This article draws together political economic theories of labor market precarity and theories about the role of difference in structuring labor market inequality to develop the concept of vulnerability fix. We argue that employers and the state have co-constructed a complicated set of programs and policies that have institutionalized unfreedom for a significant subsection of the workforce. At the bottom of the labor market, they have created categories of workers for whom the rules are different. By mobilizing these differences, employers are able to exert greater control over workers, hold down wages, and limit workers’ ability to organize. We refer to this strategy as a vulnerability fix . Focusing on unauthorized labor, guestworker visa programs, and refugee labor, we analyze how employers and the state draw on racial, ethnic, and legal hierarchies to attenuate the rights of some workers and how this also creates precarity for those who labor alongside them.

Multiple jobholding has been growing in the United States (and many European countries) for several decades, with growth accelerating after the economic crisis of 2008. While the trend was interrupted briefly by the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued afterward, despite a strong labor market. Drawing on official data sources, and focusing on the U.S. case, the paper shows that multiple jobholding is especially common among young people and, while not always driven by need, is closely linked to precarity. Using both official statistics and ethnographic interviews, it argues that we need to understand this trend in the context of the growth of risk and insecurity in the years since 1970, and links multiple jobholding to an “anti-work” critique in which on-the-books jobs are conceptualized as only part of a complex “semi-proletarian” livelihood strategy.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath instigated a series of debates about economic value. From early discussions about "who counts as an essential worker" to post-pandemic arguments about what constitutes the "infrastructure" needed to rebuild the economy, the pandemic led to reexaminations of the kinds of investments and activities necessary for the continuity of our social system. This article examines these debates through the lens of the labor theory of value as expanded by feminists and ecologists. Drawing on my 2017 book, The Politics of Value, I discuss how the political-economic upheaval that the pandemic unleashed laid bare the essential nature of care and social reproductive work, low-wage labor, public sector provisioning, and ecosystem services. The stark dilemmas of holding body and soul together during the crisis created an opportunity to rethink the artificial lines between the market and the rest of life, highlighting the essential nature of activities formerly unrecognized or considered nonproductive. The article discusses how we might take advantage of this opening to create new vocabularies and measurement practices that take into "account" and fairly reward formerly invisible and unvalued forms of labor.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath instigated a series of debates about economic value. From early discussions about “who counts as an essential worker” to post-pandemic arguments about what constitutes the “infrastructure” needed to rebuild the economy, the pandemic led to reexaminations of the kinds of investments and activities necessary for the continuity of our social system. This article examines these debates through the lens of the labor theory of value as expanded by feminists and ecologists. Drawing on my 2017 book, The Politics of Value , I discuss how the political-economic upheaval that the pandemic unleashed laid bare the essential nature of care and social reproductive work, low-wage labor, public sector provisioning, and ecosystem services. The stark dilemmas of holding body and soul together during the crisis created an opportunity to rethink the artificial lines between the market and the rest of life, highlighting the essential nature of activities formerly unrecognized or considered nonproductive. The article discusses how we might take advantage of this opening to create new vocabularies and measurement practices that take into “account” and fairly reward formerly invisible and unvalued forms of labor.

This chapter examines the significance of processes of semiproletarianization for ecological change and the nature of the labor scarcity that affects many contemporary rural communities. It examines its relationship to strategies of economic diversification, seasonal and temporary migration, and the terms of trade faced by rural households. The chapter also examines the major debates over labor availability that has emerged in the work of economists and anthropologists concerned with rural development. It reviews these debates, the lack of congruence between models of labor dynamics and empirical studies is striking, and the role of particular models in justifying specific agricultural or agrarian policies is revealed. The chapter describes the policy dilemmas that arise in attempts to introduce conservation measures when peasants are part-time farmers. It draws on the experience of two attempts to introduce improved land management techniques to rural producers—one in Jamaica and the other in Peru.

