Praveen Jha-Labour Condition in Rural India

Rural Wage Employment in
Developing Countries
There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the

developing world, particularly in Africa. This book aims to fill this gap by bring-
ing together a group of contributors who boast substantial field experience
researching rural wage employment in various developing countries. It provides
critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to rural/agrarian development,
and analysis of agrarian change and rural transformations from a long-term
perspective.
This book challenges the notion that rural areas in low- and middle-income
countries are dominated by self-employment. It purports that this conventional
view is largely due to the application of conceptual frameworks and statistical con-
ventions that are ill-equipped to capture labour market participation. The contribu-
tions in this book offer a variety of methodological lessons for the study of rural
labour markets, focusing in particular on the use of mixed methods in micro-level
field research, and more emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity.
The emphasis on context, history, and specific configurations of power rela-
tions affecting rural labour market outcomes are key and reoccurring features of
this book. This analysis will help readers think about policy options to improve
the quantity and quality of rural wage employment, their impact on the poorest
rural people, and their political feasibility in each context.
Carlos Oya is Reader in Political Economy of Development, Department of

Development Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK.
Nicola Pontara is Head of South Sudan World Bank Office, South Sudan.
The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this work are entirely
those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World
Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the governments they represent.
Routledge ISS Studies in Rural Livelihoods
Editorial Board: A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (Trent University), Saturnino M.
Borras Jr. (Institute of Social Studies), Cristóbal Kay (Chair) (Institute of Social
Studies) and Max Spoor (Institute of Social Studies).
Routledge and the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, the Netherlands
have come together to publish a new book series in rural livelihoods. The series
will include themes such as land policies and land rights, water issues, food policy
and politics, rural poverty, agrarian transformation, migration, rural-oriented social
movements, rural conflict and violence, among others. All books in the series will
offer rigorous, empirically grounded, cross-national comparative and inter-regional
analysis. The books will be theoretically stimulating, but will also be accessible to
policy practitioners and civil society activists.
1 Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization

Perspectives from developing and transition countries
Edited by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Saturnino M. Borras Jr. and
Cristóbal Kay
2 Peasants and Globalization

Political economy, agrarian transformation and development
Edited by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay
3 The Political Economy of Rural Livelihoods in Transition Economies

Land, peasants and rural poverty in transition
Edited by Max Spoor
4 Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Edited by Dominique Caouette and Sarah Turner
5 Water, Environmental Security and Sustainable Rural Development

Conflict and cooperation in Central Eurasia
Edited by Murat Arsel and Max Spoor
6 Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa

Impact on livelihoods
Edited by Paul Hebinck and Charlie Shackleton
7 Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy
Livelihoods in pastoralist communities
John G. McPeak, Peter D. Little and Cheryl R. Doss
8 Public Policy and Agricultural Development

Edited by Ha-Joon Chang
9 Social Conflict, Economic Development and the Extractive Industry

Evidence from South America
Edited by Anthony Bebbington
10 The Ecotourism–Extraction Nexus

Political economies and rural realities of (un)comfortable bedfellows
Edited by Bram Büscher and Veronica Davidov
11 Rural Livelihoods, Regional Economies and Processes of Change

Edited by Deborah Sick
12 Rural Development and the Construction of New Markets

Edited by Paul Hebinck, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg and Sergio Schneider
13 The Political Ecology of Agrofuels

Edited by Kristina Dietz, Bettina Engels, Oliver Pye and
Achim Brunnengräber
14 Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries

Theory, evidence, and policy
Edited by Carlos Oya and Nicola Pontara
This page intentionally left blank
Rural Wage Employment in
Developing Countries
Theory, evidence, and policy
Edited by
Carlos Oya and
Nicola Pontara
First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 selection and editorial matter, Carlos Oya and Nicola Pontara;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rural wage employment in developing countries: theory, evidence and
policy / [edited by] Carlos Oya, Nicola Pontara.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Manpower policy, Rural–Developing countries. 2. Labor market–
Developing countries. 3. Rural development–Developing countries.
I. Oya, Carlos. II. Pontara, Nicola.
HD5710.85.D44R874 2015
331.109173'4–dc23 2014047691
ISBN: 978-0-415-68649-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-73508-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
List of figures xi
List of tables xii
Notes on contributors xiv
Acknowledgements xvii
List of abbreviations xix
1 Introduction: understanding rural wage employment in

developing countries 1
CARLOS OYA AND NICOLA PONTARA
1 Introduction 1
2 Putting employment back into the poverty reduction policy
debates 5
3 The challenge of capturing rural wage labour in developing
countries: invisible wage workers? 11
4 Rethinking theory: towards a political economy of rural labour
markets in poorer countries 17
5 Key features of rural labour markets and contemporary
struggles of rural labour 21
6 Concluding remarks 26
2 Rural labour markets and agricultural wage employment in

semi-arid Africa: evidence from Senegal and Mauritania 37
CARLOS OYA
1 Introduction 37
2 History and methodology: an account of the neglect of rural
wage employment in Senegal and Mauritania 39
3 Emerging evidence about the significance and the types of wage
labour relations in rural areas 46
4 Key aspects of rural wage employment in Senegal and
Mauritania 54
viii Contents
3 Lifting the blinkers: a new view of power, diversity, and
poverty in Mozambican rural labour markets 69
CHRISTOPHER CRAMER, CARLOS OYA, AND JOHN SENDER
1 Introduction 69
2 Survey rationale and methodology 71
3 Variations in methods of pay: monthly, daily, and piece-work
pay 75
4 Variations in rates of pay for agricultural work 80
5 Variations in payment rates for non-agricultural work 82
6 A classification of jobs and payment methods 82
7 The political economy of labour control 88
8 Some characteristics of the poorest workers and their labour
market prospects 90
9 Conclusion 92
4 Caught in the grip of the market: past and present of rural

wage workers in South Africa 101
NICOLAS PONS-VIGNON
1 Introduction 101
2 A history of violence: the formation of the rural proletariat in
South Africa 103
3 Post-apartheid policy and invisibility of rural wage workers in
South Africa 107
4 From violence to economic coercion: the case of forestry 112
5 Conclusion 121
5 Disguised employment? Labour market surveys, migration

and rural employment in Southern Africa 128
DEBORAH JOHNSTON
1 Introduction 128
2 Labour market and household surveys in Southern Africa 129
3 Limitations of surveys in assessing employment and migration 131
4 The changing context of migration and employment 135
5 Alternative surveys of agricultural migrant employment 137
6 Conclusions 139
6 Tanzania’s rural labour markets: the missing link between

development and poverty reduction 144
BERND E.T. MUELLER
1 Introduction 144
2 Taking stock: conventional wisdom on rural labour markets in
Tanzania 145
Contents ix
3 An alternative method 149
4 Revealing the true extent of labour market relations in rural
Tanzania: a case study of the West Usambara Mountains 151
5 Policy conclusions for poverty reduction and rural
development 160
7 The policy neglect of rural wage employment: the cases of

