AHA Session 181
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Nassau East (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Franco Galdini, University of Birmingham
Panel:
Franco Galdini, University of Birmingham
Maurizio Totaro, Ghent University
Maurizio Totaro, Ghent University
Session Abstract
No matter how one viewed Communism, it is a widely recognised fact that, in the seven decades of its existence, the Soviet Union raised the living standards of tens of millions of workers. This was to change radically after the break-up of the USSR in 1991. Production collapsed, state revenue dried up, and millions were thrown into poverty. The welfare state in place during Soviet times was one of the first victims of this process. As secure jobs dissipated and precarity spread, rates of union membership plunged. At the time of the Soviet collapse, the dominant view among reformers was that a switch from the state to the market in the allocation of resources such as labor would simultaneously benefit workers and the overall development of the newly-independent Soviet republics. This view has since been so prevalent that, as informality and precarity came to dominate the realm of work following the collapse in living standards of the 1990s, the literature continued ascribing Central Asia's lack of progress to its still incomplete ‘transition’ from a shared Soviet past to an ideal-type free-market capitalism, itself the consequence of partial and selective liberalization that resulted in crony capitalism instead of development. In effect, as the struggle for ‘transition’ plays out in “the interaction of liberalizing reforms and state socialist legacies,” post-Soviet countries remain ‘exceptional’ in their lack of development for having failed to shed the latter, which continue acting “as barriers to and distortions of the former” (Clarke 2007: 5). Thirty years on, however, mass labor precarization in post-Soviet Central Asia appears in line with broader trends in the global political economy. While significant differences between countries in the Global North and the Global South endure, it is now widely acknowledged that precarious and temporary forms of labor are increasingly the norm, rather than the exception. This roundtable session brings together scholars featured in a special issue for the International Labor and Working Class History journal, which offer insights into the lived realities of precarious workers in Central Asia during the first 30 years of the region’s independence. The roundtable, and the issue from which it is drawn, showcase different case studies from Central Asia, both in terms of countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), economic sectors (agriculture, oil) and themes (gender), but with the same aim of casting the region within the broader dynamics of labor precarisation the world over in the era of global capitalism.
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