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"Traditional wage labour has experienced a significant decline in industrialised countries over the past few decades. The spread of temporary work, the proliferation of subcontracting arrangements, the use of AI, the shipment of manufacturing jobs overseas, and the employment of foreign contract workers are among the key factors driving this decline. The result is a rise of labour insecurity and fragmentation among increasingly diverse forms of flexible labour arrangements. This book examines this important transformation by considering the impact of foreign contract labour on temporary migrant workers in their places of employment and home communities. It assesses work as a source of value in capitalist, reproductive, domestic, and cultural economics, and argues for a new, work-centric field of economics. Rich in examples, it is a sophisticated anthropological appreciation of the many forms that work can take, and what these forms mean for the creation of value in people's lives"--
List of contents
Introduction: the cultural value of work; Part I. Labor in Ethnohistorical Settings; 1. It isn't Santa Claus coming to town: European expansion into Arctic environments; 2. Dispossession and conscription: Euro-American use of Native American labor; 3. Labor for forests: European expansion through naval stores; Part II. Values of Forms of Labour; 4. The value of reproductive labor; 5. Domestic economic labour, part I; 6. Domestic economic labor, Part II; 7. Cultural labor in migration economies; Part III. Labor in Economic and Anthropological Theory; 8. Labor, value, culture; 9. An anthropology of economics; Appendix A: a note on the qualifications of the author.
About the author
David Griffith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at East Carolina University. He has been writing about work and migration since the 1980s. He won 2nd place in the James Mooney award for The Estuary's Gift (1999).
Summary
With increasing economic precarity and poor employment prospects around the world, workers have pioneered constellations of livelihoods that draw on multiple sources and kinds of work. This book profiles these workers across space and time as they struggle to survive and, in the process, offer superior alternatives to conventional work.
