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- Convenors:
-
Surbhi Kesar
(SOAS University of London)
Hannah Bargawi (SOAS, University of London)
Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS University of London)
Lorena Lombardozzi (The Open University)
Susan Newman (The Open University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Politics and political economy
- Location:
- Palmer 1.08
- Sessions:
- Friday 30 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel will explore the issue of crisis in the world of work, focussing specifically on the spheres of informal economy and/or social reproduction.
Long Abstract:
In line with the theme of the conference, ‘crisis in Anthropocene’, this panel we will explore the issue of crisis in the world of work. Focussing specifically on the spheres of informal economy and/or social reproduction, the panel will unpack how recent changes in these spheres - including during COVID-19 - have contributed to engendering the current crisis in the world of work and will reflect on how this may manifest in different regions. Each of the papers in the panel advances a distinct, although related, framework to explore this common issue, and the panel discussion will be geared towards integrating these distinct insights to develop a coherent framework of analysis on crisis in the world of work. The papers will specifically draw from the experience of the economies in the Global South to inform our understanding of crisis. The key questions that the panel will engage with are the following: how does one theoretically grapple with the issue of crisis in the world of work, including during the COVID-19 pandemic? How can one develop a South-centric lens for this analysis? How can these insights be productively employed to inform both the current research on crisis and the world of work and policy direction regarding the future of work?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 30 June, 2023, -Hannah Bargawi (SOAS, University of London) Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS University of London) Sara Stevano (SOAS University of London) Lorena Lombardozzi (The Open University)
Paper short abstract:
The crisis has reshaped the organization of production & reproduction in households & global labor markets. This reorganization is exacerbating gender, class, and race inequalities. An internationalist feminist response would ensure access to services based on the centrality of social reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
This article deploys a feminist political economy approach centered on social reproduction to analyze the reconfiguration and regeneration of multiple inequalities in households and the labor markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this approach, the analysis unpacks the multiple trajectories of fragility the current crisis is intervening on and reshaping in the home and in the world of work, and their gendered and racialized features across the world. It shows how the pandemic and the measures to contain it have further deepened the centrality of households and reproductive work in the functioning of capitalism and argues that the transformative potential of the crisis can only be harnessed by framing policy and political responses around social reproduction and its essential contributions to work and life.
Lorena Lombardozzi (The Open University)
Paper short abstract:
this paper unpacks the contradictions that explain the uneven conditions of social reproduction of (and through) food. By explaining modalities of access and availability of food in rural areas, it reflects on the tensions of capitalist food system to maintain the social reproduction of rural life
Paper long abstract:
Food systems – and the interplay between food production, marketization and access- are a constituent element of the social reproduction of life. Using a social reproduction framework, this paper problematizes the ontological, epistemological and methodological premises of food system studies in agrarian change. Based on primary data collected during multiple rounds of fieldwork in rural Uzbekistan and using mixed methods, it offers a triple contribution. First, it assesses the inequalities of food security and dietary diversity among different classes of farmers and agrarian wage workers. Along these lines, it argues that individualized food security indicators do not unveil the systemic determinants that explain unequal patterns of social reproduction through nutrition during processes of agrarian marketization. To overcome individual-based theorizations, it expands the investigation to state policies, market drivers and gender norms linked to food knowledge, provision, affordability, and availability. In so doing, it unpacks the contradictions that explain the uneven conditions of social reproduction of (and through) food. Finally, by explaining modalities of access and availability of ultra-processed food in rural areas, it reflects on the tensions between the capitalist global food system and its interaction with the logic of state-led development to maintain the social reproduction of rural life.
Max Gallien (IDS)
Paper short abstract:
The paper argues that conceptual innovations in how we understand informality have outpaced common measurements. It reviews the state of the field, highlights the biases that these measurements uphold, and explores suggested alternatives using data from a survey of informal workers in Accra.
