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International Feminist Journal of
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Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries
Genevieve LeBaron
a
a
Liu Inst it ut e f or Global Issues, Universit y of Brit ish
Columbia, 6476 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T
1Z2Canada. Email:
Published online: 16 Aug 2013.
To cite this article: Int ernat ional Feminist Journal of Polit ics (2013): Unf ree
Labour Beyond Binaries, Int ernat ional Feminist Journal of Polit ics, DOI:
10. 1080/ 14616742. 2013. 813160
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Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries
INSECURITY, SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND LABOUR MARKET
RESTRUCTURING
GENEVIEVE LEBARON
University of British Columbia, Canada
Abstract ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Departing from liberal accounts that understand ‘modern-day slavery’ and unfree labour
in isolation from markets and shifting global networks of production and reproduction,
this article highlights the need to investigate how far and in what ways the deepening
and extension of neoliberal capitalism has given rise to the contemporary spectrum
of unfree labour relations. Building on feminist political economy frameworks, the
article argues that the neoliberal resurgence of unfree labour has been rooted in fundamental shifts in power, production and social reproduction whereby capital’s security
has increasingly come to rely upon the deepening of labour market insecurity for
certain sections of the population. It highlights the need to understand unfree labour
within the context of broader relations of inequality and hierarchical social relations,
particularly along the lines of race, gender and citizenship, arguing that broader and
more systemic evaluations of labour and unfreedom are essential to understanding
the variegated power relations that underpin the most severe forms of exploitation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keywords
feminist political economy, unfree labour, modern-day slavery, forced labour, migrant
labour, human rights, supply chains, multinational corporations, global political
economy, intersectionality, gender, feminist theory
INTRODUCTION
Unfree labour relations have been widely documented within contemporary
global networks of production and social reproduction. The global production
of gold, cotton, footwear, diamonds, garments, bricks, sugarcane, coffee,
chocolate, coal and many other commodities are now thought to be heavily
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2013
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dependent on various forms of unfree labour, while another body of research
has established its prominence in household and reproductive labour in cities
like New York and Dubai.1 Indeed, although exact levels are infamously difficult to document, it is widely recognized that unfree labour currently exists on
a considerable scale and that bondage and coercion are deepening rather than
diminishing within the global labour market. Yet, in spite of rising public and
scholarly awareness, there remains a considerable gap between the realities of
unfree labour and its portrayal in much recent writing.
In spite of unfree labour’s deepening significance to global economic
activity, accounts within the liberal ‘neo-slavery’ approach – both scholarly
and those common among advocacy, government and business organizations
– continue to overlook the systemic relations of power and coercion surrounding unfree labour, conceptualizing it as a series of individualized instances of
domination rather than as a social relationship of insecurity and exploitation
(cf. Bales 2004; Bowe 2007; Bales and Soodalter 2009). Large quantities of
recent output on the central but nebulous topic of ‘modern day’, ‘new’ and
‘neo-’ slavery within the broad field of liberal human rights scholarship
present the issue as a matter of engineering a suitable balance of market and
policy mechanisms to combat the most extreme human rights abuses associated with these labour practices. But in isolating the worst forms of exploitation from the broad matrix of unfreedom that characterizes the bottom rungs
of the global labour market, such accounts leave unfree labour’s social, political and economic foundations unquestioned. Grounded in a classical liberal
conception of states as benign and neutral actors, neo-slavery accounts
often overlook the role of states – especially through labour and immigration
policy – in fostering conditions in which the most severe forms of exploitation
can thrive. In short, perpetuating the somewhat fanciful notion that contemporary relations of unfree labour have been epiphenomenal to recent processes
of global economic restructuring, liberal accounts obscure more than they
reveal about the contemporary political economy of unfree labour.
Neo-slavery accounts have yielded particularly inaccurate portrayals of the
role of social hierarchies in shaping the patterns associated with unfree labour
today. In spite of growing evidence, for instance, that women, girls, migrant
workers and indigenous people are disproportionately concentrated among
the most unfree forms of labour,2 liberal scholars have characterized contemporary unfree labour as an ‘equal opportunity slavery’ where ‘race and gender
matter little’ (Bales and Soodalter 2009: 6). Such accounts perpetuate a series
of inaccurate assumptions about gender, race and labour market insecurity, as
well as reinforce the notion that gendered and racialized forms of labour exist
somehow outside of the capitalist economy. For this reason, feminist international political economy (IPE) analysis of unfree labour sensitive to deepening biases in macro-economic policy and shifting gender and racial orders is
urgently required.
