Workshop – Social Reproduction of Labour. The Place of Accommodation and Migration
Abstract
The idea for this workshop is to examine the interactions between migration (intra-country and cross-country movements), worker accommodation and work or labour processes. While housing typically remains a private issue for the average worker in most capitalist societies, this is not the case for all. Some employers and many employment situations, actors other than the worker intervene in accommodation provision. So, from domestic service workers to prisoners to agricultural workers to migrant workers in industrial dormitories, we can observe that across the globe that it is agents other than workers who are actively involved with housing. This workshop will explore the implications of different forms of living or accommodation on the nature of work, the supply of labour and the nature of resistance within the labour process. It will also examine the re-valuing of working from home, which expanded, deepened, and hybridised with working at work, during and post the Covid 19 pandemic.
Migration is central, as it is often the institutionally ‘disembedded’ – the stranger, outsider or other – for whom the more unusual, coordinated, and collective forms of accommodation provision are developed. This is often to separate migrants as a class reserve – gendered, racialised, illegal or undocumented, and transitory – from majority of host workers. But, perhaps, there is also housing and new forms of innovation here, which has implications for the wider society. The workshop will explore a range of employer, state, and worker-initiated forms of accommodation, and aim to develop a greater understanding of trends, differences, convergences, and implications of these forms for understanding the nature of work in a more globalised context.