Work Out of Place

WGHP 3 Mahua Sarkar (Ed.) WORK OUT OF PLACE Unfree and constrained work has been central to global capitalism throughout its history. Rooted in this broad consensus emerging from historical debates over the status of labor, the contributions in this volume explore a set of inter-related themes that include the relationship between free and forced work, migration (both voluntary and induced, transnational and intra-national), and its linkages to the production of constraints, the racialized logic of the global division of labor, and the role that states play in underwriting these processes. Contributors: Alena Alamgir, Eric Allina, Stephen Castles, Cindy Hahamovitch, Vincent Houben, Ju Li, William G. Martin, Mahua Sarkar, Anwesha Sengupta. WORK OUT OF PLACE Edited by Mahua Sarkar Mahua Sarkar is Associate Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. DIE REIHE: REIHE U4 The series Work in Global and Historical Perspective is edited by Andreas Eckert (Humboldt University of Berlin), Mahua Sarkar (Binghamton University), Sidney Chalhoub (Harvard University), Dmitri van den Bersselaar (University of Leipzig), and Christian G. De Vito (University of Leicester). WORK IN GLOBAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE www.degruyter.com ISBN 978-3-11-046168-8 ISSN 2509-8861 

Work out of Place Work in Global and Historical Perspective Edited by Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Christian G. De Vito Work in Global and Historical Perspective is an interdisciplinary series that welcomes scholarship on work/labour that engages a historical perspective in and from any part of the world. The series advocates a definition of work/ labour that is broad, and especially encourages contributions that explore interconnections across political and geographic frontiers, time frames, disciplinary boundaries, as well as conceptual divisions among various forms of commodified work, and between work and ‘non-work’. Volume 3 Work out of Place Edited by Mahua Sarkar ISBN: 978-3-11-046168-8 e-ISBN (PDF): 978-3-11-046682-9 e-ISBN (ePUB): 978-3-11-046480-1 ISSN: 2509-8861 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Migrant Workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2011, © József Böröcz. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements Work Out of Place stems from the international workshop entitled New Directions in Labour and Migration: Historical Legacies, Present Predicaments and Future Trends that took place in June 1– 2, 2015, at Re:work, Arbeit und Lebenslauf in Globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive, an international research center at Humboldt University, Berlin. We thank Andreas Eckert for his very generous and involved support of the workshop. Special thanks must also go to Felicitas Hentschke for her encouragement, and to Farah Barakat and Sebastian Marggraff for their superb management of the logistics. Re:work is funded by the Bundesministerium fü r Bildung und Forschung (the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and receives organizational support from Humboldt University. We thank both institutions. We are grateful to all the participants at the conference, especially Leon Fink, Susan Levine, Jürgen Kocka, Nandini Gooptu, Leo Lucassen, Thorsten Wilhelmy, Anupama Rao, and Nitin Varma for constructive engagement with the themes of the workshop. Much of the editorial work on the volume (as well as the writing of the chapters by Mahua Sarkar) was greatly facilitated by a fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Nantes, France. The editor thanks Samuel Jubé, Aspasia Nanaki, and the excellent staff at the IEA. Thanks are due also to Anne E. McCall, the former Dean of Harpur College, Binghamton University for a corresponding research leave. At De Gruyter Oldenbourg (Berlin), Rabea Rittgerodt’s commitment to this project has been immensely helpful in bringing it to completion. We thank also the anonymous reviewers for their generative criticisms. The authors are deeply indebted to Marieke Kelm and Svenja Lilly Kempf at Re:work for their editorial assistance in preparing the manuscript, and to József Böröcz for providing the cover photo (taken in Dhaka, Bangladesh). Finally, we want to thank the series editors for Work in Global and Historical Perspective at De Gruyter for their continued support. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110466829-201 Table of Contents Mahua Sarkar Introduction: Work Out of Place 1 Cindy Hahamovitch Men do not gather grapes from thorns: Indentured Labor, Guestworkers, and the Failure of Regulation 23 Vincent Houben Colonial Capitalism and Javanese Transcolonial Labor Migration in insular 55 Asia Eric Allina Between Sozialismus and Socialismo: African workers and public authority in the German Democratic Republic. 77 Alena K. Alamgir The Moped Diaries: Remittances in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor 101 Migration Scheme Anwesha Sengupta Moveable Migrants, Laboring Lives: Making Refugees ‘Useful’ in Post-Colonial India 121 Stephen Castles Unfree Labour, Migration and Social Transformation in Neoliberal Capitalism 149 Ju Li From “out-of-plan worker” to the “floating mass”: Informal Work in the 173 history of the PRC William G Martin Labor: the Hidden Factor behind Mass Incarceration USA—and 197 Decarceration? Mahua Sarkar What is Work? Who is a Worker? Commercial Gestational Surrogacy as a New Form of Labor 219 VIII Table of Contents Cindy Hahamovitch Conclusion 237 245 List of Contributors Index of Places Index of Subjects 249 251 Mahua Sarkar Introduction: Work Out of Place For some time now, the notion of a “genuine proletarian” ¹ and the fetishism of free wage labor “in our conception of life under capitalism”,² have been under increasing scrutiny. Recent work within labor history, for instance, has launched interlinked critiques that unsettle both the conception of wage-earners/workers as free individuals—with nothing to sell except their labor-power that they were supposedly able to dispose of as their own commodity—and the implicit underlying assumption that such workers were male, or at least represented a “pure social category” isolated from families or households.³ Instead, it is now increasingly clear that actually existing forms of labor under global capitalism vary greatly—both historically and today—and that the tendency to see the informal, the unfree or constrained, the incarcerated, the unemployed and the wageless⁴ as anomalous and indicative of “a situation of lack” or lag needs to be challenged.⁵ The result has been a reconceptualization of the idea of the working class to include all forms of commodified labor,⁶ or even, in a somewhat different  Karl Marx: Capital, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, 1976, 272; Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden (eds.): “Peripheral” Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization. Cambridge, 1996, 1– 3; Marcel van der Linden: The Promise and Challenges of Global Labor History, in: International Labor and Working-Class History 82 (2012), 57– 76, esp. 63.  Michael Denning: Wageless Life, in: New Left Review 66 (2010), 79 – 97, esp. 80; Robert Miles: Capitalism and Unfree Labour. Anomaly or Necessity. London 1987, 1– 11.  Van der Linden, The Promise, 57– 76, esp. 63; Amin and van der Linden, “Peripheral” Labour, 1– 3.  I use the term wageless to indicate people who may well be employed–in the sense of being used or useful–without explicitly earning wages. In this, I follow Michael Denning’s observation that wageless life need not be, and indeed is often not, workless or worthless life. Denning, Wageless Life, 79 – 97, esp. 80. See also Martin this volume for a resonant discussion about strategies of survival among the frequently unemployed urban poor in the US. For an example of an association between wageless-ness, unemployment and “waste”, see Zygmunt Bauman: Wasted Lives. Cambridge 2004.  Karl Marx: Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Harmondsworth 1973, 464; Philip Corrigan: Feudal Relics or Capitalist Monuments? Notes on the Sociology of Unfree Labour, in: Sociology 11 (1977), 435 – 463; Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary: From Here to Utopia. Finding Inspiration for the Labor Debate, in: Ana C. Dinerstein and Michael Neary (eds.): The Labor Debate. An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work. Aldershot 2002, 1– 26.  Marcel van der Linden: Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History. Leiden 2008, 32– 35. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110466829-001 2 Mahua Sarkar enunciation, all forms of labor, including unfree labor, convict labor, the wageless, and unpaid household labor that capitalism has historically utilized as “variations of ‘capital-positing’ labor”.