Infrastructuring Arrival and Beyond

Agriculture is a vital economic sector supporting rural livelihoods and regional trade; the governance of labour within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region remains fraught with systemic injustices, particularly for migrant and informal workers. The agricultural labour systems in the SADC region are shaped by a cohesion of legal complexity, economic exploitation, and ethical neglect. Therefore, this study critically investigated how ethical tensions, legal non-compliance, and institutional weaknesses shape the governance of rural and migrant agricultural labour in the SADC region, with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of existing frameworks in upholding labour rights and advancing sustainable, ethical agribusiness practices. Using a qualitative desktop research methodology, the study analysed academic literature, policy documents, legal instruments, and case studies from across SADC countries, employing thematic content analysis to identify structural patterns and governance dynamics. The findings revealed that, despite the existence of national and regional legal frameworks, enforcement remains highly selective, especially in informal and rural settings. The commercial logics of agribusiness, supported by global market pressures, systematically undermine both ethical and legal commitments. Institutional fragmentation, political inertia, and weak ethical leadership further entrench these failures. The study recommends harmonised regional labour laws, improved inspection capacity, the formal recognition of informal workers, and the integration of ethical leadership into agribusiness governance. Without these reforms, labour rights in SADC agriculture will remain aspirational rather than actionable.

The subject of communication touches on several key themes in world history and has, in various guises, preoccupied historians since the discipline’s inception. Communication (from the Latin stem communico-, meaning to share) is a broad term that encompasses language and the webs of symbolic meaning it creates, as well as the networks through which that meaning circulates. Because communications networks exisat in physical space and tend to develop along routes of trade and migration, the subject is also tied to the emergence of empires, nations, and capitalist globalization. Despite its capaciousness, however, the suggestion that communication is implicated in historical processes of planetary ecological change may strike some readers as paradoxical. In everyday use, “communication” is more readily associated with the assumedly immaterial world of language and representation than is the (more visibly) energy- and labor-intensive realm of transportation with which it is conventionally juxtaposed. An agenda for studying the environmental imbrications of communication networks first emerged not in environmental history but in media studies, where scholars since the 2010s have redirected focus from the content of texts and towards the arrangement of systems and objects in which those texts appear—in other words, to communication’s supporting infrastructure. The materialist reorientation in media studies parallels similar developments in other disciplines. Historians of technology have increasingly rejected narratives of invention and diffusion in favor of use, repair, and maintenance, while extending the field’s parameters to encompass nonhuman nature through the concept of “envirotechnical systems.” STS scholars have long attended to the sociotechnical systems within which knowledge is produced and circulated, thus positioning communication within larger information infrastructures. Economic and global historians have likewise taken up questions of materiality in what has been described as the discipline’s “infrastructural turn.” Combined with environmental historians’ attention to energy, extraction, and nonhuman agency, this convergence of scholarship reframes communication as an embodied and spatially grounded activity that unfolds within—and acts upon—more-than-human environments. While few works position themselves explicitly as environmental histories of communications networks, relevant scholarship can be sorted into three overlapping categories. First are environmental histories of long-distance connectivity and its conduits (rivers, roads, railways, and maritime passages). Second are studies that examine communications systems through their supply chains, labor regimes, and discard. Third are works exploring the forms of scientific knowledge and environmental sensibility afforded by communication infrastructures. This latter category includes the emergence of “the environment” and “the planet” themselves as coherent objects of scientific knowledge. By bringing together these literatures under the theme of communication networks, this bibliography foregrounds the material foundations of information exchange, while showing how different communication infrastructures have structured human relationships with, and understandings of, the nonhuman world.

Against the historical backdrop of some protection against unfair dismissal at State level, this article explores the chequered path to ‘a fair go all round’ in Federal unfair dismissal protection for employees in Australia, initially through awards (and the foundation laid by the federal industrial tribunal) in 1984 to legislative provisions enacted by the Federal Parliament in 1993. The vicissitudes of the Federal statutory unfair dismissal regime are scrutinised: first its virtual dismantling by a conservative government in 2005 and then its revival by a Labor government in the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth). The article analyses the nature of the unfair dismissal jurisdiction legislatively conferred on the industrial tribunal, protecting employees against ‘harsh, unjust or unreasonable’ dismissal. It argues that, while there is no clamour by employers or unions for a major overhaul of the unfair dismissal laws, legislative reform is required to promote more vigorously a ‘fair deal’ for Australian workers, especially for currently excluded categories of workers (such as gig workers and dependent contractors), and to improve access to justice in dismissal.

