Workplace Exploitation Research Articles

The trauma of exploitation: Emotional geographies of temporary migration and workplace unfreedom

This paper advances a focus on emotions as a key dimension of the actualisation of workplace exploitation experienced by temporary migrants. In doing so, we extend understandings of forced labour, unfreedom and migration and their concern for the operation of coercion in employment relations. While political-economic and legal accounts of work and oppression can tell us much about systems that underpin the occurrence of exploitation, we argue that the fluidity of unfreedoms in labour exploitation are fundamentally embodied and shaped by emotional experiences and manipulation. In order to advance this emotional account, we draw on interviews with people holding work and study visas who have experienced workplace exploitation in Aotearoa New Zealand, a context where the rapid growth in temporary migration has been associated with growing evidence of labour market abuse. Our paper addresses three key emotional dimensions of workplace exploitation that emerged in this research: inducement into exploitation, entrapment and the emotional sustenance of exploitation. Through this account we demonstrate how unfreedom is felt in the lives of temporary migrants and point towards the need to rethink both scholarly accounts of forced labour and policy responses to the workplace exploitation of temporary migrants.

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession. Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

Understanding Farmworker Fluid Intake Using Intersectionality Theory.

In the United States, Latino farmworkers are disproportionately at risk for death from heat-related illnesses. To elicit Latino farmworker perceptions on their fluid intake and heat stress, a qualitative descriptive, community-informed research study was conducted in eastern North Carolina. A total of 28 Mexican farmworkers participated in one of 4 focus groups. Using content analysis and guided by Intersectionality theory, themes and subthemes were identified. The first theme was Absence of Protection, represented by 2 subthemes: (1a) Intense Climate Considerations; and (1b) Workplace Exploitation. The second theme, Freedom to Drink, included 2 subthemes: (2a) Distance and Distaste; and (2b) Culture of Farm Work. Farmworkers perceived extreme outdoor temperatures as the greatest workplace barrier to staying hydrated and reported water accessibility and quality issues. Farmworker fluid intake was influenced by interlocking social categories and power systems. Policy recommendations that prevent farmworker heat-related illness and promote hydration are discussed.

Aligned: Sex Workers’ Lessons for the Gig Economy

Society’s perception of a type of work and the people who engage in money-generating activities has an impact on whether and how the law protects (or does not protect) the people who perform those activities. Work can be legitimized or delegitimized. Workers are protected or left out to dry depending upon their particular “hustle.” This Article argues that gig workers and sex workers face similar challenges within the legal system and that these groups can and should collaborate to their collective advantage when seeking reforms. Gig workers have been gaining legitimacy while sex workers still primarily operate in the shadow economy. This Article digs into the sometimes-conflicting desires of individuals working as sex workers and gig workers to inform how gig workers can achieve the power and economic independence necessary to prevent workplace exploitation.

Chinese Workers and Their “Linguistic Labour”: Philippine Online Gambling and Zambian Onsite Casinos

Our paper examines the relationship between Chinese gambling capital, workplace exploitation, and labour migration. Focusing on Philippine online gambling and Zambian onsite casinos, we argue that the gambling sector’s capital accumulation relies on the “linguistic labour” provided by Chinese workers to facilitate online or onsite communication between the players and the firms. Chinese-funded gambling firms continually need to import Chinese workers through a combination of legal and illegal channels. After migrating, workers are disempowered from seeking outside remediation due to connections between the firms and the host state’s elites, and because of gambling’s illegal status in China. Firms can unilaterally increase working hours and impose unfair workplace arrangements on Chinese workers. Gambling capital’s reliance on the linguistic labour of workers and the industry’s murky legal status open up avenues for exploitation and multiple sites of extraction for Chinese capital.

Canadian Immigrant Youth and the Education-Employment Nexus

Canada’s population of immigrant youth between the ages of 15 and 35 is approaching 3 million and growing rapidly. Youth are critical to Canada’s goal of recruiting immigrants to expand the economy, but there is insufficient information about their school and work experiences and inadequate support to ensure their successful integration into the workforce. This literature review investigates the connection between education and work for Canadian immigrant youth. It documents obstacles in the form of underfunded settlement services, lack of diversity in the school curriculum, inadequate English-language instruction at all levels of schooling, racially and ethnically biased streaming of students into the lowest educational track in high school, rejection of foreign school transcripts and work credentials, employers’ prejudice and discrimination, and workplace exploitation. The number and magnitude of these systemic impediments create significant obstacles for immigrant youth. A major cause of these issues is insufficient funding for immigrant services under neoliberal economic policies. The outcomes for immigrant youth include failure to finish secondary and postsecondary education, a long-term cycle of employment in low-skill, low-wage jobs, and socioeconomic hardship such as poverty and homelessness. The authors call for greater attention to this critical population and make nine recommendations that would contribute to solutions in each major issue area impacting the education of Canadian immigrant youth and their entry into the workforce.