To this end and building on feminist political economy (FPE) frameworks
that understand ‘markets not as natural forces, but as socially and politically
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instituted’ sets of relations (Prügl 2011: 113), this article attempts to clear the
conceptual ground around the fundamental point that unfree labour has not
been incidental to capitalist globalization. It highlights the need to investigate
unfree labour as an extreme result of economic and political transformations
that have reshaped the lower rungs of the global labour market. I argue that
while scholars have pointed to unfree labour’s apparent acceleration over
recent decades (cf. Bales 2004; van den Anker 2004; Bales and Soodalter
2009), accounts have generally failed to link this expansion to the broader
shifts in global relations of production and social reproduction in which
unfree labour is fundamentally rooted, including the redesigning of labour
market and immigration policies in ways that deepen insecurity and curtail
workers’ ability to exert rights. To grasp these dynamics, I argue that unfreedom in labour processes and markets needs to be more systematically evaluated and understood, particularly in relation to structural hierarchies such as
race, gender and citizenship.
The article is divided into two main sections. The first section defines and
details the insights that a FPE lens can offer to a study of unfree labour, proposing an integrated understanding of free and unfree labour as a fruitful
starting point for a deeper conceptualization. Drawing on US and Canadian
trends, the second section provides an exploratory analysis of unfree labour
as a phenomenon deeply embedded in the labour market shifts associated
with neoliberal capitalism.
BUILDING ON THE STRENGTHS OF FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY
Free and unfree labour are commonly approached in binary terms, wherein
those forms of labour considered ‘unfree’ are also generally thought to be epiphenomenal to the contemporary functioning and historical development of
the global capitalist economy. In the vast human rights literature documenting
the rise of ‘modern-day slavery’, for instance, unfree labour is conceptualized
as having a fixed, stable and timeless ontology. Slavery is defined as ‘the total
control of one person by another for the purpose of economic exploitation’
(Bales 2004: 6) and is thought to have originated in ancient times and persisted
relatively unchanged into the present. As a moral, cultural or quantitative (i.e.
rooted in population growth) phenomenon rather than a political economic
one, unfree labour often appears as a residual feature of previous historical
eras, relatively separate from the capitalist market in which it currently
happens to thrive.
Far from being confined to mainstream approaches, the issue of binary
classification also extends into Marxist analysis of unfree labour. Although
Marxist scholars extensively debated the relation of unfree labour to capitalist
production in the late 1990s, the explanatory capacity of these debates was
curtailed by ‘formal abstractionism’ (Banaji 2010) and a series of methodological limitations.3 In nearly all accounts, concepts took the methodological form
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of a binary. In Rao’s work (1999), for instance, unfree labour is simply defined
negatively in relation to ‘free production relations’. Other authors have focused
on the form of surplus appropriation as the key demarcation between free and
unfree labour, claiming that labour is free if surplus is extracted by solely
‘economic’ means, while if ‘extra economic’ means are involved, unfree
labour is present.4 The most pressing issue here, aside from a lack of heuristic
clarity, is that such ideal type categorizations and modes of investigation have
generally been more concerned with fracturing social reality into binaries
(‘free/unfree’ and ‘capitalist/non capitalist’) than with shedding light into
the actually existing labour relations people confront in their daily lives.
Not only do such approaches create little room to understand the liminal
forms of labour that do not fall neatly into either side of the binary (particularly feminized forms of work such as unpaid domestic work and sex work)
but they also tend to gloss over the substantial unfreedoms that exist in
so-called free labour.
To understand unfree labour today and its role in the global economy, there is
a need to overcome the rigid binary posited between free and unfree labour.
Because considerable continuity exists between free and unfree labour when
these categories are substantiated in relation to embodied labour in the real
world, these are best approached dialectically, as outcomes of a single set of
social property relations. Recognizing that capitalism, as a mode of production
in the historical sense,5 has involved various modalities of labour – each
characterized by distinct forms and degrees of unfreedom – it is useful to
approach free and unfree labour as part of a single continuum of capitalist
relations of labour exploitation (LeBaron 2011; see also Phillips 2013). As
Jens Lerche put it, it is necessary to acknowledge ‘the fluidity of actually occurring unfreedoms’ (2007: 447) that characterize diverse modalities of labour in
the capitalist global economy. This does not imply that the very real distinctions
between so-called free and unfree labour can be overlooked or subsumed into
one category. Rather, it is to note that capitalism has historically involved
diverse modalities of labour, characterized by different forms of surplus extraction and distinctive forms and degrees of exploitation, immobility, devaluation
and coercion and shaped by distinct hierarchies and gender orders. After all, the
modalities of labour comprising the capitalist mode of production are neither
analytically nor historically distinct, but rather have evolved in and through
each other as part of overall processes of social transformation.
