Labour Formalisation as Selective Hegemony in Reform-era Myanmar

Abstract

With the general elections of November 2010, state rule in Myanmar entered a process widely seen as a transition—if stalled—to democracy and rule of law. Such transition narratives have posited normative rule of law and arbitrary rule outside law as opposing logics, and opposing practices. A similar dichotomy is found in studies of labour informalisation in the global South, where informal labour is understood as antithetical to legally protected employment. Arguing otherwise, this article employs interview and ethnographic data to pursue an anthropology of state formation as a means of reading formality and informality as complementary, rather than conflicting, logics of state practice. Drawing on Gavin Smith's notion of selective hegemony, I hold that state actors in Myanmar have pursued varied projects of rule over a heterogeneous landscape of labour relations. In this respect, rule of law is always selective, and informality exhibits not so much an absence of state rule as an indirect modality of rule.

Keywords:

• Labour
• Informality
• Hegemony
• Myanmar

Acknowledgements

Field research for this article was conducted in collaboration with the Yaung Chi Oo Workers’ Association, with partial funding provided by the Myanmar-based MyJustice Program. I am grateful to Erdem Evren, Shozab Raza and two anonymous reviewers for input on earlier drafts of this article. This article is part of an ongoing conversation connected to the Frontlines: Class, Value, and Social Transformation in twenty-first Century Capitalism research project hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen.

ORCID

Stephen Campbell http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5408-2342

Notes

1 In this article, I employ ‘Burma’, following official use, to refer to the country up to 1989, and ‘Myanmar’ for the years that followed.

2 Republic of the Union of Myanmar, Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population (n.d.)

3 Names of informants and one township (Sinphyu) included herein are pseudonyms.

4 “Myanmar—Urban population as a share of total population,” Knoema, n.d., accessed September 16, 2018, https://knoema.com/atlas/Myanmar/Urban-population.

5 In Myanmar, according to Sections 75–79 of the 1951 Factories Act and Section 32 of the 2016 Law Amending the 1951 Factories Act, children aged 14–18 may be employed in a factory for a maximum of 4 hours per day on condition that they have obtained a certificate of fitness verifying their physical capacity to perform the work in question.

6 Section 2(n) of the 1923 Workmen's Compensation Act excludes from its definition of ‘workman’ any person whose employment ‘is of a casual nature’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the MyJustice Programme Myanmar.