Regulating Work with People and ‘Nature’ in Mind: Feminist Reflections

Apart from the discussion on “green jobs” and “just transition”, there is paucity of discussion in contemporary labour law scholarship about the role of work regulation in transition to more sustainable systems of production. While this is not surprising given the (much discussed) fact that labor law’s domain and jurisdictional boundaries have been fairly narrowly constructed, this paper reflects on the possible origins of labour law’s distancing from concerns about work or labour’s place in the human-nature relations or the socio-ecological system. Drawing on Polanyi, I suggest that the modern separation of social (including labour) and ecological concerns into distinct legal fields has its roots in the transformation of the society-nature relations that accompanied (and made possible) the rise of laissez faire capitalism. This period saw the violence of primitive accumulation through enclosures and dispossession, which enacted physical separation of people from land (and means of subsistence), but also a parallel ideational shift towards human mastery over nature. Modern labour law systems emerged out of the political struggles and regulatory responses to the varied crises produced by capitalisms’ rise. Yet, labour law norms also naturalized and reproduced the disconnection of labour from ‘nature’ in a manner similar to their exclusion of unpaid social reproductive work carried out in households. As feminist labour law scholars have shown, this exclusion of unpaid work from labour law’s scope relates to the subordination of social reproduction to productive ends, which was, like domination of nature, a background condition enabling capitalist work systems to develop. Working in parallel with feminist scholarship in labour law, and supplementing it with insights from feminist political ecology and materialist ecofeminism, I argue that these two exclusions – of social reproduction and socio-ecological concerns – are ultimately artificial, and that imagining labour law or work regulation that is more attuned to socio-ecological concerns requires tackling both these exclusions at once. Consequently, I question whether the current policy focus on “green jobs” and “just transition”, while no doubt important, can provide a fertile ground for such a parallel rethinking.