This art icle was downloaded by: [ The Universit y of Brit ish Colum bia] On: 06 Sept em ber 2013, At : 13: 26 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK International Feminist Journal of Politics Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ rf j p20 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. 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Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.813160 # 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 2 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 3 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 4 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 5 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 6 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 7 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 8 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 9 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 10 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 11 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 12 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- Genevieve LeBaron / Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries 13 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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 14 International Feminist Journal of Politics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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, -------------------------------------------------------------- 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 Downloaded by [The University of British Columbia] at 13:26 06 September 2013 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. References Agathangelou, A. 2004. The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation States. New York: Palgrave. Andrees, B. and Belser, P. (eds). 2009. Forced Labour: Coercion and Exploitation in the Private Economy. Geneva: ILO. Bakker, I. and Brodie, J. 2007. Canada’s Social Policy Regime and Women: An Assessment of the Last Decade. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada. 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