Rethinking Work: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
Rethinking Work will consider the changing spaces, temporalities and legalities of employment and how these alter conceptions, expectation and practices of work and worker relations to the broader economy. If work (increasingly) includes activities at the margins of or beyond ‘formal’ economic practices, this opens up a range of empirical and theoretical possibilities concerning the nature of such labour, and how this plural but largely precarious kind of work is reconfiguring the economy. Therefore, the group will bring together a diversity of approaches to work, drawing from both the Global North and South, and from a variety of occupations including labour that may be considered illegal, vulnerable, informal, and unpaid. The activities of the group are organized into four themes (Negotiating law and work; Vulnerable work; Informal and Precarious Labour; Unpaid work) each of which will involve two sessions. One will be a more formal event with a panel of (three) invited speakers and the other an informal event to follow two weeks later orientated around readings and discussion carried over from the first session.
John Earls (Head of Research at Unite the Union) Dr Maria Abreu (Land Economy, University of Cambridge) Dr Brendan Burchell (Sociology, University of Cambridge)
Abstracts
Maria Abreu Informal-sector entrepreneurship among vulnerable groups
The informal economy makes up a substantial share of the UK’s GDP (estimated to be around 10-13%) and includes day labourers, employees on informal contracts, and informal-sector entrepreneurs running their own business. Working in the informal sector can be beneficial in the short run, helping people bridge gaps in formal employment, or adapt to crisis situations such as illness or job loss. It also allows for flexibility in exploring business avenues, building skills or acquiring equipment and assets. This is particularly the case for vulnerable groups such as single parents constrained to working from home, or recent immigrants or refugees with uncertain legal status. This phenomenon mirrors (to some extent) the experience of the so-called “necessitydriven entrepreneurs” living on the periphery of cities in less developed countries. However, while there are benefits to working in the informal sector, there are also negative consequences that arise in the medium and long term, such as exclusion from the welfare system through a lack of contributions, and a lack of recourse to labour legislation. Remaining in the informal sector also constrains business growth, and the formalisation process is costly and bureaucratic. While much of the policy focus has been on promoting formalisation and policing tax evation, the appropriate response may depend on the nature of the work, and on the motives (of choices made under existing constraints) of working in the informal economy. I will discuss recent work on informal sector entrepreneurs in London and Brazil, their motivations for starting and/or remaining in the informal sector, their attitudes to risk, the constraints that they face, and the outcomes for their enterprises.
Brendan Burchell Self-Employment as a solution to unemployment for young people, or pushing young people into precarious jobs?
The recurrent economic crises over the past 10 years have re-focussed attention on youth unemployment. Evidence has been accumulating that many active labour market programmes (ALMPs) have been effective in providing a route out of unemployment for participating young people. Entrepreneurship has also been heralded as a way to promote economic expansion and recovery, leading to a new set of ALMPs to encourage unemployed youths to start businesses.
This paper is critical of this policy for a number of reasons.
The important distinction between self-employment and entrepreneurship is ignored or misunderstood. The ALMPs to promote self-employment seem to be more unreliable than ALMPs that are designed to lead to salaried employment. Self-employed jobs, both in Europe and in less developed countries are often poor quality jobs with bad working conditions and low pay. Rather than leading to the learning of new skills (or ‘Human Capital’) and thus better jobs, there is little evidence that self-employment is associated with an upward career trajectory or with an escape from poverty. Rather than progressing onto good jobs in the formal sector, self-employment in developing countries traps young people in a cycle between being self-employed and being an unpaid family worker. For young people from family backgrounds or regions where self-employment is the norm, breaking out of that cage to become an employee is more entrepreneurial than following others into self-employment. These critiques of self-employment challenge the orthodox view that entrepreneurship is virtuous and therefore self-employment should be promoted. The analysis of a survey of over 100,000 young people’s lives and employment histories supports these critiques. I will argue that we need to rethink the whole discourse around entrepreneurship, which has been hijacked by a neoliberal agenda. We also need to rethink quantitative research methods for studying labour markets, which are poorly suited to developing a deep understanding of the complex phenomenon of self-employment, which is characterised by thick family and business networks. Otherwise we will subject vulnerable young people to precarious work with little protection from regulation or safety nets.
Vulnerable Work: Navigating Sigma, (in)visibility and Opportunity
This second seminar explores the role of stigma in marginalising certain forms of work. The discussion will consider the ways in which such vulnerable work becomes visible as such; and the implications of working marginalised positions for worker agency.
Panel session
Louise Waite (Geography, Leeds) Francisco Calafate Faria (Sociology, Goldsmiths) Lydia Hayes (Law, Cardiff)
Readings for next session (25.11.15) will be made available today.
Abstracts
Louise Waite Working on the Edge of Society: Precarious Migrant Lives
Exploitation at work is a topic that has received significant attention throughout history. Yet there is a growing body of evidence that exploitation is on the rise across the world today. Often presented by governments and the media in the Global North as mainly a problem for poor countries and marginal workers in the Global South, over the past two decades the prevalence of extreme exploitation and what some have called ‘unfree labour’ has become undeniably globalised. This talk will explore how and why migrants in particular are implicated in these precarious labourscapes. It will empirically focus on a group who are seldom considered in debates around extreme exploitation and unfreedom; forced migrants who interact with the asylum system. I will build an argument of the production of vulnerable and precarious work through the UK’s asylum system. It will be suggested that workers' movement along a multidimensional continuum of unfreedom towards severely exploitative labour cannot be understood without recognising the intersection of job precarity, precarious immigration status, transnational family obligations and migration trajectories. The idea of the ‘hyper-precarity trap’ will be shown to be an important analytical device to demonstrate how welfare, work, race, rights, journeys, the economy and neoliberalism all come together to create the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ of vulnerable subjects and how they intersect to produce multidimensional insecurities.
