<\/p>\n
Journal: Innovation In The Social Science<\/p>\n
Type: Special Issue<\/p>\n
Special Issue Title: Making Unfree Labour: Consent, Exploitation, and the Law<\/p>\n
Volume & Issue: Volume 4, Issue 1, 2026<\/p>\n
Guest Editor: Ya-Wen Yang<\/p>\n
Publisher: Brill<\/p>\n
ISSN: 2773-0611<\/p>\n
Access: https:\/\/brill.com\/view\/journals\/iss\/4\/1\/iss.4.issue-1.xml\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Articles Included:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Introduction: Making Unfree Labour: Consent, Exploitation and the Law<\/p>\n By Guest Editor Ya-Wen Yang<\/p>\n This special issue originated in the workshop \u2018The Production and Reproduction of Social Inequalities\u2019, held on 20\u201321 September 2024 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. One of the workshop\u2019s central themes was the relationship between inequality and exploitation. All the articles in this special issue fall within this broad topic.<\/p>\n More 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\u2019 consent and its absence are managed in the workplace and how efforts to combat forced labour can, paradoxically, perpetuate exploitation.<\/p>\n While 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.<\/p>\n Kutsche and Lindner reveal the early controversies of the International Labour Organization (ILO) during its efforts to combat the forced labour imposed on \u2018native labour\u2019 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.<\/p>\n In 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.<\/p>\n Yang 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\u2013Philippines migration corridor to take migrant workers\u2019 signatures on illegal debt agreements with intermediaries at face value. Migrant workers\u2019 apparent consent, in the eyes of the judges, legitimised the illegal conduct of the intermediaries. This legal reasoning frustrated the initial purpose of Taiwan\u2019s anti-human trafficking law and further consolidated the exploitative fee structure in place throughout the migration process.<\/p>\n Parhusip, 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\u2019 migration and personal necessities prior to and during their employment by Taiwanese employers\u2014namely, 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.<\/p>\n Parhusip et al. observe that the ILO, after a long development, has established the principle of fair recruitment\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n Finally, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The 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.<\/p>\n Between 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 \u2018not forced\u2019.<\/p>\n However, the trajectory of long-term efforts to recognise how the institutional deprivation of people\u2019s 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\u2014and because their recognition is always a political struggle\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n The 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\u2013China 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.<\/p>\n This interdisciplinary research cluster belongs to the MOE SPROUT 2.0 \u201cConflict, Justice, Decolonization 2.0: Asia in Transition in the 21st Century<\/a>\u201c, operated by the\u00a0International Center for Cultural Studies<\/a>, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.<\/p>\n According to the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the total number of international migrants had amounted to 272 million in mid-2019, up from 173 million in 2000. Compared to 70 million international migrants in 1960, the figure has increased by 200 million. Among the total number of international migrants, about 100 million international migrants were from Asia, and 83 million were migrating within Asia. Most countries in Asia still practice exclusionary politics of citizenship. The migrant workers and stateless persons suffer severe discrimination and even inhuman treatment because of their non-citizen status.<\/p>\n\n
Migration, Unequal Citizens, and Critical Legal Studies<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n