The better or worse off framework suggests that individuals try to make sense of their lived experiences by comparing them with the experiences of others, or to their experiences in the past. This process typically features multiple points of comparison, rather than a single reference point. One reference point is likely to be employment vs. unemployment (the ILO calculated that roughly 188 million people were unemployed in 2019, and this figure is pre-COVID). Having a job will usually be regarded as better than not having one (although there are exceptions). A second reference point focuses upon the experiences of peers doing similar work, or those doing alternative work which could be a viable option for the person in question. The third and final point of comparison is concerned with people from different social statuses. It is here that questions of plenty/privilege and poverty/precarity take centre stage.
I will return to this final point below. At this juncture, it is important to emphasise that differences between forms of precarious labour are still highly consequential for the individuals involved. Being worse of better off is not an abstract question, but an immediate necessity. If the main point of comparison is between sex work and domestic work some people are going to favour sex work. Mining may compare favourably to farming. Migrating to another country on a tied work visa may appeal more than available options at home. The ‘big picture’ Marxist approach which regards all forms of labour as exploitative can flatten the complex ways people make their way in the world.
All the pieces matter
Ongoing efforts to target individual cases of forced labour and ‘modern slavery’ have not been particularly effective. This is by no means a new observation, but it is worth reiterating here for several reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, we have the political and logistical challenges associated with trying to separate out and specifically and selectively target a small minority of extreme cases. Forced labour is much less prevalent than precarious labour, and the conditions, interests, and systems which enable precarious labour also tend to pave the way for forced labour. So there is a strong case for putting the two together (although there are also some occasions where forced labour is spatially concentrated, such as the Xingjing region of China).
Modern slavery/extreme exploitation is the tip of the iceberg. The larger whole can only be properly understood by looking below the waterline. This means raising difficult political questions, but trying to avoid these questions – as many have –isn’t working either. It is time to (re)centre the struggle for migrant and worker rights and focus on economic systems. Workers need to be able to organise and bargain collectively. Their employers need to be held accountable when they steal their wages. Migrant workers need to be able to change their employers. Lead firms in global supply chains need to be held directly accountable for abuses which consistently occur further down their chains. There are no shortage of policies and strategies to get behind here. Attempting to separate out and specifically target cases of ‘modern slavery’ is not an effective strategy.
There are a number of different ways in which extreme exploitation can be understood. In this piece I have tried to capture the logic behind how many people think about exploitation – extreme or otherwise – by focusing upon the role of comparisons. As we have seen, these comparisons can take a variety of forms. In many cases there is a strong emphasis on consent and treatment as primary markers of comparison, with the general idea being that extreme exploitation can be best understood in terms of the absence of consent in combination with highly abusive treatment. Greater scope for consent and better treatment generally moves things back down the scale. These markers are inherently subjective, however, since people frequently have competing interests in either downplaying or accentuating the effects of exploitation. Lived experiences rarely correspond to conventional distinctions between ‘forced’ and ‘free’, but instead primarily operate somewhere within the middle of these two poles.
Extreme exploitation can also be understood in other ways. Our deeply unjust global order is increasingly defined by extreme concentrations of wealth and power, which enable a small minority to leverage their privileged position to take unfair advantage of the majority. Earlier this year, Oxfam calculated that the world’s 2,153 billionaires had more wealth than 4.6 billion people, or 60% of the global population. This was prior to a global pandemic which saw billionaires add another $10.2 trillion to their existing holdings, including $74 billion for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. This is the same Amazon which has systematically abused and exploited its workforce for years, and which has failed to offer sufficient protection against COVID for its workers.
The distribution of global wealth looks like a shallow, long-stemmed cocktail glass. The vast majority of wealth sits right at the top, while both precarious workers and precarious employers are concentrated within the stem of this glass. Precarious employers may be better off than their workers, but they are nonetheless subject to economic forces which frequently leave limited margin for error. Subcontractors in the Global South who participate in global supply chains are under intense pressure to cut costs and accelerate production cycles, and are frequently obliged to intensify their demands on workers in order to win contracts. Extreme exploitation is commonly said to arise when these suppliers push their workers too far. But if we step back from the specifics of individual relationships a different version of extreme exploitation also comes into focus. In this version, privileged corporations and individuals leverage their concentrated market power to capture the vast majority of the economic value produced within supply chains, and thereby take unfair advantage of everyone else.
Much of our thinking about exploitation is shaped by interlocking economic markets. Market mechanisms play a foundational role in determining the value of various goods and services, and thereby end up determining the going rate for different kinds of labour. This sometimes results in situations where exploitation is primarily understood in terms of pay and conditions which fall short of the going market rate. Faced with the question of whether they are worse or better off, many people will answer that they are worse off if their market value has not been properly evaluated and rewarded.
This kind of thinking is understandable yet problematic. The uncritical acceptance of market value is a recipe for normalising exploitation and inequality. When the CEO of a company earns as much as 725 times the pay of their average workers the critical question is not whether the average worker is being paid the going market rate, but how an already fabulously wealthy minority has organised global economic systems in order to take unjust advantage of a still precarious majority. If your market value is limited, does this mean that you should expect and deserve to be exploited?
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Joel Quirk | Radio Free (2020-12-15T05:00:05+00:00) Are you better or worse off? Understanding exploitation through comparison. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/12/15/are-you-better-or-worse-off-understanding-exploitation-through-comparison/
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