This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health‐care access. We find that both groups engage in precarious work, with consequences for their health and safety, including immigrant workers with citizenship. Nevertheless, migrant guest workers are subject to more coercive forms of labor discipline and a narrower range of social protection than immigrants. We argue that while formal citizenship can mitigate some dimensions of precariousness for farmworkers racialized as non‐white, achieving a more just, safer food system will require broader policies to improve employer compliance and address legislative shortcomings that only weakly protect agricultural labor.

Skilled immigration to the United States has been multi-channeled via legislations on permanent and temporary visa programs. This paper argues that skilled immigrants were not disadvantaged during the Great Recession because of a new hedging mechanism, which starts with the federal legislations that admit skilled nonimmigrants, proceeds to vest authority in employers, who perform rigorous screening and selection of temporary workers for future permanency, and ends with greater protection of those selected. To test this mechanism, the paper examines skilled immigrants' spatial mobility out of the country and their domestic labor market outcomes. The paper presents evidence from analyzing repeated, nationally representative survey data of college graduates in the US using demographic techniques of intra-cohort and inter-cohort analyses. The major findings about the substantial cross-border mobility and high levels of labor force participation among at-entry temporary visa holders who later gained permanent residency provide strong evidence to support our proposed new hedging mechanism.

This book is about labor relations in contemporary China's automobile industry. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in seven automobile assembly plants in China, Zhang explores a wide array of topics ranging from day-to-day workplace interaction to labor legislation at the national level. This book is packed with valuable information and insightful discussion. Rather than attempting to summarize, I identify and comment on three contributions of this book that are the most salient. First, in this book Zhang brings us a detailed ethnographic account of the conditions and experiences of Chinese autoworkers in the wake of the twenty-first century. Starting with a comprehensive description of the economic and policy contexts for the automobile industry (chapter 2), Zhang quickly zooms in on the firms and highlights how intense competition and China's unique institutional arrangements combined to shape workforce composition, the organization of production, and the labor management system in automobile factories (chapters 3 and 4). Zhang then examines in detail the experiences of formal workers and temporary workers under a tiered labor regime (chapters 5 and 6), focusing on how such a regime, which Zhang calls “labor force dualism,” creates distinct grievances and shapes compliance and resistance for the two groups of workers. This comparative ethnography is a valuable contribution to the literature in that it not only illustrates the complexity and dynamic nature of labor politics in China but also sheds new light on many long-held beliefs, such as those regarding autoworkers as a privileged group and the possibility of effecting broad changes with localized and short-lived labor resistance.

In the last century, and especially with the development of European market integration, economies in Europe experienced a deep restructuring of their agricultural sector. The structural shift away from the primary sector activities, with the reallocation of labour across sectors, is an important engine of economic development. Nonetheless, the patterns and drivers of structural change in the New Member States (NMS) have differed in nature, speed and intensity from those of the EU-15. More importantly, the high incidence of farm employment and family workers in some of the NMS, despite low levels of agricultural training and labour productivity, suggests that farming, particularly in the least developed regions, might be the only viable solution for obtaining a minimum standard of living, especially for those who lack the human capital for 'better' employment opportunities. Against this background, the aim of this research is to investigate the driving forces behind agricultural labour adjustments and, thus, shed light on the facilitators of, and barriers to, labour mobility. The analysis focuses on the linkages between farm and non-farm sectors and explores the determinants of agricultural employment and inter-sectoral labour mobility in six selected Member States (MS): France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Using national and European micro-level data from labour force and agricultural business surveys, the econometric analysis employs various discrete choice modelling techniques on cross-section and panel data. The key message from this research is that skills mismatch, due to inadequate levels of education and vocational training, and labour market characteristics appear to be the most important impediments to the inter-sectoral and spatial mobility of labour. The mixed evidence in the results across MS reflects the heterogeneous organisational and production structures, implying different constraints or prospects for farm survival and hence different capacities to release and absorb labour. Hence, in order to ensure an efficient allocation of labour and a smooth transition across sectors, investments in human capital and the diversification of rural areas constitute crucial rural development policies. Nonetheless, a one-size-fits-all policy is not appropriate for the wide diversity of rural areas and labour markets across MS. Instead, more targeted and diverse measures should be implemented in order to meet particular needs.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Austria joined Western and Northern European states in recruiting temporary migrant workers. While the European “guestworker” and migrant labour regimes have been subject to multiple studies in the last 40 years, migrant women have rarely been at the centre of these investigations, although their specific issues have comprised a facet of the international labour movement since the 1970s. Female migrant workers faced a double marginalization in the labour movement, both as migrants and as women. By analysing printed source material, archival documents, and interviews with women trade unionists, this chapter examines this specific double marginalization; how gender, class, and ethnicity shaped the labour activism of domestic and migrant working women; and how the international, national, and local levels interacted in the context of the deindustrialization of the Austrian textile industry.

Chinese institutional arrangements, particularly the hukou system, hinder long-term settlement of internal migrants by limiting their access to social benefits. This article proposes a new method for assessing migrant settlement: the use of age data to investigate the link between migrant “flow” and “stock”. We contend that migrants’ inability to settle mainly derives from two sources: the difficulties in maintaining migrant family togetherness, and the impediments to long-term residence of migrants themselves. Age-related indices were developed to compare China’s internal migration with other countries’ internal and international migration. The results indicate a “China difference” in migration age patterns – child and elderly dependents of migrant workers are discouraged from migrating, while migrants growing old tend to return to the origins than to remain in the destinations. Consequently, family togetherness and long-term residence in the destinations are often unachievable for migrants. Our analyses highlight China’s unique migrant labor regime, where temporary migrant workers are continuously “recycled” to keep destinations’ workforce “forever young”, reducing production costs of Chinese goods in global markets. Methodologically, our age-based “mobile-to-settled” transition framework and “settlement rate” of migrants in the transition are of value in examining migrant settlement chances more generally, applicable to internal and international migration beyond China.

This chapter provides concluding reflections from a set of nineteen case studies of transnational and intranational migration and mobility. It contrasts the ‘sedentary bias’ present in policy regimes and associated thought centred on nation-states, where movement is seen as exceptional, including normatively exceptional, with the centrality of movement in the processes of socio-economic change and evolution, particularly those promoted under capitalist systems of economic organization. While market capitalist and nation-state principles of organization differ, they combine in hybrid systems, such as those currently being elaborated in policy regimes for temporary migrant workers, to exploit migrant labour. Many of these arrangements mirror the indentured labour regimes of earlier eras. The chapter presents by contrast a perspective based on principles of human rights and human security that uses a global framework both for understanding and for evaluation and then adds an explicit gender-aware enrichment of that perspective, in order to do justice to the special vulnerabilities and exploitation of women’s migrant labour. A human security perspective, in particular, helps to base concern for human rights in an awareness of bodily and emotional needs, of global interconnections, and of the intersecting circumstances in people’s everyday lives; but it requires, and lends itself to, gender-enrichment through partnership with insights from feminist theory, as illustrated in the book’s various case studies. The systems of the nation-state, market capitalism, and gender power that are discussed in this chapter, that structure the experiences of migrant women workers, are very deeply established. The chapter suggests directions for possible re-cognition, to reduce and counter the invisibility and misframing of migration, and of women and their work; it also suggests priority areas for research and networking following the format employed for the book: linking researchers, policy practitioners and migrant advocates, South-South-North.KeywordsWomen’s migrationhuman securityhuman rightsmigration regimesglobalizationwomen’s labourintersectionality

Canada's temporary foreign worker programs (TFWPs) structure flexible labour regimes that provide 'just-in-time' workers for select industries. Through these programs, workers are commodified into units of production with minimal rights and excessive restrictions on their comportment. In this paper I focus on the restrictions placed on migrant women's bodies, desires, and sexualities through the long- standing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Based on 16 years of community engaged research in rural Canada and Mexico, I demonstrate that from the point of recruitment in Mexico, to their encounters with Canadian employers, to the seasons of life and work between rural Canada and rural Mexico, migrant women are barred from fully expressing love, desire, and sexualities. I delve into contestations of the heart and argue that the love and desire that migrant women assert are among the many forms of resistance to their commodification within a coercive labour and immigration regime that favours production over reproductions of love and affection. I argue that social justice projects must account for the frontiers of the heart and the right to love beyond borders to be fully emancipatory.

The purpose of this research was to determine the influence and significant of labor agriculture sector and government expenditure agriculture sector either individually or together to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) agriculture sector in Indonesia. The method used in this research is Ordinary Least Square (OLS) for the period 1980-2013. The analysis technique used in this research is multiple linear regression testing normality test, the classical assumption (Multicollinearity, heterocedastity, autocorrelation and proceed with the analysis of OLS (Ordinary Least Square). Its become independent variables in this study were labor of agriculture sector and government expenditure of agriculture sector, while the dependent variable is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of agriculture sector. From the analysis conducted showed that the variables of labor in agriculture sector and government expenditure of agriculture sector has a significant influence on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of agriculture sector. Labor of agriculture sector influence (+) positive to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of agriculture sector and government expenditure of agriculture sector influence (+) positive to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of agriculture sector.

