayal), hive (defense), lion (subjugation), antelopes/impalas (fright), hyena (glutton), giraffe (nonchalance), zebra (duplicity), elephant (destruction), warthog (ugliness), rhino (violence), snake (anarchy), lamb (peace), tiger (aggression), doe (compassion). Overall, the study concluded that we need leaders and followers who are similar to lambs and does for harmonious cohabitation in the ecosystem.

Wastelands of empire, sites of ‘salvation’: landscapes of ‘reform’ in late nineteenth-century Germany

This essay traces a rural network of modern carceral and internal colonial land enclosures developed in late nineteenth-century Germany. It considers the extent to which long-running debates over the value of penal colonialism and deportation for the management of societal ‘threats’ influenced shifts in carceral policy of the time, long thought to have been largely determined by the welfare reform movement of the Wilhelmine period and the notion of ‘protective supervision’ that prevailed in its wake. It is argued that certain aspects of convict colonialism, publicly interrogated by German legal theorists, were quietly adapted by carceral reform practices beginning in the 1880s. This essay speculates on the spatial and territorial implications of those adaptations, examining the little-known prison labour camps located in the sewage farms of Berlin after 1890, the model establishment of the rural labour colony founded by the pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, and the Prussian Settlement Commission’s anti-Slavic, anti-migrant program of internal colonisation, established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. It is argued that links between them were crystallised in a racialised topos of waste, framed by an emergent environmental discourse that served to sediment difference. Together, these institutions of correction, the architectures of enclosure that attended them, and the segregated geographies that resulted from them transformed the meaning and administration of Germany’s rural landscape and demarcate modern imperial planning practices that mobilised space, territory, and environment as mediums of ‘progressive’ reform and ‘protective supervision’ tied to increasingly regimented and policed forms of settlement.

Postdigital Collective Memory: Media Practices Against Total Design

AbstractThe article presents the concept of postdigital collective memory—a proposal that opens possible research fields for postdigital science and education. Postdigital collective memory is co-created between human and nonhuman beings and technological media, with the latter treated as sensitive sensors. In order to exemplify this concept, the article presents research results from field practices and design workshops conducted by the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center at Lake Elsensee-Rusałka in Poznań and the prototype of the Sensitive Data Lake (SDL)—a digital environment project incorporating human and nonhuman actants and attempting to restore a shared narrative about a place whose history has been suppressed and has faded from public memory. This lake is one of many examples of what Tony Fry calls ‘total design’: it was created during World War II, through the forced labor of Jewish prisoners, as part of the Nazi expansion into the East; and the project attempted to redesign the environment and remove the local inhabitants. Following the theories that analyze the long duration of ‘total design’ (Fry) and the concepts of transitions design (Escobar), the author’s own Critical Media Design (CMD) method was applied to develop various experimental strategies for design and educational work related to the history and memory of the Elsensee-Rusałka site in the postdigital reality.

РЕСОЦІАЛІЗАЦІЯ ЗАСУДЖЕНИХ ЧЕРЕЗ ПРИЗМУ ЇХ ПРАЦЕВИКОРИСТАННЯ

The article examines the issue of employment of persons sentenced to imprisonment. In the modern criminal law of Ukraine, the order and conditions of employment of persons sentenced to imprisonment are established in such a way that they hardly differ from the order and conditions of work of other citizens who work at enterprises of various forms of ownership. However, the work of convicts in penal institutions is significantly different from the work performed by ordinary workers. Thanks to the involvement of convicts in work in combination with other means (the regime of serving the sentence, social and educational work, etc.), it is possible to achieve positive changes in the personality of the convict, which are a real possibility in the future in the direction of adaptation to life after release from serving the sentence. Community service is one of the most effective means of correction and resocialization of convicts. The analysis of scientific publications concerning the labor use of convicts before deprivation of liberty, in the vast majority, indicates international approaches to this problem, that is, convicts can be involved in work for the purpose of correction and acquisition of certain skills, and not for the purpose of compensating for material losses, moral damage to persons, victims from crimes, or profit making by enterprises of penal institutions. Reasoned reformation of the normative and legal principles of the labor use of convicts in places of deprivation of liberty, changes in approaches to the regulation and organization of the work of convicts during the execution and serving of punishment, can contribute to improving the situation in the direction of the implementation of such a means of resocialization as the labor of convicts. In addition, taking into account by the administration of the institution of execution of punishments the special characteristics of convicts can be useful in the process of labor utilization of convicts. Key words: sentenced to imprisonment, right to work, labor exploitation, correction and resocialization.

