The Making of Cheap Labour across Production and Reproduction: Control and Resistance in the Senegalese Horticultural Value Chain

Abstract

This article investigates the making of cheap workers at the bottom of global value chains. Adopting a class relational approach, it engages in labour regime and social reproduction analyses, to examine the labour process in Senegalese export horticulture and its relations with rural households. Drawing from primary qualitative data, it analyses power relations within workplaces and households investigating the structural relations between them through the disciplining and exploitation of women. It argues that labour control beyond workplaces is crucial to the supply of cheap and disciplined workers, showing how patriarchy and religion regulate a continuum of class relations between households, fields, and packaging centres. It shows the inherent conflict between production and reproduction intensifies South of the supply chain and fuels fragmentation of women in ‘classes of labour’. While women shape, respond and defy some forms of subordination, their resistance to the combined pressures of disciplining and exploitation is less manifest.