Chris Hann and Jonathan Parry (eds.) Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject
Abstract
In Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism, anthropologists examine the casualization of work, laboring conditions, and the diminishing power of unions in the industrial settings of the Global South and postsocialist societies. The fourteen chapters of the book, positioned as autonomous articles, offer diverse ethnographic studies covering issues of class fragmentation, subcontracting, declining power of organized labor, and the role of the nation-state in conjunction with workforce casualization.
The workplaces analyzed in this publication show diverse experiences of precarity and its various consequences in settings different than those where precarity is usually being researched. The book offers a wide range of diverse ethnographic studies covering several prominent topics concerning precarity, such as the role of the nation-state, the diminishing power of organized labor, workers' political passivity, and the questions of class formation and class fragmentation.
It presents rich ethnographic descriptions of inhumane working conditions and the effects of precarious work on workers' lives. The book's authors also show how previous inequalities of ethnicity, age, and gender are deepening under the increased precarity of work.
The book's greatest contribution is the focus on the industrial settings of the Global South, which remain relatively understudied by anthropologists. It offers an important insight into the casualization of work and its impact on industrial workers in the Global South and postsocialist societies, which differ greatly from those of the Global North, and therefore establishes a more nuanced anthropological perspective on the issue.