Rwanda and Ethiopia 171
NICOLAS PETIT AND MATTEO RIZZO
1 Introduction 171
2 Who are the poorest? Conflicting evidence on rural poverty 171
3 People working for other people: key characteristics and
sources of vulnerability 191
4 The policy neglect of rural labour markets 195
8 Labour conditions in rural India: reflections on continuity

and change 205
PRAVEEN JHA
1 Introduction 205
2 Data pointers from large-scale surveys 206
3 Insights from field studies 214
4 Conclusion 222
9 Rural households’ social reproduction in China’s agrarian

transition: wage employment and family farming 230
QIAN FORREST ZHANG
1 Introduction 230
2 Historical background 231
3 China’s transition to capitalism and the growth of rural wage
employment 233
4 The dynamics of wage employment and the circulation of
labour 241
5 Wage work and socio-economic differentiation 247
6 Conclusions 249
10 Structuring rural labour markets: a case study from North

East Brazil 254
BEN SELWYN
1 Introduction 254
2 Emergence of the grape branch and its labour force 256
x Contents
3 Structuring the rural labour market: containing labour’s
developmental gains 264
4 Summary, conclusions, and policy implications 271
11 Employment instability and the restructuring of rural and

rural–urban labour markets in two Latin American export
industries 276
SUTTI ORTIZ
1 Introduction 276
2 The growth and transformation of labour markets in Colombia’s
coffee industry 278
3 Lemons, a major fresh fruit export industry in Tucumán,
northern Argentina 286
4 Conclusion 298
12 The ties made in the harvest: Nicaraguan farm worker

networks in Costa Rica’s agricultural exports 305
SANG LEE
1 Introduction 305
2 Migrant social networks 306
3 Costa Rica’s agricultural development and supporting
institutions 308
4 The wide and beaten path into Costa Rica coffee farms 309
5 Entering the exclusive non-traditional export sector 317
6 Conclusion 323
13 Improving the functioning of rural labour markets and

working conditions: towards a policy agenda 329
CARLOS OYA AND NICOLA PONTARA
1 Introduction 329
2 Policy implications 330
Index 351
Figures
Figures
3.1 Possession scores by type of job in agriculture 92
6.1 Share of kibarua incomes as percentage of total EHH income 159
Map
2.1 Fieldwork areas in Mauritania and Senegal 44
Tables
1.1 Employment status: key variables for selected regional

samples 8
2.1 Share of different types of labour in total labour inputs, by
category of large-middle farmer in Senegal, 1998 48
2.2 Trends in agricultural wage rates by type of wage labour
arrangement in rural Senegal, 1998–2012 51
2.3 Payment modalities for agricultural wage labour by village in
Mauritania (2004) 53
2.4 Occupation and socio-economic status in rural Mauritania
(2004) 55
3.1 Responses to questions about wage labour at household and
individual level 72
3.2 Sample distribution by province and employer category 74
3.3 Sample distribution by province category of non-agricultural
labour 74
3.4 Assets and education compared: MRLS and IAF surveys 75
3.5 Wage payment methods for agricultural and non-agricultural
workers, by type of employer 77
3.6 Wage payment methods by size of establishment (agricultural
workers) 78
3.7 Daily pay for weeding by selected large- and mid-scale
employers in Nampula 79
3.8 Payment rates by size of agricultural employer 81
3.9 Piece-rates on a cashew-nut farm for harvesting (Nampula) 82
3.10 Monthly wages of non-agricultural rural workers 83
3.11 Better and worse jobs: payment methods and rates 84
3.12 Employment tenure and other work conditions, by types of job 85
3.13 Workers by employer categories and job types 87
3.14 The share of different types of household and worker in ‘good’
and ‘bad’ jobs 91
4.1 Key data on SA agriculture: comparison between 2007, 2002,
and 1993 in R’000 at current prices (2007) 109
4.2 Number of workers employed by large forestry growers (2012) 114
Tables xiii
5.1 Surveys that include labour force information in Botswana,
Lesotho, and Swaziland (1993–2012) 130
5.2 Temporary work permits issued in South Africa 135
6.1 Average annual per capita EHH incomes and acreages across
quintiles 152
6.2 Gender ratio across different types of wage work 155
6.3 Distribution of education across different types of wage work 156
6.4 Agricultural production and wage work 156
6.5 Wage work and landholdings 157
6.6 Business activities and wage work 157
7.1 Comparing Ethiopia’s and Rwanda’s development indicators 173
7.2 Official statistics on status in employment in Ethiopia 174
7.3 Overview of the importance of wage employment in four
regions of Ethiopia, by poverty status (2000s) 176
7.4 Official statistics on status in employment in Rwanda (1996
and 2005–06) 178
7.5 Population shares, poverty and extreme poverty classified by
the main household activity 180
7.6 Poverty categories in the Rwanda PPA 182
7.7 Overview of the importance of wage employment in Rwanda,
by poverty status (2000s) 183
7.8 Ethiopian HICES questionnaire: employment-related
questions 187
7.9 Ethiopian HICES questionnaire: income-related questions 188
7.10 HEA template: wealth breakdown 189
7.11 HEA template: sources of income 190
7.12 Heterogeneity of rates and modalities of pay in rural labour
markets: one example (Rwamiko district, Rwanda, 2007) 193
8.1 Composition of rural workforce in millions and percentages 210
8.2 Occupational status of rural workforce in millions and
percentages 211
8.3 The growth rate of real wages at 1999–2000 prices in rural
areas 214
10.1 Farm market orientation and operations performed per
cultivation cycle 258
10.2 Grape production costs per hectare per harvest by market
orientation (2002–03) 258
10.3 Capital and labour intensity in agriculture: productivity,
accumulation, employment outcomes 260
Contributors
Christopher Cramer is Professor of Political Economy of Development at

