Introduction to Laws of Social Reproduction Lectures

Prabha Kotiswaran introduces the following three lectures by Kerry Rittich (2020), Silvia Federici (2021) and Veronica Gago (2022), which emanated from an EU-supported research project titled 'Laws of Social Reproduction'

Protocol at the Crossroads: Rethinking anti-trafficking law from an Indian labour law perspective

As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of the United Nations Trafficking Protocol, we can discern several phases of its diffusion, materialisation and interpretation in domestic criminal law regimes across the world. Although not exclusively preoccupied with sex work and sex trafficking anymore, the fact remains that the inordinate attention on trafficking in Western industrialised economies is disproportionate to the extent of the problem. Only 7% of the world’s 20.9 million forced labourers are in developed economies while 56% are in Asia Pacific. Yet in BRIC countries like India, with a substantial majority of the world’s trafficked victims and where 90% of all trafficking is domestic, trafficking has gained policy resonance only relatively recently. Even as India remains an active site for sexual humanitarianism with international and local abolitionist groups actively targeting sex workers, the article argues that less developed countries like India can play a crucial role in reorienting international anti-trafficking law and policy. Towards that goal, this article offers India’s bonded, contract and migrant labour laws as a robust labour law model against trafficking in contrast to the criminal justice model propagated by the Trafficking Protocol worldwide

Social Reproduction, Feminism and the Law: Ships in the Night Passing Each Other

In this essay, I consider the vexed relationship between feminist legal scholarship and social reproduction theory (SRT). I offer an overview of Anglo-American feminist legal scholarship on care/reproductive labour and then reflections on an agenda for the study of the laws of social reproduction by incorporating critical legal, legal realist and socio-legal approaches to women’s reproductive labour. In the process, I hope to articulate an agenda for materialist legal feminism drawing on SRT that offers a critique of care discourse (which has had a significant impact on legal scholarship) alongside sharpening a feminist legal agenda for redistributive politics

An innocent omission? Forced labour and India’s anti-trafficking law

Prabha Kotiswaran asks why, in a departure from international anti-trafficking law, India omitted reference to forced labour when criminalising trafficking in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2013

Abject Labours, Informal Markets: Revisiting the Law's (Re)Production Boundary

Over the past few decades, feminist legal scholars have successfully gendered several areas of legal doctrine, inlcuding labour law. In particular, they draw extensively on feminist theorizing of social reproduction to argue for the increased labour law protection of women's care work. While sympathetic to feminist efforts to redraw the 'production boundary', I critique in this article feminists' own reluctance to include within this production boundary the reproductive labour of women like sex workers, dancers and surrogates. I argue instead for the recognition of reproductive labour performed for the market as valuable, legitimate work. I then assess the implications of this redrawing of the 'reproduction boundary' for labour law. Through an examination of three generations of Indian labour law, I suggest that labour laws geared towards the informal economy best address female reproductive labourers' demands for both recognition and redistribution, but that for this, labour law itself needs to be reconceptualized, especially as the postcolonial state re-engineers labour laws in the prevalent economic climate to deliver benefits rather than workers' rights. A slightly modified version of this article will be published in the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, vol 18, no 1 (2014)