The Great Recession not only shook Americans’ economic faith but also prompted powerful critiques of economic institutions. This timely book explores three movements that gathered force after 2008: the rise of the benefit corporation, which requires social responsibility and eschews share price as the best metric for success; the emergence of a new group, Slow Money, that fosters peer-to-peer investing; and the 2011 Wisconsin protests against a bill restricting the union rights of state workers. Each case shows how the concrete actions of a group of citizens can prompt us to reflect on what is needed for a just and sustainable economic system. In one case, activists raised questions about the responsibilities of business, in the second about the significance of local economies, and in the third about the contributions of the public sector. Through these movements, Jane L. Collins maps a set of cultural conversations about the types of investments and activities that contribute to the health of the economy. Compelling and persuasive, The Politics of Value offers a new framework for viewing economic value, one grounded in thoughtful assessment of the social division of labor and the relationship of the state and the market to civil society.

This paper revisits debates over the labor theory of value in the 1970s and 1980s and proposes an expansion and revision for the neoliberal era. It draws on three empirical cases of social movements grappling with contemporary changes in the societal division of labor and argues that they can best be understood as “revaluation” projects seeking to bring recognition to aspects of the economy that are necessary for its long-term sustainability but are not “counted” as important.

Benefit corporations are a new type of corporate entity developed to remedy antisocial corporate behaviour by enabling mission-driven investors, managers and entrepreneurs to prioritize social values and contest the idea that profits are the only and best measure of corporate performance. To resocialize the corporate entity, the benefit corporation movement built enabling discourses and evaluation practices into the dominant model of corporate governance, shareholder value ideology. These discourses and practices expand both the purpose of the corporate entity and shareholders' power to enforce that purpose. However, this paper argues that the effort to 're-embed' the corporate entity by making it subject to non-economic claims expands the scope of corporate personhood and that doing so within extant power relations of the firm opens the door to alternative projects that undermine the benefit corporation movement's goal of fostering corporate social responsibility.

Susser and Tonnelat’s article on the three urban commons is both visionary and heartening. Its counterpastoral polemic glorifies urban modes of sociality and the forms of common property fostered by urban life. The authors find in cities communities of experience that cross class lines and create inadvertent coalitions around shared problems. They argue that specific components of what has been called “the right to the city” need to be understood as “commons”—collective property that is neither fully public nor private but shared by individuals as they go about everyday life in urban settings.

Recent waves of social-movement protest in Wisconsin challenge conventional understandings of labor activism, as they have responded not only to rollbacks of labor rights but also to privatization of state programs and resources and budget cuts that target poor and working families. Drawing from participant-observation, I explore the question of whether the movements that arose in Wisconsin in early 2011 represented an expansion of union-based activism struggling within the expanded reproduction of capital or a broader struggle against what New Enclosures Movement scholars have conceptualized as capital's ongoing primitive accumulation strategies. I examine the implications of the answer to this question for community-based labor movements in Wisconsin and beyond. [community-based unionism, labor, accumulation by dispossession, social movements, social protest]

This article explores dominant ideological framings of the economic crisis that began in 2008, by examining shifting meanings of consumer citizenship in the US. The consumer citizen was a central figure in Keynesian ideology—one that encapsulated important assumptions about the proper relationship between production and consumption and the appropriate arenas for citizen engagement with the economy. Taking Wal-Mart as a case-study example, the article analyzes the way that corporate actors have flattened and reconfigured the concept of consumer citizenship in the US—promoting the “consumer” over the “citizen” and the “worker,” which had previously been important aspects of the concept—and have replaced Keynesian-era conversations about the proper balance between production and consumption with a rhetoric of choice between low prices and high wages.

Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules - and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms - laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants' economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.

Both Hands Tied studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules—and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms—laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, Both Hands Tied provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants’ economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.

American EthnologistVolume 36, Issue 3 p. 599-600 Globalization in Rural Mexico: Three Decades of Change by Frances Abrahamer Rothstein JANE L. COLLINS, JANE L. COLLINS University of Wisconsin, MadisonSearch for more papers by this author JANE L. COLLINS, JANE L. COLLINS University of Wisconsin, MadisonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 July 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01181_8.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume36, Issue3August 2009Pages 599-600 RelatedInformation