BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Migration, Unequal Citizens, and Critical Legal Studies - ECPv6.15.13.1//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Migration, Unequal Citizens, and Critical Legal Studies
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://transit-asia.chss.nycu.edu.tw/cms
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Migration, Unequal Citizens, and Critical Legal Studies
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Asia/Shanghai
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0800
TZOFFSETTO:+0800
TZNAME:CST
DTSTART:20250101T000000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20260413T080000
DTEND;TZID=Asia/Shanghai:20261231T170000
DTSTAMP:20260416T072650
CREATED:20260413T072848Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260415T144814Z
UID:55153-1776067200-1798736400@transit-asia.chss.nycu.edu.tw
SUMMARY:Journal Publish: Special Issue: Making Unfree Labour: Consent\, Exploitation\, and the Law
DESCRIPTION:Journal: Innovation In The Social Science \nType: Special Issue \nSpecial Issue Title: Making Unfree Labour: Consent\, Exploitation\, and the Law \nVolume & Issue: Volume 4\, Issue 1\, 2026 \nGuest Editor: Ya-Wen Yang \nPublisher: Brill \nISSN: 2773-0611 \nAccess: https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/iss.4.issue-1.xml  \nArticles Included: \n\nYa-Wen Yang\, What Is Wrong with Forced Labour: Coercion or Exploitation? Reflections on Taiwan’s Temporary Migrant Worker Scheme\, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 5 (2026)\, https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p5_2.xml\nFabiana Kutsche & Ulrike Lindner\, Between Work Regulation\, Integration into the Capitalist Economy and ‘African Laziness’: The International Labour Organization and African Workers\, 1927–1930\, 3 Innovation in the Social Sciences 31 (2025)\, https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p31_3.xml\nHao-Yu Cho\, Transformation and Exploitation: The Impact of Labor Policies in Mexico’s Maquiladora Industry\, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 45 (2026)\, https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p45_4.xml\nJonathan Parhusip\, Johanna Lee & Danielle Douglas\, The Kasbon System and the Paradox of Voluntary Entry into Unfree Labor in Taiwan’s Distant Water Fisheries\, 4 Innovation in the Social Sciences 67 (2026)\, https://brill.com/view/journals/iss/4/1/article-p67_5.xml\n\n  \nIntroduction: Making Unfree Labour: Consent\, Exploitation and the Law \nBy Guest Editor Ya-Wen Yang \nThis special issue originated in the workshop ‘The Production and Reproduction of Social Inequalities’\, held on 20–21 September 2024 in Hsinchu\, Taiwan. One of the workshop’s central themes was the relationship between inequality and exploitation. All the articles in this special issue fall within this broad topic. \nMore specifically\, however\, they address the complexities of the conceptualisation of unfree labour through law in particular contexts and historical moments and reflect on the visible and invisible duress that leads to exploitation. They explore how workers’ consent and its absence are managed in the workplace and how efforts to combat forced labour can\, paradoxically\, perpetuate exploitation. \nWhile the contributors take distinctive approaches to the exploration of a range of case studies\, they engage in dialogue with one another on two overarching perspectives. First\, they trace the legal expression of unfree labour as it emerges from political contestation. Second\, they analyse different techniques used to legitimise institutionalised labour control. \nKutsche and Lindner reveal the early controversies of the International Labour Organization (ILO) during its efforts to combat the forced labour imposed on ‘native labour’ in colonies\, which eventually led to ILO Convention No. 29 (1930). The Convention was the first international instrument to tackle forced labour and has been the backbone of the worldwide ban on this inhuman form of labour extraction to this day. \nIn this regard\, the Convention is a political achievement. However\, its creation was overshadowed by racism and colonialism. European colonial powers presumed that forcing Africans to work was a civilising mission to educate the locals in a positive work ethic. The legal formation of forced labour reflects the historical limitation that it required the support of the European powers\, who relied upon and defended the use of forced labour. It thus focuses on managing direct coercion\, while institutions that created economic duress driving indigenous people into poorly paid wage work\, such as poll taxes\, were largely left untouched. \nYang points out how this limitation underlying the Convention has