8. Labour and exploitation in the contemporary waste industry.

Convenors
Hanen Chebbi, Institut Pasteur/ECUMUS
hanen.chebbi.cherif@gmail.com

Simone Di Cecco, École française de Rome, Institut Convergences Migrations
esse.dicecco@gmail.com

    The production and management of waste hold a particular place in the history of capitalism, to the point that some authors propose using the concept of Wasteocene to describe «the contaminating nature of capitalism and its persistence within the socio-biological fabric, its accumulation of externalities inside both the human body and the Earth» (Armiero, De Angelis, 2017). In the current global socio-ecological crisis, the governance of waste (household, industrial, etc.) has become a crucial issue within the broader project known as «ecological transition» or «ecological sustainability», aimed at preserving natural resources, systematising recycling, promoting the circular economy, and more.

    A vast body of literature in the social sciences (see, for example, Buu-Sao, Patinaux, 2024; Combes, 2010) has analysed the economic model that promises «green capitalism». In this model, waste, previously seen as a negative externality, now represents a new frontier for accumulation and market valuation (Schindler, Demaria, 2020). However, few studies have focused on the effects of these transformations on labour, and more precisely on waste industry workers (Fredericks, 2018; Reno, 2016).

    In this panel, we invite contributions that explore, from an empirical and ethnographic perspective, the forms of work, modes of exploitation, and categories of workers of the waste industry, above all (but not only) within the framework of contemporary ecological transition policies. We accept contributions grounded in various disciplinary approaches (sociology, anthropology, geography, etc.) and in different fields of study, whether in Mediterranean countries or other geographical regions. We welcome contributions in English and French.

    Open questions

    • What are the working and employment conditions in the contemporary waste industry? What is the composition of the workforce in this sector? What subjective relationships do these workers have with the dominant ecological discourse (Comby, 2015) that structures the field?
    • How have ecological transition measures transformed traditional occupations within the waste industry? What are the implications of these transformations in terms of exploitation, work organisation, job insecurity/stabilisation, restructuring of work collectives, and the emergence of new tasks that are more or less (de)valued?
    • What role does the informal or popular economy play in this employment market? Can we identify forms of competition, collaboration, or arrangements between informal workers (recyclers, etc.), old and new waste industry professionals?
    • What kind of relationships exist between waste industry workers and the communities living near waste treatment, processing and storage sites? How do these workers cope with the environmental slow violence (Nixon, 2011) that they may produce?
    • What is the place of free labour – domestic work, voluntary work, consumption work (Wheeler, Glucksmann, 2016) – in the contemporary refuse collection and treatment service?
    • What are the dynamics of the sexual and racial division of labour within the waste sector? How are these dynamics being reconfigured in the context of ecological transition policies?
    • Does the reorganisation of part of the waste industry open up new ways of resisting, mobilising and organising (inside or outside the unions)? How are the tensions and articulations between work and ecology reformulated in these experiments (Cukier, et al., 2023)?

    Keywords
    ecology; exploitation; green capitalism; labour; waste industry.

    Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
    anthropology; geography; political ecology; sociology.

      References
      Anantharaman, M.
      2024 Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, MIT Press.

        Armiero, M., De Angelis, M.
        2017 «Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries», in South Atlantic Quarterly, 116, 2, pp. 345-62.

        Buu-Sao, D., Patinaux, L.
        2024 «Renouveau extractif et verdissement de l’industrie face au changement climatique», in Écologie & Politique, 1, pp. 11-23.

        Combes, M.
        2010 «Reflections on “Green Capitalism”», in Mouvements, 63, 3, pp. 99-110.

        Comby, J.-B.
        2015 «À propos de la dépossession écologique des classes populaires», in Savoir/agir, 3, pp. 23-30.

        Cukier, A., Gaborieau, D., Gay, V.
        2023 «Vers un travail écologique: penser les tensions et les articulations», in Les Mondes du travail, 29, pp. 23-32.

        Fredericks, R.
        2018 Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Duke University Press.

        Nixon, R.
        2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press.

        Reno, J. O.
        2016 Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill, University of California Press.

        Schindler, S., Demaria, F.
        2020 «“Garbage is Gold”: Waste-Based Commodity Frontiers, Modes of Valorization and Ecological Distribution Conflicts», in Capitalism Nature Socialism, 31, 4, pp. 52-59.

        Wheeler, K., Glucksmann, M.
        2016 Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies, Springer.

        Convenors’ bios
        After defending a doctoral thesis in sociology on the issue of innovation in the public sector, Hanen Chebbi turned her research towards the environment and waste management in Tunisia. Her work aims to understand the issue of waste management from the bottom up, by focusing on the informal work of waste recovery carried out by marginal players such as the waste pickers known in the Tunisian dialect as barbécha (scavengers) and the refuse collectors in the municipality, where waste recovery is formally prohibited. She was a postdoc at the Institut Pasteur in Tunis, working on the issue of health and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the vaccination behaviour of Tunisians as part of the «Alliance SHS Afrique» project in partnership with the Institut Pasteur in Madagascar and the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She is currently teaching at the University of Sfax in the sociology department.

        As a specialist in migration studies, Simone Di Cecco has worked on the metamorphoses of migrant labour and racism in contemporary Italy. His research focused on the forms of unpaid work performed by asylum seekers in several towns in northern Italy, particularly in the field of urban cleaning. In this context, he also looked at the methods of confinement and exploitation used by the humanitarian world within the Italian reception system. He is currently carrying out research into the relationships of exploitation at work in the household waste management sector in Bologna and Naples. He is using an ethnographic approach in several workplaces in order to analyse the links between urban cleaning policies, the so-called ecological transition measures, and working and employment conditions (particularly subcontracting processes) in the sector.