Encouragingly, to claim that free and unfree labour comprise a spectrum of
relations is no longer completely unorthodox. The burgeoning literature on
unfree labour now contains a number of references to the need to conceptualize the ‘continuum’ of unfreedom that exists in global markets (cf. Skrivankova
2010; Phillips and Sakamoto 2012; Phillips 2013). Even the International
Labour Organisation (ILO)’s Cost of Coercion report notes that:
There is a continuum including both what can clearly be identified as forced
labour and other forms of labour exploitation and abuse. It may be useful to
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consider a range of possible situations with, at one end, slavery and slavery-like
practices and, at the other end, situations of freely chosen employment. (ILO
2009a: 8 –9)
However, although the continuities are increasingly alluded to, little thought
has been given to methods or criteria that afford a systematic evaluation of
unfreedom in labour processes and markets that can capture these crucial continuities. The remainder of this section proposes one means of doing so.
While feminist political economy work has rarely focused explicitly on
unfree labour, the framework provides key insights and a strong analytical
foundation for a study of labour and unfreedom in global markets. Departing
from masculinist political economists’ tendency to centralize a priori categories instead of exploring in historic specificity the social relations that
have upheld and contested capitalism, feminist political economy conceives
of ‘the material foundations of social life as the productive and reproductive
activities of everyday life’ (Ferguson 1999: 2) and emphasizes the ways that
the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social
struggle. In addition to FPE’s general analytic strengths and innovations,
I will argue that the method offers key insights to a study of labour unfreedom.
FPE’s success in documenting unwaged domestic labour as a constituent component of capital accumulation rather than something that exists as somehow
separate from or outside the market leads us towards the recognition that
capitalism, as a mode of production in the historical sense, has involved
various modalities of labour, each characterized by distinct layers and
degrees of unfreedom. It also focuses our attention towards the ways in
which labour market unfreedom is shaped by hierarchical social relations,
including relations to the state.
The Heuristic Advantages of Feminist Political Economy
‘Feminist political economy’ is admittedly an imperfect designation since there
are differences within the work that I am referring to through this term. I am
using this shorthand, however, to refer to the theorists and ideas associated
with a political economy perspective that emphasizes the interdependence of
production and reproduction in capitalist society and, intentionally breaking
from the structuralism and formalism common to much critical political
economy, has integrated into explanations of the global economy an analysis
of the productive and reproductive activities of daily life at its material foundation.6 This tradition is intellectually rooted in socialist feminism but reaches
its most robust and theoretically coherent expression in more recent work that
attempts to move beyond narrow conceptualizations of women’s oppression
and exploitation to develop an integrated analysis of the labour and social
relations involved in concrete and historically specific configurations of production and reproduction (cf. Bakker and Gill 2003). Synthesizing across this
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recent work, I outline three heuristic advantages of FPE for a study of unfree
labour, namely the framework’s conceptualization of: (1) labour as a phenomenon deeply enmeshed in and shaped by the broader relations of daily life;
(2) un- and not directly waged labour as central to market relations; and
(3) human beings’ complex and multiple subjectivities and agencies.
Rather than attempting to understand and explain the global political
economy exclusively in terms of the interplay between states and markets,
FPE centralizes the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life.
Rooted in the observation that political economy work has ‘largely failed to
fully integrate into explanations of the restructuring of world society the analysis of transformations in fundamental social processes and the mechanisms and
institutions upon which societies and communities as well as power and production, are built’ (Bakker and Gill 2003: 3), FPE has challenged the tendency
in much of political economy to omit from their conception of capitalism any
analysis of the social foundations of economic life. Drawing attention to the
senses in which ‘social relations are transitory and are transformed through
the activity of human beings, largely connected to and constituted by production
and social reproduction in a specified historical context’ (Bakker and Gill 2003:
22), FPE points to the necessity of conceptualizing accumulation processes in
nuanced, place-based and historical terms. For early feminist political economists, starting from the observation that in capitalism an enormous amount of
socially necessary labour – albeit unpaid, non-market labour – is performed
in private households, usually by women, a primary intention of integrating
an analysis of reproduction was to correct the sex-blindness of Marxist theory
by highlighting the roles and experiences of women in the capitalist economy.
However, more recent work has been more broadly focused on the inter-constitutions of production and reproduction as these form material foundations
through which states and markets are constituted (Bakker and Gill 2003: 4).
FPE has also emphasized the significance and historic specificity of the
capitalist separation between the productive and reproductive activities of
everyday life, which lies at the heart of gendered and racialized divisions of
labour involved in capitalist society. Noting that the rise and reproduction
of capitalism has involved fundamental changes in the ways that people
meet their subsistence and reproduce themselves and the role of the household
within these strategies, scholars like Maria Mies (1999) have argued that capitalism fundamentally undermines the unity between production and reproduction. FPE has demonstrated that the gendered, classed and racialized character
of this separation contributes to the ‘contradiction between the global accumulation of capital and the provisioning of stable conditions for social reproduction’ for the majority of the world’s population.7
A second and related analytical strength of the FPE approach is that it is well
suited to grasping the dynamics and importance of diverse modalities of
labour, especially unwaged labour, in the global political economy.
