Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon ethnographic observations from Jharkhand Migration Survey in India the paper highlights “the right to care” of inter-state-migrant construction workers in the cityspaces as an integral yet ignored domain of labor rights and various negotiations such ignorance engenders.

Paper long abstract:

The construction industry is one of the major employers of the informal, inter-state circuital-migrants in India. The Jharkhand Migration Study reveals that around 40% of Jharkhand’s circuital-migrants across social categories are engaged in the multi-layered construction sector, functioning through multiple subcontracting relationships. Drawing upon ethnographic observations the paper highlights “the right to care” of inter-state migrants at the destination as an integral yet ignored domain of labour rights. The responsibility of care and social re-production within the sector is borne neither by the employer nor the state and the care-work is delegated to the migrant subject. The degree of care labour delegated is directly dependent on the social location inhabited, the social capital accrued and the contractual arrangements negotiated by the migrant. Further, conditions of domicility limit the access of migrants to available social security measures at the destination.The paper argues that in the absence of a homogenous set of caring-rights as an integral part of labour-rights, the responsibility of immediate social re-production of migrant-labourers at the destination is taken up by contingent commensalities, constituted by peer group of workers. These collectives constituted by a shared sense of vulnerability and practical need requires to be understood as forms of ‘domesticity’, though very different from our normative understanding of it. Such domesticities are not recognised by state-apparatus and thus restrict lived-experiences of migration from informing policy. Such epistemic injustice leads to structural violence on migrants and and sustains the vulnerabilities embedded within life-experiences of migrants belonging to marginalised social stratas.

Paper short abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has turbo-charged a contradictory digital social protection agenda for African informal economies. Tensions between the social welfare case and the business case for digital social protection reveal shifts in the incorporation of informal workers in circuits of accumulation.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a new light on informality and social protection, particularly in the African context. The COVID gaze has turbo-charged a new social protection agenda that has reframed African informal economies from a pool of surplus labour to vulnerable essential workers in urgent need of social protection. Given evidence of the surprising resilience of Africa's informalized societies to COVID-19, this paper will focus in on two perplexing aspects of the more caring approach to informality. First, the reframing of African informal labour as essential workers focuses more on social protection than employment needs. The changing role of social reproduction in contemporary capitalism will be used to trace of a shift from productivist to financialized modes of incorporation of informal labour in contemporary circuits of accumulation. Secondly, the inappropriateness of digital cash transfer systems to the needs of African informal workers will be examined. Given the infrastructural and capacity challenges faced by informal workers and the areas where they live, questions will be raised about whose needs are served by the rush to digital cash transfer systems in response to the pandemic. Drawing attention to the limited benefits of digital social protection systems for reaching African informal workers, this paper will reflect on the tensions between the social welfare case and the business case for digital social protection systems, with a focus on whether caring capitalism offers a path for transforming rather than profiting from precarity.

Paper short abstract:

I will examine the encounter between global capital and informal labour regimes at the bottom of the hazelnut supply chain in Turkey. I argue that firms' preference of a “selective and partial regulation” approach to chain governance yields complex outcomes for the informal labour force.

Paper long abstract:

Informal wage labour in agriculture is an area where domestic migrants and refugees are integrated into globalised circuits of production. Based on 11-months of on-site fieldwork on the hazelnut supply chain in Turkey, this paper will explore how accumulation and extraction in agricultural value chains are crystallised in an era of informality and flexibility. Over the last few years, international organisations, nation states, and consumer demand campaigns have called for better chain regulation and chain visibility due to the prevalence of precarious seasonal migrants and child labour in hazelnut picking. However, global capital has penetrated hazelnut production and markets in Turkey through appropriating existing customs and institutions. This legitimised the variegation and informality at the bottom of this supply chain. Subsequently, a handful of NGOs and company-led social responsibility programmes emerged as the sole sphere through which global and domestic capital engages with the manual labour force in hazelnut production. Rather than tackling the structural aspects of the working conditions, these programmes remain project-based and limited in their scope and reach. I argue that this “pick and choose” approach to chain governance results in a “selective and partial regulation” of the hazelnut supply chain. This regulatory regime emerges at the intersection of inputs by different formal and informal institutions and actors. Rather than serving as a “benign escalator” for workers’ upwards mobility as is suggested by some literature on supply chain governance, they can adversely end up legitimising informal hierarchies and forms of organisations within migrant workers to complex outcomes.

