Migrant workers in the ILO's 'Global Alliance Against Forced Labour' report: a critical appraisal

Temporary migration for agricultural work has long historical provenance globally, and has increased in the most recent period of globalisation. In this paper, using examples based on my own research on both cross-border (to the UK) and internal (within India) migration by workers for temporary agricultural jobs, I raise questions about how such movements, and the labour relations with which they are associated, have been represented in global and regional analyses. The discussion is set within a summary of recent debates over the usefulness of the concept of geographical scale. I use as a case study the ILO's 2005 report, Global Alliance Against Forced Labour, which makes a clear association between temporary migrant work in agriculture and forced labour in rural Asia. I argue that the representations of forced labour that emerge from the report risk, first, painting temporary migrants as victims, rather than as knowledgeable agents, and, second, residualising unfree labour relations, rather than shedding light on their connections to context-specific and contingent forms of capitalism and capital-state relations

Intensification of work-place regimes in British agriculture: the role of migrant workers

In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive agriculture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this sub-sector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification in agricultural production related to an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration. However, within this narrative of change at the national scale, the paper also finds continuing diversity in agricultural workplace regimes. The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British agriculture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on ‘quality’, volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piece work, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component

Spaces of work and everyday life: labour geographies and the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers

In this study, I focus on the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers' people who travel away to work for just a few weeks or months. Such workers have been relatively neglected in labour geography. Perhaps surprisingly, given the focus on the agency of capital in much of his writing, I build on two arguments made by David Harvey. First, workers' spatial mobility is complex and may involve short as well as longer term migrations, and secondly that this can have significance both materially and in relation to the subjective experience of employment. The spatial embeddedness of temporary migrant workers' everyday lives can be a resource for shaping landscapes (and ordinary histories) of capitalism, even though any changes may be short-lived and take place at the micro-scale. The article is illustrated with case study material from research with workers in the agriculture sector in India and the UK, and concludes with more general implications for labour geographers engaged with other sectors and places

Disrupting migration stories: reading life histories through the lens of mobility and fixity

It has been argued that the ‘mobility turn’ is overcelebratory regarding human movement across space. Yet, critical studies of mobilities have emerged that refute this, demonstrating how various forms and aspects of mobility are bound up with unequal power relations. This paper engages with debates over migration and mobility through an in-depth analysis of three life history interviews recorded in England in 2011. The subjects of the interviews are all men in their fifties and sixties of South Asian heritage, who moved to England as minors, and who, as adults, worked in factories for at least three years. The stories in all their affectivity and sensuousness disrupt standard tropes regarding migration and contribute to our understanding of the relations between mobility, fixity, ‘race’, and class. The built-in historical perspective shows how, looking back, someone who may once have migrated across international borders does not necessarily see that as the most significant moment in their life; how someone’s past moves within a nation-state may have greater significance to them than their moves into it; how people who move at one point can also be stuck, reluctantly immobile, at another; and how both the representations and materiality of mobility and fixity are imbued with, and reproduce, class inequality and racisms

Immigration politics, slavery talk: the case for a class perspective

The UK Modern Slavery Bill, and UK politicians’ obsession with immigration, risk undermining political moves to greater solidarity among all those—migrant and non-migrant—experiencing abuse or unfreedom in their employment

Intensification of workplace regimes in British horticulture: the role of migrant workers

In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive horticulture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this subsector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification of horticultural production driven by an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration.The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British horticulture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on 'quality', volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piecework, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component

Migrant Working in West Norfolk

During 2002 and 2003 there has been a rise in the number of migrant workers in West Norfolk. A number of agencies, including King's Lynn Borough Council became concerned about the possible implications of the new migration for community cohesion and also about the risks facing migrant workers due to multiple occupancy housing, inadequate access to health services, and illegal and exploitative employment relations. As a result Norfolk County Council commissioned the University of East Anglia to carry out an initial one month study to draw together information held by key agencies and individuals in the borough as a first step towards further action. This report details the findings of the study. It is made up of seven main sections covering the scale of migrant working in Norfolk, undocumented migration and illegal employment practices, housing, health, translation and language, crime, racism and community tension. The last section suggests ways forward including current and future support for migrant workers

For the likes of us? Retelling the classed production of a British university campus

This paper contributes to recent critical geographical writing on university campuses by setting their physical production and reproduction centre stage and taking an historical perspective. Focusing on a single case study campus in the UK we revisit the archival record on its planning and early years, revealing gaps between stated intentions of increasing equality between social classes and discourses and practices which reinforced middle and upper class cultural hegemony. We then draw on oral history interviews with residents of the social housing estates immediately adjacent to the campus, including its former builders and cleaners, to explore the spatialized subjectivities of people who were generally absent from the consultations conducted by the university’s planners, and whose perspectives are not found in its official history. The findings confirm the idea of university campuses as paradoxical spaces for their working-class neighbours, at once excluding and, in unexpected ways, potentially transformational

Forced labour and migration to the UK

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Contesting neoliberal common sense: bottom-up history and the struggle over urban space

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