While Marxist approaches tend to assign methodological primacy to the
wage-earning class and have focused on the wage relationship itself as a
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defining feature of capitalism without taking into account the different modalities of unwaged labour upon which all production and exchange rest, FPE
recognizes that such a focus reproduces the liberal binary between the
private and the public and fails to problematize how states, markets and households are interrelated. Underpinned by this observation and its methodological
commitment to centralizing the activities of daily life, FPE has developed a
much broader understanding of labour under capitalism than other forms of
thought; an understanding that includes the relations of unwaged, not directly
waged and highly precarious labour, as well as forms of work (such as domestic and sex work) which are often imagined to exist somehow outside of
the capitalist mode of production (Agathangelou 2004; Peterson 2010). This
allows FPE to identify how forms of production and exploitation of labour
are related to class-based, racialized, gendered and sexualized aspects of
labour supply and control and to understand the variegated power relations
that apply to different workers.
A third methodological strength of the FPE tradition is its ability to grasp the
complex and multiple subjectivities and agencies of human subjects. Unlike
non-feminist streams of critical political economy that emphasize the methodological primacy of a disembodied, abstract conception of class, FPE conceives of capitalism as an ensemble of layered social relations. Feminist
political economists, for example, have documented the historical continuities
in the gendered and racial divisions of paid reproductive labour (Nakano Glenn
2002) and the ways that gender, citizenship and racialization shape the experiences and exploitation involved in domestic, sex and other forms of precarious
labour.8 These emphases make it possible to historicize the ways that class,
race and gender are constituted in and through each other differently in
varying spatial and temporal location, as well as to elucidate the significance
of racial hierarchies and gender orders as these have become ‘centrepieces of
capitalist rule’ (McNally 2006: 127).
In sum, as a framework that conceives of capitalism as an ensemble of
layered social relations and questions how social relations are produced and
reproduced, FPE attends to the incorporation of race and gender as fundamental organizing axes of the labour market and, in turn, to the ways that labour is
organized to create and re-create race and gender categories and relationships.
Because FPE grasps as internally and intimately related to capitalism the social
relations that other approaches have externalized and because it veers away
from mechanical causality in attempt to capture the dynamic flux of social
life, the framework offers rich and dynamic theoretical tools with which to
examine labour and unfreedom in the capitalist global economy.
Beyond Binaries: The Spectrum Of Labour Unfreedom
While feminist political economy provides a fruitful heuristic frame to investigate unfree labour, few authors within this tradition have focused explicitly
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on overcoming the binary between free and unfree labour. Because this binary
is so pervasive, however, it needs to be explicitly addressed. Although not
often invoked in discussions of feminist political economy, Karl Marx’s analysis of free and unfree labour in Capital Volume 1 usefully illustrates a relational (rather than binary-based) approach (1990).
While Marx certainly uses the adjective ‘free’ to describe wage labour, unlike
liberal and many Marxist writings on unfree labour that have tended to accept
free wage labour in capitalism as homogenously and substantively free and
then relegate labour scenarios where unfreedom is present as disconnected
instances of ‘slavery’ or unfree labour, Marx’s use of the adjective ‘free’ in
Capital does not suggest a binary between (free) waged and (unfree) slave
labour. Rather, though the tone of his writing is often overlooked, his usage
of the term ‘free labour’ varies between scathing irony that gestures towards
the severe constraints that wage labourers experience in both the realms of
production as well as exchange and more direct historical and analytical comparisons between waged labour and slavery. He describes three intersecting
forms of slavery in the Victorian era: child slavery, the ‘veiled slavery’ of
the waged workers and the pure and simple slavery of the plantation system
of the new world (Ferguson and McNally 2013). The ‘freedom’ of ‘so-called’
free labour, Marx notes, is conditioned and cut short by real and corporeal
coercion, compulsions and constraint.
Eager to emphasize that certain qualities and dynamics associated with
slavery are also present in the capital/wage labour relationship (albeit in
varying degrees and forms), Marx’s writing offers a more systematic means
by which we can evaluate and assess freedom and unfreedom in labour. He
examines: (1) the systemic compulsions and forms of coercion that underpin
people’s entrance into labour and their (in)ability to leave the labour contract;
(2) the social relations surrounding experiences in the sphere of circulation;
and (3) the conditions involved in and their experience of, the labour
process itself. Analysing modalities of labour across these three axes of
(un)freedom provides a useful starting point in our pursuit to develop more
systematic evaluations of labour in the global economy. To illustrate this, I
provide a schematic overview of key trends that shape and anchor the spectrum of labour exploitation in the global economy today.
