Factory, family and neighbourhood. The political economy of informal labour in Sheffield, UK

This article explores the experience of formal and informal steel labour in the contexts of the factory, the family, and the neighbourhood in ‘Endcliffe’, an ex-industrial district of Sheffield, UK. The article reiterates Claude Meillassoux’s claim, in his book Maidens, meal and money, that the informal economy is an ideological space for the cheap reproduction of labour in the interests of capital. Nevertheless, it also examines subjective and ethnographic understandings of the meanings of ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ and of the political nature of their shifting boundaries. In Endcliffe, capitalist subcontracting, state welfare, and economic policies of local regeneration have increased the informalization and casualization of steel labour and blurred the social spaces of the factory, the family, and the neighbourhood. The increased permeability between formal and informal economic processes and the re-embeddedness of production in the social and political texture of the neighbourhood tangles idioms of kinship and capitalist ideologies of production and turns the structural conflict between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ into a generational and gender conflict within the working class. The article shows that the ‘New Labour’ government’s attempt to transform Britain into a post-industrial and classless society has paradoxically fostered the re-emergence of ancient modes of production and forms of bonded labour.