Labor Question Research Articles

Plastic dislocations: questions of labour and environment in Plastic Heart

In the 1960s, as plastics gained traction as the ubiquitous material of consumer objects, artists began to experiment with the properties of the newly available polymers. Plastics such as latex, fibreglass, acrylic and polyethylene offered access to aesthetic experimentation with colour, reflection, transparency and flexibility. Yet the use of these materials was never without critical reflection, an orientation that strengthened with the passing of time and the increased knowledge of plastics pollution. Though the connections are usually invisible, plastic artworks never stand alone, but in fact drag into the gallery the histories of their manufacture, the extraction of their base materials, their broken relationships with land and water, and their future propensity to break down into smaller pieces and proliferate endlessly. We use the example of the exhibition Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through, curated by the Synthetic Collective, to examine how plastics bring the complications of their materiality into the gallery. We argue that exhibition production should attend to both its fossil-fuel consumption and its relations to place. Plastic Heart provides an excellent case study of how plastics and plastics pollution can be dealt with critically within the space of a travelling exhibition.

Labor as an Overlooked Entry Point into the Modern Age in the Works of Arendt and Foucault

Abstract This paper explores Arendt’s and Foucault’s thinking through the lens of the modern labor paradigm. Even if the question of labor is a less prominent path in both thinkers’ research, it leads to the heart of the modern era as they both understand it. In their respective fields, Arendt and Foucault sketch a similar link between the beginning of the modern age and the transformation of the notion of labor. While Arendt directly examines the modern glorification of labor and the emergence of the labor society, Foucault provides numerous analyses of labor as an instrument and target of disciplinary society, along with an epistemic distinction of modernity deeply connected to the term, ‘labor.’ This joint reading contributes to what might be called their philosophies of labor, as well as to the ongoing debate about the nature and meaning of labor in contemporary society.

Strike Insurance: The Labor Question and the Limits of Insurance

Strike Insurance: The Labor Question and the Limits of Insurance

The colonial labour question: Trade and social expenditure in interwar Africa

Access to education and health care are core development goals of the United Nations since its inception. Today, almost all countries have education and health systems in place. In former colonies, the historical roots of these systems can often be traced back to colonial times. In this article, we argue that spending on social services for the local population was seen as a necessary condition to expand the trade-based colonial economy especially in the initial stage of social services dating back to the interwar period. Using novel data on health and education expenditure in 35 former British and French African colonies during the height of their empires (1919–39), we show that trade volumes account for a large share in the variance of expenditure on education but not health services, and that present-day expenditures partly reflect these patterns. Our results suggest that similar mechanisms are at play within the two empires and differences between them are in degree rather than in kind.

Value and Productive Labour in the Era of Digital Technologies

This article revisits the so-called digital labour debate to clarify and problematise the many different positions in this debate. Synthesising the most promising arguments from the different positions in the debate, the article outlines a theory of digital media usage as exploited, value-producing labour. In doing so, the article criticises the Autonomist Marxist tradition and argues for the utility of a value-form theoretical approach to the question of free digital labour. In conclusion, the article argues for more analytical attention to the ways in which technological developments in contemporary capitalism can engender new processes of production and thereby also new types of unpaid value-producing labour.

‘Sandrine Bonnaire regained’: space and mobility in Sans toit ni loi and Prendre le large

ABSTRACT This article considers the parallels that can be drawn between two characters portrayed by Sandrine Bonnaire at distinct junctures in her film career: Mona, a young homeless woman whose wanderings are recounted retrospectively after her frozen corpse is discovered at the start of Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985); and Édith, a middle-aged woman who relocates to Morocco to keep her job with an offshored French textile factory in Gaël Morel’s Prendre le large/Catch the Wind (2017). It considers Mona and Édith in the context of a stasis-mobility dynamic identified as central to both films, reflects on the political implications of their mobility and considers a more proximate notion of space, with reference to the theory of haptic visuality explored previously. Prendre le large illustrates the limits of the palimpsestic star image and the recuperative possibilities of a film depicting an immersive encounter with a foreign space. I aim to demonstrate how the quite specific questions of labour and relocation broached in these films point to broader existential issues pertaining to identity and movement, as well as to consider what the two films, in dialogue with each other, might add to current debates around precarity in contemporary cinema.

