Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies of Exploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets

Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies ofExploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets

Kendra Strauss*School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

Abstract

This paper examines approaches, both within geography and more broadly, to the issue of forcedlabour in contemporary labour markets. Far from a vestige of pre-capitalist social relations, unfreelabour is part of the continuum of exploitation that is intrinsically related the contradictory natureof commodification and to capital as a social relation. The paper focuses on the UK, but drawsattention to the ways in which relations of unfreedom in the new global division of labour dis-solve clear-cut distinctions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. The first section focuseson definitions and approaches, including those related to migration and trafficking, from supra-national organisations such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The second sectionlooks at geographical approaches to forced labour and examines what a spatially grounded frame-work can bring to analyses of unfreedom. The conclusion suggests future directions for geographi-cal research on unfree labour, especially relating to the undertheorised relations betweenunfreedom, domestic labour and social reproduction.

Introduction

This issue of unfree labour is a highly topical one. As Jens Lerche has described, ‘‘Unfreelabour has received an unusual amount of official attention during the last few years.Official commemorations of the abolition of slavery are very much in vogue’’ (Lerche2007a). At the same time, in countries like the UK, tragedies such as the drowning of agang of Chinese cocklepickers at Morecambe Bay in 2004 intermittently draw attentionto the existence of contemporary of forms of unfree labour. More recently four men inLeighton Buzzard, England, were charged in September 2011 with conspiracy to commitoffences of holding others in servitude and requiring them to perform forced labour. Thesituation was described in the press as ‘modern slavery’ and the victims were vulnerablemen, mostly British and Eastern European, who were housed in ‘‘filthy buildings rangingfrom dog kennels to sheds and horse boxes’’ (Taylor 2011). Earlier the same year awoman was trafficked into Britain after accepting a job as a domestic servant was awarded£25,000 when it was discovered that she was had been working without pay for longhours and had been deprived of her passport (Press Association 2011). Cases such as thelatter, which involve individual women (and sometimes children) working in isolatedhouseholds, generally receive less attention than those that involve ‘gang’ labour.

As these examples illustrate, unfree labour is not confined to agricultural sectors nor tothe Global South; in fact, there are concerns that in the UK, it is on the rise (Straussforthcoming; TUC n.d.). The globalisation of production and capital flows, and the de-and re-regulation of national employment regimes to create flexible labour markets, meanthat there are increasing interconnections between the demand for flexible, low costlabour in the industrialised economies and a supply of workers unable to commodify their

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labour at home. Bakker and Gill (2003) call this the resurgence of ‘primitive’ labour mar-kets. But national labour markets remain important due to differences in labour regulationand state supports for social reproduction, and it is generally true that the issue of unfreelabour has received less attention in the so-called advanced industrialised countries whereit is has tended, at least until recently, to be viewed as peripheral and related to olderforms of exploitation.

Thus, while it is true there has been increased interest from academics and policy-makers in contemporary forms of unfree labour, the literature and evidence base on theforms, extent and context of unfree labour remains small, and policy debates have tendedto focus on emotive areas of trafficking (especially related to prostitution), ‘modern slav-ery’ and, to a lesser extent, child labour. Those interested in forced labour have oftencome to it through research agendas focusing on migration and migrant labour, an inter-est in sector-specific labour markets (e.g. labour practices in the agricultural or care sec-tors), and ⁄or unfree labour practices in the global South. At the same time, there remainsa lack of conceptual clarity in some of the discussions of these issues wherein forcedlabour, unfree labour, trafficking and slavery are used interchangeably or inconsistently.

Within geography, approaches to unfree labour have also been associated with researchon migration, asylum and human trafficking (Rogaly 2008a,b; Waite 2009). Notably,‘traditional’ labour geography has been largely silent on the issue, perhaps because of atendency to focus on organised labour and industrial and extractive sectors [but see, e.g.Peck and Theodore (2008) and Theodore (2003) on prison and day labourers; McDowellet al. (2009) and Wills et al. (2009) on precarious work and immigrant labour]. A spateof newly funded projects involving geographers, however, supported by organisationssuch as the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Joseph Rowntree Founda-tion (JRF)’s Forced Labour Programme and the Leverhulme Foundation, are starting toexpand the range of foci and approaches to include the scope and experiences of forcedlabour in the UK, the experiences of forced labour of asylum seekers and refugees inEngland, and political economy perspectives on the interrelationship between trafficking,forced labour and UK economy.

The relative paucity of empirical studies of unfree labour, from sector-specific, geo-graphical or micro-scale (fine-grained qualitative) perspectives, on the one hand, and theneed for greater conceptual clarity on the other, make this important and timely work.These domains reveal interconnections that serve to link spaces and relations of unfreedomin the global North with new and evolving mobililities and processes of social, economicand political change in the global South. At the same time, spaces and relations of unfree-dom that enrol vulnerable workers, both migrants and UK-born, are shaped by multi-scalarprocesses of de- and re-regulation related to regimes of migration and accumulation.1 Inthis sense an understanding of the spatial dynamics of the evolving political economy ofglobalised labour markets is vital, not only to our apprehension of complex and oftenhidden forms of exploitation, but also to a progressive politics that aims to challenge them.

This paper provides an overview of approaches to unfree labour. It focuses on theUK, where a number of the funded projects are taking place, but draws attention tothe ways in which relations of unfreedom in the new global division of labour dissolveclear-cut distinctions between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. I argue that, farfrom a vestigial form of pre-capitalist exploitation, unfree labour is part of the contin-uum of exploitation. This grounds definitions of unfreedom in Marx’s articulation ofthe contradictory commodification of labour. The continuum of exploitation is not,however, pre-determined by teleological structural relations of capital accumulation butis rather a constantly evolving and contested set of processes in which space and place

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play a key role. In this sense I am building on Rogaly’s (2008a) argument that unfree-dom in the labour process is related to context specific and contingent forms of capital-ist development and political relations. I make two further arguments aboutgeographical research on unfree labour in the concluding sections of the paper. The firsthinges on the necessity of research agenda that seeks to understand the role of spaceand place in the shaping the continuum of exploitation and unfreedom in the labourprocess at a variety of scales. This will require an understanding of the social construc-tion of both labour markets and their scalar dynamics, as well as of political–economicprocesses, institutions and frameworks of governance. My second argument directs atten-tion to the necessity of focusing, in both academic and political contexts, not only onemployers but on all of us who benefit directly or indirectly from unfree labour (inagriculture, care, hospitality, domestic and food processing sectors), as well as on thoseexperiencing exploitation. This suggests that relations of social reproduction, as well asof production, need to be analysed and understood.

Defining and Responding to Forced Labour

There is a great deal of historical research on slavery and slave-like conditions (debtbondage, peonage, etc.) worldwide; there is not room to explore these literatures here.What is important to note is that the widespread recognition that unfreedom is a featureof labour markets in the ‘advanced capitalist’ economies is relatively recent (Brass 2004),and that it extends beyond sectors that have traditionally garnered the greatest attention,such as agriculture (Anderson and Rogaly 2005). Thus, political and institutionalresponses, and academic research programmes in fields other than history and develop-ment studies, are also relatively recent phenomena. Attention from organisations such asthe International Labour Organisation (ILO) has focused on definitions, responses anddata gathering; what is emerging is a set of contested conceptual and regulatoryapproaches that articulate with one another in a variety of ways at different scales.

The definitions of unfree, forced and coerced labour require some unpacking. Theconcept of unfree labour derives from political economy: in particular, Marx’s articulationof the distinction between work and labour in capitalist economies. In the transition fromfeudalism to capitalism people were separated from the means of production and subsis-tence and became ‘free’ to commodify their labour. In this sense freedom means the abil-ity to sell one’s labour, to enter into a contract with a purchaser of labour, and to receivean agreed wage. This was a form of freedom when compared to, for example, serfdomor slavery, but Marx was clear that commodified labour under capitalist relations of pro-duction was and is not truly free labour. This is in part because the labouring classes arein fact compelled to commodify their labour, having no access to the means of produc-tion or subsistence. Marx’s concepts of free and unfree labour have been challenged andextended, not least by feminists who have pointed out that some workers (women, ethnicand racial minorities) face further barriers to the commodification of their labour (Bezan-son 2006; Dalla Costa and James 1975; Orloff 1996). This is why domestic labour andthe household are complex sites of interlocking relations of unfreedom.