become a contemporary encumbrance in the fight against human trafficking for labour exploitation in Taiwan. The narrow notion of forced labour led domestic judges ruling on human trafficking cases within the Taiwan–Philippines migration corridor to take migrant workers’ signatures on illegal debt agreements with intermediaries at face value. Migrant workers’ apparent consent\, in the eyes of the judges\, legitimised the illegal conduct of the intermediaries. This legal reasoning frustrated the initial purpose of Taiwan’s anti-human trafficking law and further consolidated the exploitative fee structure in place throughout the migration process. \nParhusip\, Lee and Douglas similarly seek to explain the paradoxical voluntariness of debt-financed migration and the deep-rooted coercion beneath it. They study the pervasiveness and burdens of the debts incurred to finance Indonesian fishers’ migration and personal necessities prior to and during their employment by Taiwanese employers—namely\, the kasbon system. Kasbon usually leads to a vicious spiral of debt; an initial debt tricks Indonesian fishers into agreeing to multiple rounds of debt and migration\, causing them to submit to abuses in the workplace. \nParhusip et al. observe that the ILO\, after a long development\, has established the principle of fair recruitment—that migrant workers should not bear the costs and expenses of their migration and employment. The Taiwanese government has also claimed to adhere to this principle under international pressure. However\, it has only performed a gesture of governance\, issuing formalist bans on illegal fee collections. Meanwhile\, the discriminatory laws against migrant fishers\, as well as the business model and profit structures of the intermediaries\, have been left intact. \nFinally\, Cho studies the changing dynamics between maquiladora workers and managers in Mexico following the loosening of regulations on dispatched workers in 2012. This legal change led to a surge of such workers\, who replaced a high percentage of formally employed factory staff. This\, in turn\, caused a shift in the management strategies at the author’s field site. The originally more family-like atmosphere on the production line was replaced by the distant relationships that necessarily accompany the nomadic nature of dispatched work. Dispatched workers also found it harder to organise themselves in the workplace. It thus turns out that the regulatory changes that make the workplace more fragmented function as an indirect means of strengthening control over labour. \nThe four articles represent different intensities of unfreedom on the spectrum of unfree labour. At one pole\, Kutsche and Lindner expose the violent oppression and the exploitation of African indigenous communities under European colonialism. At the other\, Cho documents factory wage-labourers who experience no direct coercion\, despite being threatened by the reserve army of dispatched workers created by neoliberal deregulatory trends. \nBetween these two poles\, Yang and Parhusip et al. highlight the plight of migrant workers. These workers are trapped in the double bind of discriminatory immigration regulations and a snare of debt structures. Because the pole of forced labour under colonialism appears so obviously wrong\, other forms of control over labour may appear less harmful\, less wrong and ultimately ‘not forced’. \nHowever\, the trajectory of long-term efforts to recognise how the institutional deprivation of people’s reasonable options constitutes coercion is precisely the lesson we can learn from the juxtaposition of the case studies here. It is exactly because unfreedom and exploitation can come in different shapes and degrees—and because their recognition is always a political struggle—that we need to analyse how coercion is read as benign and how the law is used to legitimise economic duress as consent. This special issue seeks to do just that. \nThe original workshop was a collaboration between the International Centre for Cultural Studies (ICCS) at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University\, the Social Inequalities Research Unit at the University of Cologne and the Africa–China Research Network at Academia Sinica. We thank those whose contributions made this collection possible. Among them are Professor Poe Yu-ze Wan\, Chief Editor of this journal\, and Professor Joyce C.H. Liu\, Director of the ICCS.
URL:https://transit-asia.chss.nycu.edu.tw/cms/event/journal-publish-special-issue-making-unfree-labour-consent-exploitation-and-the-law/
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://transit-asia.chss.nycu.edu.tw/cms/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/coverimage.png
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR