Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

List of Illustrations

Preface
Chris Hann

Introduction: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject
Jonathan Parry

Chapter 1. Varieties of Capital, Fracture of Labor: A Comparative Ethnography of Subcontracting and Labor Precarity on the Zambian Copperbelt
Ching Kwan Lee

Chapter 2. Miners and Their Children: The Remaking of the Soviet Working Class in Kazakhstan
Eeva Kesküla

Chapter 3. Work, Precarity and Resistance: Company and Contract Labor in Kazakhstan’s Former Soviet Steel Town
Tommaso Trevisani

Chapter 4. Regular Work in Decline, Precarious Households and Changing Solidarities in Bulgaria
Dimitra Kofti

Chapter 5. Precarious Labor and Precarious Livelihoods in an Indian Company Town
Christian Strümpell

Chapter 6. Regimes of Precarity: Buruh, Karyawan, and the Politics of Labor Identity in Indonesia
Daromir Rudnyckyj

Chapter 7. Between God and the State: Class, Precarity, and Cosmology on the Margins of an Egyptian Steel Town
Dina Makram-Ebeid

Chapter 8. The (Un-)Making of Labor: Capitalist Accelerations and Their Human Toll at a South Korean Shipyard in the Philippines
Elisabeth Schober

Chapter 9. Relative Precarity: Decline, Hope and the Politics of Work
Andrew Sanchez

Chapter 10. From Avtoritet and Autonomy to Self-exploitation in the Russian Automotive Industry
Jeremy Morris and Sarah Hinz

Chapter 11. Precarity, Guanxi, and the Informal Economy of Peasant Workers in Contemporary China
I-Chieh Fang

Chapter 12. From Dispossessed Factory Workers to “Micro-entrepreneurs”: The Precariousness of Employment in Trinidad’s Garment Sector
Rebecca Prentice

Chapter 13. Towards a Political Economy of Skill and Garment Work: The Case of the Tiruppur Industrial Cluster in South India
Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve

Chapter 14. From Casual to Permanent Work: Maoist Unionists and the Regularization of Contract Labor in the Industries of Western Nepal
Michael Peter Hoffmann

Afterword: Third Wave Marketization
Michael Burawoy

Index