Unfree labour is, therefore, a broad category of which forced labour and slavery aresubsets. Forced labour assumes that the labour relationship is either entered into underduress (which can include social and ⁄or familial pressure), or that it is entered into freelybut then becomes coercive (Skrivankova 2010). There is clearly overlap between defini-tions of unfree and forced labour, in the sense that a worker might enter into anemployment relationship that becomes coercive (her passport is taken away, she is not

Coerced, forced and unfree labour 139


paid the wages she was promised), which effectively curtails her ability to break the con-tract. But equally a worker might be hired under conditions that are unfree (her mobilityis curtailed) but which she considers normal. Forced labour differs from slavery by virtueof fact that in the case of the latter a worker, not just her labour, becomes the (real orde facto) property of the employer and can be bought, sold or traded. As Miles (1987,27) states of the slave: ‘‘he [sic] is himself a commodity, but the labour power is not hiscommodity’’. With the abolition of institutionalised and state-sanctioned slavery in manyparts of the world the definition has been stretched, such that many forms of unfreelabour are now labelled slavery.

These tensions between freedom (to commodify one’s labour) and unfreedom (the var-ious forms of compulsion that require one to do so under varying conditions) go to theheart of legal and regulatory attempts, at a variety of scales, to restrict certain forms of un-freedom (sex work performed by women who have been trafficked) while reinforcingothers (the restrictions placed on migrant workers in particular visa regimes). Satzewich(1991), for example, thus distinguish between unfree wage labour and unfree non-wagelabour; Miles (1987) argues that unfree wage labour is a concept that refers to economicrelations, but relations of production aren’t purely economic. Hence, the importance ofthe state as a relation of production, and the importance of relations of production moregenerally because they sustain (and are sustained by) different political and ideologicalrelations. This process has both normative and regulatory ⁄procedural elements, and is fur-ther reflected ⁄ reinforced in policy discourses. While the nation state is a vital locus ofboth regulatory and discursive frameworks, the globalisation of not only labour marketsbut regulatory and policy functions has spawned institutions that are vitally involved inthe social, legal and economic construction of multi-scalar relations through which unfreelabour is experienced and defined.

The ILO has been, at the supra-national level, arguably the most influential body toidentify, in and through its Conventions, conditions of forced labour. The Forced LabourConvention, 1930 (29), defines forced labour for the purposes of international law as ‘‘allwork or service which is extracted from any person under menace of any penalty andwhich said person has not offered himself voluntarily’’ (Article 2(1), cited in ILO 2009,5). The ILO definition thus comprises two main elements: that the work or service isexacted under the menace of penalty and that it is undertaken involuntarily. This doesnot mean, however, that initial consent renders subsequent labour exploitation null; theILO recognises that: ‘‘Many victims enter forced labour situations initially out of theirown choice, albeit through fraud and deception, only to discover later that they are notfree to withdraw their labour’’ (ILO 2009, 6). Initial consent may thus be consideredirrelevant under certain conditions.

Forced labour cannot, however, under the ILO definition, be equated ‘‘simply withlow wages and poor working conditions. Nor does it cover conditions of pure economicnecessity, as when a worker feels unable to leave a job because of the real or perceivedabsence of employment alternatives’’ (Andrees and Besler 2009; ILO 2009, 5). Thus, theinvoluntary nature of unfree labour relates to freedom of choice, yet as Skrivankova (2010)points out, there is not international agreement on what constitutes freedom of choiceand great difficulty in determining the reality of consent. This is clearly exacerbated bythe lack of global consensus on what constitutes exploitative labour practices, which is atthe heart of the international labour movement (Herod 2001). Moreover, as Andersonand Rogaly (2005, 10) point out, what is omitted is ‘‘how certain individuals come to bein positions of power over others, and, related to this, how abuses are facilitated by struc-tural and legislative issues’’.



