The Informal Labours of Social Reproduction

Abstract

To Maria Mies, who in Narsapur discovered how the whole world works.One must continue talking about labour in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic, because the labouring poor have always been particularly exposed to health-related risks. This is because the labouring poor perform key reproductive roles in capitalism; indeed, across the world, low-paid informal labourers and care workers are those who, at present, seem unable to withdraw their labour to shield themselves and their families from the potential deadly consequences of the coronavirus. Together with health workers, they are literally sustaining our lives during the pandemic. The health-depleting effects of working poverty have always been obvious in the Global South. Now, they are also increasingly obvious in the Global North. Here, I celebrate the Global Labour Journal's tenth anniversary by discussing how the study of labour dynamics of the Global South can significantly contribute to our broader understanding of global capitalism across the world. After all, as underlined by Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden (2014), it is clear by now that the "West" is following the "Rest" when it comes to rising rates of labour informalisation, which has become the "mode of employment" at a global level. In fact, the very representation of the so-called Western labour trajectory has always been somewhat biasedover-representing the experience of a handful of core countries within the Western bloc and a (male) labour aristocracy within highly differentiated working classes. Ultimately, capitalism has only ever been "Golden" for a very few, in a very few places, and during a very few years.The progressive pace of labour informalisation is remarkable, and suggests that this is how work manifests itself in the twenty-first century. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2018), 85.8 per cent of total employment in Africa, 71.4 per cent in Asia and the Pacific, 68.6 per cent in the Arab States and 53.8 per cent in the Americas is either informal (based in the informal economy) or informalised (situated within formal production but based on informal relations). Total informal employment for the whole emerging and developing economies bloc is set at 69.6 per cent and, given the weight of this bloc and the extension of processes of precarisation across the whole Global North, it is 61.2 per cent at world level. In short, our entire planet primarily labours informally. 1 If by refocusing our attention on the Global South much can be learned about how the world labours, a good deal can also be understood with regard to the mechanisms of exploitation and labour surplus extraction. In particular, the study of the informal and informalised labour relations across the Global South reveals that exploitation can indeed take many distinct "forms" (Banaji, 2010) where, for instance, the wage relation may be direct or "disguised" -like in the

Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India

“…Consideration of the role of production and reproduction in the home region at the same time is rare, as pointed out by Gidwani and Ramamurthy (2018). Though the rationale for doing so is succinctly put by Ferguson and McNally (2014, p. 13): that in using migrant labour, capital and the state "regularly draw from a pool of effectively 'cost free' labour power on whose past social reproduction they have not spent a dime" (see also Cousins et al, 2018;Mezzadri, 2020). By this, the SRT literature is now reaching similar conclusions to those of the 1970s anthropology work on labour migration and reproduction in sub-Saharan Africa.…”

Social form, social reproduction and social policy: Basic income, basic services, basic infrastructure

“…Synthesising this critical Marxist focus on social form with Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory (Bhattacharya 2017; Federici 2019; Mezzadri 2019 henceforth SRT), we then argue that these seemingly separate but interlocking crises are all temporary or contingent expressions of an underlying, more permanent crisis of social reproduction. Many presentations of the ‘crisis of social reproduction’ or ‘crisis of care’ (Caffentzis 2002; Fraser 2016) identify it as something sparked by conditions and circumstances specific to the present, relating largely to a discrete, self-contained and typically gendered and racialised set of activities that rest upon the exploitation of the paid and unpaid labour of women, migrants and people of colour (see England 2005; Glenn 1992; Perrons 2009).…”

Strengthening resilience in response to COVID-19: a call to integrate social reproduction in sustainable food systems

“…Third, both theories can contribute transformational policy and political changes in food systems. In negotiating for more resilient food systems, focusing on social reproduction allows for a broader understanding of the key processes necessary to extract labour surplus from the working poor (Mezzadri 2020). This is fundamental to question the current capitalist labour structure and to "understand and rethink labour policy and labour politics in the age of global labour informalisation, [that] spreads across the Global South, but also increasingly so in the Global North" (Mezzadri 2020, 159).…”