In the first case, examining the forms and degrees of coercion that underpin
people’s entrance into the labour market points to the necessity of examining
the role of at least three ongoing global processes in shaping the continuum of
exploitation and unfreedom at different scales and levels of governance. In the
first instance, it prompts us to consider shifting relations of production and
social reproduction, as these play out in specific contexts and places and to
ask how far and in what ways conditions of unfreedom are embedded in
these increasingly unequal relations. In the second instance, it isolates the
global transformations in land ownership that, among other consequences,
have violently integrated hundreds of millions of people into the circuits of
capital by sparking a massive wave of urban migration, as a significant
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trend. This includes acknowledging the ongoing commodification of assets
such as land, water and agricultural seeds associated with contemporary processes of ‘primitive accumulation’ as a crucial trend; one which increasingly
undermines the ability of much of the world population to secure the basic
necessities of life outside of money and markets (Bakker and Silvey 2008).
Finally, it begs us to evaluate how far and in what ways the wider neoliberal
redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich – facilitated by the redesigning of labour, social, trade and migration policy in ways that privilege the
security of capital over the economic security of the majority of the world
population (Bakker and Gill 2003; McNally 2010) – has been imbricated in
the acceleration of unfree labour.
In the second case, understanding the continuum of unfreedom and exploitation hinges on an examination of transformations in the realm of circulation.
At the macro level, the selective globalization of labour markets, labour market
de- and re-regulation as well as new legal and institutional migration regimes
are all part of the context that shapes the continuum of exploitation among
which unfree relations are intensifying. Recent changes in macro-economic
policy, as well as the political-legal contexts, and regulatory frameworks
that govern employment relations are also highly significant. Among many
other dynamics, analysis of the forms of unfreedom that working populations
confront in the realm of circulation might fruitfully begin by assessing the
interlocking impacts of the following trends: the growth and increasing
power of labour intermediaries and recruitment agents (Barrientos 2011);
the redesigning of certain states’ immigration policies towards temporary
migration for labour purposes and, in many contexts – particularly Canada
and the US – decreased rights for temporary workers (Vosko 2010; Faraday
2012); the tendency towards ever-more complex forms of subcontracting
and outsourcing; the growing imbalance of power between big brands and
their suppliers (Raworth and Kidder 2009); and the deepening of complex
dynamics of informality in the global economy (Peterson 2010; Phillips
2013). After all, the same insatiable drive to reduce corporate bottom lines
that has compressed wages and sparked a sharp decline in working conditions
in the low-skilled labour market as a whole also drives unfree labour into corporate supply chains.
Finally, developing a more systematic evaluation requires us to link evaluations of these two layers of (un)freedom to an analysis of the forms and
degrees of immobility, coercion, violence and alienation that workers confront
within labour processes themselves. This includes but is not limited to an
assessment of amount and timing of payment for labour, the forms of
labour control or discipline present (including the presence and degree
of physical violence and force, as well as imposition and manipulation of
debts), working hours and time away from capital, the role of oppression in
mediating experiences of labour, level of organization and ability to collectivize and, finally, workers’ control over their own bodies, movement, privacy
and social life. While this micro-layer of unfreedom already often figures
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centrally in accounts of unfree labour – often in overly sensationalist detail –
there is a need to connect analyses of labour conditions to broader macro and
meso systems of power and regimes of accumulation. Rather than arbitrarily
deciding on one or two of these factors as the defining attributes of free or
unfree labour, the whole range of (un)freedoms present in any labour relationship need to be broadly understood.
In sum, the continuum of modalities of labour exploitation is not pre-determined, but is rather a contested and constantly evolving set of processes in
which place, hierarchical social relations and global social property relations
play a role. Reorienting our analyses away from a simple emphasis on
wages or the power of individual employers and towards a more systematic
account of these broader trends will yield a much more sufficient understanding of the myriad unfreedoms that characterize the global labour market.
REMAKING LABOUR MARKETS: INSECURITY, HIERARCHY AND
UNFREEDOM
Today, far from being restricted to the fringes of the economy, the worst forms
of labour exploitation can be found in the supply chains of key industries,
including apparel, seafood, jewellery, coal, carpets, cattle and electronics.9
Indeed, unfree labour today goes far beyond the sex and agricultural work
with which it is generally associated. As global production networks have
been restructured to spatially displace vast amounts of manufacturing and
agricultural labour into the global South, unfree labour in the global North
has become closely linked to low-skilled forms of labour that are spatially
fixed, including agricultural, domestic and service-industry jobs (cf. Human
Rights Watch 2001; Human Rights Centre 2004; Bauer 2007). Mounting evidence indicates that the unequal and intersecting relations of gender, race
and citizenship shape vulnerability to unfree labour and that women and
girls, as well as certain types of migrants, indigenous and racialized persons,
are becoming disproportionately concentrated in these ‘privatized’ forms of
exploitation (ILO 2009a).