In addition to the definition of forced labour, associated with international law, theILO has identified a typology of forced labour and a series of indicators in order to facili-tate the difficult empirical task of gathering data and capturing trends. The typologydraws a broad distinction between three main contemporary forms of forced labour:forced labour imposed by the State (e.g. in sectors such as mining in Myanmar), forcedlabour linked to poverty and discrimination in the developing countries (e.g. bondedagricultural labour in Asia), and forced labour that arises from migration and traffickingacross the world, often associated with globalisation (e.g. trafficked domestic workers inthe UK) (ILO 2009, 11). What is notable, of course, is that forced labour in the ‘devel-oped’ countries is associated with migration and trafficking, while forced labour linked topoverty and discrimination is associated with developing countries.

In Rogaly’s (2008a, 1444) powerful critique of the ILO’s 2005 report, in which thesedefinitions, typologies and indicators are set out, he suggests that it ‘‘obscures powerrelations and contestations across different scales with multidirectional influences’’; bothhe and Lerche (2007, 447, quoted in Rogaly 2008a) point to the need to move awayfrom ‘‘unhelpful dichotomies and acknowledge the fluidity of actually occurring levelsof unfreedom’’. I would make the same point about the North-South binary implicit inthe typology above. As recent research in the UK context from the JRF and the TradesUnion Congress (TUC) research makes clear, and as the examples cited in the introduc-tion have shown, UK citizens are also at risk of being exploited in forced labourrelationships. Unfreedom thus needs be understood as a continuum of exploitation towhich any worker might be subject, but to which particular groups and individuals haveparticular vulnerabilities; the social construction of categories of difference such asgender, ethnicity and race and (dis)ability intersects with processes of class formation,which effect communities and groups at a range of scales (including immigrant, migrantand ethnic communities).

Perhaps more usefully, the ILO has developed a set of indicators to facilitate the identi-fication of instances and situations of forced labour (Anderson and Rogaly 2005; ILOConvention 29 [1930]; Skrivankova 2010). These include:

1 Threats or actual physical harm.2 Restriction of movement and confinement (to the workplace or a limited area).3 Debt bondage.4 Withholding wages or making excessive reductions (that violate previously made agree-

ments).5 Retention of passports and identity documents.6 Where the worker is an undocumented migrant or has irregular status, denunciation to

the authorities.

These indicators serve several additional purposes: they are factors that can be used toidentify situations of individual and ⁄or group vulnerability conducive to the emergenceof forced labour situations, they can be used as a basis for the design of data gatheringexercises to determine instances of forced labour, and they can indicate if a criminaloffence (on the part of the employer) has taken place. All are important because of thepaucity of data on forced labour at a range of scales, and the complexity of prosecutingcases of forced labour.

The social construction of scale operates, in relation to unfree labour, in and throughinstitutions that define and project the operation of legal, social and economic power.This prioritises the nation state: although institutions like the ILO have been important



in constructing unfree labour as an issue of rights and regulation, ultimate authorityresides with national regulatory regimes (sometimes, in the case of countries with a fed-eral structure, with additional ‘layers’ of regulation at the regional level). There have beena wide variety of national responses to the problem of forced labour, which have gener-ally sought to enshrine its prohibition in either the constitution or human rights legisla-tion; in both cases, however, it is difficult to enforce and prosecute such prohibitionswithout a corresponding criminal offence (for overviews, see Anti-Slavery International2006a,b; ILO 2009; Skrivankova 2010). In the UK, the 2009 Coroners and Justice Act cre-ated a new offence (the section 71 offence) of holding someone in slavery or servitude,or requiring them to perform forced or compulsory labour (Ministry of Justice 2010).This type of prohibition falls under the first of two broad approaches that define themajority of criminal offences related to unfree labour: legislation on slavery and slavery-life conditions and ⁄or forced ⁄ coerced labour, and forced ⁄ coerced labour only as an out-come of trafficking in anti-trafficking laws.