⁷ The current volume is rooted in the broad consensus emerging from these debates: viz. that the commodification and utilization or employment⁸ of human labor power occurs in multifarious ways.⁹ Perhaps the first shared feature of the contributions included here is, thus, an interest in forms of labor that are constrained—albeit differently and differentially—and are out of place in some significant respect or other in relation to the ideal type of “free wage labor”. Many of the papers also look implicitly at the vexed relationship between free labor and forced labor and the ways in which historically the deployment of one (usually forced/constrained labor) has often underwritten the possibility and “privileges” of the other (free labor).¹⁰ A third significant theme that weaves through much of the volume is that of migration—be it transcontinental, transcolonial, transnational, as well as in its intra-national iterations—and especially its complex and generative linkages to the un-freedom of labor. This is yet another–perhaps more literal–sense in which the essays agitate the notion of work out of place. Large-scale managed movement of laboring populations across borders—imperial, colonial or national—is of course impossible without the involvement, intervention and support of states. A fourth recurrent theme in the volume is, thus, the complex role played by states in underwriting the legal status of labor, especially in determining and overseeing the fine gradations of constraint that attach to the different categories of migrant labor. In this context the issue of “con-  Rakesh Bhandari: The Disguises of Wage-Labour. Juridical Illusions, Unfree Conditions and Novel Extensions, in: Historical Materialism 16 (2008), 71– 99; Rakesh Bhandari: Slavery and Wage Labor in History, in: Rethinking Marxism, 19 (2007), 396 – 408; Jairus Banaji: Theory as History. Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Leiden 2010; Dale Tomich: The ‘Second Slavery’. Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth Century World Economy, in: Francisco O. Ramirez (ed.): Rethinking the Nineteenth Century. Contradictions and Movements. New York, NY 1988, 103 – 117; Lourdes Beneria: Accounting for Women’s Work. The Progress of Two Decades, in: World Development 20, 11 (1992), 1547– 1560; Evelyn Nakano Glenn: From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor, in: Signs 18, 1 (1992), 1– 43; Maxine Molyneux: Beyond the Domestic Labor Debate, in: New Left Review 116, 3 – 27. See also Stephen Castles, this volume.  In the sense of using without necessarily paying wages for such usage.  Van der Linden, Workers of the World, 39.  Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 925; Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour, 1– 11; Alessandro Stanziani: Introduction, in: Alessandro Stanziani (ed.): Labour, Coercion and Economic Growth in Eurasia. 17th – 20th Centuries. Leiden 2013, 1– 26. Introduction: Work Out of Place 3 tracts” between mobile labor forces and states becomes a flashpoint in many of the discussions that unfold in this volume. Finally, together, the papers foreground and question—implicitly or explicitly—the racialized logic of a global division of labor, which has historically facilitated—and continues to encourage today—differential regimes of accumulation, consumption and displacement or migration in the global South and the global North.¹¹ A combination of many of these themes is evident in Cindy Hahamovitch’s global historical comparison between indentured work and guest-work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indenture work—a labor-mobility arrangement through which colonial states moved large populations of workers among different colonies to meet labor needs in plantations, mines and for public works throughout the second half of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century¹² seems to have shared a number of similarities with guest/temporary contract work. As Hahamovitch points out, both systems represent a mechanism of simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing cheap, pliable labor; and while they are compared often to slavery, both indenture and guestworker regimes involve(d) “nominally free” workers, who “consent(ed)” to entering into a contract. Hahamovitch also highlights a number of significant differences between the two labor-mobility systems, perhaps none more consequential than the fact that, while indentured workers were mostly expected, even encouraged, to settle in the receiving context at the end of their contracted period of work—no matter how hard that period could be—guest-workers were and still are obliged to leave, typically at their own expense. It is worth recalling here that guest-work as a preferred labor-mobility regime emerged in the late nineteenth century amidst a widespread process of nationstates coming into their own, and developing technologies of population mobi-  Moon-Ho Jung: Coolies and Cane. Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore 2009; Kelvin Santiago-Valles: Forced Labor in Colonial Penal Institutions Across the Spanish, U.S., British, and French Atlantic, 1860s-1920s, in: Marcel van der Linden and Magaly Rodríguez García (eds.): On Coerced Labor. Work and Compulsion after Chattel Slavery. Leiden 2016, 73 – 97. For a discussion of the origins of the terms global South and North, see Arif Dirlik: Global South. Predicament and Promise, in: The Global South, 1, 1 (2007), 12– 23, esp. 12– 13.  Hugh Tinker: A New System of Slavery. The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830 – 1920. Oxford 1974; David Northrup: Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1934 – 1922. Cambridge 2005; Madhavi Kale: Fragments of Empire. Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia, PA 1998; Jan Lucassen: Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century. A Brief Overview, in: Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds.): Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues. Bern 1997, 45 – 56. 4 Mahua Sarkar lity and control that allowed periodic expulsion of temporary immigrants.¹³ In a formally post-imperial world it is, thus, the cold unconcern of receiving states towards non-citizen (or alien, or foreign migrant) labor and the constant threat of deportation that govern the lives of guest-workers, rather than the perfectly exploitative, frequently coercive, and at the same time paternalistic stance of colonial officials towards their indentured colonial subjects.¹⁴ The connection between the spread of the production of primary commodities (such as sugar, rubber, tobacco, copra, oil, gold, or diamonds) in colonial plantations and mines for metropolitan consumption, and the large-scale mobilization and displacement of labor in the colonies—a seminal theme in Hahamovitch’s work—is also central to Vincent Houben’s study of Javanese contract workers. Beginning in the 1830s, the Dutch colonial state initiated a system of cultivation that trapped a large proportion of the rural population of Java into a system of forced labor. By the end of the nineteenth century, these global entanglements would only deepen further as plantation agriculture spread beyond Java to the outer islands of insular Asia, now under the aegis of international private capital, but always with the active cooperation of the colonial state. Not surprisingly, this greater integration of what is today the Indonesian archipelago into the world market went hand in hand with increasing organised recruitment and indenturing of Javanese labor, again under explicit state brokerage. However, as both Hahamovitch and Houben point out, the coolie trade was not only an imperial project, but also an “object of imperial scrutiny” that sometimes extended beyond the jurisdiction of a single colonial power. For instance, in his paper, Houben draws on reports by Dutch labor inspectors from the 1920s, whose probe into working conditions of Javanese migrant workers covered colonies not just under Dutch rule, but also under British and French, control. As in the case of the British imperial authorities grappling with the task of inventing a standardized contract for indenture in the late nineteenth century, here too we find an attempt on the part of the Dutch colonial bureaucracy to rein in the worst abuses of their subjects in insular Asia, even if only to ensure that the in-  Cindy Hahamovitch: Creating Perfect Immigrants. Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective, in: Labor History, 44, 1 (2003): 69 – 94; Kristin Surak: Guestworkers. A Taxonomy, in: New Left Review, 84 (2013): 84– 102; Mahua Sarkar: The Flipside of the Integration Question. Guestworker Regimes and Temporary Circular/Managed Migration in History, in: Refugee Watch, 49 (2017): 1– 25.  