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This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences.

Objective/context: The article aims to analyze child recruitment as a form of human trafficking. Beyond the theoretical perspectives that focus on security or rights, it addresses the topic as a form of unfree labor. By means of a case study focused on child recruitment by right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia, the paper analyzes how children entered and exited illegal armed groups, the functions they performed, and the exploitation they endured. The research argues that child recruitment operates as a large-scale labor-market uptake in the wartime social order, where the “employers” are paramilitary groups, and the labor force, in part, consists of children and adolescents. Methodology: This case study relies on different sources of information: a database on child recruitment provided by the special Justice and Peace Unit of the Colombian Attorney General’s Office (989 cases between 1981 and 2005), sentences of Peace and Justice, testimonials given by victims in judicial processes, and semi-structured interviews with different actors. Conclusions: The paper shows that child recruitment as a form of trafficking is functional to wartime social order in contexts of poverty and inequality. There is demand and supply; thus, both girls and boys, who worked as soldiers, are not only victims but also agents that make decisions in challenging conditions. Therefore, if the socioeconomic options for these children, even after their demobilization from the armed group, are still a choice between bad and worse, joining a violent (no longer “armed” but “criminal”) group will remain a feasible alternative. Originality: The article contributes to the academic literature on a recent topic, such as the overlapping between child recruitment and human trafficking in armed conflict and post-conflict situations. It also contributes to the literature on “unfree labor,” as the study focuses on an actor (illegal armed groups) that has not been analyzed until now. Finally, the research demonstrates the limits of understanding human trafficking (and child recruitment as a form of trafficking) as a problem of security or rights entitlement. It highlights the analytical and political advantages of categories such as “unfree labor” to provide effective solutions for the prevention and reintegration of child soldiers.

Migrant farmworkers in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) are bound by unfree labor relations. Migrants are employed by and live adjacent to Canadian family farms. Extending current research on Canada's SAWP, I specifically conceptualize the family farm as a locus of unfree labor relations. The article identifies how employers impose mobility controls around migrants' freedom to leave their workplaces, circumscribing where, how, and when migrants can circulate in Canadian communities. Growers use discourses and practices of paternal care and protection to justify these controls, revealing the familial features of employer-employee relationships. Harnessing a relational understanding of the family farm, I argue that worker (im)mobilities reveal key features of extant family farm relationships. Direct involvement by state officials and legal frameworks undergirding the SAWP effectively enable and sanction employer practices. Contributing to mobilities research, I identify how family farms exercise and directly benefit from state-sanctioned forms of power that allow them to restrict and regulate migrants' mobilities at localized levels. With relevance to both Canadian and U.S. contexts, the power to \"fix\" farm labor in place is highly desirable for family farms as a labor control mechanism. Material geographies of everyday (im)mobility help employers and states secure high levels of labor control from this low-wage migrant labor force. Arguments are based on qualitative research with fifteen migrant farmworkers employed on ten farms in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada, as well as additional interviews with sending government officials, local civil society, and growers.

This article proposes a cumulative approach to contemporary manifestations of unfree labour based on an exploration of dynamic combinations of common elements of the phenomenon. This understanding challenges enumerative and depoliticized tendencies in current approaches to both characterizing unfree labour and identifying victims. A cumulative approach recognizes the interlocking impacts of multiple forms of compulsion and duress, which shape the choices migrant workers make when their alternatives are severely limited and agency constrained. To illustrate this approach the article draws on a case study of Bangladeshi contract migrant construction workers in Singapore.

In late 1837 and early 1838 the British imperial government was preparing for an empire-wide transition from bonded to nominally free labor. This article builds upon recent scholarship that promotes a holistic, global approach to this transition, by narrowing the temporal frame and expanding the spatial. We emphasize interconnectivity and simultaneity rather than chronological succession, and we analyze the governance, rather than the experience, of this transition. Our approach is founded upon analysis of correspondence passing from every British colonial site through the Colonial Office in 1837–1838. We suggest that this hub of imperial government sought to reconcile the persistence of different conditions in each colony with the pursuit of three overarching policy objectives: redistributing labor globally; distinguishing between the moral debts owed to different kinds of bonded labor, and managing tradeoffs between security, economy, and morality. We conclude that the governance of the transition to free labor is best conceived as an assemblage of material and expressive elements of different spatial scales, whose interactions were complex and indeterminate. Through these specific governmental priorities and a particular communications infrastructure, these elements were brought into critical alignment at this moment to shape a significant transition in relations between people across the world.

The present paper attempts to explore the conceptual challenges in the research of prison labour and to sketch the contours of a proposed theoretical framework, which can highlight the connection between penal policy tendencies, labour market dynamics and organizational practices of prison labour regimes. Based on a literature review, it is argued, that besides market dynamics on which many of the existing prison labour narratives are focused, the state is also a key agent in generating, maintaining, or relieving the potential tensions between the two main objectives of prison labour: rehabilitative purposes on the one hand and economic efficiency on the other. It is assumed that through the conceptualization of prison labour as one of the most radical manifestation of state-imposed unfree labour, it is possible to shed new light on state-labour relations. By doing so, the research on prison labour could be enriched with some new aspects. A tanulmány célja a fogvatartotti munkáltatás kutatását övező konceptuális kihívások feltérképezése, valamint egy olyan elméleti megközelítés körvonalainak felvázolása, amely rávilágíthat a kriminálpolitikai tendenciák, a munkaerőpiaci folyamatok és a fogvatartotti munkáltatási rendszerek szervezeti gyakorlata között meghúzódó összefüggésekre. Az írás központi állítása, hogy a fogvartotti munkáltatásra vonatkozó szakirodalomban gyakran kiemelt hangsúllyal kezelt piaci folyamatok mellett az államnak is kiemelt szerepe van a fogvatartotti munkáltatás két meghatározó célja – a reintegrációs célkitűzések és a gazdaságossági szempontok – közti potenciális feszültségek generálásában, fenntartásában és enyhítésében. A tanulmány amellett érvel, hogy a fogvatartotti munkáltatásnak az állam által kirótt nem szabad munkaként való értelmezése és elméleti megközelítése jó eséllyel új szempontokat hozhat a munka és állam viszonyának értelmezésébe, ezáltal pedig a fogvatartotti munkáltatás vizsgálatába is.

