Debt collection as labour discipline: the work of finance in a Myanmar squatter settlement

Abstract

Critical studies of development in the global South have called attention to the failure of existing modernisation projects to deliver on promises of full employment in well-remunerated wage labour. Despite this shortfall in formal employment, non-normative labour forms have proliferated globally, alongside mass expansion of financial markets since the late 20th century. In the present article, I take up these multiple trends as interrelated phenomena, inquiring into the work of finance in the extraction of value where individuals labour outside of formal employment. The argument, in brief, is that manifold debt relations have facilitated an effective extraction of value from non-normative forms of capitalist labour in the informal economy. This argument contrasts with positions that see informal labour as non-capitalist, or posit such labour as lying outside class relations of exploitation. Ethnographically, I engage these issues through a study of heterogeneous livelihoods among residents of a squatter settlement located in an industrial zone on the outskirts of Myanmar’s former capital, Yangon.