It is true that many guest-workers in post Second World War Europe were eventually allowed to settle in the destination countries. However, this liberal accommodation seems to have been specific to the post-war context of reconstruction and economic boom. Hahamovitch, Creating Perfect Immigrants, 69 – 94, esp. 84– 85. Introduction: Work Out of Place 5 denture system continued to reproduce itself, thereby producing enormous profits for the Dutch colonial enterprise. Indeed, such instances of colonial ‘benevolence’ seem to pepper the history of unfree work: from the “close and merciful watchfulness” of John Montagu’s ‘enlightened’ convict labor system in nineteenth century colonial South Africa,¹⁵ to the discomfort of British and German officials over the inhumane treatment of ‘coolies’ in German occupied Samoa at the turn of the twentieth century,¹⁶ to the attempts by British colonial authorities to provide a degree of protection to their Jamaican subjects recruited as contract workers in the US in the 1940s,¹⁷ many a study records the dilemmas of colonizers negotiating the precarious choice “between evil and uneasiness”.¹⁸ It is worth emphasizing here that the demand for indentured laborers in the past and guest-workers both historically and today is rooted not in the scarcity of labor per se—as commonly claimed by planters and employers alike—but in the need for cheap and dispensable labor. The unfreedom of labor—whether in the colonial plantations,¹⁹ the mines of southern Africa,²⁰ the sugar fields of the U.S. South,²¹ or the myriad contexts in which contract workers the Persian Gulf, in South-east Asia, in the US or in the UK²² find themselves toiling today —is, and always has been, directly tied to the drive for exceptional surplus ex-  Nigel Penn: ‘Close and Merciful Watchfulness’. John Montagu’s Convict System in the MidNineteenth-Century Cape Colony, in: Cultural and Social History 5, 4 (2008), 465 – 480.  Jürgen Schmidt: Arbeit und Nicht-Arbeit im ‘Paradies der Südsee’. Samoa um 1890 bis 1914, in: Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte 15 (2016), 7– 25.  Hahamovitch this volume.  Albert Memmi: The Colonizer and the Colonized. London 2003, 87.  Kale, Fragments of Empire; David Chanderbali: Indian Indenture in British Malaya. Policy and Practice in the Straits Settlements. Leeds 2008; Marina Carter and Khal Torabully: Coolitude. An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London 2002; Patrick Harries: Plantations, Passes and Proletarians. Labour and the Colonial State in Nineteenth Century Natal, in: Journal of Southern African Studies, 13, 3 (1987), 372– 399.  Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman: South Africa’s Labor Empire. A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines. Boulder, CO 1991; Rob Turrell: Kimberley’s Model Compounds, in: Journal of African History 25, 1 (1984), 61– 67; Tshidiso Maloka: Basotho and the Mines. A Social History of Labour Migration in Lesotho and South Africa, C. 1890 – 1940. Dakar 2004; Francis Wilson: Labour in the South African Gold Mines 1911 – 1969. Cambridge 2011.  Hahmovitch, Creating Perfect Immigrants, 69 – 94, and this volume.  Sam Scott: Making the Case for Temporary Migrant Worker Programmes. Evidence from the UK’s Rural Guestworker (‘SAWS’) Scheme, in: Journal of Rural Studies, 40 (2015), 1– 11; David Griffith (ed.): (Mis)managing Migration. Guestworkers’ Experiences with North American Labor Markets. Santa Fe, NM 2014; Amarjit Kaur: Labour Migration in Southeast Asia. Migration Policies, Labour Exploitation and Regulation, in: Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy 15, 1 (2010), 6 – 19; Andrew Ross: The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor. New York, NY 2015. 6 Mahua Sarkar traction under capitalism.²³ Note also that, overwhelmingly, indentured migration in the nineteenth century—and I would add, most guest-worker programs historically and today—recruited non-white workers. The excessive exploitation of workers under these schemes is justified by their supposed inferiority—racial and cultural—produced and renewed continually through discourse and specific institutional practices.²⁴ In turn, the acceptance of—or, worse yet, apparent consent to—conditions of work that are supposedly beneath white/native/citizen labor, seem to further underscore the indentured or migrant workers’ essentialized inferiority. The epithets ‘cheap’, ‘pliant’, ‘managed’, ‘flexible’ and ‘dispensable’—commonly associated with indentured and/or temporary contract workers —thus get neatly grafted on to a de facto racial and ethnic coding. Contract work involving non-citizen labor from the global South constitutes the subject matter of two other papers in the volume—those by Eric Allina and Alena Alamgir—but here the focus is on work-mobility programs among socialist countries. Between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War, thousands of migrant workers came to socialist Europe from Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, and Vietnam— “reportedly the leading supplier of migrant labor to the Eastern Bloc”.²⁵ As in the West, these labor migration programs within the  Even Max Weber, who considered the use of unfree labor generally unprofitable and incompatible with capitalism, conceded that under specific historical conditions use of unfree/slave labor can produce large profits. Max Weber: General Economic History. New Brunswick 1981, esp. 298 – 301. Marxist scholars have of course noted the advantages of a migrant labor system for profit extraction. See Claude Meillassoux: Maidens, Meal and Money. Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge 1981; Robert Miles: Capitalism and Unfree Labour. Anomaly or Necessity? London 1987, esp. 4– 11; Robin Cohen: The New Helots. Migrants in the New International Division of Labour. London 1987.  One notable exception to this tendency was the case of Polish seasonal contract workers in Prussia in the late nineteenth century, but as scholars have pointed out, Polish migrants—indeed Polish people in general—were considered ethnically inferior by German society. For discussions of historical instances of European migrant workers, see Ulrich Herbert: A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880 – 1980. Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers. Ann Arbor, MI 1990; Gary Cross: Immigrant Workers in Industrial France. The Making of a New Laboring Class. Philadelphia, PA 1983; Ulrich Herbert and Karin Hunn: Guest Workers and Policy on Guest Workers in the Federal Republic. From the Beginning of Recruitment in 1955 until its Halt in 1973, in: Hanna Schissler (ed.) The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949 – 1968. Princeton, NJ 2001, esp. 194– 96, 205. A contemporary example of the hiring of white migrants in temporary contract work might include the Working Holiday Makers from Overseas (WHMO) program in Australia today. See Scott, Making the Case, 2.  Jorge Perez-Lopez and Sergio Diaz-Briquets: Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly in the Socialist World. The Cuban Experience, in: Population and Development Review 16, 2 (1990), 273 – 299. Introduction: Work Out of Place 7 socialist world were certainly part of a strategy to ease the problem of labor shortage in “advanced socialist economies” in post-war east-central Europe, but they were also a mechanism to address issues of labor surplus and the lack of adequate skills in the socialist third world.²⁶ Consequently, these contract work schemes seemed to have differed significantly from their counterparts in the capitalist world in terms of both discourse and institutional practice. To begin with, far fewer people moved through the socialist guest-worker programs.²⁷ But perhaps the more important issues emerging from Allina and Alamgir’s analyses—as well as from the larger literature on state-socialist “worker-trainee” programs²⁸—are the extent and nature of state involvement in these arrangements, and the tensions between the need for surplus extraction—the “openly recognized… raison d’être” of guest-worker programs in the West—and the imperatives of a “politics of socialist internationalism” (Allina, this volume). Together, they seemed to have encouraged a different geometry of power between sending and receiving states, with an explicit emphasis on “assistance”, “training”, and an “investment in human capital” through “skills transfer” to less developed countries in the third world. As Alamgir’s archival work on the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese labor migration program shows, such an overall orientation meant that at least in the early decades of the bi-lateral agreements (i. e. before the 1980s), the needs and wishes of the sending state determined to a large extent the kind of “training” that the migrant workers would receive—including, in one instance, apprenticeships in filmmaking! Alamgir’s reading of the complex negotiations around migrant remittances—a part of which had to be in kind due to the difficulties of currency conversion—further reveals how different wings of the Czechoslovak state could in some instances end up on oppos-  Perez-Lopez and Diaz-Briquets, Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly, 273 – 299, esp. 275 – 279.  