Although it was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, labor-starved gold-rush California permitted employers to bind Native Americans as unfree leased convicts, minor custodial wards, debt peons, and, between 1860 and 1863, indentured servants or “apprentices.” As a key component of California's elaborate system of unfree Native American labor, Indian apprenticeship flourished for three years until its abolition during the Civil War in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Little remembered today, much remains obscure regarding the essential details of Indian apprenticeship and the illegal slave trade that emerged to supply the considerable market demand for bound labor. This essay focuses on Humboldt County in northwestern California, where significant numbers of white residents made extensive use of Native American apprentices at the same time that many of their neighbors demanded—and began carrying out—the forced removal and outright extermination of local Indian peoples. Building on valuable data that the anthropologist Robert Heizer extracted in 1971 from the unique but now missing cache of over a hundred surviving indentures discovered in 1915 by the historian Owen C. Coy, this study offers two detailed group profiles of Humboldt County's white employers and their legally bound Native American workers. These collective portraits reveal the social, economic, and demographic compositions of frontier California's master and servant classes while simultaneously tracing both the rise and the fall of Indian apprenticeship within the violent racial context of Humboldt County during the gold rush and the Civil War.

Objective/context: The article aims to analyze child recruitment as a form of human trafficking. Beyond the theoretical perspectives that focus on security or rights, it addresses the topic as a form of unfree labor. By means of a case study focused on child recruitment by right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia, the paper analyzes how children entered and exited illegal armed groups, the functions they performed, and the exploitation they endured. The research argues that child recruitment operates as a large-scale labor-market uptake in the wartime social order, where the “employers” are paramilitary groups, and the labor force, in part, consists of children and adolescents. Methodology: This case study relies on different sources of information: a database on child recruitment provided by the special Justice and Peace Unit of the Colombian Attorney General’s Office (989 cases between 1981 and 2005), sentences of Peace and Justice, testimonials given by victims in judicial processes, and semi-structured interviews with different actors. Conclusions: The paper shows that child recruitment as a form of trafficking is functional to wartime social order in contexts of poverty and inequality. There is demand and supply; thus, both girls and boys, who worked as soldiers, are not only victims but also agents that make decisions in challenging conditions. Therefore, if the socioeconomic options for these children, even after their demobilization from the armed group, are still a choice between bad and worse, joining a violent (no longer “armed” but “criminal”) group will remain a feasible alternative. Originality: The article contributes to the academic literature on a recent topic, such as the overlapping between child recruitment and human trafficking in armed conflict and post-conflict situations. It also contributes to the literature on “unfree labor,” as the study focuses on an actor (illegal armed groups) that has not been analyzed until now. Finally, the research demonstrates the limits of understanding human trafficking (and child recruitment as a form of trafficking) as a problem of security or rights entitlement. It highlights the analytical and political advantages of categories such as “unfree labor” to provide effective solutions for the prevention and reintegration of child soldiers.

This article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

La construcción de la historia del trabajo ha sido deudora de la noción del progreso de la humanidad concebida en sentido ascendente y guiada por la aspiración humana de libertad. Responde a una combinación de la ideología liberal y del ideario hegeliano en su asociación al momento de las revoluciones. Y encontró en la esclavitud real la referencia con la que contrastarse, uso retórico que ha quedado en el lenguaje popular para denunciar formas de explotación consideradas abusivas. El trabajo no-libre predominó en el pasado y se proyectó en el siglo XIX en la segunda esclavitud como uno de los pilares del naciente capitalismo industrial. Mientras se mantenían formas de coacción laboral, se iba creando un sentido de voluntariedad, de consentimiento medido por la percepción del salario, compatible con la entrega de la persona al empleador durante el tiempo de trabajo y la ausencia de alternativas para ganarse la vida. Este artículo ofrece una reflexión conceptual y metodológica sobre los aspectos mencionados. The construction of the history of work has been indebted to the notion of human progress conceived in an upward direction and guided by the human aspiration for freedom. It responds to a combination of liberal ideology and Hegelian thought in its association with the moment of revolutions. It found in real slavery the reference with which to contrast itself, a rhetorical device that has remained in popular language to denounce forms of exploitation considered abusive. Unfree labor predominated in the past and was projected in the 19th century into “second slavery” as one of the pillars of nascent industrial capitalism. Although forms of labor coercion persisted, a sense of voluntariness was created, of consent measured by the perception of wages, compatible with the surrender of the person to the employer during the working day and the absence of alternatives for earning a living. This article offers a conceptual and methodological reflection on the aspects mentioned above.