Assembling Fair Labour. Moral Values and Private Sustainability Standards at Indian Tea Plantations and Natural Stone Pits

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Organising labour in a way to guarantee adequate incomes, reliable contracts, and safe work conditions remains a challenging task especially in countries of the Global South, where low salaries and the patchy enforcement of national regulation pertaining to work and environment continue to attract global capital. Inspired by normative values such as the equality of trading partners, solidarity, and empowerment of producers, a number of “fair” or “ethical” trading initiatives aim at improving the conditions of workers by setting standards regarding child labour, wages, work contracts, overtime, besides others. Together with formal and informal laws, rules, agreements, social relations, and ideas, such standards construct a complex web of regulation of labour that manifests in partly overlapping, complementary or contradictory regulations of labour at local sites. Yet, there is hardly any research on how private sustainability standards (PSS) work inside and in relation to these already existing regulatory contexts. Taking the controversially discussed outcomes of PSS, and the contradictions between the universalist approach of PSS, and the uniqueness of local labour regimes as starting points, this project seeks to understand what role PSS play in shaping and transforming labour regimes at specific production places in the Global South, namely at globally integrated tea plantations and natural stone pits in India. Thereby, it contributes to a better understanding of the multi-scalar governance of labour regimes. Conceptually, the project draws on a novel combination of the approaches of assemblage, governmentality, and moral economy, and thereby complements existing research on the workings of PSS from Labour Geography and Global Production Networks.