Paper short abstract:

The paper identifies how ill-health emerges from embodied experiences of boundary crossing between workforce inclusion and exclusion in South Africa, intensified by successive crises of Covid-19, food price hikes, localized drought and violent unrest.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores ill-health arising from boundary crossing between workforce inclusion and exclusion. It focuses on food system workers in South Africa. In this sector, many kinds of work involve only delimited and partial inclusion, from seasonal picking to farm work interrupted by repetitive injuries, to migrant street vendors working under the threat of government reprisal. Moreover, in the last three years the boundaries of workforce inclusion have been intensified and even re-drawn by successive crises: the near collapse of food supply chains and escalating hunger caused by government regulations to control Covid-19; food and fuel price hikes; local drought; and the July 2021 ‘unrest’ – a period of widespread violence and looting of shops, causing the death of over 300 people and damage to thousands of shops and businesses.

The paper draws on research conducted with a team of community researchers in 2022. It explores how mental and physical ill-health emerge from the embodied experiences of boundary crossing between fluid states of inclusion and exclusion, intensified by these recent social ruptures. It reflects on how the social infrastructures mobilised to alleviate hunger may also help to relieve the mental and physical strain of precarious work.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research on the construction industry in the North East of England, in this paper I explore how health and safety on site was understood through an ethics of labour which both extended beyond the boundaries of the conventionally economic and helped to ensure project success and profit.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the construction industry in the North East of England, in this paper I explore how the health of workers was understood by those with the responsibility to protect it. As I will discuss, those working for the main contractor understood the work they were doing in relation to a history of construction site accidents and illnesses, where two people died a week in accidents and the health impacts of the dangerous working conditions were numerous. Health and safety on site was shaped by numerous laws, regulations, programmes, policies, and codes but as I will argue, these formal expectations were interwoven with, and animated by, an ethics emerging from labour. These ethics extended beyond the boundaries of the conventionally economic to include kinship and considerations of the whole person beyond their labour, including their ‘mental health’. At the same time, these ethics were not separate from the hierarchy that organised this labour and were shaped by the complex and contentious dynamics of sub-contracting and the industry’s regimes of capital accumulation. Protecting health formed part of the managers attempts to reconcile the contradictory demands of the construction site which required both speed and safety and helped to secure the success of projects and their associated profits in the context of an industry where capital accumulation is uncertain and fragile.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on archival research to explore the transformation of understandings of occupational health and unwellness in the context of very-large-scale epidemiological studies among British civil service workers and their officeplace environments.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day, a series of very-large-scale epidemiological studies conducted amongst civil servants in Britain and elsewhere transformed medical conceptions of clerical labor and its environments as sites of occupational health and toxicity. Focusing especially on the British case, this paper will combine medical and economic anthropology in order to understand these transformations as they trafficked across the porous boundaries between medicine, politics, the economy, and social life. It will track the circulation and interaction of three sociomedical concepts as these accrued multiple meanings in the course of their development: “the social gradient”; “stress”; and “the work-home interface.” In doing so, the paper argues that civil servant epidemiological subjects served for the British political and medical establishment as a site of value extraction twice over: first as workers charged with the orderly and efficient dispensation of human government, and second as a substrate for the experimental formulation of new theories of wellness and its opposites. The paper will place its archival findings within a global context to suggest a new way of understanding the work of capitalism: through the physical embodiment of the toxicities of what I call "conditional labor."