Undervalued and Overrepresented: Voices of Migrant Domestic Workers in India

In India and globally, domestic work continues to be one of the professions that is rooted in the history of colonialism, slavery, and servitude due to lack of workplace regulation and one-on-one power negotiation between the employer and the worker. Thousands of households in urban India are dependent upon domestic workers for tasks such as cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and caregiving. This profession predominantly consists of women from low socioeconomic families, and scheduled caste and tribe. Additionally, due to urbanization and a decline in the agricultural industry, majority of the domestic workers have migrated from various parts of the country due to poverty. The migrant women domestic workers (MWDWs) are often faced with exploitative conditions at the workplace and their social environment. Previous studies and policy initiatives have focused on workplace exploitation. However, there are challenges that go beyond the confines of the employer’s house that adversely impact the well-being of the MWDW. Using a social work lens that emphasizes the impact of the sociocultural, and economic environment on an individual’s wellbeing, the current study aims to go beyond the direct employer–employee relationship. This study analyses data from 91 MWDWs from 6 states in India—(i) Bihar, (ii) Jharkhand, (iii) Karnataka, (iv) Madhya Pradesh, (v) Odisha, and (vi) Uttar Pradesh. The results of the study contribute towards (i) providing an insight on the everyday hardships of the MWDW (ii) emphasizing the need to diversify the discourse of domestic workers’ rights and well-being to include the role of the family, community, state, and national level infrastructure, and (iii) recommending alternative approaches for securing decent work and overall well-being that can supplement government legislation.

Work relations and helping in the lives of Amazon rural women workers

Changes in methods of agricultural production have impacted on the lives of those involved in this sector. New social relations, technologies, values and landscapes have been introduced as well as potential risks to health. Female workers have a specific experience that requires a closer analysis to understand their situation. The research addresses the interrelationship of health, work, and the environment of women agriculturalists in a rural Amazonian community. This focus allows the identification and understanding of relations between the women and the actors with whom they share daily activities and the implications for health, work, and self-image. Using qualitative methods the experiences of 47 women were captured through collective interviews, which were analysed by Nucleus of Meaning Analysis (NMA), adapted from Categorical Content Analysis. Work is central to the lives of the women workers but is attributed with different meanings depending on the context and the relationship. It was found that the relationship with employers increases the risk of workplace exploitation; with male partners work is characterised as ‘helping’. Work with female co-workers increases a sense of identity, strengthens social bonds and an ability to solve problems. In conclusion, in addition to issues related to production methods, the subjective relational universe of these workers is marked by a complexity that impacts on their lives and health. The authors suggest that research on the impact of daily life and workplace on health considers the different and complex relations and subjective demands, especially in contexts endowed with uniqueness.

Locals and Migrants in the Coalmining Town of Enugu (Nigeria): Worker Protest and Urban Identity, 1915–1929

AbstractThis article focuses on the varied workforce in and around the Enugu Government Colliery, located in south-eastern Nigeria and owned by the British colonial state. Opened in 1915 at Udi and in 1917 at Iva Valley and Obwetti, the mines were in a region with a long history of slave raids, population shifts, colonization, and ensuing changes in local forms of political organization. The mines brought together an eclectic mixture of forced and voluntary unskilled labor, prisoners, unskilled contract workers, and voluntary clerical workers and artisans. Moreover, the men were from different ethno-linguistic groups. By taking into account this complex background, the article describes the gradual process by which this group of inexperienced coalminers used industrial-protest strategies that reflected their habituation to the colonial workplace. They organized strikes against the village men, who, as supervisors, exploited them in the coalmines. Their ability to reach beyond their “traditional” rural identities as “peasants” to attack the kinsmen who exploited them indicates the extent to which the complex urban and industrial environment challenged indigenous identities based on locality as well as rural status systems and gender ideologies. One of the major divisions to overcome was the one between supposedly backward “locals”, men who came from villages close to the mine, and more experienced “foreigners” coming from more distant areas in Nigeria: the work experience as “coalmen” led “locals” to see themselves as “modern men” too, and to position themselves in opposition to authoritarian village leaders. The article thus traces the contours of the challenges confronting a new working class as it experimented with unfamiliar forms of affiliation, trust, and association with people with whom it shared new, industrial experiences. It investigates the many ways that “local” men maneuvered against the authoritarian control of chiefs, forced labor, and workplace exploitation by “native” and expatriate staff.