SOAS, University of London, Department of Development Studies. He
teaches on the MSc Development Studies and MSc Violence, Conflict and
Development. His research interests include rural labour markets, African
industrial policy, and violent conflict/transitions to peace. His publications
include Civil War is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Develop-
ing Countries (C. Hurst, 2006); and, together with other authors in this
volume (Johnston, Mueller, Oya, Sender) the research report ‘Fairtrade,
Employment and Poverty Reduction in Ethiopia and Uganda’ (www.ftepr.
org/publications).
Praveen Jha is Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and
Planning (CESP), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University,
New Delhi, India. He is currently Honorary Visiting Professor at Rhodes Uni-
versity, Grahamstown, South Africa, and at the African Institute for Agrarian
Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe. He is one of the editors of the journal Agrarian
South: Journal of Political Economy. His broad area of research and teaching
is political economy of development, with an emphasis on labour, agriculture,
natural resources, public finance, education, and history of economic thought.
Deborah Johnston is Reader in Development Economics at SOAS, University

of London, Department of Economics. She has worked on sub-Saharan Africa
for over 20 years, conducting research on rural labour markets, poverty,
welfare, migration, and land, and published widely in various academic jour-
nals. She is the author of Economics and HIV: The Sickness of Economics
(Routledge, 2013). She is co-editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change.
Sang Lee received her doctorate in the Department of Environmental Science,
Policy and Management from the University of California, Berkeley where
she conducted the field research for the basis of the chapter presented in this
volume. She currently serves as an Agriculture Development Professional in
New Delhi, India. Most recently she has worked on the design and implemen-
tation of food security development programmes in Africa and South and
South East Asia.
Contributors xv
Bernd E.T. Mueller holds a PhD in Development Economics from SOAS, Univer-
sity of London, as well as an MSc in Economics from the University of Münster,
Germany. He is currently Rural Employment Expert in the Decent Rural
Employment Team at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United
Nations (FAO), based in Rome, where he works on promoting the creation of
rural jobs and improving working conditions, particularly for youth and women.
Before joining FAO he worked as a Research Officer at SOAS, where he
managed field research of the ‘Fair Trade, Employment, and Poverty Reduction’
study in rural Ethiopia and Uganda. He has extensive experience in the field of
rural development and rural labour markets, particularly in East Africa.
Sutti Ortiz is Emerita Professor at Boston University. She has written exten-
sively about risk and the decision-making process of peasants and small
farmers, predominantly in Latin America. Since 1984 her research has
focused on agricultural labourers in export industries, with particular atten-
tion to modes of control and labourers’ bargaining power. She is the author of
Harvesting Coffee, Bargaining Wages: Rural Labor Markets in Colombia,
1975–1990 and has published widely in various academic journals.
Carlos Oya is Reader in Political Economy of Development, Development
Studies Department, at SOAS, University of London. He has published
widely on various aspects of agrarian change, agrarian capitalism, rural
poverty, and labour markets, mostly on Africa, from an agrarian political
economy perspective. Current research interests also include the impact of
certified standards on agricultural wage employment, and methodological
questions on the political economy of large-scale land deals in Africa. He is
co-editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change.
Nicolas Petit holds an MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, University of
London. He currently works as Senior Consultant on Sustainable Develop-
ment with a focus on agricultural commodities. Nicolas has worked for the
European Commission, United Nations and various non-governmental organ-
izations. Until recently he was the Director of Standards and Assurance at the
Better Cotton Initiative.
Nicolas Pons-Vignon is a Senior Researcher at the School of Economic & Busi-
ness Sciences (SEBS), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South
Africa. He holds a PhD from EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris). Nicolas’ research focuses on labour markets, economic
policy, and the role of the state in economic development. He has been the
editor of the Global Labour Column since its inception in 2009. Nicolas initi-
ated the African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics
(APORDE) in 2007, taught in South Africa, which he directed for seven years
before joining the Scientific Committee.
Nicola Pontara holds a PhD in Development Economics from SOAS, Univer-
sity of London. Nicola worked in the Ministry of Planning and Finance in
xvi Contributors
Maputo, Mozambique, as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow before
moving to the World Bank in Washington, DC. At the World Bank his work
and research interests have included social protection and labour, poverty,
labour markets, and political economy of development. He is currently the
Head of the World Bank South Sudan Country Office based in Juba, South
Sudan.
Matteo Rizzo is a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London and works across
the Departments of Economics and Development Studies. His main research
interests include informal labour and globalization, urbanization, and the
political economy of agrarian change. He is currently completing a mono-
graph entitled Taken for a Ride: Neoliberalism, Informal Labour and Trans-
port in an African Metropolis, 1983–2010 (Routledge).
Ben Selwyn is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Development
Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Workers, State and
Development in Brazil: Powers of Labour, Chains of Value (2012) and The
Global Development Crisis (2014).
John Sender is Professor Emeritus at the Economics Department, SOAS, Uni-
versity of London. He has designed surveys and conducted fieldwork in many
rural areas of Africa and Asia over a period of almost 40 years, usually focus-
ing on the development of labour markets and rural poverty. His publications
include important references for the study of capitalist development and
labour markets in Africa such as The Development of Capitalism in Africa
(Methuen, 1986) and Poverty, Class and Gender in Rural Africa: A Tanza-
nian Case Study (Routledge, 1990), both co-authored with Sheila Smith.
Qian Forrest Zhang holds a PhD from Yale University, and is currently Asso-
ciate Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore
Management University. His research on China’s political agrarian economy
aims at developing a new understanding of the dynamics of agrarian change
in China, covering topics such as accumulation, dispossession, and differenti-
ation, through the lens of commodification processes.
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of a long, sometimes challenging, but ultimately