It is this second approach that highlights a key challenge for researchers and policy-makers: the conflation of trafficking and forced labour, or the elision of forced labour otherthan as an outcome of trafficking or people smuggling. As Skrivankova (2010, 8) states,

Often the two concepts are confused – to the disadvantage of people who might have been vic-tims of forced labour but who were not trafficked. These people are excluded from protectionand assistance…and where there is no stand-alone labour offence, often not even recognised asvictims of crime.

There is a further issue of conceptual clarity wherein economic migration, peoplesmuggling, trafficking and ‘illegal’ migration become difficult to disentangle. In theEU, for example, even those who have rights to free movement may be smuggled ortrafficked, especially if from peripheral or previously excluded countries, regions orcommunities; young women from A8 countries, for example, may be trafficked intothe UK for prostitution even if they technically have the right to free movement, andintermediaries involved in people smuggling may also be part of the networks thatchannel undocumented workers into forced labour situations. Research by Allambyet al. (2011) showed that in Northern Ireland experiences of forced labour were notspecifically linked to gender, age or nationality but rather related to vulnerabilitiesassociated with a lack of language skills, limited access to social networks, and limitedlocal knowledge.

There are clearly good reasons for focusing on the vulnerability of migrant workers,however, especially undocumented migrant workers or those with irregular status. Inlegal definitions of trafficking forced labour is implicit: this is the case within both theinternational definition adopted by the UN, and the one enshrined in the UK Asylumand Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill 2004 (and grounded in the EuropeanConvention on Human Rights). As Anderson and Rogaly (2005) point out, however,the primary concern is thus with the movement of people rather than abusive labourpractices, which diverts attention away from the key issue relating to the interrelationshipbetween immigration status and vulnerability to exploitation, and perversely allows immi-gration controls to be framed as a solution to human rights abuses.

Forced Labour, Unfreedom, and the Contemporary Capitalist Space-Economy

Anderson and Rogaly (2005, see also Brass 2004; Lerche 2007b; Rogaly 2008b) counterthis discourse through an approach that focuses on structural and macro political–



economic processes that influence forced labour practices, including attention to demandfactors, production systems, and labour shortages. This approach, I would suggest, vitallyshifts the terms of the debate away from the sole focus on the identification and prosecu-tion of instances of exploitation to a more systematic analysis of the power relations thatproduce exploitation in the context of the capitalist space-economy.

The (albeit selective) globalisation of labour markets and increased labour mobility,demographic ageing, labour market de- and re-regulation to facilitate flexibilisation, andnew political, legal and institutional migration regimes are all part of context that shapesthe continuum of exploitation by which forced labour is defined. These broad processes‘come to ground’ in different ways at different scales. Labour intermediation is a goodexample of how this happens (Theodore and Peck 2002). Anderson and Rogaly (2005),Rogaly (2008a,b) and Scott (2008) have all illustrated how labour intermediaries play acrucial role when the exploitation of vulnerable workers can be identified as forcedlabour. For migrants, they are often part of complex web of sub-contracting arrangementsthat may originate in the workers’ home country. Allamby et al.’s (2011) research shows,for example, that in the fishing industry in Northern Ireland Philippine fishermen paidfees to agencies for job placements, only to encounter unfree conditions when theyarrived (confiscation of passports and threats of violence). The same report highlightedthe complex web of contracting relationships in the agriculture sector, which meant thatEastern European workers did not ultimately know by whom they were employed.

