Ambiguous jurisdictions: navigating U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones as extraterritorial spaces

ABSTRACT

This article explores the potential for exploitation of jurisdictional ambiguity presented by Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs) in the United States as extraterritorial spaces within national territory. Nearly half a million people work in hundreds of U.S. FTZs. Transnational corporations are increasingly, with states’ assistance, operating in rural FTZs and asserting extrajudicial authority to create totalising environments of power and labour relations within the zones. Ethnographic examples are provided from research on how variously situated interviewees make sense of the web of local, state, national and international jurisdictions they navigate daily in FTZs in Kentucky and South Carolina. Fear, silencing and contingency are among the technologies of control workers experience in FTZs along with the daily physical disciplining of bodies leaving U.S. territory while still on U.S. soil. FTZs illustrate the extent to which U.S. economic activity is global, contradicting the economic nationalist and isolationist rhetoric of the recent Trump administration. That contradiction is foregrounded for workers in rural factories utilising Foreign-Trade Zones, who may be uncertain of the applicability of U.S. legal protections in the workplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalisation
• jurisdiction
• Foreign-Trade Zones
• United States
• transnational corporations
• rural

Acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by a University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences Sabbatical Research Award (2019), ‘U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones: Local and/or Global Spaces?’, and a University of South Carolina Women’s Studies Program Carol Jones Carlisle Faculty Award (2008), ‘Crossing the Line: Women and Foreign-Trade Zone Employment in South Carolina’. I would like to thank Micah Sorum, Mark Whitaker, David Whitaker, all those who agreed to be interviewed for this project, and the editors of this special issue on extraterritoriality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Wright (2006) on women as disposable workers.

2 These institutions asserted spatial, financial, social and physical disciplinary control (see Foucault 1977) over workers and their families.

3 FTZs were part of racial capitalist U.S. policies from the outset: `Producing a flexible territory for capital was simultaneously a way of producing an inflexible territory for labor, and of reproducing a rigid hierarchy of racialized labor’ (Orenstein 2019: 132).

4 I have learned about the vital role of the informal sector in rural southeastern U.S. communities through ethnographic research, but its exact contribution cannot be estimated, just as with formal sector employment. For example, would the worker I described earlier who had to collect 15 different W-2 forms (for tax reporting) from temping in all those warehouses during a single year have been reported as a single employee, or as 15 different jobs created for the community?

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Notes on contributors

Ann E. Kingsolver

Ann Kingsolver is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky (2011), NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (2001), editor of More than Class: Studying Power in U.S. Workplaces (1998), and co-editor of Global Mountain Regions: Conversations Toward the Future (2018), Appalachia in Context: Place Matters (2018), The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology (2017), and The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (2007), which won the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize in 2011.