rewarding process. We had to struggle with multiple commitments, time pres-
sures and many late nights to make sure the collection saw the light. This
endeavour would not have been possible without the dedicated and enthusiastic
engagement of the contributors. We thank them deeply for their patience during
the many rounds of revisions, sometimes with long time lags in between. We
also thank them for being flexible and accepting suggestions to ensure that dif-
ferent contributions – despite the diversity of views, disciplinary backgrounds,
and areas of interest – would result in a coherent body of work. We would like
to single out the staff at Routledge, particularly Natalie Tomlinson, who pro-
vided the initial push, and Lisa Thomson, who oversaw the final stages of this
project. They made this book possible by persistently but patiently chasing us,
encouraging our work, and making sure the book would meet the high standards
of Routledge. A special thanks to them. Encouragement, enthusiasm, and
patience were also the key characteristics of the editors of the Routledge ISS
Studies in Rural Livelihoods, colleagues and friends Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Jun
Borras, and Cristóbal Kay. We are particularly grateful to Helena Pérez-Niño
and Tom Muddimer for their assistance, commitment, and enthusiasm. They are
not only brilliant research assistants but also emerging contributors to the study
of rural labour relations in Africa.
This book is a special tribute to the longstanding scholarly work of John B.
Sender, who has encouraged us (and indeed some of the contributors) to pursue
the study of capitalism in Africa and to investigate the nature, extent, and signifi-
cance of rural wage employment in developing countries. John’s intellectual
integrity and valuable academic contributions over the years have been a con-
stant source of support and inspiration. For all that and also his feedback on early
drafts of the introduction and conclusions, we are deeply thankful to him.
Finally, this book is dedicated to the millions of rural wage workers who eke
out a living, with little or no assets, by using their labour power and dignity.
These workers represent very vulnerable segments of the rural population, yet
they continue to be under-recorded in official statistics. Moreover, the labour
markets where they seek their survival on a daily basis are often ignored by
many researchers and policy makers. This book wanted to tell their stories: it
xviii Acknowledgements
contains evidence about their life and work, and reflections about their prospects
for a better standard of living. The faces, voices and names of many respondents
who, despite their conditions, patiently and happily sat through long question-
naires and open interviews, remain extremely vivid in our memory and in those
of all the contributors to this book.
The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this work are
entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the
World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the governments they
represent.
Abbreviations
AgriBusiness SA Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa

ANSD Agence Nationale pour la Statistique et la Démographie
(Senegal’s National Statistics Agency)
ATC Asociación Tucumana del Citrus (Tucumán Citrus Association)
BCEA Basic Conditions of Employment Act 1997
BSAC British South African Company
BSP Bahujan Samajwadi Party
CAJ Juazeiro Agricultural Cooperative
CBEs commune-and-brigade enterprises
CDHLCP Commissariat for Human Rights and Fight against Poverty
CESP Centre for Economic Studies and Planning
CODEVASF Commisão do Vale do São Francisco (Commission for São
Francisco Valley)
COSATU Congress of South African Trade Unions
CSA Central Statistics Agency (Ethiopia)
CWIQ Core Welfare Indicator Questionnaire Survey
DAFF Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (South Africa)
DARE De-Agrarianization and Rural Employment
DfID UK Department for International Development
DoL Department of Labour (South Africa)
DPRU Development Policy Research Unit (South Africa)
DWAF Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (South Africa)
EC European Commission
EHH extended household
EICV2 and Enquête Intégrale sur les Conditions de Vie des ménages 2 and
EICV3 3 (Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey in Rwanda)
ELP economically linked person
EMPBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agrícola (Brazilian
Agricultural Research Entreprise)
EPCV National Household Survey (Mauritania, 2004)
EV El-Vejha
FATRE Federación Argentina de Trabajadores Rurales y Estibadores
(Argentinian Federation of Rural Workers and Stevedores)
xx Abbreviations
FAWU Food and Allied Workers Union
FCFA CFA francs (Senegal currency denomination)
FDI foreign direct investment
FDRE Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
FETAPE Federação de Trabalhadores Agricolas de Pernambuco
(Pernambuco Rural Workers Federation)
FNCC Federación Nacional de Cafeteros Colombianos (Federation of
Colombian Coffee Producers)
FTEPR Fair Trade Employment and Poverty Reduction project
FWP Food for Work Programme
GBOS Gambia Bureau of Statistics
GDM Grandes Domaines de Mauritanie
GDP gross domestic product
GFI gross farming income
GIRM Government of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania
GPs Growers Processors
GTP Growth and Transformation Plan (Ethiopia)
HEA Household Economy Approach
HHs households
HICES Household Income Consumption and Expenditure Survey
HIMO Haute Intensité de Main d’Oeuvre (High Labour Intensity)
HR human resource (management)
IAF Inquérito dos Agregados Familiares (Household Survey,
Mozambique)
ICAFE Instituto del Café (Coffee Institute of Coffee, Colombia)
ILFS Integrated Labour Force Surveys
ILO International Labour Organization
INDEC Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censo (National Institute of
Statistics and Census, Argentina)
INEC Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de la República de
Costa Rica (Costa Rica’s National Institute of Statistics and
Census)
IOM International Office for Migration
IRCA Immigration Reform and Control Act
IUF International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant,
Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations
KILM Key Indicators of the Labour Market
KM Keur Mour
LFS labour force survey
LICs low-income countries
LRA Labour Relations Act 1995
LSMS Living Standards Measurement Surveys
M Maloti (Lesotho currency denomination)
MDG Millennium Development Goals
MENA Middle East and North Africa
Abbreviations xxi
MERG Macroeconomic Research Group (South Africa)
MGNREGA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
MGNREGS Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
MOA Ministry of Agrticulture (China)
MOLSA Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (Ethiopia)
MRLS Mozambique Rural Labour Market Survey
MT Mozambican Meticais (Old)
NAC new agricultural country
NAP National Agricultural Policy
NBS National Bureau of Statistics (China)
NGO non-government organization
NLFS National Labour Force Survey
NSS National Sample Survey (India)
NSSO National Sample Survey Organization
NTAXs non-traditional agricultural exports
NUM National Union of Mineworkers
OE Ould Egueile
PANI Patronato Nacional de Infancia (National Childhood
Organization)
PASDEP Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty
PPA Participatory Poverty Assessment
PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
PRSP-I Rwanda’s Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
PSNP Productive Safety Net Programme
PT Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, Brazil)
QLFS Quarterly Labour Force Surveys
QUIBB Questionário de Indicadores Básicos de Bem-Estar (Core Welfare
Indicators Questionnaire Survey, Mozambique)
R$ Real (Brazilian currency denomination)
RIGA Rural Income Generating Activities (programme)
RLE Rural Labour Enquiries
RLMS Rural Labour Market Survey 2004 (Mauritania)
RNFE rural non-farm employment
RSA Republic of South Africa
RWU Rural Worker Union
SAFCA South African Forestry Contractors Association
SENALDE Servicio Nacional de Empleo (National Service of Employment)
SF São Francisco
SGRY Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana
SINTAF Sindicato Nacional de Trabalhadores Agro-Pecuários e
Florestais (National Union of Agricultural and Forestry Workers)
SME small and medium entreprises
SNNPR Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region
SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
SPAT Strategic Plan for Agricultural Transformation
xxii Abbreviations
StatsSA Statistics South Africa
STR Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workers Union,
Brazil)
TIA Trabalho de Inquérito Agrícola (Agricultural Survey,
Mozambique)
TNC transnational company
TVEs township and village enterprises
TZS Tanzania shilling (currency denomination)
UATRE Unión Argentina de Trabajadores Rurales y Estibadores
(Argentinian Union of Rural Workers and Stevedores)
UM Mauritanian Uguiya (currency denomination)
UNECA United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
UNIDO United Nations Industrial Development Organization
WDR World Development Report
WUM West Usambara Mountains
ZAR South African Rand (currency denomination)
1 Introduction
Understanding rural wage employment
in developing countries
Carlos Oya and Nicola Pontara
1 Introduction
This book makes an important contribution to the literature on development
studies and the political economy of development by filling a considerable
research gap. There has been remarkably little research on rural labour markets
and on rural wage labour in sub-Saharan Africa (henceforth Africa), Latin
America, and Asia.1 The dearth of evidence concerns in particular Africa, where
the study of labour relations and, more specifically, rural wage employment is
remarkably rare. This volume, therefore, includes substantial material on Africa.
Publications on rural poverty, particularly in low-income countries (LICs),
continue to spill a great deal of ink on proposals to improve the lives and pro-
spects of small producers (smallholder farmers), self-employed workers and
micro-entrepreneurs. By contrast, not much attention has been paid to the fate of
those who lie at the bottom of production chains as wage labourers, or those who
eke out a living by combining different kinds of economic activities to survive,
including both wage and self-employment. Theory, evidence, and policy have
been particularly silent about seasonal and casual agricultural wage workers, a
segment of the rural working class that is not adequately captured in official sta-
tistics but that remains central to poverty reduction strategies, since a large pro-
portion of rural wage workers tend to be extremely poor (World Bank 2007).2
As a result, the policy debate on the constraints to and the opportunities for
expanding wage labour demand, the levels of real wages, and the prevailing
working conditions, has been squeezed out. Drawing from a broad literature as
well as the contributions presented in this volume, this chapter explores some of
the reasons for this neglect, especially how ideology and theoretical preferences
have shaped a poverty agenda which does not feature the employment question
at its centre.
1.1 Methodological approach and aims

