Low-skill no more! essential workers, social reproduction and the legitimacy-crisis of the division of labour

Workers in the realm of social reproduction – e.g. nurses, carers, cleaners, food preparation workers etc. – are considered low-skill and are poorly remunerated. During the Covid-19 crisis they have been recast as ‘essential’, leading to unprecedented praise and attention in public discourse. Nonetheless, public praise for these ‘essential’ workers so far has not translated into a commitment for higher wages and improved working conditions. In this article, we argue that skills hierarchies continue to determine labour market outcomes and social inequalities. We pinpoint that these are embedded into the logic of capitalist social relations, rather than being an expression of the features of jobs themselves. We also show how some socially reproductive sectors resist the tendency to automation precisely because of the prevalence therein of a workforce which is portrayed as un-skilled. By focussing on low-skilled workers’ engagement in various forms of labour unrest and their demands for long overdue recognition and wage rises. the article puts into question the inherited skills-lexicon according to which low-wage jobs are unproductive and lacking in skills and competence. The authors conclude that these workers’ fights for the recognition of the dignity and importance of their jobs and professions can facilitate a rethinking of the division of labour in our societies

Weber: Religion, Nation and Empire

Colonialism figures in the work of Max Weber in multiple forms. While in his professorial address he supported internal colonialism as the antidote against the threat represented by the immigration of foreigners, in the writings on world religions colonialism appears as displacement, amnesia and Freudian slip. Colonial subjects in particular are portrayed as personalities unable to develop the mentality that would help them to free themselves from what Weber regarded as the chains of a communitarian, gregarious and subaltern life. In the end, I argue that Weber’s work contributed, albeit contradictorily and not always explicitly, to spread an idea of colonial violence as a force of progress and a racist idea of colonial others as backward

Corporatisation and financialisation of social reproduction: Care homes and childcare in the United Kingdom

The ownership and financial strategies of companies providing care for children or older people have become an increasingly salient concern, in both research and policy, because of their implications for the quality and availability of care services, as well as working conditions. However, analysis has tended to be sector specific. This article provides the first comparison of ownership, business models and workforces across childcare and adult social care in the United Kingdom. It reveals growing convergence in terms of the dominance of large companies and their financial strategies, which can reward investors while undermining access to care and worsening working conditions for large, low-paid workforces. We conceptualise these developments in terms of corporatisation and the related process of financialisation. They are, we argue, underpinned by the political economy of low wages for care work, which we explain using feminist social reproduction theory – highlighting the devaluation of feminised and racialised caring labour. The article identifies the need for further research to account for differences between the sectors, to map the geographies and political economies of care, and to compare these processes internationally

Social Reproduction Feminisms

Social Reproduction (SR) feminism is the name given to that set of conceptualizations from different strands of Marxist and socialist feminism trying to explain these processes of life-making, how such processes are part of capitalist accumulation and what this means for how we as individuals and as a society produce and maintain our lives and human capacities. SR feminism is thus a loose but nonetheless broadly coherent school of thought – one that identifies and develops the insight that the social labours involved in producing this and the next generation of workers plays an important role in the capitalist drive to produce and accumulate surplus value. The tradition picks up on, and aims to correct, the naturalization of the gendered division of labour seen in Marx’s critique of capitalism and in the socialist tradition more broadly. It does so by developing an insight at the heart of Capital Volume 1, where Marx identifies ‘labour power’, or our capacity to labour, as the ‘special commodity’ that the capitalist needs to set the system in motion and keep it running. Our labour power, Marx tells us, has the ‘peculiar property of being a source of value’ (Marx, 1977: 270) because with that labour power, we create commodities and value for capitalism. The appropriation of our surplus labour by capitalists is the source of their domi- nance. Without our labour power, then, the system would collapse. But Marx is frustratingly silent on the rest of the story. If labour power produces value, how is labour power itself produced? In this chapter we outline the trajectory of SR feminism, particularly as it unfolded in Europe and North America, by focusing upon the main theoretical contributions. By critically engaging with Marx’s critique of political economy, SR feminism extends his analysis to grapple with the ways in which the social reproduction of labour power ground processes of accumulation in relations of social oppression. This unfinished project has, as we show below, a pointed political message: the fight against capitalist exploitation must be, at one and the same time, a fight against social oppression

Dispossessing the Private Sphere? Civic Integration Policies and Colonial Legacies

