Unfree labour and social reproduction

Kendra Strauss-Donald, Simon Fraser University, Department of Geography

This work is comprised of several strands, which build on a broader long-term research agenda on restructuring in labour markets and welfare institutions. I have recently completed work, in collaboration with Professor Judy Fudge at Kent Law School, on unfree labour and the regulation of temporary employment agencies in the UK. This has included writing on the establishment of the Gangmaster Licensing Authority and, more recently, changes to the Overseas Domestic Worker visa. I am interested in how legal and regulatory regimes reflect, and are shaped by, social and economic relations of domination that privilege the social reproduction of citizens over non-citizen ‘Others’. Having recently relocated from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge to the Labour Studies program at Simon Fraser University, I am currently working on questions of jurisdiction and legal scale in relation to anti-trafficking legislation in Canada and the UK. This research focuses on NGOs as legal actors and what counts as ‘work’ in the politics (and geopolitics) of labour trafficking.