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Soldiering—war work—constituted a peculiar form of labor in the 18th-century Anglo-American world. These troops straddled the worlds of free and unfree labor. Army recruits encountered wage work with labor processes in which the army is an employer, its officers are managers, and troops are workers, yet they yielded control of their bodies and lives. Often bound for life, housed, provided for, and subjected to, brutal military discipline, military labor can also be viewed as unfree labor. Martial labor was not slavery, being for many a voluntary occupation, but it comprised a form of servitude. Soldiers occupied a marchland of labor relations due to the unusual nature of “production” in warfare. A soldier's bondage enabled his deployment on the periphery of acceptable human conduct, performing the “black” service of spilling blood in the interests of the state in return for “white” money. Despite much attention to the slave factory, plantation, merchant ship, craft shop, and household, the military garrison has largely been ignored by other than military historians. This chapter examines the British regular army in the Seven Years' War, where soldiers' labor, at once paid and coerced, secured an American empire at a heavy price in human life.

This chapter explores the experiences of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, whose unfree labour contributes to the country's construction sector boom. Drawing on recent scholarship on the rise of debt as a coercive form of labour control within late-capitalist exploitation, the chapter asks how unfree labour relations constrain brick workers' aspirations for life beyond the kiln. In doing so, it considers how unfree labour represents a form of escape for many from unsustainable microfinance debt, while trapping them within the structural constraints of unfreedom. The chapter concludes that there is a need to foreground the role of unfreedom, and the constraints it places on worker agency, within accounts of unwaged and informal work.

This chapter attempts to resymbolize apartheid and examines the history of South Africa under the narration of black unfree labor. It explains the negative impact of colonization on the black majority in South Africa, and proposes possible courses of action should the unfree black labor be freed from the brutal chains of exploitation. The chapter also analyzes the works of Sampie Terreblanche to trace the historical developments of racialized capital in South Africa and reviews Ernst Cassirer's understanding of the way in which a telos is always implied in any positing of history.

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s biggest electronics contract manufacturer of Apple, used the labour of 150,000 student interns – 15 per cent of its entire million-strong workforce in China – during the summer of 2010. This Chapter looks into the quasi-employment arrangements of student interns, who occupy an ambiguous space between being a student and a worker in Apple’s global supply chain. The incorporation of vocational school teachers into corporate management can strengthen control over students, who are in effect unfree labourers during their internships, which could last from three months to a year. While male and female student interns are required to do the same work as other employees, their intern labour is devalued. With the loss of their capacity to control the timing, location and training content of the internships, student-workers vent their pent-up anger and grievances in the capital accumulation process, in which their fundamental rights to labour and education are scarified.

Globalization—guided by a neoliberal logic, purporting to increase informalization of economies and labour markets, and accompanied by the fragmentation of ‘citizenship’, and accelerating migration—currently challenges central features of the so-called Swedish model. Trade union organization in Sweden has been declining since the beginning of the 1990s, this chapter argues. So has the societal status and strength of trade unions; developments most severely experienced by the blue-collar unions. Accruing burdens of informalization and racialization are particularly carried by migrants and disadvantaged groups of migrant background, and these are poignantly brought out by reports on the exploitation of forced or unfree labour. The chapter sums up these trends and focuses on the response of trade unions. From studies of the documentation of four blue-collar trade unions, exposed to powerful forces and processes of transformation, a picture emerges of their often contradictory analyses and strategies at the present conjuncture.

This chapter examines two forms of unfree labor — debt-bondage and human trafficking — in which sex workers were not recompensed for their labor and, for a variety of reasons, remained stuck in their place of employment. Women involved in debt-bondage arrangements exchanged work for room, board, and a cash loan. Under debt-bondage agreements, the indebted paid off a monetary debt through labor for a definitive period of time. The chapter discusses how unscrupulous managers used debt-bondage to exploit sex workers. It also talks about trafficked women and how they were typically tricked or abducted and sold against their will to brothels in Tonkin or China, linking the sex industries of both countries. The chapter discusses how the prevalence of trafficking became a thorn in the side of the colonial government as France had already completely abolished slavery and slave trade in its terriroties since 1848. Finally, it discusses the colonial efforts to stop abuses of unfree labor.

Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, rapid capitalist accumulation depended heavily on the efficient transfer of workers across enormous distances and far-flung imperial domains. Whether voluntary, coerced, or something in between like indenture, much of this extraordinary traffic of labor power around the globe was organized by imperial networks and expanding cross-border state and corporate entities. Yet labor historians, despite recent efforts to write in a “transnational” mode, have yet to fully develop analytical paradigms that sufficiently take into account the peculiar dynamics of empire and colonialism as a broader category of analysis. The three chapters in this section, while rooted in distinctive times and places, offer a glimpse of what such a “labor and empire” paradigm might look like. First, imperial labor forms seem to be inherently hybrid in character, making a poor fit with rigid analytical categories of relations of production or expropriation. Moreover, the multiplicity of forms of imperial labor exploitation demonstrates the inherent instability of the traditional contrast—and alleged teleology—of unfree and free labor. Finally, these chapters suggest, when imperial laborers engaged in struggle, they forced to the surface tensions and contradictions within and beyond the borders of imperial states and systems.

This chapter focuses on the origins of English imperialism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the systems of unfree labor that were developed to help sustain overseas expansion. It begins with a consideration of one of the earliest justifications for overseas colonization: the need for England to unburden itself of its apparent “surplus” population. It then explores the development of indentured service and convict transportation in places like Virginia and Barbados in the early seventeenth century. The chapter considers why in the long run neither indentured service nor convict transportation became a viable alternative to slave labor in the West Indies by connecting the issue of unfree colonial labor to contemporary debates in England over population and political economy. Ultimately, the turn toward African slavery in the Caribbean colonies was not an isolated economic event on the colonial periphery, but one closely tied to political, economic, and social concerns in the metropolis.

This chapter examines the 2012 changes to the United Kingdom’s Overseas Domestic Workers visa, changes which increased the vulnerability of domestic workers to exploitation by prohibiting them from changing employers, abolishing their route to settlement, and limiting the duration of their visa to six months. It considers how the UK Government used the discourses of slavery, trafficking, and forced labour to justify stripping the visa of its key protective rights and the route to citizenship. The chapter contends that in the UK the criminalization of trafficking and modern slavery distracts from the general vulnerability of domestic workers to exploitation by employers. It argues that the case study illustrates how anti-trafficking discourse has an elective affinity with traditional (civil and political) human rights, strict migration controls, and criminal prohibitions, rather than social and labour rights

This very brief concluding chapter both summarizes the preceding chapters, and argues that South Carolina’s reliance on the enslaved for their political development was prescient, as unfree labor remains essential to modern statecraft.

This introductory editorial chapter paints the background to current issues of international migration, unfree labour, racialization, and changing frameworks of citizenship. The theoretical basis for this chapter is drawn from a modified view of the writings of Karl Polanyi. Using the notion of ‘precarity’ as a central concept, the editors analyse the prospects for a contemporary ‘double movement’ which challenges the commodification of labour under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The introduction summarizes and discusses the content of the book’s fifteen chapters in the light of this perspective, and posits a discussion of human rights as a stratagem for today’s labour movements. It makes a case for bringing the labour movement back in, through debates on migration, migrants’ working conditions, the organization of labour, and the utopia of social justice in a post-neoliberal era.

South African apartheid stands out in the academic literature as a generic case of the discriminatory political economy of migration in modern capitalism. In this chapter Carl-Ulrik Schierup brings into focus recent developments in post-apartheid South Africa, which is fractured by outbreaks of xenophobia and upset by police violence against striking workers. It is a historical moment presenting labour unions and other movements of civil society with imminent challenges. It signifies a current crisis of South Africa’s celebrated ‘community’ or ‘social movement’ unionism in the context of globalisation, corporate restructuring, a vast and exacerbated social inequality, the informalisation of labour, and a re-racialising regional migration system. It posits that a third way back to the future for trade unions, between politics of irregular migration and a new ‘global apartheid’ of ‘managed migration’, may be through retrieving their own past rootedness in workplaces and local communities, and in organising internal and cross border migrants.

