Introduction: Work Beyond the Wage

Abstract

This chapter argues that we need to rethink ‘work’ from the perspective of the global majority for whom wage employment has never been the norm. It outlines three dominant ways of conceptualising work – as commodified, informal and precarious – and demonstrates the ways in which all three are constructed against a particular idea of wage employment. An alternative framework of ‘ordinary work’ is presented which de-centres the wage through a focus on everyday values and practices in diverse economies. This framework proposes to broaden the socioeconomic imaginary of work, opening up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently. The chapter ends by outlining the structure of the book, organised around three key themes: ruptures, struggles and possibilities.

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

“…While not all papers in this collection explicitly describe their methods as countertopographical, ambitions to trace lines of connection across locations pulse throughout. In their examination of two different kinds of urban workers in two very different cities—waste collectors in Delhi and market vendors in Kampala—Aman Luthra and William Monteith (2021) offer “aesthetic technologies” as one contour line that connects the transformations in labour processes across the two sites. Workers in both cases have appropriated such technologies—identity cards, uniforms, and codes of conduct—to assert claims to the legitimacy of their livelihoods.…”

“…Molinari and Pratt (2021) situate their account of the experiences of long‐term care workers in several facilities within broader contexts of underinvestment, privatisation, and the concomitant financialisation of this sector in British Columbia specifically, and Canada more generally. Luthra and Monteith (2021) contextualise the disciplining of informal workers not only in the context of more recent world‐class city making projects but also a much longer history of racial colonial logics of spatial ordering that the two cities share. Together, these papers elucidate dynamics and contours of life and work outside the wage that are at once global and intimate (Pratt and Rosner 2006), spatial and temporal, and resonant across location, all together modelling different connective approaches for grappling with the complex interplay among these registers.…”

“…Other lessons emerge from Symposium authors’ careful attention to the strategies and creative politics of the excluded as they respond to new regimes of governance and the coloniality of power. Luthra and Monteith (2021) draw our attention to the similarities in the changing nature of informal work in two different sectors (waste collectors and market vendors) in two postcolonial cities (Delhi and Kampala). In both cases, workers adopted certain technologies of aesthetic discipline to simultaneously claim citizenship in world‐class city making projects while retaining a certain degree of autonomy over the labour process.…”

“…The politics of everyday life emerges as a key contour line threading through the contributions, even as its potentialities are often ambiguous and intertwined with the very forces producing exclusion, hardship, and, indeed, catastrophe. Drawing on Gago's (2017) notion of the “vitalist pragmatic”, Luthra and Monteith (2021) argue that waste collectors’ and market vendors’ adoption of aesthetic technologies cannot be reductively understood as a form of subjugation to world‐class city making projects imposing discipline from above. Instead, labourers’ appropriation and modification of these aesthetic rationalities are better understood as strategic acts of accommodation in increasingly hostile urban environments.…”

Personalized Value Struggles amid Marketization: The Search for the Good among Men on the Margins of Bucharest

“…1 In an attempt to move beyond the normative frames of wage labour and the tendency of theorizing in the negative by focusing on the "have-nots," recent scholarship on work has turned towards livelihoods and investment in social relationships among people who subsist-at least partly-without wage employment. 2 For instance, recent anthropological studies of recycling consider precarious forms of living and value creation as potential alternatives to wage-based production. 3 Based on fieldwork in Bucharest's "most ill-famed" neighbourhood, this article engages with value struggles concerning the crystallization and evaluation of "the good" under conditions of urban precarity.…”