Learning in Struggle: Argentina’s New Worker Cooperatives as Transformative Learning Organizations

This article considers Argentina’sempresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores(worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERTs) astransformative learning organizations. ERTs are illustrative of how workers’ conversions of capitalist firms into worker cooperatives—especially conversions emerging from troubled firms and in moments of deep socio-economic crises—transform workers (from managed employees to self-managed workers), work organizations (from capitalist businesses to labour-managed firms), and communities (from depleted to revitalized and self-provisioning localities).Theoretically, the study is grounded in class-struggle, workplace learning, and social action learning approaches. These theoretical perspectives help the study work through how workplace conversions by workers, when converting troubled investor-owned or proprietary firms into worker coops, act as catalysts for contesting workplace exploitation and capitalist crises, while also beginning to move beyond them by forging new social relations of production and exchange. In the case of Argentina’s ERTs, crises in the political economy and micro-economic crises at the point of production during the collapse of the neoliberal model at the turn of the millennium heightened workers’ self-awareness of their situations of exploitation and motivated collective action. As a result, new worker cooperatives were created that also stimulated the social, cultural, and economic renewal of surrounding communities.The study’s research method relies on extended case studies of four diverse ERTs, which included ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews. Observations of daily workflows were conducted, as well as interviews and informal conversations with founding and newer ERT workers. In a more structured portion of the interview protocol, key-informants were asked to reflect on how they had personally changed after being involved in the ERT, and how production practices and involvement with the community had transformed in the process of conversion.The article concludes by outlining how worker, organizational, and community transformations emerge from workers’ processes ofinformal learningandlearning in struggleas they collectively strive to overcome macro- and micro-economic crises and learn to become cooperators. This learning, the study shows, occurs in two ways:intra-cooperativelyvia informal workplace learning, andinter-cooperativelybetween workers from different ERTs and with surrounding communities. The self-management forged by ERTs thus embodies new, cooperative, and community-centered values and practices for these workers that, in turn, sketch out different possibilities for economic and productive life in Argentina.

Work or Place? Assessing the Concurrent Effects of Workplace Exploitation and Area-of-Residence Economic Inequality on Individual Health

Building on previous multilevel studies in social epidemiology, this cross-sectional study examines, simultaneously, the contextual effects of workplace exploitation and area-of-residence economic inequality on social inequalities in health among low-income nursing assistants. A total of 868 nursing assistants recruited from 55 nursing homes in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia were surveyed between 1999 and 2001. Using a cross-classified multilevel design, the authors tested the effects of area-of-residence (income inequality and racial segregation), workplace (type of nursing home ownership and managerial pressure), and individual-level (age, gender, race/ethnicity, health insurance, length of employment, social support, type of nursing unit, preexisting psychopathology, physical health, education, and income) variables on health (self-reported health and activity limitations) and behavioral outcomes (alcohol use and caffeine consumption). Findings reveal that overall health was associated with both workplace exploitation and area-of-residence income inequality; area of residence was associated with activity limitations and binge drinking; and workplace exploitation was associated with caffeine consumption. This study explicitly accounts for the multiple contextual structure and effects of economic inequality on health. More work is necessary to replicate the current findings and establish robust conclusions on workplace and area of residence that might help inform interventions.

Managing the Toll of Stripping

This article examines three psychospatial boundary-setting strategies exotic dancers rely on to manage the difficulties of working in strip bars: what the author elaborates as the “toll” of stripping. These include setting personal rules, “othering” of fellow performers, and creating a dancer persona. Dancers set rules to personally determine the amount of sexual and emotional contact they are willing to have with customers to prevent workplace exploitation and manage the toll of stripping. Othering involves constructing oneself as superior to one's peers, and the dancer persona provides an internal boundary that separates the “authentic” from the stripper self.

‘Just a Temp?’

Women’s continued high rate of participation in non-standard employment, especially temporary and part-time jobs, attracts much critical concern. Many social analysts of work regard non-standard employment as heightening risks of economic insecurity, workplace exploitation and social marginalization. Labour economists regard temporary and part-time work as comprising ‘secondary’labour markets and workers in this sector as ‘secondary earners’.Many analysts consider women’s over-representation in this sector to be a consequence of women’s exclusion from primary sector employment and its expected better conditions. This article develops an interpretive analysis of a qualitative study of 45 women temporary workers in New Zealand in 2001–2002.The experiences and aspirations with respect to work of this particular sample of women currently engaged in temporary employment relations indicate some divergent trajectories from those more commonly observed. In contrast to most current depictions of women and temporary employment, the findings indicate that some women are striving to practise their own preferential employment arrangements in ways that actively challenge conventional economic assumptions of employment behaviour and traditional trajectories of women’s lives.The article proposes that these efforts may indicate alternative oppositional strategies to normative acceptance of qualitatively degraded jobs and employment relations.