This paper analyses of determinants of agricultural labor flows and the role of human capital in this process on the basis of the Slovenian Labor Force Surveys for the years 1993 to 1999. The household heads living in larger households, having a larger farm size, and working full-time (more hours per week) in permanent jobs are more likely to stay in agricultural employment. The empirical evidence clearly suggests that human capital plays a crucial role for labor mobility and labor adjustment. Young, female and educated individuals are more likely to enter into employment in non-agricultural, particularly service activities. There are remarkable circular flows of elderly and less educated persons between being employed in agriculture, unemployment and retirement pools. Small-scale and part-time farming provide temporary employment opportunities. Investments in human capital to improve quality of labor in agriculture and to increase mobility and flexibility of labor are the key issues in synergy reducing labor mismatch and improving efficiency in labor flow adjustment.

This article examines migrant agricultural labour in southern Italy as a concentrated site of contemporary extractive capitalism. Focusing on the 2011 strike of migrant workers in Nardò (Apulia) and the subsequent Sabr trial, it argues that labour exploitation in European agriculture is not a marginal deviation or the result of criminal excess, but a structurally organised regime sustained through migration control, labour flexibilisation and territorial governance. Situating the case within the framework of racial capitalism and state-mediated extraction, the article conceptualises Europe as a space of internal frontiers, where incorporation into production is systematically coupled with precarious legal and political membership. The Nardò strike exposed the racialised foundations of agricultural production, while the Sabr trial translated structural exploitation into individualised criminal responsibility. Together, they illuminate the dialectic between conflict and legality through which extractive labour regimes are both challenged and stabilised. By foregrounding the legal and institutional production of vulnerability, the article contributes to a critical understanding of how democratic legality coexists with, and mediates, extractive accumulation in contemporary Europe.

Reviewed by: Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula by Benjamin Reilly Alan Mikhail Benjamin Reilly. Slavery, Agriculture, and Malaria in the Arabian Peninsula. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. x + 211 pp. Ill. $28.95 (978-0-8214-2182-6). The main thesis of this book is that malarial conditions produced in the agricultural zones of the Arabian Peninsula led to a reliance on imported African slave laborers since they proved more able than locals to resist malaria. Tightly focused on proving this thesis, this short book zooms in on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though it often makes forays much further back in time. The analysis is strictly material, epidemiological, and ecological. Slavery is an economic system of productive agricultural labor in this book, not a cultural or human institution made up of individual lives. Reilly builds his argument systematically, literally from the ground up. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a wonderful account of the complexities of irrigation, agriculture, and slave and non-slave labor in the Arabian Peninsula. After a case study in chapter 3, the book’s analytical argument continues in chapter 4 where we come to see how African slaves were the keys to making malarial agricultural regions viable and productive. The final chapter argues that Arabia’s slave system was not a temporary phenomenon, but rather a fundamental component of its history and economy, one that would eventually be inscribed even in the very genes of the peninsula’s peoples. The achievements of this book are many. Empirically, Reilly adds rich detail to our still adolescent understanding of the agricultural history of the Arabian Peninsula. Oil and religion dominate the region’s historiography. There are, however, obviously other—often older—stories to tell, and Reilly gives us some of them. The details of irrigation systems, bustan gardening, and geographic zones are all extremely useful. The book succeeds too in arguing against the dominant understanding of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa—namely, that it was overwhelmingly concentrated on domestic slavery and concubinage. Historians have long drawn a distinction between slavery in the Muslim world and slavery in the Americas. If the latter was based almost entirely on extractive labor for the cultivation of cash crops, the former aimed at serving an elite, producing offspring, and staffing a military. Reilly shows us in fact that the two systems were not as different as we might think. African slaves were used for agriculture in the Middle East, or at least in the Arabian Peninsula, and primarily for one of the same reasons they were in the Americas—their adapted resistance to malaria. With this intervention, Reilly should be commended for bringing the Middle East more squarely into studies of global slavery and the African diaspora. The book also serves as a longer history of forced labor migration and displacement in the Arabian Peninsula. The majority of the people living in many of the peninsula’s countries today are non-citizen migrant laborers from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and other parts of the Middle East. Long before the coercive power of our era’s global wealth disparities, the Arabian Peninsula’s servile labor regime, as Reilly shows, had been forcibly imported from outside of the region. Throughout the book, Reilly is very clear that sources are a problem. “The study of Arabian Peninsula history,” he writes, “obliges one to be as flexible and [End Page 728] creative as possible with the relatively small amount of available evidence” (p. 127). Ultimately the book’s wonderfully “flexible and creative” attempts to overcome the source problem, using everything from genetics to poetry, is also its greatest weakness. Can a study of slavery in colonial French North Africa really be used to illuminate the situation in the Arabian Peninsula? How well exactly can Indian Ocean slave numbers be used as a proxy for the scale of the trade in the Arabian Peninsula? Perhaps more problematic than these sorts of proxy questions is Reilly’s near total reliance on European and American travel literature and British colonial sources. To his credit, Reilly is very upfront about the shortcomings of his source base and in explaining how and why...