The heterogeneity, fluidity, and context-specificity of wage labour relations in
developing countries calls for a comparative approach where common themes
and specific situations are addressed and analysed to improve our understanding
2 C. Oya and N. Pontara
of the place, nature, and dynamics of rural labour markets in processes of eco-
nomic development. The principle that ‘work’ and wage labour is a social rela-
tion (and that labour should not be regarded as a commodity) underpins the
contributions in this book.3 This principle calls for an interdisciplinary approach
to rural labour markets and wage labour relations whereby the material, social,
political, and cultural dimensions interact without a-priori conceptual hierar-
chies. The authors in this volume come from a variety of disciplinary back-
grounds – economics, anthropology, political economy – but most of them share
common characteristics: critical perspectives drawn from classical political
economy, heterodox development economics, and economic anthropology; a
critical assessment of the orthodox, especially the economics mainstream’s,
approach to rural/agrarian issues, but also of small-farmer-centred neo-populist
traditions; a commitment to historical analysis and appropriate contextualization;
and the aim to analyse social and economic ‘change’ and transformations in the
countryside through the lens of political economy. A fundamental tenet of this
approach is that the process of accumulation, the different trajectories of capital-
ist development (thus the expansion of agricultural commodity production,
labour migration, emerging industrialization, and so on), and the range of inter-
ventions by state and other non-state agencies during these processes, are central
to the formation of rural labour markets and the conditions of labour. Several
chapters document such historical processes, their peculiarities and consequences
for rural labour market formation in each context, e.g. Pons-Vignon on South
Africa, Oya on Senegambia and Mauritania, Cramer et al. on Mozambique, Ortiz
on Colombia and Argentina, Jha on India, Selwyn on North East Brazil, and
Zhang on China. In each case, the configuration of factors leading to emergence
of rural labour markets or new employment dynamics may be unique. However,
there are also common stylized facts such as the process of rural social differ-
entiation, an increasing reliance on wage labour opportunities for survival
(whether in rural or urban areas), population mobility in search for jobs, the
central role of the state in shaping the trajectories of capitalist development and
the conditions of labour, and the role of external factors through investment and
trade.
The selection of case studies and research material also responds to other
imperatives. First, the aim here is to showcase the work of scholars who have
substantially contributed by generating solid field evidence on rural wage
employment in different parts of the developing world, but especially in Africa.
All the authors have extensive field research experience in rural areas and most
on rural labour issues. Thus a key feature of all the case studies presented in this
volume is that none of them are primarily or only based on data analysis of sec-
ondary sources, e.g. national household survey datasets, which feature so promi-
nently in the existing research on poverty and on the rural non-farm economy. It
is a contention of this book that existing secondary sources and their methods of
data collection are inadequate to capture the incidence, particularities, and
dynamics of rural labour markets. The contributors to this volume have all con-
ducted high-quality fieldwork within a variety of disciplines and methods,
Introduction 3
though many of them are associated with the interdisciplinary political economy
tradition. Second, given the paucity of relevant research and the high quality of
work done by emerging scholars in the field, the desire here is also to encourage
the efforts of younger researchers who have demonstrated a sustained interest
and commitment to research on labour relations in developing countries (in this
volume, Mueller, Petit, Pons-Vignon, Rizzo, Selwyn, and Lee).
1.2 A primer on key notions: ‘wage’, ‘employment’, and ‘rural’

