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Paper short abstract

Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Bulgarian steel plant, the paper approaches outsourcing as a mechanism that fragments labour, produces hierarchies, and redistributes bodily and financial risk, revealing how global inequalities are made tangible at the workplace.

Paper long abstract

Different groups of workers employed by multiple companies converge daily in and around the steel plant in Pernik, a Bulgarian industrial town. Following privatisation in the late 1990s, restructuring processes fragmented workers once employed under the same company. A part of the workforce remained in the main company while a significant amount of the workers is employed by outsourcers. This form of proximate outsourcing produced new categories of labour, hierarchies of value, and regimes of (in)visibility. Outsourcing in this case takes place locally, given that both workers of the main company and of the outsourcers work and live closely, resulting in proximate distances, in buildings next door and/or across the same production line. Although employees work in proximity, ownership and control are dispersed globally, bringing new multi-scalar geographies of power that further link the workplace to transnational corporate relations.

Drawing on long-term fieldwork, the paper analyses outsourcing as a technology that (re)organises labour relations and shapes divisions across skill and institutional boundaries. It explores how outsourcing is coupled with age, gender, and ethnic inequalities and how these divisions are informed by differential exposure to danger and multiple types of risk. By foregrounding safety and vulnerability, the paper conceptualises outsourcing as a mechanism for redistributing risk and producing hierarchies of bodily and financial risk exposure. Focusing on outsourcing that operates in spatial proximity to the main company allows the paper to show ethnographically how global inequalities are rendered tangible in everyday labour practices, revealing embodied experiences and inequalities of capitalist restructuring.