Legislative attempts to uncover informal sectors strip away the choice of opacity.

So what does this discussion of legibility have to do with thinking about workers in the global economy and the politics of labor organizing? Well, what I want to argue here is that struggles over the transparency and/or opacity of the economic landscape can play central roles in clashes between capital and labor. Given the constraints of word limits there is not room to go into too much detail here, but I hope that a few examples will illustrate the point I am trying to make. A central issue with the growth of precarious work is that those workers subject to it are much less visible in the landscape than are workers who enjoy more. Labor History281traditional full-time jobs and who are represented by labor organizations and other such entities within the formal sector. This is because it is much more difficult for those various state actors who might be charged with concern for them, together with labor organizations who might wish to represent them, to monitor their working conditions. When workers are not represented by unions that can, for instance, lay down across large swaths of an industry or region rules and conditions to which employers are forced to abide but are, instead, individualized within the economic landscape, it is much more difficult for them to seek the protection of government regulators of health and safety standards. Likewise, when workers toil in sweatshops that are literally hidden out of view in large cities like New York or Mumbai, or are perhaps employed as subcontracted industrial homeworkers manufacturing components at piece-rates within the walls of their own homes, it is difficult for either unions or state agencies to find them to ensure that they are not being abused and/or exploited. There is, then, a spatial politics of concealment and disclosure in the landscape – Mitchell, for instance, provides the example of how California agricultural interests in the 1930s hid migrant labor camps by locating them off the beaten track and surrounding them with fields of high crops to avoid them being observed from the road, thereby making it more difficult for representatives of the California Commission of Immigration and Housing to check on their conditions. Consequently, part of any strategy to improve precarious workers’ lot might involve making their laboring in the economic landscape more visible. In this regard, it is important to note that one of the principal characteristics of the contemporary global economy has been the geographical lengthening of commodity chains. One of the things that this means is that for those at the end of the commodity chain it is now much more difficult to know much about those workers located at points earlier in the chain. Geographical distance, in other words, is a fundamental element in the fetishization of commodities detailed by Marx.4 Thus, the further away an end-user is in space from the producers of the commodities which s/he consumes, the more difficult is it for him/her to know much about the conditions under which the producers of the commodities labor – were commodities made in worker cooperatives or in factories in Export Processing Zones full ofu ̈ber-exploited migrant laborers? Certainly, humans have long consumed goods that were made by people they never personally met. However, when manufacturing was largely organized regionally or nationally, it was much more likely that consumers could know something about the producers of such commodities. Today, by way of contrast, growing numbers of commodity chains stretch globally, such that their beginning and ending points are often separated not by tens or hundreds of miles but by thousands. Globalization, in other words, has served in many instances to make the planet’s economic landscape much more opaque for consumers who might wish to buy only products made by well-remunerated workers. In response to such conditions, growing numbers of workers and their organizations have sought to develop strategies to make the global economic landscape more transparent. A particularly well-organized example has been the ‘Mapping Supplier Chains’ project. Initiated by the International Research Network on Autowork in the Americas (IRNAA), this project has seen its primary task as that of mapping ‘the changing contours of this supply chain, from vehicle assembly282Symposiumplants, to in-house suppliers of major components including drive trains, to outside suppliers responsible for the manufacture of integrated systems, to commodity suppliers and job shops contracted to deliver parts and small components to other plants in the chain’ (see Babson and Jua ́rez5for more on the IRNAA). Through such activities, labor activists have opened up at least part of the global economic landscape to greater inspection – they have made it more transparent, there by helping to defetishize some of the components used in automobile manufacturing. The issue of transparency and opacity, however, is more complex than the above example of mapping commodity chains might imply. This is because there are actually sometimes instances when workers might prefer to remain invisible. For example, a crucial element in labor organizing is often finding a place where in workers can meet and discuss things beyond the watchful eye of their bosses. Thus, one of the things that has made mining unions strong in most countries is the ability of miners to use underground nooks and crannies as places in which to talk union. The ability to effectively ‘hide’ from the employer’s gaze within the workplace has been much more possible for miners than has been the case in much office work, where work spaces can more easily be physically engineered by employers to make them readily subject to their surveillance (see Herod6for more on the spatial engineering of workplaces for purposes of labor control, as well as on workers’ efforts to subvert such workplace designs). But there are other examples of such opacity in the landscape. For instance, sugar workers and other agricultural laborers have often been able to disappear out of sight of their overseers by going into the fields, where their spatial proximity to one another working in gangs has given them opportunities to talk union.Certainly, I do not wish to imply here that the abilities of workers and their bosses to make the economic landscape either transparent or opaque are equal. But what I do want to suggest is that the power of making something transparent or opaque is contextual and therefore something be to be theorized, rather than assumed. Thus, sometimes employers have the upper hand and sometimes it is workers who do. The key political point in all of this, though, concerns how to ensure that workers, especially those employed in precarious positions, can choose to make their positions either visible (perhaps when they seek the protection of government to ensure they are paid properly) or invisible (perhaps when they seek to avoid government regulators because they wish to remain part of the informal economy for some reason).