 Unfree labour in the 21st century?Siobhán McGrath Chapter 5 in Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work, 2023, pp 74-82 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: This chapter argues for attending to the dynamics of freedom and unfreedom in all labour relations - not only those that might be categorised as ‘slavery’, trafficking or forced labour. It offers a critical review of varied approaches to conceptualising unfreedoms vis-à-vis labour: influential definitions of human trafficking, forced labour and contemporary ‘slavery’; Marxian conceptualisations of (and debates around) unfree labour; and recent literature proposing a ‘spectrum’ approach to freedom and unfreedom in labour relations. It then explores how we might conceive of dimensions of freedom and unfreedom in ways that break through binaries of free and unfree labour. To do so requires drawing on a range of scholarship to attend to dynamics of dispossession, social reproduction, migration and carcerality as well as to situate our understandings of freedoms and unfreedoms. It further requires recognition of ‘everyday unfreedoms’. In doing so, we can understand struggles over freedom as struggles over power. The chapter therefore calls for (re-)conceptualising struggles over freedom as struggles over power. Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19739_5 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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