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This paper investigates the everyday lived realities of Southeast Asian migrant workers who left the formal sector of the labour market and entered the informal agricultural sector before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Taiwan. Drawing on observations of migrants' daily lives and farm work and 19 in‐depth interviews, it delves into migrants' subjective experiences of vulnerability, paternalism, exploitation, and control at work due to a lack of legal protection and the illegality of their employment. Although the literature has identified a link between 'running away' from formal employment and seeking freedom, this research suggests a continuum between experiences of work in the formal and informal economic sectors. The paper sheds new light on mobility, work, illegality, and informality and how these have constantly shaped 'runaway' workers' subjective experiences of freedom and unfreedom during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyse agrarian class relations in Sangli, a village in Rewari district, southern Haryana, in light of the linkages of agricultural households with non‐agricultural economic activities. I find that better‐off households that are primarily dependent on agriculture are the most likely to re‐invest in agriculture. Agricultural surpluses allow upper caste landowning households to diversify into businesses or formal employment; alternatively, landownership provides a failsafe against precarious daily wage work, which is the only type of work available to lower caste landless households who lack economic and social capital. This segmentation of diversification opportunities is understood as conjugated oppression resting on caste and land ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a traumatic lockdown in 2020, India's migrant factory workers have headed back to work and on worse terms than before. Struggling with new levels of denial of entitlements, workers respond by withdrawing from their fragile hold on formality, moving instead further into the informal sector. Based on voice notes recorded on Saajha Manch, a phone‐based community media platform, the paper examines workers' experience that their efforts to claim their rights lure them into a quagmire in a bureaucracy which sucks their energy while assuring no clear outcome. Seeing evidence of failed enforcement and structural inequality all around them, workers conclude that the law is not meant for them and hence show little interest in the new labour codes hastily enacted at the height of the pandemic. The paper highlights the dysfunction of the formal sector in delivering to its low‐waged workers who remain unserved in spite of registration and documentation in place. As they join the ranks of informality, however, migrant factory workers do not lose interest in associative and contentious activity. On the contrary, freedom from the bureaucracy of rights may be a boost to new forms of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Tanzania witnessed a revival of economic planning that explicitly aimed to combine rapid economic growth with accelerated structural transformation of the economy. To achieve these planning targets would require a relatively modest drop in the share of agriculture in GDP, but a dramatic fall in its share in employment by 2025. Tanzanian planners assume that labour is locked in agriculture because agricultural productivity is low, from which they conclude that, to release labour to fuel the expansion of manufacturing, it is imperative to raise agricultural productivity by appropriate land policies, leveraging private investment and developing public-private partnerships. We argue that, analytically, this planning argument leaves out the possibility that causality may run the other way - from high labour retention in agriculture to low agricultural productivity - and that, empirically, the observed patterns inherent in actual processes of economic transformation in Tanzania do not tally well with the assumptions of planners. More specifically, in so far as labour flows out of agriculture, it flows towards informal-sector activities, both rural and urban, rather than towards formal manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causes of the Asian economic crisis have been the subject offierce debate among economists. Yet little is known about the impact on employment and wellbeing. in Indonesia, the worst affected country, the malaise turned info a political and societal upheaval which brought an end to the New Order regime. Based on anthropological field work in two villages along the coast of West Java, the paper discusses the repercussions for work and welfare in the rural hinterland. The author criticizes the policies of the Government of Indonesia as well as those of the World Bank and other international agencies on what has happened and what should be done. His micro study on socio-economic dynamics in two localities, researched in a longitudinal perspective, argues that since the start of the crisis the poverty level, then already much higher than officially acknowledged, rose to include more than half of all households. In contrast to the received wisdom that the village still functions as a community, the crisis has widened the gap between the rural rich and poor. The fieldwork findings are held to justify conclusions for areas with similar structural characteristics: densely populated, with a highly skewed pattern of land distribution, long-distance labour circulation between city and countryside and involving a substantial part of the total workforce, especially the landpoor and the landless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]