Migrant waste collectors inThailand’s informal economy

Abstract

Recent scholarship on primitive accumulation and deagrarianisation in the global South has addressed a decline in formal employment prospects, leaving most expeasants (and their heirs) struggling to earn a livelihood in the informal economy. Taking this phenomenon as a point of departure, and drawing on the case of migrant waste collectors in Mae Sot, Thailand, this article examines the multiple ways that waste collectors are embedded in informal relations of production and exchange. This variable relational embeddedness has implications, it is argued, for the forms of struggle available to those engaged in informal labour.