Temporary Labour Migration and Supply Chain Capitalism: The Pacific and Latin America As Sites of Social Reproduction

• In Event: Settler States, Temporary Labour: A Multi-sited Analysis of Social Reproduction, Transnationality, and Migration Management

Abstract

In this paper, I consider the workings of contemporary agricultural guestworker schemes through the lens of what anthropologist Anna Tsing has theorised as supply chain capitalism, with its mobilisation and production of difference as integral to its exercise of power. In their embrace of agricultural guestworker schemes, both Australia and Canada produce other geographical regions—the Pacific and Latin America, respectively—as sites of social reproduction of agricultural labour. Through enforcing strictly time-limited, circular labour migration, these receiving countries thus seek to secure a plentiful supply of workers for their own critical industries, while ensuring that the often-gendered social and care work of producing and sustaining workers is firmly sequestered in their home countries. These migration regimes are in turn bolstered by often-racialised imaginaries that position particular people and bodies as suited to gruelling agricultural labour, and that position different places and histories in hierarchical relation to each other. Drawing on long-running research into Pacific Islander labour mobility in Australia, I describe some of the ways in which these dynamics play out in relation to the particular contexts, histories, and imaginaries of the Australian settler-state. I also consider the rich patterns of transnational Pacific sociality that intersect with, and sometimes challenge, the spatial arrangements of difference, labour and power that the state and industries pursue. With an eye towards Latin America and the Canadian guestworker scheme, I ask what a comparative perspective might offer to our understandings of these global patternings?

Author

• Victoria Stead, Deakin University