Paper short abstract:

With a focus on a state-led formal incorporation in Beijing’s informal waste economy, this paper examines how migrant waste labour experience precarity and dispossession within a purportedly caring policy framework.

Paper long abstract:

The waste economy in the global South is characterised by precarity and informality, exposing labour to health hazards, market volatility, and exclusive governance. While a rich seam of scholarship has spotlighted the dispossession experienced by waste workers in neoliberal urban projects, there is a lack of nuanced analysis regarding how this could be addressed within a ‘caring’ framework. Drawing upon seven months of ethnographic research conducted at various recycling sites in Beijing, China, this paper investigates how waste workers experience precarity amidst state-led formalisation. Over the past three decades, approximately 300,000 rural migrants have engaged in Beijing’s informal waste economy. Despite facing hardships and exclusion, these workers have asserted a sense of autonomy within their everyday informal arrangements, interpreting this as ‘freedom’ (ziyou). Since 2017, the Beijing municipal government has sought to integrate informal workers into the state-owned recycling sector, claiming to enhance safety and dignity in waste work. I argue that formalisation has, paradoxically, increased the vulnerability of waste labour. Measures such as standardising types of recyclables, reducing the quantity and accessibility of recycling sites, have undermined the inclusive traits of the former migrant waste economy. By illustrating that workers’ assertion of ‘freedom’ risks morphing into a sense of directionlessness, this paper highlights how inclusive capitalism deprives individual labour of their ontological experience. It also considers how new circuits of accumulation in global South contexts perpetuates ongoing dispossession in its rural society.

Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the promises and ambitions of Kenya´s social and financial protection interventions, drawing attention to how caring capitalism may be a site generative of new possibilities even when Kenyans experience its failures.

Paper long abstract:

Social and financial protection interventions by the Kenya government have often targeted ordinary Kenyans, especially those in the informal economy. Such interventions including cash transfers, the national health insurance (Supa Cover), and more recently the financial credit facility ´the Hustler fund´, are utopian and aim to provide financial support and expand access to public services such as healthcare. The interventions are structured and organized differently. Their point of convergence, however, is the intention to increase the purchasing power of those considered to fall within the informal economy. The interventions are also framed within a progressive language of state responsibility for the welfare and healthcare of its citizens, substantive citizenship, inclusion, alleviation of poverty and national transformation. Yet, they enter and operate within layered histories of differentiated citizenship, rising costs of living and unemployment, increasing privatization of public services, a fragmented and struggling public healthcare system and a growing debt economy. Drawing on ethnographic research on these interventions in Kenya, I examine their promises and ambitions and how these are in tension with the experiences of Kenyans targeted by them. The resources provided by the state ´caring´ interventions are both limited and unreliable and many beneficiaries of these schemes are often compelled to invest, maintain, and depend on pre-existing informal networks and/or establishing new ones, shaped and reshaped by a new terrain of proliferating digital technologies in Kenya. I draw attention to how caring capitalism may be a site generative of new possibilities even when Kenyans experience its failures.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the extent to which digital labour platforms have reformed the precarious conditions of informal work in Kampala’s moto-taxi industry, arguing that their limited and ambiguous effects in this regard are also accompanied by a new political economy of barely-regulated extraction.