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses being ‘unwell’ in relation to politics of labour in coastal shipbreaking. It reflects on how permeability can be used to conceptualise the boundary crossings of unwellness by taking into account toxic embodiments within and beyond workers’ bodies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between labour and health in Bangladesh’s shipbreaking industry. Unwellness extends beyond spectacular violence of maiming and deaths from explosions and falling from great heights to the slow violence and lingering effects of ill-health caused by constant toxic exposure as vessels are taken apart without adequate personal protective equipment. Toxic fumes from burning paint-coated steel, taking apart asbestos and glasswool fibres, intermingle in the humid airs with other toxicants from Chattogram region’s industrial factories – they extend far beyond place-based boundaries of employment. While workers are increasingly compensated for accidents, to what extent can trade union activism taking into account the slow onset of ill-health of workers considering the crossing/dissolution of boundaries of labour in today’s global capitalist system? Shipbreaking workers, both migrants and permanent residents, work in conditions where hazardous materials and invisible pathogens pollute the very air they inhale even after they have finished their shifts – and there are increasing cases of asbestosis and problems of chronic illness among workers and the communities surrounding shipbreaking yards. These health effects from highly profitable shipbreaking activities are unevenly distributed as the negative externalities affect working class populations the most. I reflect on how these insights from an industrialising formerly agrarian region in South Asia may help us help us theorise unwellness in ways that may help create alternate possibilities for labour politics.

Paper short abstract:

Witnessing extraordinary accidents or illness in waged work makes workers choose flexible daily wage jobs that they can refuse in case of fatigue or high risk. The paper shows how health and endurance is often sought through ordinary non-waged work in support of the need to legitimise the latter.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I discuss the trajectories through which workers come to do seemingly insecure and ordinary daily wage jobs of headloading or scrap collection in a working-class neighbourhood in Mumbai. Given how the memory of violent events often get embedded into ordinary lives (Das 2006), I show how witnessing extraordinary accidents, fires or prolonged illness in waged work shapes workers’ perceptions of themselves and their work. Despite the boundaryless nature of their current work – each day at a different site – they prefer that contracts negotiated daily give them the choice of refusing dangerous work or taking days off to care for tired bodies. The local waged work options of being an electrician, sweatshop worker or brick kiln worker expose them to persistent dangers of smoke inhalation, short circuit fires and machine malfunction. Based on an ethnography and interviews conducted in 2019, I take a life cycle approach to facilitate a dissolution between the boundaries of work done in the past, present and future. Adding to the literature on refusal of waged work (Millar 2014) and the circularity between formal – informal work (Mezzadri and Majumder 2020), this paper shows how good health and endurance are sought through rather than despite improvisational work. A focus on such acts of errantry (Glissant 2010) helps move away from the continued primacy of waged work, unanchor definitions of contemporary work from singular hierarchies of value and contribute to the growing call for recognition of ordinary work (Vicol, Monteith, and Williams 2021).

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the 'legitimate' claimant is constructed by the state and apprehended by informal workers claiming benefits for silicosis, an occupational disease, in India. This scheme does not require proof of work, and is an emergent negotiation around work, welfare, and ill-health.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers how 'legitimacy' is constructed, negotiated, and apprehended by doctors, bureaucrats, lawyers, and trade unionists impacted by occupational disease. Through twelve months of participant observation in a trade union and a health clinic in Rajasthan, this paper describes the ethical visions and anxieties that animate the life of a government compensation scheme for silicosis, a lung disease contracted by stone-carvers in my field-site. This government scheme is 'ex gratia', that is, a payment made out of a moral obligation and not a legal one, to workers with a certified diagnosis of silicosis. It marks a fundamental break from the logic of workers' compensation as it requires no proof of employment, in recognition of the fact that almost all workers are employed informally, off the books and for short periods. While 'legitimacy' is intended to be solely parsed through a medical lens, in practice, work history remains a central part of the diagnostic process. Further, silicosis itself is a 'boundary-crossing' illness: it is often concomitant with tuberculosis and other infectious pulmonary diseases. I argue, through my work, that while the bureaucratic imaginary of the 'occupational' illness has allowed for a new kind of politics that attends to informality and precarity, it ultimately limits what kinds of diseases and suffering become legible to the state. I close by considering what the contradictory nature of 'ex gratia' might open up to us, in reckoning with informality and the moral nature of disease under capitalism.