A Plantation Precariat: Fragmentation and Organizing Potential in the Palm Oil Global Production Network

ABSTRACT This article draws on research conducted among migrant workers in the palm oil industry in Malaysia. It explores the fragmentation and the precaritization of palm oil labour and discusses how workers react to different forms of precarity in pursuit of their own spatial strategies of social reproduction. The article shows how migrant workers use extensive, transnational networks to circumvent or challenge the strategies of spatial control of capital. Migrant workers use these spatially and temporally contingent networks to avoid national border controls, to abscond and switch employers, and to organize collective bargaining and wildcat strikes. Fragmentation thus provokes a counter‐reaction from workers, who scale up everyday resistance strategies, producing the potential for new spatialities of solidarity. It is argued that this everyday practice of workers could become the basis for more political spatial organizing strategies within the palm oil global production network (GPN).