Contemporary forced labour situations occur in some form in all nations. The formthose situations take – how extensive and systematic they are, whether they cluster byeconomic sector, by region or area, or whether they are primarily defined by socio-cultural axes of difference (race, ethnicity, class, gender, age) – is conditioned by thesocial relations of capitalist economies, which are both internally and externally varie-gated. In other words, they are defined by uneven development within and betweencapitalist nation states.2 In fact, forced labour is an excellent exemplar of the ways inwhich the state still matters, materially, theoretically and empirically, since unfreedom inthe labour process can currently only be prosecuted, and regulated, at the national level.In reality, the socio-economic conditions from which exploitation in the labour processemerges encompass different combinations of all of the factors suggested above.

Research on forced labour in particular sectors in the UK has highlighted the interrelationof factors of production, social relations and spatial structures in the prevalence of forcedlabour in agriculture and food processing, hospitality, care and construction (Anderson andRogaly 2005; Brass 2004; Skrivankova 2010; TUC n.d.). Anderson and Rogaly in particu-lar, in their research on migrant workers, have made attempts to systematically assesscommon elements that contribute to the prevalence of extreme exploitation in the labourprocess. In their 2005 (24) report, in collaboration with the TUC, they state that:

Despite their internal heterogeneity, the segments of the sectors which concern us involve ardu-ous, sometimes dangerous and usually informally skilled work. Labour tends also to represent asignificant proportion of the total operating costs.

They go on to note that many of the sectors are large, both in terms of value and size ofworkforce; in most cases the work itself is location-specific (harvesting agricultural prod-ucts, caring for the elderly, working on a building site); and in several of the sectors pro-duction is also time-bound.

Two additional factors are of particular significance in two of these sectors. In agriculture,it is the well-documented imbalance in power between the large retailers (supermarkets)



and their small suppliers. The former squeeze margins and drive costs down throughpressure on the supply chain; in agriculture and dairying, food processing and horticul-ture, where margins are often already narrow and producers operate at the thin edge ofcost recovery, elasticity (especially in the context of a new low-wage labour supply fromthe EU accession countries) is in labour costs. Since many agricultural supply chains arenow global, there are additional pressures on British suppliers from non-UK producerswho may themselves engage in exploitative labour practices, despite the existence of vol-untary codes of practice on the part of retailers (Barrientos 2008). In the care sector inthe UK outsourcing and the privatisation of services on the part of large public sectoremployers such as the National Health Service (NHS) and local councils has led to theincreased use of agency staff. Unlike directly employed public sector workers, agencystaff are seldom unionised and may be recruited directly from sending countries by thirdparty-intermediaries, making them extremely vulnerable to exploitation (Anderson andRogaly 2005; Dyer et al. 2008; TUC n.d.). The ways in which migrant labour has beenmobilised in and through these processes has amounted in some instances to the racialisa-tion of particular types of low-wage work [see, e.g. Satzewich 1991 on agriculturallabour in Canada, Holgate 2005 on racialisation and union organising in the UK andDuffy 2005 on care work].

As these points suggest, production-related factors do not solely determine degrees andforms of un ⁄ freedom of the labour process. The political-legal context and regulatoryframework that governs employment relations interacts with those factors in a variety ofways. The UK has what Tony Blair once proudly called one of the most ‘light-touch’systems of employment regulation in Europe. The minimum wage was only introducedin 1999 and is relatively poorly enforced. The temporary staffing industry operates in anenvironment that has been characterised as

an exemplar of neoliberal policy environment in which labour markets are characterised byshort-term employment, low levels of unionisation, individualised and competitive employmentrelations, high levels of labour market inequality, and strong private sector involvement in plac-ing workers in employment. (Watts 2009)

The enforcement of employment law, moreover, relies on employees making Tribunalclaims; likewise breaches of the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974) require workers toprove that they are in fact employees. Both can be difficult for vulnerable workers inmediated employment situations and next to impossible for migrants, especially thosewith irregular immigration status.

Conclusion

This paper has focused current approaches to unfree labour and on new and emergingresearch agendas. At the heart of both, however, are the workers themselves: theirexploitation, and the appalling conditions they endure, ensure cheap food for Britishtables, clean offices and homes for higher paid workers, affordable care for the elderly,and higher profits for companies. Workers in forced labour situations have agency andexercise choice, a fact that is at the heart of critiques of the focus on trafficking andrelated discourses of victimisation, but their choices are severely limited by the actionsof those who seek to exploit them for profit (Cumbers et al. 2008; Rogaly 2008b,Skrivankova 2010).