Extensive empirical research is required to establish how and why unfree
labour is emerging and sustained, who is profiting from it and how, and to
assess variegation across specific industries and geographical spaces. But at
a general level it is clear that unfree labour across recent decades has been
rooted in state and corporate attempts to remake labour markets – particularly
their bottom rungs – in ways that heighten capitalist profitability and deepen
labour market insecurity. Focusing on the US and Canadian contexts, this final
section of the article offers an exploratory analysis of the ways in which neoliberalism has tilted the entire spectrum of labour exploitation towards greater
unfreedom, underpinning the apparent acceleration of unfree labour10 and
deepening insecurity and unfreedom in the labour market more broadly.
Although other authors provide richer and more nuanced accounts of these
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trends than it is possible to elaborate here, my aim in this section is to reposition unfree labour as part of the broader social transformations associated with
neoliberal labour market restructuring. Indeed, because unfree labour is too
often examined in isolation of the political and economic policies associated
with neoliberalism, linking unfree labour to the neoliberal regulatory framework is a necessary and politically urgent task.
The recent wave of unfree labour in the US and Canadian contexts has deep
roots in broader shifts in relations of production and social reproduction,
including changing employment norms, a general decline in pay and
working conditions and the virtual erasure of acknowledgements of and
attempts to address structural inequality in labour market policy (cf. Bakker
and Brodie 2007). As commercial profits started to decline in the 1970s and
as the state struggled to balance international interventions with doubledigit inflation, a declining dollar and large capital outflows at home, forces
emerged to challenge the Keynesian-era trends of inward economic development, expansionary welfare policies and the strengthened bargaining power
of unions (Panitch and Gindin 2012). US policies designed to undermine
working class power and combat inflation, such as the ‘Volcker shock’ of
1979 – 82, were formally instigated as policies of ‘discipline’ and ‘stability’,
marking the beginning of the neoliberal era characterized by the deepening
of markets and competitive pressures. Among other shifts, market-led regulatory restructuring has involved the removal of controls placed on the movement of capital and goods, facilitating the ability of corporations to move
production overseas in order to exploit cheap labour and loose regulatory
regimes resulting from the de- and re- regulation of labour markets
(cf. Soederberg 2010).
As a wide body of critical and feminist political economy research has
demonstrated, the emergence of neoliberalism in the US and later in Canada
was essentially a political response to the domestic gains that had previously
been achieved by subordinate classes that came to be seen as barriers to
accumulation (LeBaron and Roberts 2010; Panitch and Gindin 2012). Labour
has become cheaper and increasingly flexible in form as employment has
been restructured in ways intended to re-impose ‘work ethics’ and social discipline on labouring populations (McNally 2010). This has involved a number
of measures to facilitate workers’ higher productivity while accepting stagnant
or lower wages. Union density has declined dramatically – down to 11.8 per
cent in the US and down to 29.4 per cent in Canada as of 2009 (OECD
2013). Part-time, seasonal and day labour have increased as proportion of
labour market activity, while the forms of work associated with the ‘standard
employment relationship’ have significantly declined (Vosko 2010). Taken
together, these shifts have dramatically increased insecurity among and
inequality between working populations in the US and Canadian context
and particularly the racialized and feminized poor among them. In David
McNally’s words, ‘by fostering job insecurity in these ways, a new political
climate was engineered, one designed to buttress market discipline’, eroding
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fundamental rights and protections won by working populations through
social struggle earlier in the century (2010: 115).
Waves of neoliberalization have redesigned labour and immigration policy.
Among other shifts, this has significantly expanded the temporary foreign
migrant work programmes closely associated with labour abuses that are
often classified as ‘modern-day slavery’ (cf. Sharma 2006; Dauvergne 2008;
Faraday 2012). For instance, since Canada’s Non-immigrant Employment
Authorisation Program was established in 1973 and expanded with the introduction of Bill C-11 in 2001, a number of programmes have facilitated the
entrance of migrants as workers, but make it increasingly difficult for
certain groups to enter, live and work as permanent residents and eventually
formal citizens. Through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, Live-in
Caregiver Program, Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program, the Low Skilled
Pilot and other initiatives, Canada brings in over 150,000 people a year to
work temporarily (CIC 2012), with numbers reaching 238,093 in 2004
(surpassing immigrants with the possibility of gaining permanent residency).
Although these workers are employed in various sectors, an increasingly
small percentage enter under the ‘high-skilled’ category while those arriving
under ‘low-skilled’ categories more than doubled from 2002 –8. In Canada,
the shift towards mostly low-skilled and low-waged temporary foreign
workers has been accompanied by feminization and racialization (Trumper
and Wong 2007). Similar trends have been documented in the US’ official
‘guestworker’ H-2 visa programme (Bauer 2007).
