Labour Market Enclosures

Speaker: Sunil Kumar (LSE)

Chair: Dr. Indrajit Roy, Department of Politics

Date: May 8, 2018, 6.00 - 7.30pm

Venue: B/S/008

Dr Sunil Kumar, Social Policy, LSE, will speak on the Urbanisation-Construction-Migration Nexus with a focus on Chennai, India. In contemporary large-scale construction projects, migrants are recruited to ‘undertake work’; previous migration streams were characterised by the aim to ‘seek employment’. Internal construction migrant workers in large-scale construction work and live in labour camps on site making them ‘invisible’ and hard to ‘reach’. The research conceptualises these large-scale construction projects as ‘labour market enclosures’; the ‘panoptic’ being used to exercise control. The research raises a number of policy implications - the conundrum of collective action being particularly challenging.

YARN in collaboration with CAHR.