This chapter explores how sex work is constructed as a mode of deviant heterosexuality in the twenty-first century. It contends that ongoing moral panics over commercial sex do important political work for capitalism by distracting attention from the close entanglements between heteronormativity and economic injustice. The chapter begins by investigating the connections between the criminalization of sex work and the austerity agenda that has defined Britain’s political economy since 2010. It then interrogates the linkages between the politics of sex work and the politics of anti-immigration, arguing that neoliberalism has itself been made thinkable through anti-trafficking discourses that restrict labor freedoms in the name of eradicating unfree labor.

In many ways, the problems that have beset southern labor for the past century and a half—unfree labor, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and virulent and sometimes violent repression of those who have tried to organize unions—have become the problems of workers across the United States, as the regional convergence of labor markets has pulled wages and conditions for workers across the nation closer to those of southern workers rather than the reverse. By addressing the troubled state of labor and the deep inequalities inherent today, we will use this volume to demonstrate how the South’s long history of worker exploitation and labor practices have become standard fare throughout America.

The development of the capitalist world market has always been linked to social inequality, differentiation of workers, and the use of migration to create various forms of ‘unfree labour’: slavery, indentured workers, guestworkers, forced labourers, and undocumented workers. The differential denial of equal rights has been based on gender, race, ethnicity, legal status, national origins, and the ideology of human capital. This chapter addresses the history of migration, focusing on changing modes of differentiation, contrasting the labour recruitment systems of the 1945–70 period with the epoch of globalization and the creation of a global labour market. Various forms of the denial of rights of citizenship and the precarization of labour are examined. The chapter concludes with a discussion of an accelerated feminization of labour, and the growth of precarious temporary and casual employment arising through the global economic crisis.

One might perhaps not expect to find many similarities between labor in Virginia 1660-1750 and in New South Wales 1800-1840. However, there was a crucial unfree white labor stream that fed both British colonies in these two periods: convicts. At first glance, the convicts’ working lives look similar—Virginian convicts were held by a master, often on a plantation, and were working for the master’s profit, while New South Wales convicts were assigned to a master, often on a farm, and worked for the master’s profit. However, this is where the similarities end. The control over the convicts by the New South Wales government meant that there were greater rules and regulations over convict living standards, work hours, usage, and punishment. None of these controls existed for Virginian convicts, who were wholly controlled by their masters. As a result of this difference in control, we see a dynamic change in the method used to motivate effective labor from the convict population. While masters of Virginian convicts relied on coercion and punishment to force work patterns, employers in New South Wales instead relied on incentives and rewards. This chapter explores the impacts on method of control, and how it influenced the shift from coercive-driven labor to incentive-driven labor.

Settlers in the Australian colonies from the 1820s to the 1860s had access to an extraordinary range of unfree and undercompensated labourers, including convicts, unpaid Aborigines, and indentured Chinese, Indian, Pacific Islander, and European labourers. From the 1820s to the 1840s convicts formed the great majority of servants and labourers employed by settlers and constituted the largest part of the colonial population. The status of master of non-white labour was especially key to evolving patriarchal conceptions of white settler masculinity and integral to the ideas of such manly independence deployed to argue for responsible government in the Australian colonies. Masters outnumbered mistresses, and the magistrates and police constables who oversaw the harshly regulated labour system were all men. In judging how different categories of labourers should be treated and compensated, white settler men asserted their moral authority in legal and material ways.

This brief and synthetic epilogue argues that the South’s history lays bare the ways that antidemocratic governance has been used in this country to protect unfree labor arrangements and to blunt collective decision-making about the conditions of wealth production and distribution of wealth. That history helps sharpen our analysis of the current concern over the future of work. More than half a century ago, labor and black freedom advocates teamed up with analysts of the cybernetics revolution to ask “Are there other proper claims on goods and services besides a job?” The epilogue argues that the question is as pertinent now as when it was formulated, and that the South is where it will have to be answered.