Working the salterns. Convict workers in the natural salt pans of Hambantota, in British colonial Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT In the early 19th century, the British colonial state in Sri Lanka embarked on an experiment in deploying convict labour for salt collecting. ‘Criminals’ from all parts of the island region convicted mainly for robbery and vagrancy and sentenced to hard labour by various courts of justice, were sent to an isolated outpost in the district of Hambantota in the deep south of Sri Lanka to labour at a naturally formed saltern known as the Maha Levaya. Executive, judicial, and administrative actors of the state played a key role in mobilising and immobilising the convicts at the saltern in order to fulfil the dual functions of punishment and profit. This paper contends that the inter-regional and local practice of im/mobilizing convicts to worksites as seen in Hambantota was a micro-spatial process of punishment, exile and labour extraction that was integral to larger processes of social control and labour coercion. However, despite the attempts at confining the convict labour force at the saltern through military and judicial means, the men condemned to labour for salt resisted the conditions of servitude through multiple strategies ranging from flight to evasion.

Transatlantic Women at Work: Service in the Long 19th Century

This special issue focuses on “Transatlantic Women at Work” in the 19th century, with attention paid specifically to the labor women performed that was deemed by family, community, government, and often the women themselves as “service.” Our introduction briefly describes the six articles and responses included in this issue, and their origins in an online forum in 2021 and 2022, three poems, and one fictional work. The overview of contributions is followed by an attempt at theorizing the understanding and conception of the idea of “service” from a diachronic perspective. This exploration of varying notions and the accompanying politics of “service” is organized in sections as follows: “The Evolving Concept of ‘Service’ in the Long 19th Century,” “Theorizing: What Is this Thing Called Service,” “The Tradition of ‘Service’ as a White, Middle-Class Notion,” “Women’s Service and Reform,” “Municipal Housekeeping as Service to the Community,” and “Women of Color and ‘Service to Their Race’.” Our examination of 19th-century conduct books and reform texts by and for women illuminates how evolving notions of service as benevolence was primarily connected to a well-to-do class of White women and conceptualized against a notion of servitude as hard (enumerated) labor associated with poor women and Women of Color. We show how since the beginning of the century Black activists fought against such racial essentialism. However, White service notions lastingly influenced both 19th-century (segregated) ideas of women’s social roles and 20th/21st century women’s historiography that continued to center White concepts of True Womanhood. We conclude by acknowledging that in our own 21st century, women (especially Women of Color) too often continue in the vicious cycle of being relegated to lower paid and lower status service work, professions which remain lower paid because they are held by women. As we point out, the recent Covid pandemic shed renewed light on this transatlantic reality.

Hard Labor and Sweet Delights

Abstract Luisa Carnés’s novel Tea Rooms: Mujeres obreras (1934) recounts the corporeal and sensory experience of workers in a pastelería, capturing their hunger and fatigue amid the smells of freshly baked pastries. These working women are thus inserted into economic space, defined as the production, distribution, and consumption of the material goods that sustain life and give pleasure. The novel makes palpable their desire to enjoy the consumer products that surround them—whether in the tea room, in nearby shops, or in the cinema across the street—pleasurable goods that remain beyond their means. In the musical comedy El bailarín y el trabajador (1936), a ruined señorito, formerly a ballroom dancer, finds himself relegated to working in a cookie factory. As he redirects his bodily exertion from nonproductive to productive labor, he sings of the working life as “dulce y sabrosa” (sweet and flavorful). Based on a play by Jacinto Benavente (1925), and repurposed in the era of the Popular Front, the film attempts to ease class conflict by celebrating the working life and asserting interclass harmony, thereby appealing to viewers on both the left and right. But despite its bourgeois perspective, the striking shots of the machinery, with the masa (dough) emerging from the cylinders—flattened, stamped, and cut into cookies—clearly suggest the masses in the process of organizing and coming to consciousness. And juxtaposed with these factory scenes are segments showing the glamorous, “sweet” life of the idle rich. Both the novel, with its Marxist critique, and the film, with its bourgeois message, mobilize affects by deploying the material metaphors of foodstuffs—sweets, in this case—that provide not so much sustenance as pleasure. These two works thus foreground in quite different ways the notion of “communal luxury,” the right of workers to beauty, to pleasure, and to a life of the mind.