At the outset, it is important to provide an introductory discussion of some terms
that are widely used in this book. By ‘employment’, or what the World Bank has
recently called ‘jobs’ (World Bank 2012), we mean ‘work performed for pay or
profit’, which can be remunerated in a variety of ways, in cash or in kind. This is
what is often considered a ‘market oriented’ job, although the employers can be
any individual, private, or public entity (Belchamber and Schetagne 2013). To
be sure, there are many types of work that are not explicitly remunerated in any
way, but the boundaries between existing categories of ‘work’ are sometimes
blurred, especially in the rural areas of poor countries. What the ILO now calls
‘unpaid trainee work’ (Belchamber and Schetagne 2013), for instance unpaid
apprenticeships, could also be regarded as forms of employment, since the skills
and knowledge acquired by a trainee could be classified as a ‘wage’.4
Moreover, the notions of ‘wage employment’, and more generally the ‘wage
contract’, are published in the ILO statistical conventions where an employee–
employer relationship is assumed. However, as argued by many of the contributors
to this book, the application of this concept to rural areas characterized by wide-
spread poverty, casual work, and occupation multiplicity, is not straightforward.
The interpretation of these terms and their use in statistical conventions constitute a
serious methodological challenge. Swindell (1985, 95) notes, for example, that ‘the
reluctance to study African labour employed by Africans may be influenced by
the fact that it is not the easiest of jobs to document and separate out day-by-day
the various types of hired labour’. Indeed, the categories constituting employment
status (e.g. paid employee, own-account worker, employer, unpaid family worker,
and so on) are based on the ‘labour force approach’, which is usually linked to
notions of wage employment that are primarily relevant for developed countries
and designed to contribute to national account statistics and unemployment figures
(Standing 2006; Breman and van der Linden 2014).5 In this book, ‘wage employ-
ment’ refers to any form of work for another person or entity in exchange for any
kind of compensation, whether in kind (including land, for example) or in cash. If
the ‘employer’ provides all or the bulk of the means of production (i.e. land,
working capital, equipment, seeds, and so on) the labour relation is characterized
by a wage-contract even if in a disguised form, e.g. as labour tenancy or sharecrop-
ping (see Banaji 2010). In this case, a wage worker only has his/her labour power
to offer and does not own the means of production required to carry out the job. In
contrast, if a person carries out an activity using her/his own means of production
and his/her own labour to provide a service or sell a good and get something in
return, that would normally be described as self-employment, although it is always
necessary to ask probing questions to investigate the possibility of disguised wage
employment.
The notion or ‘rurality’ also poses methodological problems. The definition of
‘rural’ is seldom discussed in depth, including in studies that focus on the RNFE
(rural non-farm economy). First, the boundary between the rural and urban differs
widely when demographic criteria are used. For example, the cut-off point ranges
from 200 inhabitants in Denmark to 50,000 in Japan (Dirven et al. 2011). Within
Africa, two neighbouring countries like Senegal and Guinea differ substantially in
terms of the population cut-off point used to define urbanity (10,000 in the former
and 1,500 in the latter). Second, in the real world, the boundaries between ‘rural’
and ‘urban’ are not always well defined. Understanding socio-economic dynamics
may require an analysis of rural–urban interactions, especially in contexts where
household fluidity, workers’ mobility, and ‘footloose labour’ are predominant
(Breman 1996). The notion of ‘rural’ may not be particularly useful in these con-
texts. Third, debates on the definition of ‘rurality’ cut across various disciplines
where the research interests, the themes treated and the questions posed are very
different. There is obvious tension, therefore, between simple statistically driven
definitions/concepts, such as population size and density, and conceptually driven
measures, including subjective indices and socio-economic classifications which
are more complex and aim to encompass a range of factors, e.g. employment,
population, migration, housing conditions, land use, and remoteness (Rousseau
1995). In some Latin American contexts rural boundaries are particularly blurred
and debates over the meaning and future of ‘ruralities’ thrive, in connection with
ongoing processes of ‘de-agrarianization’ (Kay 2009). Criteria of employment or
‘principal’ occupation are also complicated by the increasing fluidity of labour rela-
tions straddling the urban–rural divide, as argued by Lerche (2010) in the case of
India. While multiple occupations can be found in ‘rural’ areas, typically ‘rural’
occupations like agricultural wage employment may attract urban-based workers,
for example in Latin America, as shown by Ortiz in this volume in relation to both
coffee and citrus harvesters who live in towns and cities not too distant from the
farms. Zhang, in this volume, also illustrates the need to straddle rural–urban
divides in China to understand employment dynamics in both rural and urban areas.
This book does not opt for a single particular definition of ‘rural’. The authors
of different chapters rely on the notions of rurality that they regard as most
useful in the various contexts they analyse. The main reason the term ‘rural’ has
been adopted in the title is that, despite a primary focus on agricultural wage
employment across chapters, it is impossible to analyse employment in ‘rural’
areas without an account of the wide range of forms of non-farm employment,
which are assuming increasing importance in people’s survival, so several
authors in this volume also address or even focus on non-farm employment in
their diversity (Zhang, Jha, Cramer et al., Petit and Rizzo, Lee, Ortiz). Although
some chapters discuss and provide evidence on non-agricultural wage employ-
ment (Cramer et al., Lee, Petit and Rizzo, Jha, Zhang, Ortiz), the primary focus
remains on wage employment in agriculture.
Introduction 5
2 Putting employment back into the poverty reduction policy
debates
A key message of this book is that for a better understanding of poverty – and of
ways to eradicate it – it is necessary to gain a better understanding of employ-
ment relations. More specifically, the study of the nature and evolution of rural
labour markets is highly relevant for the analysis of poverty trends and determi-
nants; and for the formulation of policy. More attention to those who totally or
partially depend on rural wages for their survival is also necessary to understand
and characterize broader processes of socio-economic transformations and the
development of capitalism, both at the global and local levels. The process of
rural labour market formation and the expansion of wage employment generally,
and in rural areas in particular, have historically been defining features of the
development of capitalism, even if universal dependence on wage employment
is not a necessary condition for capitalism to expand.6 The evolution of rural
wage employment should therefore be analysed in light of long-term uneven
processes of capitalist transitions.
2.1 The neglect of wage employment in mainstream poverty agendas