If we start from Marx’s articulations of free and unfree labour, the extremes of thiscontinuum are defined by, on the one hand, ‘freedom’ to commodify one’s labour under



conditions of perfect information and an absence of power asymmetries betweenemployer and employee, and on the other by an absolute inability to commodify one’slabour (as in the case of slave, who is herself a commodity but cannot sell her labourpower). Yet in a capitalist system the extraction of surplus value entails a degree ofexploitation of all waged workers. This conceptualisation is somewhat different fromSkrivankova’s (2010) articulation, which seeks to use the model of a continuum ofexploitation as a framework that can encompass the complex interlocking legal, eco-nomic, regulatory, social and cultural factors that contribute to individual and groupexperiences of forced labour in different national, regional or local contexts. The modelshe employs posits decent work and extreme exploitation as the opposite points on thecontinuum, using the ILO’s (2006) definition to define the former, but does not expli-citly recognise the tensions inherent in the ‘‘freedom’’ that charactertises decent work. Ina sense, however, these articulations complement one another; Marx’s forces us to con-sider the fundamental power imbalance between labour and capital, while Skrinvankova’shighlights the ways in which this fundamental dynamic is mediated and highly contextual.Yet there is one dimension of the relationship between free and unfree labour that nei-ther model addresses explicitly: the one traditionally framed as the opposition between‘domestic’ and ‘productive’ labour.

Feminist political economists have argued for decades that our conceptual models forunderstanding labour markets and employment relations fails to adequately account forthe interrelationship of paid and unpaid work and of economically productive andsocially productive labour (that is, the relations of social reproduction) (Bakker 2007;Mitchell et al. 2004; Picchio 1992). Moreover, aspects of domestic and unpaid work –also called care work, emotional labour, household labour – blur the boundaries bywhich freedom and unfreedom are understood. The care work associated with biologicalreproduction, for example, may for some people in some situations contribute to aninability to commodify their labour, as feminist theorists of the welfare state havepointed out. Even where the work of caring is itself commodified, the emotional labourinvolved may make workers particularly vulnerable to exploitation, while this worktends to itself be devalued because it reproduces people and not capital or money.Finally the sphere of the household, which may be both a site of production and ofsocial reproduction, disrupts the binary distinction between public and private sphere ina way that challenges ‘traditional’ employment norms and regulatory frameworks(Bernhardt et al. 2008; McGrath and DeFilippis 2009). The fact that the household is‘private’ makes exploitation that happens within it doubly invisible. More privilegedwomen may respond to patriarchal and capitalist forms of exploitation and unfreedom byshifting the burdens of reproduction onto racialised women and working class women sothat they can commodify their labour, which in turn creates polarisation among womenin countries like the UK (Cox 2006).

These points suggest a number of directions in which the surging interest in forcedand unfree labour among geographers could be channelled. Current projects aimedstrengthening the empirical knowledge base, understanding and documenting the rangeof institutional and regulatory responses, and deepening our understanding of intersectingaxes of vulnerability are all important and welcome. Theorising and analysing howcapital – in particular employers of low-wage workers – benefit from relations of unfree-dom in the labour process is important, but so is a recognition that lifestyles in thewealthy countries of the global North are in some domains made possible, or at leastaffordable, by unfree labour.



Examining how forced labour is implicated in particular (especially emerging) socialrelations of production and regimes of accumulation will help us understand and articulatethe limits to current responses. The example of the establishment of the GangmasterLicensing Authority in the UK, in response to the death of the Morecambe Bay cocklep-ickers, is a case in point. The licensing regime it enforces provides more oversight andmonitoring of labour providers in agriculture and related areas, but does nothing tostrengthen the rights of workers or challenge the role of the large retailers at the top ofthe supply chain (see, e.g. Brass 2004; Rogaly 2008b, Strauss 2009). It is moreover sub-ject to the same limits as other licensing and inspection regimes, namely political will inrelation to resources and enforcement.