Care, agency, and social reproduction in the H-2A context: A case study from Ohio

This paper uses the qualitative results of a survey of 285 H-2A workers in Ohio to explore questions of care, social reproduction, and agency within agricultural guestwork. Drawing on frameworks developed in labor and feminist geography, it examines how H-2A workers create community and develop skills of social reproduction during their time in the United States. Countering the common narratives of H-2A worker as victims or stoic, long suffering laborers, the research draws attention to the relational and emotional lives of the men who do this work. By highlighting affective and social dimensions of the guestworker experience, it argues for an approach to questions of agricultural labor that emphasizes the agency, range of experiences, and humanity of the people who participate in the H-2A program.

Educators' invisible labour: A systematic review

AbstractThe hidden or overlooked nature of many of educators' professional activities complicates the already difficult task of supporting educators' labour—in both K‐12 and higher education settings. These efforts can be understood as types of invisible labour. Following PRISMA standards, we conducted a systematic literature review to answer a single research question: How have scholars framed educators' professional activities in terms of invisible labour? This systematic review searched 10 educational databases and identified 16 peer‐reviewed journal articles spanning 2011–2021. From thematic analysis of these studies, we developed a model of five types of invisibility that intersect and mask educators' professional efforts: background, care, precarious, identity and remote labour. The review also showed several overall themes related to educators' invisible labour, which we discuss in connection to the literature: effort is often semivisible, invisibility is subjective, effort by marginalised educators is often overlooked, labour in unexpected places often means effort is overlooked, and there are layers of factors masking effort. We then discuss implications for practice, starting with five invisible labour questions to prompt reflection, then how to apply invisible labour as an improvement lens for identifying needs, allocating resources, analysing jobs and tasks, and evaluating performance.

The 1973 Migrant Workers’ Conference and Histories of Multiculturalism

Nowhere is the alliance between leftist organisations, trade unions, migrant workers’ clubs and ethnic welfare societies better represented than in the migrant workers’ conferences held in 1973 and 1975. This article argues for the historic importance of these overlooked moments in the history of twentieth-century labour migration. It explores the inter-ethnic and social justice aims of grassroots multiculturalism in Australia – a model that has been lost in subsequent official renderings of multiculturalism. What was the social and political position of non-Anglo migrant labourers and the migrant rights activists representing their interests? How did they engage with the labour movement and the Far Left? What political alliances formed around this question of migrant labour and migrant welfare for ethnic minority workers? And what were the outcomes of these conferences? This article will explore the improbable alliances and tensions that formed the migrant rights movement in the early 1970s; track its fracturing after the mid-1970s, when economic crises rendered its more ambitious redistributive aims unachievable; and examine how the ideological direction of state-endorsed multiculturalism diverted its inter-ethnic social justice agenda.

Rightless rurality: the illegalization of Myanmar migrant laborers in Thailand’s agro-industry

ABSTRACT This paper explores relations of production in contemporary agrarian capitalism through the case of rural-rural migration from Myanmar to Thailand. It focuses on the often-overlooked rural proletariat, in this case, illegalized migrant laborers. It shows how migrants live and work in precarity, and argues that their social position is a result of practices of illegalization deployed by state authorities, local police, and farmers, which control and immobilize migrants socio-economically, spatially and politically. The paper adds to debates on the agrarian question of labor, stressing capital and (il)licit law enforcement as co-constitutive in shaping exploitation in the agro-industry.

RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS IN THE CONCEPT OF THE FUTURE SOCIETY IN THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF THE 19THAND BEGINNING OF THE 20TH CENTURIES

Based on the analysis of the works of the classics of Marxism, the works of theorists and historians of German social democracy, articles by priests of the Catholic Church and representatives of Christian socialism in Germany at the end of the 19th century, theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, Russian and foreign researchers of German social democracy and the labor question, an attempt is shown to a departure from the orthodox Marxist policy of the German Social Democracy of the late 19th-early 20th century regarding religion, the church, religious organizations and believers towards a more pragmatic party policy aimed at attracting faithful Catholic workers into their ranks. In German Social Democracy, after the repeal of the law against the Socialists, which fell as a result of joint political actions against the policy of the government of Otto von Bismarck, a coalition of opposition bourgeois and clerical parties, the restoration of existing voting rights, in the interests of growing party ranks and strengthening the influence of the Social Democrats in local Landtag and the Reichstag, created the opportunity to propagate socialist ideas among the workers, who were under the strong influence of the church. The question arose: what kind of party policy should be pursued in the future with regard to believers so that this does not contradict the program of the party and does not reduce the quality of its party ranks. These questions served as the subject of discussion in the party and led to the subsequent adjustment of its party program, the exclusion from it of the provision on the reactionary nature of all other classes of society, except for the proletariat. The problem was to develop such a policy of the party towards the church and believers that it would not contradict the basic Marxist postulates on this issue and at the same time would not interfere with the attraction of believers to the party, especially from rural areas that were under the strong influence of the clergy.

