Migration and the invisible economies of care: Production, social reproduction and seasonal migrant labour in India

This paper shows how invisible economies of care spanning spatiotemporally divided households are crucial to exploitation of migrant labour at the bottom of labour hierarchies. The empirical material focuses on low‐caste and tribal people who seasonally migrate within India for low‐wage precarious work. At the centre of analysis is shown to be an intimate relationship between production and reproduction, the mobilisation of regional differences created by internal colonialism (alongside caste/tribe) in accumulation, and the significance of kinship over generations (alongside gender). This paper focuses on the processes of migrant labour exploitation which are crucial for capitalist growth and the inequalities they generate. Ethnographic research conducted in different sites across India shows how patterns of seasonal labour migration are driven by class relations marked by hierarchies of identity (caste and tribe) and the spatial geopolitics of internal colonialism (region) – differences that are mobilised for accumulation. Labour migration scholarship has mainly explored sites of production. We extend recent social reproduction theory (SRT) and an older literature on labour migration and reproduction to argue that the intimate relationship between production and social reproduction is crucial to the exploitation of migrant labour and that this means we have to place centre‐stage the analysis of invisible economies of care which take place across spatiotemporally divided households, both in the place of migration and in the home regions of migrants. Furthermore, we develop recent work on SRT and migration to argue that an analysis of kinship (gender over generations, not just gender) is crucial to these invisible economies of care. This analysis is important in showing the machinations of capitalist growth and for political alternatives.