A number of factors have contributed to the underestimation of the dynamism of
rural labour markets in developing countries, especially in Africa but also, on a
massive scale, in China, particularly for non-farm wage employment in ‘informal’
activities (Huang 2013). First, few studies have focused on analysing the question
of labour and working conditions in the process of economic development, focus-
ing instead on economic growth, health and education as the key drivers of
poverty reduction, partly because dominant discourses and institutional funding
have prioritized these questions (Wuyts 2011; Amsden 2012; Chang 2010). In
other words, in most mainstream accounts ‘poverty’ has been divorced from
‘labour’. As a result, a striking imbalance has emerged between the expanding
agenda on poverty and the paucity of evidence generated on employment, what
Amsden calls ‘jobs dementia’ (Amsden 2010).7 Wuyts (2011, 4) argues that:
the growth–poverty reduction nexus cannot be taken as an axiom, not even

within the confines of a single country, let alone the purpose of cross-
country comparisons. Instead . . . how well working people fare depends not
only on productivity growth, but also on the extent to which it translates into
growth in labour earnings and on whether or not this goes hand in hand with
employment growth.8
Second, the lack of attention to rural wage employment is reinforced by the con-
ventional wisdom that most wage employment is created in urban areas,9 espe-
cially during processes of industrialization and urbanization; that in developing
countries – again, particularly in Africa – rural labour markets are either absent
or very thin and rural wage labour is negligible (Barrett et al. 2005; Binswanger
et al. 1989; Mellor 2014; Valdés et al. 2010). This belief is particularly strong in
relation to agricultural wage employment (Mwamadzingo 2003; FAO et al.
2005). Thus, even the emerging mainstream literature that does acknowledge the
importance of rural livelihood diversification and the rise of off-farm income
sources (Barrett et al. 2005, 15) asserts the ‘limited place of off-farm agricultural
wage labour in rural African livelihoods’.10
Reardon (1997), in one of the most widely cited articles on the emerging
RNFE, reviews a large body of literature on off-farm employment in Africa and
concludes, for example, that agricultural wage income is quantitatively not very
significant as a source of income compared to non-agricultural income sources.
However, he concedes that there is a substantial knowledge gap on hired labour
markets in the ‘rural nonfarm sector’. The relatively low share of farm wages in
Reardon’s findings does not necessarily suggest a low incidence of agricultural
wage employment, especially among the poor, but may reflect the fact that agri-
cultural wages are well below wage and non-wage earnings in other sectors of
rural economies. It also reflects the fact that remittances from migrants employed
as agricultural wage labourers are rarely reported as agricultural wage income in
the standard household surveys and simply appear as an income category without
reference to whether wage or self-employment are the key sources. Moreover,
the relative importance of agricultural wage employment cannot be simply
implied from imprecise estimates of income shares. Accessing a casual job at a
critical time in a year – the ‘hungry season’ when food stocks run out, harvests
are not ready and food prices are at their peak – can make the difference between
the ability to feed oneself or starving, even if the share of farm wages in total
imputed income in a year is low.
A reason for the neglect of the most insecure and poorly paid forms of rural
wage labour is that often this activity is lumped together with a heterogeneous
set of non-farm activities, which are often associated with a higher socio-
economic status (as in Reardon et al. 2000; Barrett et al. 2005; Mellor 2014),
making the links between poverty and farm or non-farm rural wage employment
uncertain. By lumping together very different forms of wage labour, income-
based studies fail to appreciate the importance of wage employment for the most
vulnerable rural people, especially very poor women (Sender 2003; Cramer et
al., this volume; Mueller, this volume). The literature on African RNFE, overly
focused on the binary ‘own-account farm income vs non-farm income’, usually
fails to distinguish clearly between wage employment and other forms of RNF
employment, as well as between wage employment in agricultural activities and
other forms of rural wage employment. In fact, it is often hard to classify indi-
viduals clearly in one category or the other. For example, how to classify a rural
woman who is employed to clean the house and cook in a rural area, but must
also work as a coffee picker for her employer during the harvest? Is she an agri-
cultural wage labourer or a domestic servant?11 To be sure, an important aspect
of this ‘stylized fact’ is acknowledged by some of the contributions to the main-
stream literature, notably Lanjouw (2007) and Winters et al. (2008). Lanjouw
(2007, 57) states that: ‘[a] fairly robust stylized fact about rural poverty in many
Introduction 7
parts of the developing world is that the poor are highly represented among agri-
cultural wage labourers’. This finding is especially ‘robust’ in the case of Latin
America and Asia (Lanjouw primarily writes about South Asia) but much less so
in Africa (Winters et al. 2008, 8; Davis et al. 2010), where data on rural wage
employment are certainly less reliable and generally patchy. The problem is that
non-farm activities, and wage employment within them, are very diverse and
context-specific, so a clear link with poverty is hard to establish. In general, the
finding that the rural poor are over-represented among those who participate in
the rural labour market, especially as agricultural wage labour, is intimately
related to the phenomenon of social differentiation that lies at the heart of pro-
cesses of socio-economic transformation in the countryside (Lenin 1982). While
there is a wealth of fascinating scholarly material on social differentiation and
rural labour market formation (on Africa, for example, see Sender and Smith
1990; Kitching 1980; Ghai and Radwan 1983), this kind of literature has seen a
remarkable decline since the mid-1980s. This decline has partly mirrored the
gradual marginalization of political economy in economics (Milonakis and Fine
2009) and the growing dominance of (new) neoclassical economics and neo-
populist approaches to rural development, which have focused so much research
on smallholder producers, commodity markets and price reforms (Oya 2011).12
The ideological blinkers that lead researchers and policy makers to neglect
rural wage employment in developing countries, especially agricultural wage
employment, could not, by themselves, conceal the importance of rural labour
markets for the poorest people. The ideology requires statistical support in the
form of ‘representative’ numbers. Thus the lack of attention to wage employ-
ment in rural areas is often supported by official statistics from national house-
hold surveys, labour market surveys and population censuses, which tend to
paint a picture of a rural world dominated by own-account workers (in farming
or in the RNFE) and their family members. According to the 2013 World Bank
World Development Report on ‘Jobs’ (World Bank 2012, 6), ‘a job does not
always come with a wage’. In fact, figure 1 in that report suggests that, on
aggregate, employment is usually dominated by non-wage employment (a com-
bination of own-account farming and non-agricultural self-employment). This is
particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa, where the reported proportions of men
and women who engage in some forms of wage employment is very low,
matched only by female wage employment in the Middle East and North Africa.
Only in Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean are wage
employment markets well developed. Our own calculations from ILO data show
that the median percentage of total wage employment is 20, 45, and 58, respec-
tively, in Africa, a sample of middle-income Asian countries, and a sample of
six large Latin American countries (Table 1.1). For combined figures (urban and
rural), the degree of variation within sub-Saharan Africa is stark, with a number
of countries clustered in Southern Africa having between 70 and 85 per cent of
their employed population in wage jobs, in contrast to the majority of other
African countries where the proportion of wage employment does not exceed
25 per cent, and much less in rural areas (Oya 2010, table 2). So, overall, official
Table 1.1 Employment status: key variables for selected regional samples (recent surveys)
Wage and salaried workers Total self-employed

