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Paper short abstract:

We provide a gender lense on the ‘spectrum of voluntariness’ in Kenya’s community health. We examine the unpaid labour demands community health volunteers experience and how this has been enjoined over years through existing structures.

Paper long abstract:

Unpaid community labour has been a cornerstone of foreign interventionism since the late colonial period (Rossi 2017). In health, Community Health Workers (CHWs) have been promoted as core to delivering primary services, in particular since the 1978 UN Declaration of Alma Ata. While originally trumpeted as a revolutionary, pro-poor approach to realising the right to health, over time unpaid community labour has been coopted by public and private actors to their own ends. Drawing from life story interviews and ethnography with Community Health Volunteers (CHVs) in Isiolo, Kenya (2022-2023), we unpack how historical, intersecting forms of ‘expanding dispossession’ (Bin 2018) have exacted unpaid labour over decades. CHVs, who sign contracts and are accountable for such, remain legally volunteers without any labour protections. Indeed, the notion of ‘voluntarism’ has restricted avenues for CHVs to organize for change, encapsulated by a failed strike in 2021. While the majority of CHWs are women globally, in Isiolo it is an even divide, suggesting egalitarianism. However, we explicate how such labour remains gendered to the extreme within this one county. Specifically, where such work is seen as a ‘step-up’, in rural areas with no opportunities for self-improvement or where patriarchal norms restrict women’s movements and activities, the majority are men. Where such work is a ‘step-down’, of no material or symbolic value as in urban areas, the majority are women. We conclude with our reflections on this gendered ‘spectrum of voluntariness’, where autonomy is discernible but conditioned by past dispossession, which we understand as violence.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the gendered links between debt and social reproduction in India by showcasing how debt is managed by the unpaid and underpaid labor provided by women, children and female kin. This unpaid labor to manage debt and SR, we show depletes women physically, financially and mentally.

Paper long abstract:

Existing work on rising debt and credit borrowing in the Global North illustrates the myriad ways global processes of financialization and privatization of social reproduction have increasingly pulled poor and racially marginalized women into the circuits of global finance. Our paper explores the gendered links between debt and social reproduction in India, where neoliberal forms of capitalist transformation have engendered a crisis of social reproduction, and differential forms of credit borrowing and debt has become an everyday mode of living, especially for the precariously laboring. By drawing from semi-structured interviews conducted with precariously laboring households across diverse rural-urban regions in two states in India, Uttar Pradesh and Goa, we show how credit and debt is deeply interwoven in sustaining basic needs of everyday life (making families food secure, and meeting vital expenses related to education, housing, health care, marriage), but at the same time how it repletes value and constrains social reproduction of certain lives; especially women and female kins, whose (un)paid and underpaid self exploitative forms of affective and emotional labor helps families accumulate credit, manage household debt and finance amidst food insecurity and other forms of livelihood precarity.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how the complex social justice mechanisms in rural settings of developing countries shape women’s care work and contributions. By taking Atakora as a case study in West Africa, I question the boundaries of ‘female work’ not captured in existing social reproductive theory.

Paper long abstract:

Rural women, who work in local agricultural value chains in Atakora, Benin, narrate their experiences of their care burden. By taking Atakora as a case study in West Africa, I question the boundaries of ‘female work’, who draws them, and how they shape women’s experiences and opportunities of domestic and ‘productive’ labour? In this presentation, I will consider how the complex social justice mechanisms in rural settings of developing countries may shape women’s care work and contributions. The findings of this paper call into question the applicability of existing iterations of social reproductive theory (SRT) which model a western dyadic relationship between man and woman, husband and wife, through a western lens of analysis. Based on data collected during multi-year fieldwork (2017-2019) in rural Atakora, I argue for the expansion of existing understandings of SRT and care work to include the reality of women’s social world where women care what others think. Specifically, qualitative data of this research brings forth a novel form of care burden that includes ‘reputational cover’ or covering for economically inactive husbands in public. I argue this is additional unpaid labour is a form of social injustice that denies women credit for their own contributions and creates a situation where women’s work becomes even more invisible. As such, it may lead to the undervaluing of the amount and weight of women’s overall care burden in both the social and economic realms of responsibility that could distort policy interventions for poverty alleviation at the household level, and social justice at the community level.

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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I would like to study the role of women domestic workers' intersectional and gendered positioning in shaping their participation and experiences in the labour market by conducting a primary study of part-time women domestic workers in Delhi.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a primary study of women domestic workers (WDW) in Delhi, this paper aims to study the factors shaping women’s participation and experiences in India’s domestic workers’ labour market. The last two decades have seen a rise in the share of women as domestic workers in the urban sector. Most of this upsurge has been attributed to the growing middle class’s increasing demand for part-time domestics. Employing part-time domestics allows the employer to pay the worker only for limited tasks. This allows the worker ‘greater autonomy’ in working hours. Such flexibility may be limited given their reproductive responsibilities as women. A disproportionate representation of women workers from marginalised caste groups also characterises the occupation. Moreover, these women are not entitled to minimum wages and social security as workers. Consequently, these women might bear a disproportionate burden of paid and unpaid care responsibilities. Given this context, this paper aims to answer two questions. First, what is the role of social structures of caste, class, and gender in shaping their participation and experiences as a worker? Second, what is the role of women’s reproductive responsibilities in shaping their participation and experiences as a woman? The data for this study was collected via detailed interviews with 150 WDW in two districts of Delhi. The participants were selected using systematic random sampling and interviewed using a structured questionnaire. This study contributes to an analysis of the role of individuals’ intersectional and gendered positioning in the reproduction of low-wage employment and unfair labour contracts.