In the mid-1970s, only around 170,000 migrants worked in east-central Europe and the Soviet Union. The corresponding figure for guest-workers employed in various western and northern European countries in 1973 was an estimated 6.7 million. Perez-Lopez and Diaz-Briquets, Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly, 273 – 299, esp. 273 – 274; Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos: Guest Workers, in: Peter N. Stearns (ed.): Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern World, vol. 3. Oxford 2008, 526.  Tanja R. Müller: Memories of Paradise. Legacies of Socialist Education in Mozambique, in: African Affairs, 109 (2010), 452, fn. 2; Jochen Oppenheimer: Mozambican Worker Migration to the Former German Democratic Republic. Serving Socialism and Struggling Under Democracy, in: Portuguese Studies Review 12, 1 (2004), 163 – 183; Perez-Lopez and Diaz-Briquets, Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly, 273 – 299, esp. 275 – 279; Alena Alamgir: Socialist Internationalism at Work. Changes in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese Labor Exchange Program, 1967 – 1989 (PhD dissertation). 2014. 8 Mahua Sarkar ing sides of a disagreement over what goods and, more importantly, how much of them the Vietnamese workers would be allowed to take back with them. In a related vein, in his study on Mozambican workers in the GDR, Allina notes that in spite of the “authoritarian nature of the East German state” and its “highly suspicious posture toward things foreign”, at least some young Mozambican migrants were able to eke out a space of discernible agency in their daily lives. Overall, it would seem that the experience of foreign workers moving within the framework of bi-lateral agreements of cooperation between states in the socialist bloc was largely beneficial for the workers: at the end of the training period, as workers and union members in the host countries, they typically faced the same working conditions, received the same salary, bonuses, and fringe benefits as “native” workers.²⁹ Indeed, as Allina points out, the term used to refer to Mozambican workers in the GDR was “Werktätiger”—a term used mainly in the GDR to refer to workers belonging to “a work community” or to “a socialist brigade”—³⁰ and not Gastarbeiter or guestworker as was common in the Federal Republic. His analysis also suggests—and Alamgir’s would concur—that the clear racial discrimination that has so often marked guestworker regimes in the West,³¹ may have been tempered in the socialist context by a larger ideology of inclusive internationalism, however fraught, fragile and ultimately shortlived such accommodations would turn out to be. Finally, within the state-socialist context, the struggles for workers’ rights—to paraphrase Alamgir—did not necessarily happen “outside” or “in opposition to the state”; often it took place “within and with the assistance” of some arms of the state against others. Or, as Allina observes, “the exercise of power was a many-sided affair” in GDR factories, involving factions of both the German and Mozambican state representatives, seemingly wielding “an authority more often paternalistic than authoritarian”. In other words, while the involvement of states in the socialist migrant worker schemes was intense, the exercise of power, persuasion and discretion was often variegated, providing on balance appreciable protection for workers’ rights. The themes of migration, the status of labor, and the role of the state come together with a twist in Anwesha Sengupta’s work on the refugee-rehabilitation schemes in newly independent India in the 1950s and 1960s. Besieged by millions of people displaced in the wake of the partition of the subcontinent the  Perez-Lopez and Diaz-Briquets, Labor Migration and Offshore Assembly, 273 – 299, esp. 283.  I am grateful to Sandrine Kott for underscoring the specificity of the notion of Werktätiger, which was apparently in use only in the GDR. A more general translation of the word might be “employee”, as Allina points out in his paper.  Herbert and Hunn, Guest Workers and Policy; Hahamovitch, this volume. Introduction: Work Out of Place 9 nascent state of India devised a complex plan of refugee resettlement that moved thousands of people first to Assam and Tripura³²—states neighboring the erstwhile province of Bengal—and then further afield to the inhospitable area of Dandakaranya,³³ and later, to the former penal colony of Andaman Islands. The policies were conceived with the simultaneous aim of reducing the population pressure on Calcutta (now Kolkata) and West Bengal³⁴—the destination(s) of choice for most refugees coming from eastern parts of the erstwhile province of Bengal—and populating parts of India’s territory that needed to be settled. While at first glance the refugees’ need for rehabilitation seemed to dovetail neatly with the state’s plans to harness cheap labor to advance its developmental goals, in Sengupta’s reading, the “dispersal schemes”—that further displaced an already displaced population often against their expressed wishes—essentially transformed the refugees into an unfree workforce. While much of the existing discussion about refugee rehabilitation focuses on the state’s policies and their effectiveness or failures, Sengupta brings a rare focus on the nature of the contract that this uprooted population was obliged to enter into with the receiving state to secure its place within the nation-state. Belonging to the nation, in other words, was not a given for the displaced; it had to be earned through sustained hard labor in unfamiliar, if not hostile, surroundings, and often in vocations in which they had little competence. In this regard, the experiences of this particular form of unfree, migrant labor—the refugee workforce in post-partition independent India—may be compared to that of indentured workers, who were frequently recruited by colonial states to settle land and meet labor needs in under-populated areas. Their situation may be reminiscent also of that of convict workers,³⁵ deployed by states in  Assam and Tripura are states in India that share borders with the eastern half of what was the undivided province of Bengal, now Bangladesh. Assam shares a part of its borders with the Indian state of West Bengal as well.  A refugee colony set up by taking tracts of land inhabited mainly by adivasis or indigenous peoples in the states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. The Dandakaranya Project was controversial from its inception. For a critical account, see Antara Datta: Refugees and Borders in South Asia. The Great Exodus of 1971. London, 2013.  The western part of the erstwhile province of Bengal, West Bengal is a part of the Union of India; Kolkata is its capital. The politics of (re)naming continues until today. For an example see “Rename West Bengal to Bengal: TMC MP Demands in Lok Sabha” (31. Mar. 2017), in: The Economic Times. URL: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/rename-westbengal-to-bengal-tmc-mp-demands-in-lok-sabha/articleshow/57939483.cms (15. Apr. 2017).  Anand A. Yang: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, in: Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003), 179 – 208; William H. Worger: Con- 10 Mahua Sarkar difficult work projects in the guise of “disciplining the indigent through regimentation and labor”³⁶ in exchange for the possibility of eventual social (re)integration. Note also the multiple boundaries that the refugees in post-Partition India were forced to negotiate. To begin with, they had to cross what was an international border in formation within the territory of what used to be a single province (undivided Bengal in Sengupta’s study).