Global Dis-Connectedness of Labour: ‘Living Well for Less', Class, Race and Trafficking in Human Beings in the UK

By reflecting upon the impact of the current recession on the continuing commodification of migrant labour in Europe, this paper will contribute towards the sociological exploration of the re-emerged tensions and ‘dis-connects’, along the lines of race, social class and gender, between people who produce and people who consume, between those who profit and those whose reward for their backbreaking labour is just enough to get going. It will question how the neoliberal organisations of production, circulation and consumption operate within the context of inflated racist, sexist, islamophobic and anti-immigration rhetoric, and how they serve to legitimise and normalise the continuing dismantling of the welfare state and labour market de-regulation to accommodate the governing ideology of our times: ‘living well for less’. 

The paper is based on the current research exploring the links between anti-trafficking policies in Europe and public knowledge and understanding of human trafficking. It will focus on the role of current anti-trafficking policies in the UK in reducing the complexity of human trafficking to the issues of illegal immigration and criminality. In describing human trafficking as ‘modern slave trade’ with the blame firmly placed on ‘ruthless criminal gangs’, the current UK government approach reduces the problem to the individual behaviour of devious criminals and of naïve and passive victims. Within this context, any suggestion that human trafficking remains epiphenomenal to class, race and gender, and directly responds to the growing demand for exploitable and disposable, usually immigrant, labour to satisfy the appetite of Western consumers to ‘live well for less’ seems so hard to fathom, so ‘not-Wilberforce’ and ‘not-democracy’, yet so close to neoliberal reality.