Precarious Bodies: Occupational Risk Assemblages in Bolivia and Trinidad

Abstract

This article develops the concept of "precarious bodies" to theorise the lived experience of labour precariousness in the twenty-first century and its implications for workers' health, well-being and household reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic research with Bolivian miners and Trinidadian garment workers, we explore the relationship between workers' exposure to global market forces and their everyday experiences of work, health and risk in these industries. "Precarious bodies" is a heuristic that takes into a single frame the macro-level economic and regulatory processes that create risks for workers, and the various ways in which workers negotiate these risks through their work practices and livelihood choices. We show precarious bodies to be both vulnerable and strategic. Positioned in situations of exploitation and risk, their choices to protect their livelihoods can harm their health and reinforce -rather than counteract -the precarious circumstances of their households.

Instruments of health and harm: how the procurement of healthcare goods contributes to global health inequality

“…Aggressive price comparison and global supply competition are known to have a significant effect on workers' labour conditions and health and safety, producing and perpetuating jobs that are very often precarious, insecure and unhealthy [20,21]. As this global competition pushes governments, manufacturers, and suppliers to lower prices, basic labour rights are overlooked in order to attract buyers and procurement contracts [1,20]. As the next subsection illustrates, the thousands of healthcare goods used every day to promote health and economic prospects in the UK too often damage the health and socio-economic prospects of people living and working elsewhere.…”

“…Produced in cooperatives, unregulated factories, or sweatshops in Pakistan, Mexico, Thailand or the USA, the jobs generated under this open global competition are often unregulated, insecure and highly unhealthy [1,3,6], and often imperil, rather than safeguard, the health and wellbeing of workers and their dependants both in the short and long-term. This tends to be the case whether or not states have ratified the International Labour Organization's (ILO) conventions [18] There is little information regarding the specific disease burden associated with working on these production lines and, as happens with other industries, attempts at measuring this burden are often obstructed by suppliers, buyers, producers, and/or governments themselves [20,21].…”

“…Indeed, calling such a machine a "health-improving measure" would be a misrepresentation of its total effects, and would amount to an admission that the health of some people was more important than the health of others, which points to an obvious injustice. 1 In principle, health need not be rivalrous, since resources could be distributed in such a way as to ensure that everyone had equitable and adequate access to the determinants of good health (see e.g. [48]).…”

“…For those of us living in the United Kingdom (UK) one of the most obvious effects of economic globalisation is that the products we have come to rely upon are generally sourced and processed where labour and raw materials are inexpensive and readily available. However, cheap production costs frequently track poor labour regulation and/or weak enforcement of existing regulation [1][2][3] , which raises concerns about justice for workers. These concerns have led to high-profile campaigns in favour of ethical trade across various industries (such as mining, garments or agricultural products), but despite the fact that poor working conditions have also been observed in global procurement networks within the healthcare industry, this sector has received little attention or critique.…”

Work after precarity

“…Drawing together phenomenology and political economy, Howard analyzes labor through its perceptual engagement with the environment, insisting that the environment is not just land and sea, but also markets, competition, and traumatic experiences of loss. Fishermen's health and safety are tightly tied to global circuits of trade: at greatest risk of death or injury not only in the peaks and troughs of commodity pricing (Prentice and Trueba 2018), but worsened by the calamity of debt financing when declining prices force fishermen to work on poorly-maintained boats in all weather. She shows the intimacies of class relations on the boats, where decision-making and controllike the earnings from the catch-are unevenly distributed.…”