Building a Social Reproduction Theory of work-related health: the case of racialised migrant workers in London’s commercial cleaning sector (2020-2023)

Abstract

Building from its race-attuned currents, this thesis seeks to develop Social Reproduction Theory’s (SRT) “latent potential” for theorising work-related health. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the centrality of human health to capitalist political economies. Furthermore, the pandemic galvanised struggles over workplace health and safety (H&S) and sick pay among low-paid workers in the UK that both preceded the pandemic and continue today. Born of action research with a campaign to improve conditions in commercial cleaning in the UK, this research explores some of the questions that these ongoing struggles pose to SRT. Though SRT proved to have significant explanatory power when met with the issues raised by a pandemic that threatened human life on a mass scale, it has so far lacked sustained theoretical and empirical investigation of the relationships between health and social reproduction. Moving from conditions of “pandemic exceptionality” to those of “necropolitical normality”, this research combines primary and secondary qualitative data to examine how the work-related health of Latin American commercial cleaners in London is mediated by the (re-)productive relations of neoliberal capitalism and how this investigation contributes to the development of an SRT of work-related health. The central argument is that neoliberal H&S policies and legislation, the privatisation of sickness benefits, the turn to workfare, the intensification of internal and external bordering and contemporary racisms, nativisms and classisms combine to systematically over-expose low-paid, precariously-employed migrant workers to preventable work-related health risks and their consequences, effectively producing them as disposable to and depletable by neoliberal capitalism. The thesis thus proposes perceptibility, protection, disposability and depletability – all of which operate unevenly according to multiple, overlapping categories of physical, social, legal, epistemological and discursive differentiation – as key concepts for an SRT of work-related health.

Date of Award	25 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (Supervisor), Bridget Anderson (Supervisor), Joe Devine (Supervisor), Roy Maconachie (Supervisor) & Rachel Forrester-Jones (Supervisor)