Paper long abstract:

Motorcycle-taxis are one of the speediest and most convenient ways to get around the Ugandan capital city of Kampala, but they are also the most dangerous. Digital ride-hailing platforms have emerged in recent years as a response to this, promising to create safer forms of work and transit through what their CEOs describe as a market-based approach to transport reform – essentially, incentivising compliance with safety standards such as helmet-wearing by raising the incomes of those performing this work ‘digitally’ and undercutting the fares ‘traditionally’ paid by passengers. Against a backdrop of repeated failures by state authorities to reign in a vast moto-taxi workforce long considered both economically marginal and politically untouchable, platformisation here has been widely portrayed as a step towards more effective regulation of the industry as a whole, with for-profit (social) enterprises and external venture capital now playing a central role. Through case study research, this paper / talk critically examines the promise of regulation-via-privatisation in this context by drawing attention to the ways in which narratives of road safety, sectoral reform and entrepreneurial empowerment are being used to conceal various modes of extractive engagement with informal workers at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ – through commissions, through data and through equipment. In doing so, platforms create new political economies of work within the industry that produce ambiguous effects on pre-existing working conditions and increasing levels of disaffection amongst the workforce, leading to fundamental questions about the purpose, extent and ultimately contested nature of the platform ‘revolution’.

Paper short abstract:

The handloom sector in Assam largely comprises of female weavers working in informal and precarious conditions. This research examines the impact of policies and interventions on ‘women’s empowerment’ by government and non-government entities and how they impact the lives of these women.

Paper long abstract:

The term ‘women’s empowerment’ has become a buzzword in the last two decades, with its meaning and approaches to it changing through policies and interventions at various levels of implementation. Existing literature on empowerment use a linear notion of empowerment, as women either becoming empowered or not empowered. However, women’s everyday lived realities consist of multiple axes of power and power relations.

It is in this context that the research looks at women’s empowerment and agency within the context of handloom weavers in Assam (India) who are unorganised and are working in precarious conditions, and then locate the impact of the different approaches to women’s empowerment taken by government and non-government entities in the lives of the weavers. The research also examines the lived realities of the women and how they understand empowerment, contest and negotiate it in their everyday lives.

Through an ethnographic study in Sualkuchi (Assam), the findings are situated in the larger context of changes that we are witnessing in the Global South, within a neoliberal and care capitalism paradigm and the rise of far-right politics. The research contributes to the literature on gender, work and informal labour and brings forth an important aspect of the loom owner and weaver relations which has not been explored in the literature previously – a form of bonded labour relation as a result of the system of ‘advance payment’ taken out by the weavers from the loom owners and what it means for women’s agency and empowerment.

Paper short abstract:

Using a participatory photovoice approach with casual wage workers and self-employed food establishment operators in Accra, this paper investigates local perspectives of “good” work and the transformative potential of collective action in informal urban economies.

Paper long abstract:

In lower-income countries, the majority of the workforce sustain their livelihoods in the informal economy. Previous research has highlighted the vulnerability and precarious working conditions of informal labour. Yet, there is little research on workers’ own conception of “good” work and collective action by informal economy workers to enhance their working conditions accordingly. This paper presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary photovoice project with informal casual and self-employed workers in Accra’s food service sector to address these gaps. The food service sector in Accra provides a pertinent case study due to its rapid growth, large informal (and female) labour force, and the unique presence of an umbrella trade union organization for informal workers – a rarity in sub-Saharan Africa. We employ interpretative phenomenological analysis to reveal the lived experiences of informal economy workers based on in-depth interviews and workers’ own photographs of key aspects of their everyday work activities. In addition, we use group sessions among photovoice participants and a workshop with union representatives to identify collective demands and ways to improve the design of union membership and benefits. These empirical findings are then embedded into the wider history and politics of Ghana’s informal economy to assess the extent to which they can provide grassroots transformative tools for social justice and revalorise informal workers in the absence of formal protections. We conclude with implications for the policy agenda on decent work, spearheaded by the ILO and policymakers in lower-income countries, as well as for the governance of informal urban economies.