Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses one crucial way in which capital has valorised in the Uzbek national via the exploitation and appropriation of 'cheap labour.' It deploys a Marxian-inspired framework that takes as the point of departure in the analysis capital accumulation on a global scale, whose concrete historical forms can be found in the policies and institutions of national states that mediate this global process. In this way, the paper critiques the methodological nationalism found in the literature on Uzbekistan under President Karimov (ex. IMF 2018: 6; Cooley & Heathershaw 2017; Batsaikhan & Dabrowski 2017: 306; Blackmon 2011: Chapter 2), including in the Uzbek government's self-representation (ex. Karimov 1998, 1995, 1993), placing the antagonistic relations between labour and capital at the centre of the analysis.

First, the paper explains the process of rural labour re-proletarianisation as critical to understanding the country's post-independence political economy. As collective farming ('shirkats') gave way to commercial farming ('fermerstvo') at the end of 1990s-beginning of 2000s, labour shredding created a rural army of labour for capital to exploit in and outside Uzbekistan. Second, the paper connects this turning point in the country's history to processes of formality/informality in the labour market in Uzbekistan, focusing on patterns of labour exploitation. Third, it closes in on informality to expose the gendered dimensions of labour's exploitation as well as the appropriation of women's work inside and outside the household. Finally, the paper connects re-proletarianisation in the Uzbek countryside with mass migration to third countries, explaining the key role of remittances in labour reproduction within the Uzbek political economy.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the influence that manpower agencies have on employment in Kazakhstan's oil sector.

After independence, Kazakhstan's oil sector was flooded with trans-national companies bringing into the industry several of their cross-border standards.

The use of manpower agencies, i.e. the outsourcing of HR and the atomization of the workforce, characterizes one oil region more than others in Kazakhstan. The presence of manpower agencies and the absence of trade unions is directly linked to practices by trans-national companies, this paper argues. Manpower agencies have a decisive role in making employment and labor more precarious in the oil sector.

In particular, the paper highlights how their role fills several gaps: 1) trans-national companies offload responsibilities (time spent on HR for direct employees; responsibility on Health & Safety); 2) employers' preference for lower salaries and worse conditions; 3) lack of independent trade unions.

Their presence stimulates a race to the bottom also between workers, who have no other option but to accept precarious (the seasonal fluctuation of jobs in the oil sector is in fact one of the main reasons for which these large companies justify their use of manpower agencies), unsafe, and underpaid jobs.

The drive towards the inflation of "local content" in Kazakhstan's oil industry proved to be yet another reason that trans-national companies use to employ manpower agencies.

Against this backdrop, the paper also offers a peek into "industrial gossip", gathered during fieldwork in the Atyrau region.

This more anthropological side of the argument highlights how political pretexts, personal spats, family relations, and bribes have broken up both the world of trade unions and that of manpower agencies. The latter, however, has a propensity and an incentive for atomization, which makes it stronger, while the rifts among the former have weakened the labor movement, before it was essentially killed by recent legislation.

Paper long abstract:

After a widely-reported tragedy of five children perishing in a house fire in Kazakhstan's capital while their parents were away at night-shift jobs, conflicting imperatives of gendered productive and reproductive labor came to the forefront of the Kazakhstani's public consciousness in early 2019. This highly-publicized case in turn ignited a conflagration of civic protests at regional administrative centers by "mothers with many children" (mnogodetnye mamy, kopbala analar), the official designation for low-income women who have four or more children and are eligible for monthly monetary allocations from the government. The popularity and sympathy that these mother's protests sparked were widely attributed as a leading factor in President Nazarbayev's decree to fire the standing government on February 21, and may have also contributed to his decision to resign on March 19, after nearly 30 years of rule.

In the aftermath of Nazarbayev's resignation, these mother's protests have petered out and media attention has shifted away from highlighting their demands; moreover, when other protestors gathered against the renaming of the capital from Astana to Nur-Sultan in a decree by newly-appointed President Tokayev, they were quickly jailed. Meanwhile, promises made by the new government to increase childcare benefits and address housing shortages for low-income families have yet to be fulfilled, and women continue to labor at precarious jobs while birthing and raising the new generation of Kazakhstani citizens. This paper is informed by theories of women's reproductive and productive roles in relation to the state (Yuval-Davis 1997) and draws upon media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the extent to which women's work - at the job, within the family, and in the public sphere - can engender governmental responses and change in a field constrained by economic hardship, corruption, and patriarchal demands by both society and the state.

Paper long abstract:

In early January 2017, after a court ruled in favour of the dissolution of the Kazakhstani Federation of Independent Trade Unions, workers at Oil Construction Company (a state-owned service company) in Aqtau entered a hunger strike. After two weeks the strike came to an end, with its leaders arrested, the participants fined, and those identified as "instigators" fired. By narrating the trajectories of four of the latter in the following sixteen months, in this paper I want to interrogate the effects that the strike and its consequences had for the (re)production of these laid-off workers' subjectivities in relation to the state, to their social environment, and to themselves. In its ambivalent meaning of "citizen" and "breadwinner", azamat will serve me as a concept expressing the tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the abstract legal-juridical subject with its rights and duties and, on the other, an embodied masculinity and a moral positioning needing constant reproduction amidst conjunctural and processual relations of forces.

During the months following the strike, as the oil service sector went through a restructuring involving the downsizing and precarization of its workforce in order to restore profitability, the tensions in the meaning of azamat came to the fore. If agencies for the re-training of former workers into entrepreneurs stressed how this was an occasion to take "one's life in its own hands", leaving behind the subjection of salaried labor for the freedom of the citizen, for many workers the loss of their job induced a crisis that was simultaneously one of the citizen and of the (male) subject,​ reshaping perceptions of the state and of the self. This reshaping developed along different trajectories: withdrawing from work due to a sense of "dignity" as well as to the black mark the strike had left on one's "employment record" (trudovaya knizhka); returning to the village and starting a volatile husbandry business; continuing with labor activism, even taking stage at international conferences; or following the dream of "liberated work" in a pyramidal scheme, purifying oneself from the moral and physical intoxication of the oil industry through the curative products one would sell by means of its embodied labour​.