Covert carcerality for “high-income cheap labor”: Indian tech workers in the United States

Abstract

In racial capitalism, employers increase their profit by recruiting “cheap labor,” who are typically racialized minorities. States and employers govern these workers by carceral means, variously confining them, extracting their labor, and ensuring that they remain docile enough not to protest and demand better wages and rights. But how are workers—who draw high wages yet experience labor devaluation or “cheapening”—governed? Based on interviews and participant observation, I study Indian immigrant tech workers in the United States. To distinguish their class position, I characterize them as “high-income cheap labor” and contend that these workers are governed by “covert carcerality”—where the material privilege of high income and documented migration make their labor devaluation by carceral means insidious. I identify three mechanisms of covert carcerality—neutral enclosures, informalization, and restricted family formation. The covert carcerality of high-income cheap labor reveals the class-based variations of carceral labor governance in neoliberal capitalism.