Theorising Digital Dispossession: An Enquiry into the Datafication of Accumulation by Dispossession

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of work and labour was being deeply pondered upon. The demarcations that emerged out of this juncture led to a bifurcation of labour into ‘essential workers’, who are pushed into precarity from the threat of disease and contractual uncertainty in employment, and those who ‘work from home’. While geo-spatial segregation of these distinctions is contingent upon the specific relation of the nature of work with datafication, we are impelled to ponder upon the role that the accumulation of surplus value plays in this process. More specifically we must ask, what role does digital labour play in the datafication and datafied reorganization of work and workplaces? The inadequateness of data colonialism as a theoretical tool that accounts for the historical-materialist and dialectical roots of extraction and accumulation of user data requires a retheorization of the process. In this paper, I shall examine the ontological inadequacies of the metaphors of colonialism, and its extractivist logic, being transposed and mapped onto the studies of datafication. Following this I shall explore ‘digital dispossession’ as a convergence of Digital Capitalism and the neoliberal reorganization of digitized social labour, alongside its necropolitical implications. Drawing upon David Harvey’s theorization of ‘Accumulation by Dispossession’, I argue for a classical Marxist interpretation of datafication as a new reorganization of capitalist accumulation that acts and appropriates surplus generated by prosumers through the unpaid and discursive digital labour performed on digital platforms.

International organizations and the question of child labor in the Iranian carpet industry

ABSTRACT This article examines child labor in the Iranian carpet industry, from around 1890 to 1930. During this period, child labor was shaped by a combination of local and global factors, including the involvement of international organizations of various kinds. Whereas European carpet firms, under the protection of British diplomats in Iran, employed and exploited Iranian children, British missionaries attempted to alleviate the physical harm that befell child laborers and treated them in missionary hospitals. In the years following the First World War, the International Labour Organization approached the Iranian government with a direct request to curb the practice, and British diplomats supervised and reported on what they saw as an improvement in the working conditions of these children. I argue that both child labor and the attempts to curb it were intrinsically linked to children’s bodies – their abilities, health, and protection. Children’s supple fingers were considered ideal for carpet knotting, and the damage this labor caused young bodies was central to the discourse on improving their labor conditions. This article uses the lens of childhood history to shed light on some of the intricacies of the attempts to regulate child labor in Iran and to analyze Western observers’ views on this issue.

Formations of Feminist Strike: Connecting Diverse Practices, Contexts, and Geographies

This introduction to the special issue on Feminist Strike takes up the question of what remains marginalized and overlooked within dominant discourses on contemporary feminist protests. Drawing on experiences of and approaches to feminist refusal that involve questions of labour, we propose the ways in which conceptualizations of feminist strike can be employed as a lens to build a conversation between different practices, scales, and geographies, particularly across postcolonial and postsocialist contexts. Through a reading of Aliki Saragas’s film Strike a Rock (2017) about the women living around the Marikana miners’ settlement in the aftermath of a major strike, we explore how notions of feminist strike can be expanded by situating Black women’s struggles in South Africa within a long tradition of women’s resistance and showing how political resistance is bound to questions of reproductive work. To understand the intersection of postsocialist, post-conflict, and (pre-)Europeanization transformations, we consider the case of a large-scale strike and public demonstrations against the bankruptcy of the Croatian shipyard Uljanik that took place in 2018 and 2019. Our perspectives on the Marikana and the Uljanik strikes show how women in both places practise a politics of refusal and resistance against ruination, violence, and defeat. In the last section, we summarize the contents of the articles that comprise the special issue.

Making virtual celebrity: Platformization and intermediation in digital cultural production

Focusing on intermediation in cultural production in a digital ecology consisting of multiple platforms mediating simultaneously converging and diverging industries, this study critically engages with the thesis that platforms act primarily as a disintermediation vector in a linear value chain within a single industry. With two empirical cases of intermediation in the emerging virtual celebrity sector – one organizing the recursive loop of prosumption, the other articulating authenticity against technological standardization and overproduction, the study shifts the focus away from questions of labor and agency of individual creators and unpacks the conditions of intermediation in the context of new industrial models of value creation, commodification, and division of labor. The empirical cases demonstrate that the implications of platforms for digital cultural production are paradoxical – while their business models lead to a centralized process of value capture, their flexible organizational forms may afford new distributed patterns of value creation.

