Meet the workers capitalism calls disposable
Top image: Rohingya man U Kyaw Win Chay prepares netting (Photo: Myanmar Now/Wikimedia Commons)
CU 91Ҹ researcher Shae Frydenlund raises questions about a system that profits when workers are left behind
Even before the sun rises over the wholesale food markets of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the work is unending. Produce and poultry move fast, destined for the city’s restaurants and grocers, to be part of meals served in a few short hours.
During the summer months and around holidays, the workers who make this daily cycle happen are mostly stateless Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. They often work for weeks without taking a day off from the back-breaking labor. Doing so risks one being blackmailed.
When fall arrives and business slows, the same workers who were indispensable just weeks earlier are let go without warning. Sometimes the layoff lasts a day, other times for multiple weeks. Left with no other options, these Rohingya workers are put in an unthinkable predicament, unable to provide for their families or plan for life’s tomorrows.
Shae Frydenlund, an assistant teaching professor in CU 91Ҹ's Center for Asian Studies, asks in her research, "What does it mean to be left behind by capitalism?"
This is the world Shae Frydenlund moved into for nine months, living alongside Rohingya day laborers just north of the city. The stories she heard posit a foundational question about the politics driving both the local and global economy: What does it mean to be left behind by capitalism?
From the mountains to the market
Frydenlund, an assistant teaching professor in the 91Ҹ 91Ҹ Center for Asian Studies, arrived at her most recent research with a decade of expertise. After graduating from Colgate University in 2010, she spent a year as an IBM Thomas J. Watson Fellow, traveling between the Tibetan Plateau, the Andes and the Amazon to study global trade in high-value medicinal plants and animal products.
After a brief skiing detour in Vail, her passion for research brought her back to academia.
“My master’s thesis focused on labor relations, ethnicity and race in Nepal’s Everest industry,” she says. “My PhD dissertation was a study of how Rohingyas, ethnic minorities violently displaced from the Chittagong Hill Tract region of what is today northwest Myanmar, became invaluable to industrial manufacturing and meatpacking sectors in Colorado.”
Her most , published in New Political Economy, grew directly from this work.
“The paper we are talking about is based on a chapter of my dissertation, which theorizes the relationship between refugee labor and the accumulation of capital more broadly,” says Frydenlund.
A new way of thinking about surplus
The heart of Frydenlund’s research is a concept she calls “dialectical disposability.”
“To put it simply, the idea of ‘dialectical disposability’ is about recognizing the constant movement and change that shape experiences of work—including unemployment,” she says.
For many years, scholars have used the idea of “surplus population” to describe groups who are unemployed and largely shut out of the formal economy. This includes refugees, stateless people, and indigenous communities. Embedded in this term is an assumption that these are people capitalism has passed over and left behind.
Frydenlund pushes back on this, drawing on Marxian political economic theory and nine months of on-the-ground ethnographic research. She argues that reality is both more dynamic and more nefarious.
“Not only are unemployed people valuable to ‘the economy,’ I suggest that this value is created from the process of jerking people in and out of the so-called surplus population,” she says, adding, “People who are deemed economically useless are far from it.”
In other words, instability created by employers is the game. Indeed, those who need labor for market work in Kuala Lumpur and industrial jobs in the U.S. alike depend on this cycle of hiring and firing workers who are easy to exploit.
The constant threat of dismissal keeps workers compliant, says CU 91Ҹ researcher Shae Freydenlund. (Photo: Rohingya Creative Production/Pexels)
The constant threat of dismissal keeps workers compliant. After all, there is always someone willing to take your place.
This system also suppresses wages and keeps labor costs flexible enough to absorb the shocks of a volatile food market. However, it’s the workers who pay the price.
Levers of exploitation
Understanding how the system works requires a look at the structures that make it possible. Frydenlund is direct about what those levers are.
“Exploitation requires the production of difference. This is at the heart of theorizations of racial capitalism,” she says.
In Malaysia, that difference is manufactured through a combination of racial hierarchy, statelessness and immigration enforcement.
Rohingya workers—most of whom lack official documentation—are racially profiled, publicly framed as threats to the economy and denied the legal protections afforded to even low-wage Malaysian workers. This leaves them with little-to-no leverage.
“Immigration enforcement is vital for maintaining an apartheid labor system that separates workers based on citizenship status and nationality. Employers also offload the costs of immigration violations onto workers themselves, leveraging the risk of employer-paid fines as justification for paying lower wages,” Frydenlund says.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same mechanics are at work in the United States, where Frydenlund’s earlier research followed Rohingya refugees into meatpacking and industrial manufacturing jobs in cities like Denver and Greeley.
“I found that the refugee resettlement system acts as a labor broker, supplying firms with cheap, supposedly docile workers,” she says.
The theft of time
In her fieldwork, Frydenlund witnessed the human cost of this system up close. In households where unpredictable, weeks-long unemployment is the norm, families struggle to pay the bills and plan for the future. The question of when work might return hangs like a dark shadow over everything.
“I would describe the impacts of precarity as a form of psychological torture that makes people frantic. I think of the insecure and temporary employment that has become so common now, from platform work to Amazon warehouse work, as a system of organized crime that steals future time from people,” Frydenlund says.
The consequences are far reaching.
"We can’t fully understand exploitation, uneven development or climate change without detailed attention to places and people."
“Being chronically unable to plan for future purchases, rent, hospital bills, childcare, food, vacation (because we all deserve to rest and play), it’s a form of physical and psychological violence,” she says.
Repairing the system
Giving refugees the legal right to work is a common policy response to the type of labor exploitation Frydenlund studies. She understands the appeal but rejects this “fix” as insufficient.
Legalizing access to formal labor markets, she argues, leaves the underlying structure of racialized inequality untouched. Malaysian food markets, like American meatpacking centers, are embedded within systems of racial hierarchy and economic exploitation that aren’t fixed by issuing a work permit.
What Frydenlund observed in the field, however, offers some hope. In Kuala Lumpur’s markets and beyond, she documented communities building solidarity outside the formal economy. From coalition work to engagement with unions and everyday acts of mutual care, these communities are slowly unifying.
“This is solidarity in unpaid social reproduction work, and it’s magnificent,” she says.
It’s a reminder that the workers at the center of her research are more than data points in a global economic behemoth. They are people. Paying close attention to them, Frydenlund argues, is the only way to understand the abstract forces shaping all our lives.
“We can’t fully understand exploitation, uneven development or climate change without detailed attention to places and people,” she says.
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