³⁷ Those who were sent outside of the state of West Bengal in India were further displaced across borders marking spaces of linguistic and cultural affinities. Those borne across the dreaded kaalapani ³⁸ to the Andaman Islands, meanwhile, faced the additional prospect of losing their caste location according to the Hindu system of beliefs. And finally, through the Partition process this particular segment of erstwhile colonial subjects found themselves reincarnated, not as independent citizens but, rather, as post-colonial burdens. Indeed, the very use of the term “dispersal” is telling in this context of the state’s ambivalence towards this body of (not-quite-desired/desirable) denizens: for if in one sense the word connotes disseminating or “spreading something over a wide area”³⁹, the other is certainly associated with the “splitting up” of a crowd⁴⁰ presumably to diffuse any potential for collective action or challenge to authority. If the contributions discussed so far focus mostly on two historical moments —the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hahamovitch, Houben) and the mid twentieth century (Allina, Alamgir, Sengupta), the final set of articles in the volume brings us into a still unfolding neoliberal present, shaped by what David Harvey has called a “corporate capitalist” political project intent on crushing the power of labor and other social movements resurgent through the 1960s vict Labour, Industrialists, and the State in the US South and South Africa, 1870 – 1930, in: Journal of Southern African Studies 30, 1 (2004), 63 – 86; Christian G. De Vito and Alex Lichtenstein (eds.): Global Convict Labour. Leiden 2015.  Martin, this volume; Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York, NY 1977.  Note that a much greater number of refugees crossed into independent India from West Pakistan across a similarly emergent border in the north-western part of the subcontinent.  Literally “black waters”, the term used to refer to the sea or ocean. According to Hindu beliefs, a person crossing the sea loses his/her caste standing.  Oxford Learners Dictionaries. URL: http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/eng lish/dispersal?q=dispersal (3. June 2017).  Collins Dictionary. URL: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/dispersal (3. June 2017). Introduction: Work Out of Place 11 and into the early 1970s .⁴¹ Visible consequences of this political project include a sharp increase in the off-shoring of jobs to, and the massive outsourcing of labor from, the global South,⁴² the increasing informality of labor relations⁴³ and precarious and flexible working conditions everywhere,⁴⁴ deindustrialization through automation and robotization,⁴⁵ a widening gap between the rich and the poor,⁴⁶ and a complex reorganization of states that allows them to be simultaneously more absent—i. e. abdicate their social responsibilities—and more present—in their increased capacity for policing, coercion and mass incarceration.⁴⁷ And it is this specter of flexibility, even redundancy, produced by the  David Harvey: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford 2005; David Harvey: Neoliberalism is a Political Project, in: Jacobin (July 2016). URL: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-har vey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/ (15. May 2017); Johanna Bockman: The Political Projects of Neoliberalism, in: Social Anthropology 20 (2012): 310 – 317; Genevieve LeBaron: The Political Economy of the Household. Neoliberal Restructuring, Enclosures, and Daily Life, in: Review of International Political Economy 17, 5 (2010), 889 – 912.  Cohen, The New Helots; International Labour Organization: Global Estimates of Migrant Workers. Geneva 2015. URL: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-dgreports/-dcomm/docu ments/publication/wcms_436343.pdf (26 October 2016).  For theoretically insightful discussions of informality see Mark Granovetter: Economic Action and Social Structure. The Problem of Embeddedness, in: American Journal of Sociology 91, 3 (Nov 1985), 485 – 510; József Böröcz: Informality Rules, in: East European Politics and Societies 14, 2, 348 – 380. For recent critical discussions that both acknowledge the importance of informal work/informality of labor relations and point to the inadequacy of the terms, see, for instance, James Ferguson: Give a Man a Fish. Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution. Durham 2015; Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden: Informalizing the Economy. The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level, in: Development and Change 45, 5 (2014), 920 – 940.  Michael Denning: Wageless Life, in: New Left Review (Nov Dec 2010), 79 – 97; Guy Standing: The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class. London 2011. Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham (eds.): Liberating Temporariness? Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity. Montreal 2014. For a parallel argument that highlights precarity as an inherent characteristic of labor under capitalism, see Marcel van der Linden: San Precario. A New Inspiration for Labor Historians, in: Labor 11 (2014), 9 – 21. For a useful overview of recent discussions of informality and precariousness within labor history, see Andreas Eckert: Why all the fuss about Global Labour History? The New Obscurity, in: Andreas Eckert (ed.): Global Histories of Work. Berlin 2016, 3 – 22.  Martin Ford: The Rise of the Robots. Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future. New York, NY 2016.  Branko Milanovic: The Haves and the Have-Nots. A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. New York, NY 2011.  Martin, this volume; Loïc J. D. Wacquant: Punishing the Poor. The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham 2009; Mathieu Hilgers: The Historicity of the Neoliberal State, in: Social Anthropology 20, 1 (2012), 80 – 94, esp. 85. 12 Mahua Sarkar “fraying of the labor contract”⁴⁸ that emerges as the most significant common denominator in the papers that follow. In his overview article Stephen Castles, for instance, draws on Karl Polanyi’s seminal work on market liberalism in the eighteenth century to highlight “the disembedding of the economy from society” as a precondition for market efficiency that has once again become “the dominant ideology of globalization since the mid-1970s.” The paper explores the connections between “primitive accumulation” or the dispossession and alienation of people from land, the creation of unfree labor forced to accept “repressive and…insecure conditions” of work, the “efficient” accrual of profits, migration, and social transformation in the current historical juncture. As Castles argues through his survey of precarious work in post-industrial, emerging industrial, as well as less developed economies, primitive accumulation⁴⁹ / dispossession has now taken on “a new global form” such that de-industrialization and the disempowerment of erstwhile well-organized industrial working classes in the global North occurs in tandem with uprooting of massive numbers of people in the global South through conflict and warfare. As recent reports by the UNHCR warn, by the end of 2015, the number of people “forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations” had reached a staggering 65.3 million. Put in another way, on an average 24 people were displaced from their homes “every minute of every day” during 2015,⁵⁰ swelling the ranks of a transnational pool of workers forced to accept tenuous contracts, if any, and increasingly exploitative working conditions. Castles’ discussion of the uses of labor migration and the “sharp division” between the “national” and “foreigner” locations is useful in this context. As he points out, where primitive accumulation leads to economic and social development within the same political territory, workers might see some of the benefits in the long run. But where workers are alienated from the land and forced to work in another socio-political formation—as in the case of guest-workers (eg. Hahamovitch, this volume)—such dispossession becomes much more conse-  Michael Denning: Design and Discontent, in: New Left Review 90 (Nov Dec 2014), 147– 152, esp. 150; Nikil Saval: Cubed. A Secret History of the Workplace. New York 2014.  Recent editorial work on the collected writings of Marx and Engels has emphasized that the widely used term “primitive accumulation” is a somewhat misleading translation of the German term “ursprüngliche Akkumulation.” The more correct translation would be “original accumulation”. I thank Marcel van der Linden and Andreas Eckert for bringing this point to my attention.  UNHCR: Global Trends. Forced Displacement in 2015. URL: http://www.unhcr.org/576408cd7 (22 May 2017). Introduction: Work Out of Place 13 quential. It is also worth clarifying here that Castles’ understanding of the “unfreedom” of workers is far more capacious than what is conventional.