This article addresses the gendered and racist dimensions of the ‘assimilationist turn’ of current civic integration policies for immigrants. It does so by looking at the intersections between family law and current civic integration legislations in two specific countries: France and the Netherlands. In both the French and the Dutch case, the content of the civic integration material regarding gender equality and women’s rights focuses especially on the family. In France, such a focus was strongly advocated by the High Council for Integration (HCI – Haut Conseil a l’integration), according to which one of the most pressing problems that migrant women face is the fact that “the application of the law of nationality in matters of personal status and bilateral agreements limit women's rights.” The position of the HCI reflects a common trope in Western discussions on legal pluralism and its consequences for minorities and women’s rights, one within which gender oppression and gender violence are related to religious law with the effect of producing a binary opposition between culture and religion, on the one hand, and human rights and gender equality on the other. However, I argue that, not unlike the recent ban of the Muslim headscarf from French public schools, whose fundamental racism has been traced back to the history of French colonialism, the fixation on family norms as evident in integration policies is animated by a similar colonial anxiety. In the Netherlands the right-wing nationalist Minister Rita Verdonk – the main initiator of the civic integration turn in the country – defended the civic integration policies as aimed to defend Dutch progressive norms regarding sexuality and women’s rights from backward family values. As Sarah van Walsum aptly notes, “in linking exotic family norms and immigration to formulate a compound threat to the Dutch nation, Minister Verdonk gave vent to anxieties whose roots ran deeper than the above named moments of religiously inspired violence could account for. Her words were in fact strikingly reminiscent (…) of the discourse used in colonial times to distinguish the Dutch, legally defined as ‘European’, from the ‘native’ inhabitants of the former Dutch East Indies” (van Walsum 2008: 6). In the end, this article seeks to demonstrate how the “normative” side of integration policies and preparation materials – and, within them, the mobilisation of women’s rights – is an expression of a nationalist and racist register, as well as of a colonial legacy

Introduction: Righting Feminism

This is the introduction to a special issue on Righting Feminism. In recent years, we have witnessed the multifarious ways in which feminism as an emancipatory project dedicated to women's liberation has increasingly “converged” with non-emancipatory/racist, conservative, and neo-liberal economic and political agendas. Today, feminist themes are not only being "mainstreamed" but are also increasingly being mobilized to bolster existing power hierarchies as well as neo-liberal and right-wing xenophobic political agendas. The convergence of feminism with these dominant ideologies and forces has taken many forms in the West. In Europe, right-wing nationalist parties have utilized gender equality to further a racist, anti-immigrant agenda. In the US, not only has gender equality been brandished to justify imperialist interventions in countries with majority Muslim populations, but, more recently, high-powered corporate women have publicly endorsed a form of feminism that is informed through and through by a market rationality. This themed issue intervenes and queries what appears to be the “righting of feminism”. For us, this notion refers not only to feminism’s rightward turn but also to the way in which rights language, namely, women’s rights, have been mobilized to advance non-emancipatory goals. And, yet, righting feminism simultaneously – and crucially – connotes a political desire and aspiration to make feminism “right” again by reclaiming its emancipatory potential. This issue includes an extensive critical introduction which provides an overview of the field and presents the work of the contributors. Each of the six essays in the issue then discuss crucial aspects of the ways in which feminism has been increasingly associated with either neoliberal or right-wing xenophobic ideologies and propose original analyses in order to shed new light on this perplexing phenomenon

The Frontline as Performative Frame: An Analysis of the UK COVID Crisis

In this paper, we examine the multiple significations of the “frontline” metaphor in the UK during the first ten months of COVID-19. We argue that the term “frontline” has operated as a performative frame, which has helped to produce the very notion and the materialization of the “COVID-19 frontline” and keyworkers. Showing how the UK gov- ernment has repeatedly cited this metaphor, we outline the contradictory effects it has generated through an interplay of hyper-visibility and opaqueness. The frontline meta- phor has been used to justify the government’s injection of massive amounts of public money into the economy, render hyper-visible workers who had previously been invisible, whilst generating a sense of civic responsibility. Simultaneously, however, the metaphor has created a smokescreen for corrupt practices, deflecting attention away from resource- starved health and social care infrastructures and intensifying forms of “everyday border- ing” and “everyday racism” that deepen structural injustices in the UK

The business of care: Private placement agencies and female migrant workers in London

This article presents the results of a qualitative research project on private domestic and care placement agencies in London. Although there is a paucity of empirical studies on these private actors, they have become increasingly important in the domestic and care sector in the UK. In a context of growing commodification and marketization, the article shows how domestic and care services constitute an extremely profitable ‘industry’ in which large companies are increasingly investing. Drawing on content analysis of agencies' websites and in‐depth interviews with agencies' managers/owners, migrant workers and key informants, the article sheds light on these intermediary figures' marketing and business strategies as well as on the ways they contribute to establish the language and practice of domestic and care work as a business. Furthermore, it highlights the employment conditions and selection criteria established by these private agencies for female migrant workers, particularly in a context in which commodification/marketization is expected to foster more professionalization. The article thus fills a significant gap in the literature on domestic and care work, gender and migration by analysing the ways in which for‐profit recruitment agencies have become important players in the care industry