Taxonomies at work: profit and race in the quest for the ‘best worker’ in Mauritius

ABSTRACT

In the guestworker system deployed in the Mauritian export factories, where migrants come to work on temporary contracts, employers and their labour brokers constantly need to hire new workers. And in this permanent renewal of the workforce, recruiters express their preferences for specific nationalities of employees and their disdain for others. Through in-depth interviews conducted with both employers and labour brokers, this contribution explores the production of a ‘knowledge’ on workers, a taxonomy that attributes certain qualities to certain people in the ranking of the ‘best worker’. The article contends that racialised assumptions on work ethic are intimately combined with a logic of profit maximisation, both dimensions being mutually constitutive of taxonomies at work.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour brokers
• guestworkers
• Mauritius
• nationalities
• race
• classification

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to Patrick Neveling, Béatrice Hibou and David Lincoln for their helpful and stimulating comments on earlier versions of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Inherited from the British rule (1810–1968) and commonly applied today as categories of self-identification, Mauritians often consider themselves as belonging to a specific ethnic group: the Indo-Mauriciens descending from the indentured labourers of the nineteenth century and divided between the Hindu community (which represents over half of the Mauritian population) and Muslims; the Créoles, from African descents and predominantly Catholic representing around one third of the whole population; then tiny minorities, the Franco-Mauriciens, white, mainly descending from the owner families of the plantations and the Sino-Mauriciens, issued from ancient Chinese communities established on the island.

2 By the Recruitment of Workers Act, Act 39 of 1993.

3 National Assembly Debates, First session, Debate n°31, November 23, 1993, p. 3367.

4 Figures from Statistics Mauritius, Labor Historical Series: Survey of Employment and Earnings, 2020.

5 Ministry of Labour, Industrial Relations and Employment, Guidelines for work permit applications, Employment Division, 2016.

6 The only rupture in this overall trend is the significant decrease of Bangladeshi workers for the year 2009. This is due to the government decision to suspend all entries from Bangladesh after Bangladeshi perpetrators killed a Mauritian national in a terrorist attack in Mumbai, the director of the powerful State Bank of Mauritius. As evident in the graph, this ban on Bangladeshi workers was partially substituted by Indian workers. This remained, nonetheless, only temporary, and the proportion of Bangladeshi workers continued its interrupted progression the year after.

7 Third Legislative Assembly Debates, Debate n°26, December 2, 1970, p. 2040–2061.

8 Women accounted from 60 to 80 per cent of the workers in the textile industry between the 1970s and the early 2000s, according to data issued from Statistics Mauritius, Survey of Employment and Earnings, 2020.

9 Explicit race or ethnic talks are socially undesirable in the Mauritian context and often avoided, pejoratively labelled as “communalism”.