⁵¹ As he sees it, workers are unfree “if they are discriminated against on the basis of non-economic criteria, such as gender, race, ethnicity, location, place of origin or legal status…What is common to all types of unfreedom is that they restrict a person’s opportunities of competing as an equal on the labor market.” While this definition may be too “diluted” for some scholars, ⁵² it nonetheless invites us to reflect on what “choice” or the “ability to choose”—the substance of “freedom” for all practical purposes—means in a context deeply compromised by the intersectional workings of multiple social structures. Overall, Castles seems to support the Polanyian notion of “reembedding… the market in society through the realization of a humane and sustainable form of capitalism”, but in the current global economic and political environment it is not clear whether such a rescue of capitalism is possible at all.⁵³ The notion of precarious work also figures prominently in Ju Li’s study of internal migration in two different moments in the recent history of China involving very different categories of labor: “out of plan” factory workers in the socialist era, and a mobile “floating mass” comprised of peasant migrant workers, former State Owned Enterprise (SOE) workers, and “drifting college graduates” in the current context of a neoliberal market economy. Li mobilizes the concept of “informality” to capture what otherwise disparate groups of workers share: a lack of access to permanent or “in plan” jobs, and/or a migrant status. However, their situation ought to be distinguished from the “wageless” masses or “self-employed” associated with informality, or more typically with the concept of informal sector elsewhere in the world.⁵⁴ In Li’s account, informality in China is re-  Jan Lucassen: Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century. A Brief Overview, in: Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds.): Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues. Bern 1997, 45 – 56; Robert J. Steinfeld and Stanley L. Engerman: Labor—Free or Coerced? A Historical Reassessment of Differences and Similarities, in: Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds.): Free and Unfree Labour. The Debate Continues. Bern 1997.  We thank the reviewers for the articles in this volume for bringing this point to our attention.  David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London 2014; Paul Mason: The End of Capitalism has Begun, in: The Guardian 17, 7 (2015). URL: https://mirror.explodie.org/ the-end-of-capitalism-has-begun.pdf (13 June 2017).  Alejandro Portes and Saskia Sassen-Koob: Making it Underground. Comparative Material on the Informal Sector in Western Market Economies, in: American Journal of Sociology 93, 1 (1987), 30 – 61; Denning, Wageless Life, 79 – 97, esp. 88 – 90; International Labor Office: Women and Men in the Informal Economy. Geneva 2002, 2. More relevant examples of the kind of informality that Li discusses might be found in the context of late state-socialism in Europe. See, for instance, Böröcz, Informality Rules, 348 – 380, esp. 354– 359. 14 Mahua Sarkar lated to conscious shifts in the strategies of capital accumulation by the state in response to ideological, economic and political pressures. Her argument is clear: informality is neither a “natural”, nor an inevitable outcome of the transition to market economy; it has been put into place and maintained in China for several decades. The process seems to have begun with the exclusion of the country’s massive peasant population from the “permanent labor system”—implemented in the 1950s—and their later recruitment as “deviant” or “out of plan” workers by enterprises dealing with steep production demands on the one hand and rigidly limited “in plan” labor quotas on the other. Such flexible arrangements in the socialist period emerged, not outside the purview of the state, but rather, as a result of the “revisionist” policies of some segments of the leadership intent on greater accumulation of surplus—albeit within the socialist ideological framework. With the beginnings of the new “market society” in the 1980s, these tendencies toward flexibilisation have only deepened as many sectors of the previously state-owned economy have come under the control of private capital. Perhaps the most significant instrument that underwrites the flourishing of flexible working conditions in China is the hukou or household registration system.⁵⁵ First introduced in 1958 to regulate rural-urban migration, the hukou system at its inception had focused on rationing food supplies in the cities, ostensibly to deter migrants from rural areas. ⁵⁶ In the context of China’s transition to a market economy and especially the rapid expansion of export-oriented production⁵⁷ since the 1980s, the hukou system has undergone significant revisions. Today, the system is both disabling and differentially enabling: on the one hand the abolition of food rations facilitates labor migration to the cities; on the other, the denial of local hukou to a majority of the migrants effectively limits their access to affordable housing, education and other subsidies, making it  Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden: The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System, in: The China Quarterly, 139 (1994): 644– 668.  Similar systems of resident registration exist or have existed in other parts of the world. For two examples, see Noah Rubins: The Demise and the Resurrection of the Propiska. Freedom of Movement in the Russian Federation, in: Harvard International Law Journal 39, 2 (1998), 545 – 566; David Chapman: Geographies of Self and Other. Mapping Japan through the Koseki, in: The Asia-Pacific Journal 9, 29 (2011). URL: http://apjjf.org/2011/9/29/David-Chapman/3565/ar ticle.html (12 June 2017).  According to an ILO report on China, the number of Special Economic Zones or Export Processing Zones of different kinds rose from 5 in 1979 to 344 in 2011. Xiangquan Zeng, Chenggang Zhang, Liwen Chen, Xue Yang, and Yichen Su, Export Processing Zones in China. A Survey and a Case Study. International Labour Office, 2012. URL: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-ed_dialogue/--actrav/documents/publication/wcms_221012.pdf Introduction: Work Out of Place 15 well-nigh impossible for them to settle where they work. The result is a “floating” workforce primed to be grist for the state’s “flexible and capital-friendly” labor policy mill.⁵⁸ The lower pay and lack of benefits of this unsettled workforce in the big cities is justified by its migrant status, while the cost of its social reproduction is borne by families and households in the hinterland. Note also the complex role that the state plays in the production of a remarkably attenuated system of labor hierarchies even within a single national space.⁵⁹ If the relationship between transnational migration and the status of labor constitutes one of the recurrent themes in this volume, Li’s paper—quite like Sengupta’s—brings into sharp relief just how consequential crossing borders can be within a single national space, even for citizen labor. Finally, although Li does not comment on it, her discussion of the “drifting college graduates” in China’s cities seems to index a submerged history of the emergence of the office as a dominant space of work—its move from the position of a “satellite revolving around the factory and the mine” to the very heart of a new economy based on “information and service”.⁶⁰ If this process unfolded over a long period in the West, in China it seems to be telescoped and hastened through an extraordinary enunciation of time-space compression”.⁶¹ If the office has come to represent the “signature” workplace of advanced industrial societies,⁶² the prison at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century would seem to be its antithesis: the ultimate space of un-freedom for sure, but also of wageless-ness, idleness, and redundancy. As William Martin notes in his paper (this volume), the consensus among scholars studying the “stunning rise” of mass incarceration in the US since the 1970s is that there is simply “no demand for the labor” of the millions of people who fill “the nation’s prisons and linger in the ‘school-to-prison-pipeline’.”⁶³ What  Zeng et al., Export Processing Zones in China, 1.  Cheng and Selden, The Origins and Social Consequences.  Michael Denning: Design and Discontent, in: New Left Review 90 (Nov Dec 2014), 147– 152, esp. 148. See also Nikil Saval: Cubed. A Secret History of the Workplace. New York, NY and London 2014.  David Harvey: The Conditions of Modernity. An Enquiry into the Orginis of Cultural Change, Oxford 1989, 284– 307.  Saval, Cubed.  