A range of scholars and community organizations have documented the
forms of exclusion and the systematic labour and human rights abuses that
characterize these programmes (cf. Human Rights Centre 2004; Fudge and
MacPhail 2009; Thomas 2010). The majority legally tie workers to one
employer, curtailing their ability to exit unfree labour situations. Evidence is
plentiful that these programmes shift power and oversight away from states
and enhance employers’ power and control over employees, as well as restrict
workers’ ability to exert rights. Employers commonly use a range of techniques
to limit freedom of movement and perpetuate social and cultural isolation.
Concentrated primarily in spatially fixed industries such as construction, domestic labour and agricultural labour, labour concentrated in temporary foreign
work programmes is some of the most deeply unfree in Canada and US society
(cf. Bauer 2007; Faraday 2012). The mounting evidence, that unfree labour is
highly concentrated in temporary and seasonal forms of work and among
migrant workers rather than full citizens, begs us to carefully consider the
forms of unfreedom, insecurity and social hierarchy created and reinforced
by these programmes.
Neoliberalism has also been characterized by the re-institutionalization of
unfree labour regimes, most notably prison labour programmes in the US.
Legally defined as a form of ‘involuntary servitude’ in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, the re-imposition of prison labour during neoliberalism has been one component of broader attempts to aggressively impose
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social and labour discipline fundamental to neoliberal regimes of accumulation. Tactically used both to replace public sector workers and to break
strikes, the neoliberal resurgence of prison labour has worked to anchor accelerated labour exploitation and discipline, as part of a range of tactics through
which capital has pushed down real wages, shed labour, sped up and intensified the work process (LeBaron 2012).
Labour market restructuring has taken place within the broader redefinition
of the Canadian and US governance structures in a more privatized and commodified way. Often referred to as the ‘new constitutionalism’, these processes
have constrained types of government economic interventions, limiting
capacity for social redistribution and welfare and promoting more privatized
systems of governance; ‘locking in’ the rights of capital while simultaneously
locking out democratic control over key aspects of the public economy (Bakker
and Gill 2003). Heightening dependence on waged labour, such measures have
compelled fundamental shifts in the way that individuals and families live and
reproduce themselves, individualizing risk associated with volatile markets. At
the same time, welfare restructuring and the carceral management of poverty
have reinforced the precarious labour market as the only pathway for survival
among the lowest segments of the working class.
In sum, labour market restructuring has expanded the qualities of work
(temporariness, precariousness, insecurity, inability to organize and limitations on workers movement – such as by legally tying them to one employer)
that severely constrict labour freedoms in the realms of production and circulation. When these trends are examined alongside macro level shifts in
relations of production and social reproduction, it is clear that neoliberalism
has reaffirmed the boundaries of private property and market discipline in
ways that have deepened various forms of unfreedom and insecurity for
large segments of the working class. As the state has bolstered power and
control for employers and labour market, social and immigration policies
have been redesigned in ways that privilege the security and rights of
capital over the rights and wellbeing of the majority of the population, the
entire spectrum of labour exploitation has been tilted towards greater unfreedom. Far from an anomalous trend, there is a need to understand the acceleration of unfree labour within the context of these broader shifts. In particular,
there is an urgent need to problematize the ways in which unfreedom is organized by individuals’ relationship to the state, mediated by the social organization of difference and anchored in collective forms of vulnerability resulting
from intensified and individuated forms of labour market insecurity.
CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A FEMINIST POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
UNFREE LABOUR
This article has sought to refocus scholarly attention towards the broader political and economic context in which unfree labour has accelerated in recent
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decades. It has argued that the ideas that have effectively portrayed unfree
labour as horrifying yet isolated incidents of ‘modern-day slavery’ perpetuated
by sinister and greedy people, but disconnected from the bastion of freedom
and personal liberty that is purportedly the free market, are scarcely helpful
in understanding unfree labour’s role in the global economy today. While
the trope of ‘modern day slavery’ has done much to raise public awareness
and moral outrage about the extreme human rights violations experienced
by victims of unfree labour, accounts in this tradition have done little to illuminate the root causes of unfree labour. There is thus a need to move beyond
these limitations and lack of heuristic clarity and to develop categories and
forms of thought that allow us to understand unfree labour’s role in the
global economy and the historical shifts that underpin it.
While some historians and labour studies scholars have identified the crucial
role that unfree labour systems have played in various moments, sectors and
spaces of capitalist development, systematic ways of understanding labour
and unfreedom across the entire spectrum of labour exploitation have yet to
be developed. To contribute to more robust understandings of unfreedom,
this article has argued that the continuum of modalities of labour exploitation
is not pre-determined, but is rather an evolving and contested set of processes
in which the hierarchical social relations of gender, race and citizenship and
global social property relations play a role. It has further argued that in
order to overcome binary conceptions of labour, there is a need to assess
workers’ freedom and unfreedom across at least three planes: (1) the compulsions and forms of coercion that underpin entrance into labour relationships;
(2) the social relations surrounding experiences in the sphere of circulation;
and (3) the conditions involved in, and experiences of, the labour process
itself. Reorienting our analyses away from a simple emphasis on wages or
the power of individual employers and towards a more systematic account
of these broader trends will yield a much more sufficient understanding of
the myriad and accelerating unfreedoms that characterize global labour
markets.