Heart rate modeling and prediction of construction workers based on physical activity using deep learning

Construction projects require long working hours where workers are subjected to intensive tasks such as hard manual labor, heavy weightlifting, and compulsive working postures. Among the physiological metrics, Heart Rate (HR) is reported to be a good indicator of physical stress and workload. HR forecasting models have been used in various areas including cardiopathy research, heart attack warning indicator, and early physical fatigue detection. However, there are no reported studies on HR modeling and forecasting in the construction field. Modeling and forecasting the HR of construction workers using construction field data is of paramount importance due to the direct relationship between activity level and HR. The objective of this study is to (1) analyze the effect of physiological factors including breathing rate, acceleration of torso movements, torso posture, and impulse load on the HR of construction workers, and (2) model and forecast one-minute ahead HR for construction workers based on their physical activity using deep learning algorithms. To this end, physiological metrics of five bridge maintenance workers performing several construction activities were collected. According to the Pearson correlation and entropy based mutual information analysis, time-lagged variables including acceleration of torso movements, torso posture, and impulse load have significant effect on the HR data. The results of deep learning models indicate that Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional GRU (BiGRU) have similar predictive performance. However, LSTM had the best overall performance in HR prediction with Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 5.4, 7.34, and 5.77%, respectively. These models have the potential to facilitate the mitigation of cardiovascular strain and enable proactive prevention of accidents in the construction industry.

Design and Analysis of Stair Climbing Trolley

Abstract: We are mainly designing a stair climbing trolley so as to reduce or bring ease of physical labour for some of the hard labour sectors in economy like construction sector

Beschuldigd van intrafamiliaal geweld voor het Hof van Assisen van het Scheldedepartement / de provincie Oost-Vlaanderen, 1811–1867

Summary Accused of domestic violence before the Assize Court of the Scheldt Department / Province of East Flanders, 1811-1867. – Studying the criminal prosecution of intrafamily violence in the Scheldt department / province of East Flanders between 1811 and 1867 is only possible by consulting the archives of the Assize Court of that region. Because this Assize Court only dealt with the most serious criminal cases, one can only study the tip of the iceberg. Between 1811 and 1867, the Assize Court of the Scheldt Department / Province of East Flanders in Belgium treated 203 criminal cases involving interfamily violence. 107 (53%) of these cases involved violence against a child and in 94 of those 107 cases (88%) an infanticide. In total 103 people were charged with an infanticide, but in the end only 38 were punished with death, being the then legal punishment for this crime. All other accused were acquitted or, after a reclassification of the facts listed in the indictment, sentenced for another crime such as an involuntary manslaughter of a child or concealing a child. The main reason for this was the fact that an infanticide, which was usually committed without witnesses, was very difficult to prove. Thirteen other criminal cases for violence against a child dealt with violence against a no longer new-born child. The Court of Assizes applied the normal penalties in these criminal cases. This usually involved mostly intentional manslaughter, murder or attempted murder of such a child. In the period 1811–1867, the Court of Assize also tried 73 people for violence against a parent or grandparent. Of those 73 persons, 15 were acquitted and 58 (7 women and 51 men) punished. Three persons accused of elder murder were punished: one for intentionally beating his father, one for murdering his father and one for murdering his mother. The 55 other accused were punished for intentional hits on an ascendant. Partner violence was the category of interfamily violence that was least dealt with by the Assize Court. In total, the Assize Court handled only 25 criminal cases for marriage partner violence, involving 27 people as perpetrators or accomplices. Six of those 25 criminal cases dealt with poisoning of the partner and 12 criminal cases with murder or attempted murder of the partner. In only five of the last 12 criminal cases, the accused was sentenced to death, but in the end only one of them was guillotined. The four other death row inmates were given a kingly grace who commuted their death sentences to a hard labour. In the other seven of those 12 criminal cases, the case was reclassified to intentional manslaughter or intentional hits and wounds and punished as such. The Assize Court also treated five criminal trials in which a person was charged from the outset with intentional manslaughter of the marriage partner. In three of those five criminal cases, the accused was also punished for such intentional manslaughter, in one of those five criminal cases, the offences were reclassified to intentional hits and wounds causing illness or disability of more than twenty days, and in one of those five criminal cases, the accused was acquitted. Finally, the Assize Court also treated two criminal cases in which a person was charged from the outset with intentional hits and wounds against his marriage partner. In one of those two criminal cases, after a reclassification of the facts, the Court sentenced the accused to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 200 francs. In the second criminal case the accused was acquitted.