Figures from 2015 record over 2 million people imprisoned and between 4000 and 5000 prisons in the US. See Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birbeck College, University of London: World Prison Brief. URL: http://www.prisonstudies.org/ (22. May 2017). According to figures quoted by Martin (this volume), by 2010, seven million people in the US were under some form of correctional supervision. An earlier study records a “dramatic increase” in incarceration rates worldwide in the decade between 1985 and 1995, but also notes that compared to the US, the 16 Mahua Sarkar is more, this carceral complex is not only “highly racialized” and “gendered”— housing primarily black and Latino young men—but also concentrated spatially in poor, rural areas with a predominance of black populations, prompting scholars to read “the era of mass incarceration” as a “new stage in American racial inequality.”⁶⁴ Indeed, as Martin’s paper chillingly observes, the number of incarcerated black men in 2010 in the US exceeded the number enslaved in the nineteenth century. Given that wage work is at best a rarity for this vast population living in and out of prisons, it is not surprising that the scholarly discussion around mass incarceration in the US also elides the question of “labor” or “work”, concentrating instead on debates over the “freedom and civil rights” of the indigent. Indeed, in the face of the wageless and apparently superfluous (at least, to capital) multitudes across the world, “to speak of labour [today seems to be] to speak of the already enfranchised.”⁶⁵ However, this “decoupling of incarceration from waged labor” seems to be peculiar to the current historical moment. For, convict labor has long been part of a global system of forced migration, and transportation⁶⁶—quite like “the recruiting of slaves and the contracting of bonded workers”—have “complemented the international migration of free European peoples” throughout the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ In fact, racially divergent labor regimes were the norm within the global convict labor system. As Martin’s survey of this particular unfree labor form shows, rehabilitation for white prisoners and brutal convict labor for black/colonial subjects constituted two sides of a linked global prison system emergent in the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ rate of increase in incarceration was far slower in Western Europe. See Marc Mauer: Americans Behind Bars. U.S. and International Use of Incarceration, 1995, in: National Criminal Justice Reference Service, NCJ 174074 (1997), 1– 22. URL: https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract. aspx?ID=174074 (19 June 2017).  Bruce Western and Christopher Wilderman: The Black Family and Mass Incarceration, in: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621, 1 (2009), 221– 242.  Denning, Wageless Life, 79. For a recent account of informal worker mobilization around citizenship rights, see Rina Agarwala: Informal Labor, Formal Politics, and Dignified Discontent in India. New York, NY 2013.  The practice of transporting convicts to a penal colony, see Transportation, in: Oxford Dictionary. URL: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/transportation (5. July 2017).  Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold: Unshackling the Past, in: Stephen Nicholas (ed.): Convict Workers. Reinterpreting Australia’s Past. Cambridge 1988, 7; Anand Yang: Indian Convict Workers in Southeast Asia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, in: Journal of World History, 14, 2 (2003), 179 – 208. See also, Hahamovitch, this volume on the question of color-coded labor-migration in the nineteenth century.  De Vito and Lichtenstein, Writing a Global History of Convict Labor. Introduction: Work Out of Place 17 The importance of prison labor diminished in the twentieth century, especially in the context of the post World War II economic boom and the era of welfare states and union activism. The intense growth of a carceral complex since the 1970s, thus, poses difficult new questions. To quote Martin: “If prisons are centers of unfree labor, but that labor remains idle, what work do prisoners and prisons do?” The extant scholarship seems to proffer three kinds of explanations: first, that there is a revival of “direct exploitation” of the incarcerated as cheap and unfree labor for commodity production; second, that private prison corporations profit from the business of housing and “serving” the incarcerated; and, third, that the carceral complex may be part of the state’s strategy to warehouse “surplus bodies” that are redundant to the needs of capital and hence “permanently excluded” from a meaningful life under capitalism.⁶⁹ In Martin’s view, all three explanations are useful but each amplifies a single dimension of the complex web of factors driving the astounding proliferation of prisons and imprisonment in the US. Martin himself seems to read mass incarceration as part of a state-capital response to two kinds of resistance by the “underemployed, rarely employed and new unemployed” black laboring classes in the 1960s: first, disruption through urban rebellions and, second, delinking, or the embracing of alternative means of sustenance “beyond the waged labor/capital relationship” by black households. If the former took place visibly on the streets of cities across the US, the latter operated within the less visible sphere of social reproduction through the sharing and pooling of resources among kin and friends, spearheaded by inter-generational networks of women.⁷⁰ Martin’s foregrounding of the attempts by poor black households’ to eke out an existence outside of the capital-wage relationship lends support to recent calls by labor scholars to reimagine the “dispossessed proletarian household”—usually thought of as a calamity—as a “wageless base of subsistence labour” that anchors the efforts of wage-seekers. It would seem that mass incarceration of the last few decades has targeted precisely this ability of the working-poor and/or wageless communities to regenerate themselves in the face of nearly impossible odds. Indeed, as Martin intimates, the state’s strategies of taming and containment of the wageless have been so successful that, today, the task of surveillance and disciplining seems to be left increasingly to the capillary workings of nonprofit organizations deep within communities, while mass incarceration slowly gives way to a counter-tendency of widespread decarceration in the US. Unem-  Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; and for a more general discussion of wageless-ness, Denning, Wageless Life.  Carol B. Stack: All Our Kin. Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York, NY 1983. 18 Mahua Sarkar ployment continues to be a central organizing principle in the lives of the formerly incarcerated; only now, in keeping with the trends of the times, they are circulated endlessly among so-called “reentry” and “training programs” that certify employability, but offer no guarantees of employment. The final substantive paper in this volume turns our attention to yet another form of paid or waged labor that thrives on informal and flexible arrangements— viz. commercial gestational surrogacy, which has emerged as a crucial element of a hugely profitable global assisted reproductive technologies (ART) industry.⁷¹ Surrogacy as a practice—whereby women bear children on behalf of other women who may be unable (or unwilling) to conceive or carry a child to term —is not new. What is new is the ability of current assisted reproductive technologies to enable women to bear children genetically unconnected to them. And it is this severance of the “genetic” from the “biological” components of motherhood that underpins the rapid growth of a global gestational surrogacy industry today, reportedly worth over six billion dollars. In a remarkable appropriation of the notion of “outsourcing labor”, intending parents (frequently from the global North) can now have either their own gametes—or sperms and eggs from donors of their choice—be fertilized (through IVF) and implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother—often from the global South—who bears the child on their behalf. Two sets of factors⁷² seem to drive the meteoric growth⁷³ and globalization of this industry: the unavailability or banning of commercial surrogacy in a majority of countries that lead intending parents to seek the services of clinics and surrogates in a handful of destination countries;⁷⁴ and the vastly differential costs  According to a recent NASDAQ report, the ART industry was worth USD 22.3 billion in 2015, and is projected to reach USD 31 billion by 2023. Global Market Insights: Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Market size worth USD 31 Billion by 2023 (5. July 2016), in: Globe Newswire. URL: https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/07/05/853690/0/en/Assisted-ReproductiveTechnology-ART-Market-size-worth-USD-31-Billion-by-2023-Global-Market-Insights-Inc.html (17 June 2017).  