Multi-scalar analyses of the geographical and spatial effects of the recent economic cri-sis, impacts on regional and local labour markets, and related re-configurations of thesocial and spatial relations of production in particular sectors are also important in thecontext of what is shaping up to be a new assault on labour rights in the UK. The UKgovernment has proposed removing most Legal Aid related to employment claims inEngland, including for most advice in advance of employment tribunal hearings, forrepresentation for employment matters heard outside the tribunal system, and for appealsto the Employment Appeal Tribunal. This will make it harder for low-paid workers toaccess the system. At the same time, new elements of compulsion in the welfare systemare setting the UK more firmly on the workfare path, meaning increasing levels and con-ditions of unfreedom for those accessing state benefits. New caps have been proposed onunskilled migration from outside the EU. These measures will have different impacts indifferent places, interacting with what has been highly geographically uneven crisis.Finally public sector cuts in the UK will place enormous pressure on local authorities,pubic bodies and the NHS to cut costs, which is likely to mean new waves of outsourc-ing and privatisation.

Yet the national and regional scales are not ‘containers’ for these processes. Theincreasing, though uneven, interconnection of places, institutions, communities and mar-kets; labour market flexibilisation; fiscal austerity and welfare state retrenchment; and newmobilities (state-sanctioned and ‘illegal’) mean that relations of unfreedom in the globalNorth and South are increasingly interrelated. A young woman in China leaves her sonto be cared for by her mother and pays a ‘snakehead’ to smuggle her to England whereshe works in agriculture and food processing before being drowned in the cold waters ofMorecambe Bay: her labour is one element of what keeps food prices down, and super-market profits up, in the UK (Broomfield 2006; Rogaly 2008a; Strauss forthcoming).Hundreds of women demonstrate in London over plans to change the immigrationregime for domestic workers to remove their right to change employers: the HomeOffice states that: ‘‘This government is determined to get immigration down to sustain-able levels…we are reviewing all work routes that which can lead to settlement’’ (BBC2011). Unfreedom in paid labour and unpaid work link up the mircoscale of the house-hold and the macroscale of the global political economy in ways that geographers are wellplaced to analyse and articulate. It can thus be hoped that the current interest in coerced,forced and unfree labour is the beginning of a sustained research agenda, and a progres-sive politics.

Short Biography

Kendra Strauss is a feminist economic geographer and Research Associate in Urban Polit-ical Economy at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include critical political



economy, pensions and labour market change, social reproduction and gendered eco-nomic inequality.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Kendra Strauss, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow,East Quad, University Avenue, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

1 Regimes of migration and regimes of accumulation may be related, but in complex ways. In the UK, for exam-ple, the popular backlash against what have been perceived (and framed by the tabloids and right wing media) aslax immigration rules under the previous Labour government has resulted in promises from the current Conserva-tive-Liberal coalition government to slash the number of non-EU migrants permitted to settle in the UK. Yet UKgovernment takes pride in characterising the national labour market as highly flexible, and on in its ‘light-touch’approach to regulation, which has stimulated the demand for low-paid workers at the bottom end of the labourmarket. UK businesses have thus expressed concern about the new immigration regime, which may make chokeoff the supply of workers from, for example, Asia, India and China to the restaurant and hospitality sectors.2 I am not suggesting, of course, that all recognised nation states are what we would typically define as capitalist,nor that there is a hegemonic form of global capitalism. I am suggesting that no contemporary nation state isuntouched by capitalist economic and social relations. Myanmar, which is recognised as having high levels of state-sponsored forced labour, is clearly not capitalist in the sense of having an economy defined by the functioning ofquasi-free markets; its economy, and labour conditions, are, however, strongly influenced by the modes of capitalistdevelopment being pursued by its border countries China and Thailand.

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Documents

Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies of Exploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets