Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India

Abstract

This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region)differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre-stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives.

Circular Migration and Precarity: Perspectives from Rural Bihar

“…This can be seen from a Marxist analytical framework where processes of capitalist accumulation have led to surplus extraction and super-exploitation of labour (Jain and Sharma 2019;Lerche and Shah 2018). Migration, crucial for capitalist growth and labour mobility, far from being voluntary, is viewed as a compulsion generated in the interest of capital (Shah and Lerche 2020;Vijay 2005). Increasing circular mobility and informalisation of the workforce are closely intertwined; circular migration facilitates the informalisation of economic activity; at the same time, the informal economy puts a premium on labour mobility' (Breman 2019, p. 179).…”

Women, Migration and Labour Exploitation: Challenging Frameworks

“…In valuing women's labour the social reproduction vs production dichotomy has not been very helpful, and our work is in line with recent developments that build on earlier calls to challenge and undermine this analytic separation (Shah and Lerche 2020). The two case studies that follow exemplify the challenges and limitations concretely that framing migrant women's work through those lenses pose.…”

“…After the cutting season is over, some (male) sugarcane cutters move out to work as construction labourers, while women, children and the elderly remain in the villages. These are the spatio-temporally distributed 'invisible economies of care' we referred to above (Shah and Lerche 2020).…”

The Pandemic in India and Its Impact on Footloose Labour

“…In a recent article, Shah and Lerche ( 2020 ) have quite rightly pointed out that the research on labour migration in India mainly deals with the predicament of this footloose workforce at the sites of their arrival. Their analysis zooms in on the kinship and family support networks which keep the migrants, even during their absence connected to their home base in a production–social reproduction binary.…”

“…The future’s agenda is anybody’s guess, but it may get even worse for the excluded misfits than it already has been so far. Discussing the plight in which the bottom ranks of footloose labour are entrapped, Shah and Lerche ( 2020 ) sum up their ordeal as conditioned by hyper-precarity, a concept coined by Lewis et al ( 2015 ). The term implies more than just vulnerability due to destitution and emerges from the interplay in late capitalist economies between neoliberal markets and highly restrictive labour regimes denying workers (and migrants specifically) freedom of employment.…”