New labor struggles in the US Rust Belt

Sharryn Kasmir

Chapter 6 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 310-314 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This entry draws on my ethnographic research in the Rust Belt region of Pennsylvania. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social movement and labor organizations waged campaigns in relation to the state-designation of “essential” work and against the exclusion of migrant workers from federal pandemic relief bills. I bring an Anthropology of Labor perspective to these on-the-ground developments to show that labor is a political formation, turning on struggles over division and difference, inclusion and exclusion, recognition and erasure. I make the case that labor is best understood as a political and historical subject, and a heterogenous one. I argue that the key intellectual task is to apprehend the variegated relations of exploitation, extraction, incorporation, dispossession, etc. of actually-existing capitalism across uneven social and economic ground.

Keywords: Labor; Social movement organizations; COVID-19 pandemic; Anthropology of Labor; Migrants; Rust Belt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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