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.