Labour agency in the Plantationocene: the organising potential of everyday spatial practices

Oliver Pye

Chapter 19 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 329-341 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Current debates on the ‘Plantationocene’ tend to neglect the issue of labour. This chapter introduces a Labour Geography perspective on plantation workers as constitutive of the global capitalist economy. It looks at the history of enslaved, indentured, and precarious labour in plantations from the perspective of those migrant workers at the forefront of agribusiness agriculture. The chapter argues that the spatial dynamics of plantation agriculture emerge from the contradiction between the dystopia of controlled and fragmented labour pursued by capital versus workers’ struggles for their own social reproduction. Everyday life practices of migrant workers create spatial dynamics that embed the plantation within transnational social networks. Research findings from the palm oil industry in Indonesia and Malaysia consistently show that migrants thwart territorial control elements of the labour regime, for example by crossing national borders illegally, bringing in family members, switching employers, or conducting wildcat strikes. These everyday practices create the potential for spatially new organising strategies.

Keywords: Labour Geography; Plantationocene; Plantation labour; Everyday struggles; Transnational organising strategies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
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