Towards A Comparative Political Economy Of Unfree Labour

Many works about agragarian change in the Third World assumes that unfree relations are to be eliminated in the course of capitalist development. This text argues that the incidence of bonded labour is greater than supposed, and that in certain situations rural employers prefer an unfree workforce.

The distinction between 'capitalism from above' and 'capitalism from below' is important in the analysis of the agrarian question in poor countries. The 'Prussian path' and the 'American path' are here examined, against existing historical scholarship. Their unfolding, from their earliest roots to the point of final 'agrarian transition' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is considered. The dialectic between social relations and productive forces, mediated as it was by the state, is treated and the implications for capitalist industrialisation scrutinised.

Many works about agragarian change in the Third World assumes that unfree relations are to be eliminated in the course of capitalist development. This text argues that the incidence of bonded labour is greater than supposed, and that in certain situations rural employers prefer an unfree workforce.

This book illustrates the enduring relevance and vitality of the comparative political economy of development approach promoted among others by a group of social scientists in Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s. Contributors demonstrate the viability of this approach as researchers and academics become more convinced of the inadequacies of orthodox approaches to the understanding of development. Detailed case material obtained from comparative field research in Africa and South Asia informs analyses of exploitation in agriculture; the dynamics of rural poverty; seasonality; the non farm economy; class formation; labour and unfreedom; the gendering of the labour force; small scale production and contract farming; social networks in industrial clusters; stigma and discrimination in the rural and urban economy and its politics. Reasoned policy suggestions are made and an analysis of the comparative political economy of development approach is applied to the situation of Africa and South Asia. Aptly presenting the relation between theory and empirical material in a dynamic and interactive way, the book offers meaningful and powerful explanations of what is happening in the continent of Africa and the sub-continent of South Asia today. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of development studies, rural sociology, political economy, policy and practice of development and Indian and African studies.

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends. It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor

Twice the Work of Free Labor is both a study of penal labor in the southern United States, and a revisionist analysis of the political economy of the South after the Civil War.

A timely analysis of Canadian temporary labour migration policies.

Millions of young people—and increasingly some not-so-young people—now work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand magazine offices, legislative backrooms, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, map the human genome, and pick up garbage. Intern Nation is the first exposé of the exploitative world of internships. In this witty, astonishing, and serious investigative work, Ross Perlin profiles fellow interns, talks to academics and professionals about what unleashed this phenomenon, and explains why the intern boom is perverting workplace practices around the world. The hardcover publication of this book precipitated a torrent of media coverage in the US and UK, and Perlin has added an entirely new afterword describing the growing focus on this woefully underreported story. Insightful and humorous, Intern Nation will transform the way we think about the culture of work.