Paper long abstract:
Much scholarship on informality and development begins with an observation of the huge size of informal economies, often citing widely available statistics from the ILO or from indirect modelled measurements such as Schneider (2010) or Elgin (2021). However, there are a range of well-established issues with these measurements: they are based on inconsistent data sources in different geographies, and rely on large assumptions. Furthermore, scholarship on informality in recent years has increasingly moved away from a dichotomous view of informality, highlighting multidimensionality and complex relationships between workers, firms and state structures. This paper takes stock of common measurements of informality and examines where the issues with dominant measurement are particularly impacting scholarship. It then examines alternative proposals, including an index approach, multidimensional and institution-specific approaches to measuring informality. It illustrates the implications of these approaches using novel data from a survey of informal workers in Accra collected by the ICTD, WIEGO and ISSER in 2022.
Surbhi Kesar (SOAS University of London) Snehashish Bhattacharya (South Asian University) Lopamudra Banerjee (Bennington College)
Paper short abstract:
The article explores three specific contradictions - that between capital and labour in the ‘interior’ space of capital; that between capital and its ‘outside’; and those emerging from ‘dispersion’ of the circuit of capital to its ‘outside’ - to understand the conditions of crisis in world of work.
Paper long abstract:
The severe economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the global working population can be interpreted as both a fallout from, and a violent assertion of, a larger crisis in the world of work. While this crisis has been attributed to the pre-existing conditions of widespread informality and precarity in the domain of remunerative work, the authors of this article dig deeper to read these conditions and the crisis tendencies as articulations of certain key contradictions that define the world of work in the present conjuncture of global capitalism. The article highlights three specific contradictions: that between capital and labour in the ‘interior’ space of capital; that between capital and its ‘outside’; and those emerging from ‘dispersion’ of the circuit of capital to its ‘outside’. The ‘outside’ is the economic space that exists within capitalist social formation but represents the domain of unwaged work carried out in the processes of non-capitalist production and distribution, both within and outside the space of the household. The authors argue that the expanded reproduction of capital has sharpened this triad of contradictions in the present conjuncture in specific ways in the global South and global North through continuous informalization of work, exclusion of masses of population from the ‘interior’ domain of capital, and insistent dispersion of the circuit of capital to its ‘outside’ through various forms of ‘non-standard’ labour processes and work arrangements. The article provides some illustrations of how these processes have registered and contributed to the crisis situation in times of the pandemic.
Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This article reads the COVID-19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour.
Paper long abstract:
This article proposes a reading of the COVID-19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on the restructuring of reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of differentiated surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour. Learning from the pandemic and the social reproduction of the surplus populations it generated, the analysis argues that debates on inequality should be re-centred on its existential nature and its embeddedness in social oppression, and that labour relations should be considered as key reproducers of inequality. It also argues that informal labour should be increasingly understood as playing the reproductive role of ‘global housework’ in contemporary capitalism.
Kate Meagher (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on debates about informal workers as 'surplus to requirements' or 'essential workers', a social reproduction lens will be used to examine the linkages of African informal workers into circuits of capital, and the use of social protection narratives to stabilize precarious forms of inclusion.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will draw on the insights of social reproduction perspectives on informal work to examine the ways in which African informal workers have been linked into circuits of capital, and how social protection narratives have been deployed to normalize and stabilize the expansion of precarious work in Africa. Drawing on debates about whether informal workers are 'surplus to requirements', or 'essential workers', this paper will examine how linkages and narratives from the sphere of social reproduction are used to expand 'disguised employment' of informal and precarious workers in a range of modern capitalist sectors. Evidence from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa will be used to explore the extent of incorporation of precarious workers into sectors associated with modernization and structural transformation, and the intense levels of exploitation facilitated by these processes. The social protection and 'essential worker' narratives arising from the pandemic will be interrogated as a means of further normalizing rather than challenging the expansion of precarious work in Africa and beyond. The paper will reflect on how celebratory and 'caring' narratives of informal and precarious work shift the focus of crisis from the incorporation of precarious workers into the formal circuits of capital, to the lack of minimalist social protection to ensure the viability of these arrangements. Reflection on social protection strategies of decommodification, depoliticization and financialization will refocus attention on what social reproduction thinking can tell us about progressive approaches to the crisis of work that focus on promoting decent work rather than stabilizing precarious work.