‘Very Fond of Spirituous Liquors’: Alcohol and Fugitive Black Life in the Slaveholding South

ABSTRACT Hard labour, toil, and the pain and suffering of social and corporeal violence branded enslaved experiences in the slaveholding world of the plantation South. But enslaved people were also simultaneously in constant motion in the making of insuppressible alternative worlds that fundamentally endangered the fragile system of chattel slavery. In everyday acts of self-interest and refusal, enslaved people built and sustained a competing world of fugitive consciousness and practice that was often bolstered, emboldened, and reinforced by the consumption and possession of spirituous liquors. This essay treats Black people’s relationships with alcohol during the period of enslavement as an analytic for locating contestations of power and Black social life – or, an often overlooked yet revealing window into the transgressive underworlds of enslaved and fugitive making. Despite great efforts to control their bodies, movement, and intake, enslaved people poured, drank, and put alcohol to use in their creation of uncapturable moments and spaces of self-making, pleasure, sociality, and resistance. Whether joining outlaw parties, trading in forbidden clandestine economies, fleeing the confines of plantation borders, living maroon lives, or plotting and executing revolt, those sharing in these fugitive pursuits viewed alcohol as a valuable ingredient in the advancement of free life.

The Ghosts Inside: The Historic Struggle to Reclassify Prison Labor, 1967–1979

The 1970s saw incarcerated laborers engage in an unprecedented battle to secure recognition, rights, and protections. This article traces the rise of the Prisoners Union, the largest and most prominent organization of its sort, as it endeavored to elevate the standing of captive labor. Through qualitative analysis of archival materials, this work unpacks penal laborers’ classification struggles aimed at advancing status in the penal field and rejoining the ranks of the working class. Investigating this movement's successes and failures enhances empirical knowledge of prison organizing as well as theoretical understandings of classification struggles, and helps contextualize historic penological developments.

Nilai Pendidikan Karakter Kerja Keras Menurut Al-Qur'an: Kajian Tafsir Al-Misbah dan Al-Wasith

This study aims to: 1) Describe the passages in the Qur'an that promote hard labor and character development and how mufassir interprets them. 2) Describe the fundamental guidelines for effective work found in the Qur'an. 3) Examine the meanings of toil in the Qur'an. In this work, interpretive science is combined with the Maudhu'i interpretation method. The Qur'an serves as the study's main source of data, along with the Tafsir Al-Mishbah by M. Quraish Shihab, the Tafsir Al-Azhar by Hamka, the Tafsir Al-Wasith by Wahbah Zuhaili, and other scholarly writings, articles, journals, and other materials with pertinent discussion where necessary. The study's findings reveal that: 1) The Al-Qur'an has numerous verses that call for individuals to reflect, such as Surah Al-Qasas verse 77, Surah An-Najm verses 39-41, Surah Az-Zumar verse 39, Surah At-Taubah verse 105, Surah An-Naba' verse 11, and Surah Al-Jumu'ah verse 10. 2) The fundamental teachings of the Qur'an, which advise Muslims to work hard because work is worship, mercy, a duty, an honor, a calling, an expression of gratitude, art, actualization, and a field of good acts, 3) According to the Qur'an, character education should emphasize values like tenacity, diligence, creativity, discipline, and devotion.

Recreolization as Decolonial Dramaturgy: Tansi Language in Tonel Performance, Sawahlunto City

Tonel performance in the city of Sawahlunto is practiced by the ethnic community who speak the Tansi creole language. Sawahlunto in tropical West Sumatra, Indonesia, was built by the Dutch colonialists in the late 19th century as a coal mining center based on the labor of local people and the forced labor of convicts of various ethnicities sent from around Indonesia. The multiethnic population developed a pidgin language which later became the Tansi creole language. This article discusses a new strategy for developing Tonel dramaturgy, which emerged through performances at the Sawahlunto Cultural Festival in 2021. Paying attention to the theatrical communication that occurs in Tonel performance, this study analyses how changes in the Tansi language used during performances, can be recognized as processes of decreolization and recreolization. The recreolization process proved to be a way to break the remnants of the continuing effects of colonialism in the Tansi culture. By changing words or adding new words to the Tansi language during the performances, the Tansi community builds a new dramaturgy based in a practice of cultural decoloniality through Tonel performance. This decolonial practice is particularly significant in the currrent development of Sawahlunto as a postcolonial mining tourism city, and the detangling of its colonial legacy.

Prison Labor across the Carceral Continuum

Prison Labor across the Carceral Continuum