Lydia Hayes Law at work – vulnerability and the institutional humiliation of the homecare workforce
My contribution to the re-thinking work debate is based on my ethnographic study of working class women engaged as homecare workers and personal assistants to older and disabled people; caring for them in their own homes. I have engaged in interdisciplinary which combines ethnography and social theory with a doctrinal assessment of the employment law status of homecare workers and their various construction as legal subjects at work. In my forthcoming monograph Working in Homecare: class, gender and law, I trace the ‘institutionalised humiliation’ of the homecare workforce in the UK. There is little doubt that homecare workers occupy a marginalised position within the labour market since their working terms, conditions and tasks are aligned at the fraying edges of concepts we associate with the world of paid work. These include the margin which separates ‘work’ from ‘pleasure’, the margin between paid labour and the fulfilment of unpaid familial duty, and the margin between care-giving as employment and care-giving as social conscience.
The vulnerabilities associated with such conceptual ambiguity, in which homecare workers might be regarded as standing on a multi-dimensional fault line in the labour market, are made material in the inferiority of their working terms, conditions and tasks. However, the evidence suggests that it is a consequence of marketisation and privatisation that homecare workers are now at the bottom of the UK labour market hierarchy. These women are providing paid care in circumstances where the very notion of the labour market begins to crumble.
According to Fineman, vulnerability is a human condition to which the law responds inadequately, since law valorises autonomy, independence and an abstractive economic rationality. However, if vulnerability is a human condition which is imported into, and ever present within, contemporary employment relations, how might we account for marketisation and privatisation as legal processes through which vulnerabilities materialise as inferiority? In my account of the institutionalised humiliation of the homecare workforce, worker vulnerability is a gendered legal construct; by which I mean that the homecare workforce has been rendered vulnerable in law and through law on the basis of gendered doctrine.This is evident in the structuring of legal rights, such as the right to equal pay, which incentivises privatisation and embeds deeply sexist attitudes about the valuing of women’s labour in relation to the labour of men. It is evident in the denial of statutory entitlements, such as the benefit of national minimum wage provisions, on the basis of legal misrecognition of caring labour. It is evident in the gendered application of employment protection law according to sexist presumptions and in the gendering of a labour market order which is organised around legal concepts of employment status. Most recently it appears in the development of criminal law sanctions which apply in relation to uncaring behaviour or sub-standard conduct at work and especially target the homecare workforce. The state's turn towards criminal law to regulate the homecare workforce is intensifying a discourse in which the ‘wrong kind’ of homecare worker represents an ever-present threat to established gender and class hierarchy.
Francisco Calafate-Faria “They sell their dinner to buy their lunch”: precarity, temporality, and futurity in the work and lives of waste-pickers/informal recyclers in Curitiba, Brazil
The Brazilian city of Curitiba is famous for its urban planning and environmental policies. Since the 1990s it has received several major international awards on account of its innovative solutions. Amongst them is the city’s municipal recycling system implemented in 1989. Curitiba has become a model for the cities of the global North, from within a country and a continent which are usually regarded as undeveloped, and therefore tending to the past. But these model narratives, which are projected locally, nationally and internationally conceal a very important fact: informal collectors and informal circuits of commercialisation are responsible for more than 90% of the municipal waste recycled in Curitiba. The official narratives of the city (also known as “first-world capital”) seem incompatible with the persistence and preponderance of informal recycling as an element of “underdevelopment” with which the city always tries to deal, without ever acknowledging it. As disruptive elements of a narrative of futurity, waste-pickers are increasingly marginalised, even if the city’s focus on recycling offers enhanced possibilities of participation. My ethnographic work with waste-pickers (or catadores as they are called in Brazil) sought firstly to investigate beyond the city’s curtain of self-promotion into the material human infrastructure that is responsible for the prideful recycling rates that make the model city. Working with theoretical and empirical tools developed by urban geography and sociology I also aimed at bringing waste-pickers’ lives and discourses to confront some of the stereotypes and preconceptions developed by researchers and NGO workers who intervene on the ground. In my first contacts with institutional actors in the field I heard heard utterances like: “they sell their dinner to buy their lunch” so as to explain the difficulty in implementing the programmes that are designed to solve “the problem”. By following materials and actors through recycling circuits (from collection to industrial re-processment) and organisational spaces, with attention to their work, lives, personal aspirations and political expression, I found evidence that contradicts structuring notions of temporality based on general stereotypes about waste-pickers.
Amongst those basic notions that structure interventions and determine marginalisation is the association with waste-pickers with the waste they pick, not only in terms of social value but also in terms of temporality. Thus waste-pickers ubiquity in the city and their crucial role in the cleaning of the city is met with disgust and pity, based on the idea that waste-pickers are not only deemed to be swept away by progress but also that their own biographies can only progress if they leave the activity. In this seminar I will present evidence of an unacknowledged temporality amongst waste-pickers, which ethnography allowed me to unveil. Contrary to dominant perceptions their work has different roles in waste-pickers’ biographies, often mobilising aspiration and futurity, collective and individual aspiration, as well as a will to participate in the city, and not simply to survive off its discards.