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Paper short abstract:

Examines changing relations of indebtedness and caste dependency in two villages in Tamil Nadu. Illustrates diverse rural livelihood trajectories, how small-scale industrialists mobilise relations of unfree labour, and the impacts of debt bondage on relations of caste, power and dependency.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in two villages in the Tiruppur garment hub this paper explores radically different rural developments within one region of Tamil Nadu. It examines the diversity of rural livelihood trajectories, how small-scale industrialists mobilise relations of unfree labour to their capitalist ventures, and the impacts of debt bondage and bonded labour on relations of caste, power and dependency.

In Allapuram, rural livelihoods had, since the 1990s, become dependent on town-based garment work. Dalits had weakened their ties and dependency on higher-caste Gounder landowners, thus transforming relations which had previously been marked by unfree labour and debt bondage in agriculture. However, in the last 10 years, as garment units mushroomed in village itself, Dalits have entered new relations of indebtedness with their garment employers and unfree labour relations are being reintroduced.

In Mannapalayam labour relations showed the opposite trajectory: in 2008-9 Dalit employment in the village powerloom industry was marked by high levels of indebtedness as cash “advances" created bonded labourers. These ties of bondage were carried over from agriculture into the rural powerloom sector and Dalits’ relations with Gounders remained highly antagonistic. Here, however, recent changes in powerloom technology and the labour recruitment regime (interstate migrant workers) have reduced Gounders’ reliance on local Dalit workers, who themselves increasingly seek to escape powerloom work with its associated relations of indebtedness, bondage and discrimination. As a result, here Dalits are becoming less indebted to Gounder powerloom workers and their lives have become less intertwined than before.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper looks the continuum of coercion between slavery and indentureship in plantations of British Guiana by looking at the relationship between the plantations’ history of slave coercion during slavery and indentured labour mortality after emancipation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the role of coercion in plantation economy in determining indentured labour mortality. The plantation could have an impact on the workers mortality in two ways- 1) through infrastructure availability: the living conditions in the barrack could affect the exposure of the workers to new diseases. Equally, availability of medical facilities in the plantation could ensure treatment and avoid death of workers inflicted with such diseases, 2) through work practices and abuses: plantation workers were required to work long hours under difficult conditions in unfamiliar work environments. The plantations which were accustomed to labour practices and profit margins associated with slavery may continue use coercive methods to extract labour to ensure the marginal productivity greater than fixed wages. Equally however, abusive practices would have reputational costs. Thus plantations could adjust their extractive methods to reduce long term reputational costs.

We use archival sources to create a data set to analyse the relationship between the plantation economy and indentured labour migration in British Guiana. We use information on indentured workers, including their mortality using ship data digitised from The Walter Rodney National Archives in Georgetown Guyana holds ship registers which digitised for the project. We have matched our indentured worker database with a database of plantation characteristics that we will built using archival resources including estate details made available by UCL (available here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/) as well as data on slave punishment by estate from slave records in National Archives.

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Paper short abstract:

The institution of caste has shaped the relations of production historically. This paper examines the change in representation in formal employment and the wage gap between deprived class and upper caste groups in India since the 1990s, more than two decades after the reservation law was implemented

Paper long abstract:

The institution of caste has shaped the relations of production historically and has a continuing impact on the modern production process. Groups lower in the social hierarchy often do not have the means of production, are paid at an unfair rate, and are less represented in the formal sector. Affirmative action policies in different forms intended to close such gaps have played an important role in ensuring social justice.

In the context of India, the Mandal Commission’s recommendation on reservation in the public sector for Other Backward Classes (OBC) identified based on social, economic, and educational backwardness was implemented in 1990, which also saw a massive protest. However, it’s debated that the 27 percent quota for the OBC has not helped much in the upliftment of the group in the labor market and other sectors. A recent study (Bera, Dubey & Malhotra, 2024) finds that though the wage gap between OBC and better-off groups is low, almost half of the gap cannot be explained by human capital endowment and institutional factors, indicating possible wage discrimination. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to measure the change in representation in formal employment and the wage gap for OBC compared to the upper caste groups between the 1990s (when Government of India implemented the law) and 2019, two decades later, and examine the accounting factors. Given the increasing identity politics and questioning of the reservation policy, this study provides evidence for the importance of affirmative action from the perspective of social equity.