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Notes

Simon Chilvers, Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Canada.

Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA.

Colin McFarlane, Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK.

Sarah Washbrook, St Antony's College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Paul Gillingham, History Department, University of North Carolina, Wilmington NC, USA.

Patricia M. Pelley, Department of History, Texas Tech University, Texas, USA.

Stephen K. Wegren, Department of Political Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA.

Randall J. Stephens, Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, Massachusetts, USA.

Jessica Budds, Geography Department, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK.

Rosemary Thorp, Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Lúcia Sá, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.

Raúl Acosta, St Cross College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

Tom Brass formerly lectured in the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge, UK.

1 It was seen by the reviewer at the local arthouse cinema in Richmond-upon-Thames, where – encouragingly – the audience was larger than is usually the case for this kind of film. Ghosts has now been issued in DVD form.

2 Like Ghosts, each of these films has addressed in a fictional manner a politically controversial issue: the struggle by Mexican Americans on strike; the battlefield slaughter of the Scots during the Jacobite uprising; the impact of martial law following a nuclear attack on the UK; and the 1943 Bengal famine.

3 Although the Chinese immigrants are clearly aware of the reasons for their exploitation, and also object to this, neither of these facts add up to the kind of ‘empowering’ quotidian agency that exponents of the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ framework insist is always present in such contexts.

4 Apart from the central episode at Morecambe Bay, many of the other events depicted in Ghosts are corroborated in a special report based on research by Hsiao-Hung Pai, ‘Inside the grim world of the gangmasters’, The Guardian (London), 27 March 2004. See also her ‘Another Morecambe Bay is waiting to happen’, The Guardian (London), 28 March 2006.

5 That the object of the gangmaster system is capitalist restructuring, or the replacement of free labour by unfree – and thus cheaper and more easily controlled – workers so as to enhance profitability, is finally being recognized. Hence the following: ‘Ensuring the influx of foreign labour is not used to undercut the wages of domestic employees is another key challenge. The Low Pay Commission's last annual report expressed concerns that the growing use of migrant workers was being used by unscrupulous employers to circumvent the minimum wage’. See ‘Immigration drives an economic revival’, The Guardian (London), 21 March 2007. Even the normally conservative members of the Bank of England monetary policy committee now accept that resort by employers to such low wage unfree workers is ‘limiting the bargaining power of labour’ in other sectors of the economy – see ‘wage claims kept low by fear of foreign workers, says MPC member’, The Guardian (London), 31 May 2007 – which is precisely what capitalist restructuring is designed to do.

6 Even when official complaints are made, nothing happens. Despite some 45,000 investigations and 19,000 complaints from the public about employer non-compliance with UK minimum wage legislation, there has only been one criminal prosecution. According to the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, ‘it is common knowledge that there are all too many employers who take advantage of the flexible-labour market to try and avoid paying the minimum wage. The lack of prosecutions suggests that they are getting away with it.’ See ‘Deluge of complaints on minimum wage abuse’, The Sunday Times Business Section, 29 April 2007.

7 See, for example, ‘Migrants hold down inflation, says governor’, The Guardian (London), 14 June 2005; and ‘Migrants have lifted the economy, says study’, The Guardian (London), 27 February 2007. According other accounts –‘The PR tycoon, a private dinner and PM's meeting with Euro lobby group’, The Observer (London), 17 September 2006, and ‘Shortage of pickers may hit strawberry crop’, The Guardian (London), 28 May 2007 – businessmen and the National Farmers' Union are lobbying for open access by East European workers to UK markets, thereby providing capitalist producers with an expanding industrial reserve army of labour. Invoking laissez faire principles, the house journal of UK capitalism makes no secret of the fact that the object of expanding the reserve army of labour composed of (unfree) workers who are cheap is to enhance profits by depressing wages: ‘it must be remembered that the case for free immigration is primarily one of liberty. Employers should be free to hire whom they want … [i]f a government doesn't respect these basic liberties, isn't it likely to violate investors’ freedoms too? … [s]o it's clear that free immigration is a good thing for the economy and the stock market… Lower wages mean lower prices and lower interest rates', etc., etc., Investors Chronicle, 27 April to 3 May, 2007.

8 On this, see House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee 2003 and Brass 2004.

9 This omission may be due to the fact that, hitherto, English courts have convicted only ‘foreign’ gangmasters. See, for example, ‘Gangmaster convicted over “slave” workers’, The Guardian (London), 4 February 2005; ‘Gangmaster denies he led cocklers’, The Guardian (London), 20 September 2005; and ‘I got calls from people in the sea. The tide was coming up’, The Guardian (London), 25 March 2006. The gangmasters in question were Ukranian and Chinese nationals.