There is of course also the ideological impetus to achieve what is seen as a “complete” family or to counter feelings of inadequacy due to infertility. See for instance Helena Ragoné: Surrogate Motherhood. Conception in the Heart. Boulder, CO 1994, especially 346 – 347  A recent global report estimates a probable rise of about 1,162 per cent in the occurrence of international surrogacy cases in a 5-year period between 2009 – 2013. Permanent Bureau HCCH: A Study Of Legal Parentage. The Hague 2014, 60.  According to recent news reports, countries that allow for-profit surrogacy at present include Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Cambodia, and Mexico. Altruistic surrogacy is possible in Canada, the U.K., Denmark, New Zealand, and parts of Australia. Roli Srivastava: Factbox. Which Countries Allow Commercial Surrogacy? (19.01. 2017), in: Health News. URL: http://www.reuters.com/ar ticle/us-india-women-surrogacy-factbox-idUSKBN1530FP (14 June 2017); Victoria Burnett: As Mexican State Limits Surrogacy Global System Is Further Strained (23 March 2017), in: New York Introduction: Work Out of Place 19 of surrogacy services in the global South and the North.⁷⁵ While much of the extant literature on surrogacy foregrounds the many ethical and human rights issues that the practice agitates, my paper takes up the question of just what kind of labor does gestational surrogacy involve, and offers some thoughts on the ways in which a global regulatory framework might be envisaged to meet the substantial challenges thrown up by this ever-shifting transnational industry. If informality, flexibility and redundancy are hallmarks of the experience of work under neoliberal capitalism–as a number of the papers in this volume index—commercial gestational surrogacy is suggestive of yet another development that is poised to shape the future of work as we know it: viz. the rise of new occupations and, more importantly, of new kinds of workers. (Or, perhaps, it is the reincarnation of older occupations and workers in previously unimaginable guises). Beyond gestational surrogacy, other contemporary examples of new forms of work and workers might include Commercial Content Moderation (CCM) —a novel form of “dirty work” or cleaning operation that involves managing “digital trash” generated by an ever-expanding cyber economy undertaken by a computer-trained and typically young workforce, toiling in backstage offices across the world—⁷⁶and, perhaps more spectacularly, robotic labor. Robots have been in use in industrial production already for several decades,⁷⁷but now they seem to be deployed increasingly in the service sector, including in the medical industry, in defense applications, in the dairy industry and livestock farming, as well as in mundane tasks such as reception work, waiting tables, Times. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/world/americas/as-mexican-state-limits-surro gacy-global-system-is-further-strained.html (17 June 2017).  For instance, China (mainland), France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland prohibit all forms of commercial surrogacy; while others—such as Austria and Norway—ban gestational surrogacy by prohibiting egg donation. Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, South Africa and some provinces of Canada allow altruistic surrogacy, where the surrogate is paid only for the medical expenses she incurs during the process. Permanent Bureau HCCH, A Study Of Legal Parentage, 14– 15.  Dorothea Hoehtker: Who’s job is it to take out the digital trash? (23. May 2017), in: Work in Progress. International Labour Office Blog. URL: https://iloblog.org/2017/05/23/the-secret-stressesof-the-editors-of-the-internet/ (31. May 2017); Sarah T. Roberts: Commercial Content Moderators. Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work, in: Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes (eds.): The Intersectional Internet. Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online. New York, NY 2016, 147– 160; Adrian Chen, The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feeds (23. Oct. 2014), in: Wired. URL: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/ (31. May 2017).  According to the International Federation of Robotics, the total units of robots sold rose from 81,000 in 2003 to 254,000 in 2015, with Asia being the largest growth market. International Federation of Robotics: Executive Summary World Robotics 2016 Industrial Robots, in: IFR. URL: https://ifr.org/img/uploads/Executive_Summary_WR_Industrial_Robots_20161.pdf (4. June 2017). 20 Mahua Sarkar simple care-work in hospitals, and even reading to children in pre-schools.⁷⁸ As a recent report by the International Bar Association predicts, exponential development of the artificial intelligence industry—dubbed as the fourth Industrial Revolution—will usher in a new “workplace reality” in the near future whereby jobs “at all levels in society presently undertaken by humans” are likely to be “reassigned to robots or AI”.⁷⁹ If we are indeed “valuable to ourselves and to one another to the extent that we produce at work”⁸⁰ then this prospect of a future in which work is dislodged from its central place in human lives is alarming, to say the least, and devastating for many.⁸¹ In preparation for the projected consequences of this most recent bout of automation, and to combat inequality in general, a number of countries⁸² have been deliberating on, and even experimenting with the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A social security instrument that, according to its supporters, promises “security for everyone in society, [and to] reduce inequality and provide insurance against robots replacing humans in the labour market”, UBI also has its detractors. A recent study by the OECD, for instance, argues that the “simplicity of basic income schemes” necessitates “large increases in taxation”, but that it would be less effective in targeting the needs of the poorest. ⁸³  Samantha Boh: Robots in Singapore (21 May 2017), in: The Straits Times. URL: http://www. straitstimes.com/singapore/robots-in-singapore (4. June 2017). The IFR reports the sale of 41060 professional service robots, and over 5.4 million service robots for domestic and personal use in 2015. These numbers are poised to rise significantly in the coming years. International Federation of Robotics: Executive Summary World Robotics 2016 Service Robots, in: IFR. URL: https:// ifr.org/downloads/press/02_2016/Executive_Summary_Service_Robots_2016.pdf (4 June 2017).  IBA Global Employment Institute: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and their Impact on the Workplace. London 2017. URL: https://www.ibanet.org/Article/NewDetail.aspx?ArticleUid= 012a3473-007f-4519-827c-7da56d7e3509 (19 June 2017).  To echo one recent summation: “We are valuable to ourselves and to one another to the extent that we produce at work.” Kathi Weeks: The Problems of Work, in: New Labor Forum 23, 2 (2014), 10 – 12. See also Denning, Wageless Life.  Kathi Weeks has of course argued convincingly against the tendency to accord too much importance to wage work.  Countries debating the usefulness of Basic Income schemes include the US, Switzerland and France; Finland and the Netherlands have begun trial programs. See for instance  Chris Giles: Universal Basic Income Would Fail to Cut Poverty, says OECD, (May 28 2017), in: Financial Times. URL: https://www.ft.com/content/82334db2 - 414d-11e7 -9d56 -25f963e998b2? mhq5j=e1. See also Ashley Blackwell: Hawaii to Study Universal Basic Income and the Impact of Job Automation on Social Safety Net (18 June 2017), in: Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). URL: http://basicincome.org/news/2017/06/hawaii-study-universal-basic-income-impact-job-automa tion-social-safety-net/ (19 June 2017); Tony Fitzpatrick: Freedom and Security. An Introduction to the Basic Income Debate. Basingstoke 1999; Manos Matsaganis: Social Policy in Hard Times. The Case of Greece, in: Critical Social Policy 32, 3 (2012), 406 – 421. Introduction: Work Out of Place 21 Clearly, the debate over adequate adjustment instruments will only intensify in future decades as the challenges thrown up by the need to share our work-space–indeed, work itself–with not just “othered” human beings, but also with robots and AI become more widespread and entrenched.⁸⁴ What remains to be seen is whether in the face of “the AI phenomenon” the category “human” will coalesce or fragment further, producing even more differentiated regimes of accumulation and mobility, and belonging and exclusion across and/or within the global North and the South.  The IBA has already intimated the urgent need for new legal frameworks and the introduction of “human quotas” for certain sectors of the economy. IBA-GEI, Artificial Intelligence, esp. 39 – 40.