The economy of migration. Knowledge, accounting, and debt

ABSTRACT What we propose in this paper is to elaborate on what it means to consider ‘migration’ as part of an oikonomia. This is not an ‘economic perspective on migration’ but a genealogy of migration as a way of managing people in light of both colonial divides and questions of labor and race. First, we argue that ‘migration’ is constituted as an effect of accounting, of the registration of comings and goings and of belonging within a reference space of governed territories. We illustrate how migration is born out of the specific accounting inventions made by Ernst Ravenstein. Second, we argue that the accounting of a singular thing called migration only starts to take off when nineteenth-century empire reaches its tipping point. Third, we illustrate how this accounting constitutes a form of double bookkeeping. To record or register migration is to make a record of what the nation would be if the people marked as migrants were not present, and it is to simultaneously record what it costs the nation now that they are. In this oikonomia, migration is enacted as a form of debt.

Labour and value: new challenges for work and industrial relations in a post-pandemic era

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic, a highly disruptive crisis event, significantly impacted economies, societies and organisations globally. It also brought questions of labour and its value to the fore, particularly as workers from key occupational groups sought to protect the most vulnerable individuals in society. It also triggered a mass re-evaluation of the meaning we assign to work. But to what extent has a fundamental re-evaluation of work, labour and value taken place in the aftermath of this crisis? In this introduction to the Special Issue of the 2023 AIRAANZ Conference, we examine this question, exploring new challenges facing labour and value in the aftermath of the pandemic and inviting scholarly discussion on emerging ways of valuing labour that promotes decent work and sustainability.

Revisiting Enduring Labour Questions and Social Reproduction Dynamics in Rural Zimbabwe’s Post Land Reform Context: Implications on Citizen Welfare and Wellbeing

Enduring agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics in former settler colonies like Zimbabwe have always been a subject of much scholarly interest. Two decades after Zimbabwe’s controversial fast track land reform programme (FTLRP), the agrarian labour questions and social reproduction dynamics are receiving renewed attention. This is partly attributable to an uneasy political transition, neo-liberal economic trajectories, and the perceived reversals of the policies of the Robert Mugabe administration. With these changes occurring, questions are arising on how this is implicating on agrarian labour and social reproduction in the resettlement areas created by the FTLRP. In a context of trying to understand the outcomes of land and agrarian reform framed within the transformative social policy conceptual framework, this article explores emergent agrarian labour and social reproduction dynamics in the two rural districts of Goromonzi and Zvimba in rural Zimbabwe. Using an interpretive research paradigm and a mixed methods research approach, the study elicited responses from 200 small to medium scale farmers who are beneficiaries of the FTLRP. Arguing from the position that land and agrarian reforms are an overlooked vector of social policy, the article investigated the extent to which the FTLRP has facilitated the creation of employment opportunities, enhanced the productive and reproductive capacities of land reform beneficiaries, enabled wealth distribution and improved rural livelihoods. The article shows that despite the emergent capitalist trajectories and the continued super exploitation of labour reminiscent of the settler colonial era, empirical field-based evidence suggests that redistributive land reform has contributed to socio-economic transformation and enhanced citizens welfare and wellbeing. This is shown as having been evident in the realm of agrarian labour and social reproduction.

Review of Harvesting freedom: The life of a migrant worker in Canada by Gabriel Allahdua

The question of migration, land, labour, and food are intricately intertwined. In this book Harvesting Freedom: The Life of a Migrant Farmworker in Canada is a living narrative that recounts life in St. Lucia, and gradually reveals the enmeshed connections of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism manifested in Canada’s farm labour system. The book narrated by Gabriel Allahdua, a migrant farmworker becoming an incomparable migrant justice activist, is evocative of the power of critical research methodologies and knowledge production. Edward Dunsworth in his collaboration with Allahdua, brings to us, a first-hand account in a book format, all while setting up the stage and weaving a rich scholarship in the introduction. This is how decolonizing knowledge can look like in academia.

ChatGPT Isn't Magic

ChatGPT Isn't Magic