This is a particularly timely and necessary conceptual task since, just like
other modalities of labour exploitation, much contemporary unfree labour is
both anchored in and reproduces capitalist social property relations. Because
the conditions in and power relations surrounding these forms of labour
have been shaped by fundamental shifts in relations of production and social
reproduction, unfree labour cannot be isolated from these broader transformations, but rather must be investigated relationally as a fundamental component of neoliberalization. The notion that unfree labour is fundamentally
incompatible with market expansion is drawn into sharp relief by studies
that reveal it is increasing in importance as it enters the supply chains of
major corporations in the formal economy, triggered by the same shifts in
power and production that have increased unfreedom in the labour market as
a whole (cf. Andrees and Belser 2009; ILO 2009a, 2009b; Faraday 2012). By
extension, any assumption that capitalism and unfree labour are incompatible
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is misplaced, as are those that treat unfree labour as an unchanging and individuated phenomenon. As a coherent trend in relations of production and
reproduction across the neoliberal period, unfree labour needs to be understood
as a constituent part of the global market in which it is located.
Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013
Genevieve LeBaron
Liu Institute for Global Issues
University of British Columbia
6476 NW Marine Drive
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada
Email: genevieve.lebaron@ubc.ca
Notes
1
Unfree labour is notoriously difficult to document. Yet, a number of recent studies
have established its role in contemporary relations of both production and reproduction. See Human Rights Centre (2004), Andrees and Belser (2009), ILO (2009a),
United States Department of Labour (2010), Phillips and Sakamoto (2012) and
Phillips (2013).
2 See ILO (2009a, 2009b).
3 The term ‘formal abstractionism’ was coined by Jairus Banaji (1977, 2010) in his
critique of the ‘bad theory’ common to many Marxist historians. He uses the
term to criticize these theorists’ ‘substitution of purely theoretical explanation
for theoretical research and/or recourse to a theory that is itself simply a string
of abstractions’ (2010: 8). See LeBaron (2011) and Rioux (2013) for a longer discussion of Marxist debates on unfree labour.
4 For a critique of this tendency among scholars associated with ‘political Marxism’
see Rioux (2013).
5 As Jairus Banaji has argued, while Marxist work has tended to conflate the two,
Marx in fact ascribed two meanings to the concept of mode of production. While
one of these meanings was ‘indistinguishable from the "labour process"’ (Banaji
1977: 4), the other usage carried a broader and more specifically historically
meaning ‘of a period or epoch of production, a social form of production’
(Banaji 1977: 4– 5).
6 Cf. Ferguson (1999), Bakker and Gill (2003), Peterson (2003, 2010), Agathangelou
(2004), Stasiulis and Bakan (2005) and Roberts (2012).
7 See Mies (1999), Bakker and Gill (2003: 27); also Bakker and Silvey (2008) and
Roberts (2012).
8 See Peterson (2003, 2010), Agathangelou (2004) and Vosko (2010).
9 See Andrees and Belser (2009), United States Department of Labour (2010), Phillips
and Sakamoto (2012), Strauss (2012) and Verité (2012a, 2012b).
10 Neo-slavery accounts commonly argue that slavery has accelerated massively
across recent decades and some scholars even argue that we’re seeing unprecedented amounts of unfree labour (cf. Bales and Soodalter 2009). However,
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Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries
15
whether unfree labour is truly accelerating or simply deepening in importance as it
enters the supply chains of corporations in the mainstream economy is an empirical question that has yet to be adequately answered.
Acknowledgements
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I am grateful to V. Spike Peterson, Sandra Whitworth, Elisabeth Prügl, Adrienne Roberts, Anne Runyan and Juanita Elias for their generous engagement
with this work as well as to Isabella Bakker, David McNally, Nicola Phillips and
Sebastien Rioux for rich and influential conversations on labour unfreedom. I
am also grateful to those who gave feedback on this article when it was presented at the International Studies Association Conference panel on Feminist
International Relations: Towards an Integrated Analysis? in San Diego, CA, in
April 2012. All errors and omissions are my own.
Notes on contributors
Genevieve LeBaron is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global
Issues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, specializing
in feminist political economy, labour studies and international relations. She
has published recent articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, Politics & Gender, New Political Economy, WorkingUSA: Journal of
Labour and Social History, Capital & Class and Review of International Political Economy. See http://www.genevievelebaron.org.
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