Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

Abstract

Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

‘Accumulation by appropriation’: The integration of recyclable-waste collector cooperatives in Salvador, Brazil, and the right to the city

“…This creates a permanent surplus, superfluous, redundant population – a kind of human-as-waste, excreted from the capitalist system (Bauman, 2017; McIntyre, 2011; Yates, 2011). For those whose life has become superfluous “waste streams themselves become work places” (Doherty and Brown, 2019: 7).…”

“…For Bauman (2017: 5)the production of “human waste”, or more correctly wasted humans (…) is an inevitable outcome of modernization (…) and of economic progress (that cannot proceed without degrading and devaluing the previously effective modes of “making a living” and therefore cannot but deprive their practitioners of their livelihood).This perspective shows how the production of human-as-waste is indissociable from the process of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003), a fundamental mechanism for the continued reproduction of capital, whereby specific categories of people are deprived of the access to – or control over – their means of subsistence by massive private and public enclosures, which have resulted in an ever-expanding surplus population at the global scale, a population “exceeding even the functions assigned to a labour reserve” (Li, 2017: 1252) but which still resides within the capitalist mode of production, constituting a major source of unpaid labor and surplus accumulation. Waste pickers, like other informal workers, are an emblematic part of this global surplus population, upon which value is created, captured, and destroyed through new forms of super-exploitation (Doherty and Brown, 2019; Yates, 2011).…”

Remote (Dis)engagement: Shifting Corporate Risk to the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’

“…Building on Simone's notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ (2004), ethnographic studies have highlighted the ways in which social networks come to plug the gaps left by the absence of formal material infrastructures, enabling the exchanges that support the perpetuation and reproduction of life in informal economies (De Boeck, 2012; Doherty, 2017; Xiao and Adebayo, 2020). Through the lens of social infrastructure, scholars have examined how cash‐strapped post‐colonial states with poorly functioning public systems ‘devolve “infrastructure onto labor”’ (Doherty and Brown, 2019: 8), enrolling the labouring bodies of informal workers to close the gaps in public services, from waste (Doherty and Brown, 2019; Fredericks, 2018) and water (Anand, 2017), to financial services (Kar, 2018; Kear, 2016; Tooker and Clarke, 2018). Appropriating the social networks of informal economies is also a strategy of corporate accumulation at the bottom of the pyramid (Dolan and Roll, 2013; Huang, 2017), observed in industries from consumer goods and financial services, to food and energy.…”

Circularity and Enclosures: Metabolizing Waste with the Black Soldier Fly

“…Despite such pronouncements, as anthropologists have demonstrated, the fulfillment of the most basic urban provisions, particularly throughout the global South, continue to depend on haphazard practices, improvisation, and existing forms of labor and exploitation (Simone 2004; Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Degani 2018). An ecologically modern approach to waste management in China, as elsewhere, obscures the range and depth of work performed by municipal waste workers and informal laborers whose bodies make possible the movement and transformation of matter (Gidwani and Reddy 2011; Fredericks 2018; Doherty and Brown 2019). In Dr. Wu's laboratory, what is obscured includes not only the behind‐the‐scenes work performed by assistants like Ms. Lin but also the productive harnessing of insects' metabolic and reproductive activity—as if it, too, were labor.…”