(employees) (%) workers (%)
Average Median Average Median
Sub-Saharan Africa (34 countries) 28 20 70 80

Asian middle-income countries 43 45 57 55
Latin America (6 countries) 57 58 42 42
Source: adapted from Oya (2013, 253); author’s calculations from data from Key Indicators of the
Labour Market database, ILO (7th edition) www.ilo.org/kilm.
statistics would suggest that sub-Saharan Africa is indeed different from other
developing regions in terms of labour market outcomes.
Cross-country contrasts on the incidence of rural wage employment are
even more pronounced. In terms of agricultural wage employment, only 4 per
cent of adult men and 1.4 per cent of women are reported to ‘mainly’ work as
agricultural wage labourers in rural Africa, compared with 22 per cent of men
and 11.4 per cent of women in South Asia, and 21 per cent and 2.3 per cent,
respectively, in Latin America. Moreover, non-agricultural rural wage
employment also appears to be significant in South Asia, Middle East and
North Africa (MENA), East Asia and Latin America (between 15 per cent and
31 per cent for men, and up to 12 per cent for women). This is in marked con-
trast to Africa, where this type of employment only applies to 9 per cent of
men and 3 per cent of women (World Bank 2007, 205, table 9.2). A recent
study by Davis et al. (2010), reporting income sources for a selected sample
of developing countries, confirms these contrasts and illustrates huge (and
perhaps inconsistent) discrepancies in findings between African countries.13
While these survey data confirm the high rural labour market participation in
Latin America, they paint a very inconsistent picture in Africa: 55 per cent of
rural people have worked for agricultural wages in Malawi, compared to 3.7
per cent in Ghana and 3.8 per cent in Nigeria. When the reported indicator is
income shares, the average income share from agricultural wage employment
in Malawi is only 11 per cent, still much higher than that of Ghana (1.4 per
cent) and Nigeria (2 per cent). These studies report that for non-farm wage
employment (still an excessively aggregated category), variation in labour
market participation is also substantial: from 50 per cent in Pakistan and over
30 per cent in Nicaragua and Vietnam, to estimates in Africa of nearly 16–18
per cent in Malawi and Ghana, and only 9 per cent in Nigeria.
Unfortunately, official employment statistics of the kind reported by the ILO,
FAO, and the World Bank in their databases, and therefore estimates from
studies that essentially analyse data from the existing national databases, are
fraught with problems. Section 3 of this chapter will describe some of them, par-
ticularly the issues that most affect the reliability of estimates of rural wage
employment.
Introduction 9
2.2 Contrasting assumptions and narratives on poverty reduction
The neglect of rural wage employment and the ideological, analytical, and statis-
tical biases that underpin it have contributed to the acceptance of a simple nar-
rative of poverty reduction that hinges on a number of assumptions about the
characteristics of the rural poor. Sender (2003) argues that the rural poor are
thought to be composed of a homogeneous set of small, self-employed farmers –
e.g. ‘smallholders’, ‘subsistence farmers’, ‘peasants’ – who rely on non-market
mediated consumption of the items produced on their own farms. At times,
claims are put forward that a sub-group of small farm households – female-
headed households – contain poorer people than other rural households. On the
basis of this interpretation of rural poverty, two overarching policy conclusions
are often made. First, the rural poor would benefit from the introduction of pol-
icies that provide appropriate price incentives to expand production on the farm.
Second, to respond to such incentives, producers need timely and realistically
priced inputs to their farming operations. Hence, it becomes imperative to
provide poor smallholders with improved access to inputs and seasonal and
medium-term production credit. In order to tackle the gender dimension of rural
poverty, moreover, such programmes would do well to privilege rural females.
Such policy prescriptions have been adapted somewhat in the mainstream liter-
ature, based on the belated recognition that: a very large number of the rural
poor in Africa are landless or near-landless; and, among them, many rural
African women only have land of insufficient size or quality to enable them to
farm effectively. It follows that it would be hardly possible for them to survive
on the basis of consumption derived from production on their own plots. There-
fore, a common recommendation to overcome (female) deprivation in rural
Africa is to promote other forms of rural self-employment, especially non-farm
self-employment, through the support of micro-credit programmes.14
A closely related popular literature strand recommends ‘income diversification’
as a potentially effective way for the rural poor to escape poverty or at least to cope
with uncertainties and shocks (Ellis 2000; Reardon et al. 2000; Mellor 2014). Much
of the burgeoning literature on the RNFE stems from this intellectual tradition,
which uses the so-called ‘livelihood approach’ (one dominant variant in the 2000s
being the ‘sustainable livelihood approach’) to analyse rural people’s ‘choices’
facing uncertainty, poverty, and shocks. This approach, although currently in
decline (Scoones 2009), has influenced countless researchers and policy makers
interested in rural development and poverty, but has made little contribution to the
understanding of rural labour markets and wage employment (see Pontara 2010 for
a comprehensive critical review).15 Many of the assumptions listed by Sender
(2003) are in fact replicated in this tradition. Methodological individualism, coupled
with choice theoretic production and consumption theory from neoclassical eco-
nomics and influenced by pro-smallholder farming approaches have helped con-
struct a narrative whereby availability of ‘assets’ (land, labour, savings, ‘human
capital’, ‘social capital’), risk-coping mechanisms, and the ‘portfolio’ of economic
activities largely determines success or failure in getting out of poverty.
By contrast, a different account, framed within a political economy tradition,
suggests that rapid poverty reduction historically requires the entry of low-
skilled people into secure wage-earning jobs in higher-productivity activities; a
process that always involves structural transformation (Amsden 2012). These
socio-economic transformations (structural change, urbanization, occupational
changes, income growth, and changes in consumption patterns) are usually
driven by major state interventions in infrastructure, credit provision, innovation,
and targeted subsidies. In short, the fastest and most sustained poverty reduction
stories are to be found in those developing countries where a process of dynamic
structural transformation has been achieved. Processes of structural transforma-
tions are usually driven or accompanied by accelerated transformations in the
countryside, what the agrarian political economy calls ‘agrarian transitions’, for
which there is a variety of historically specific paths (Byres 2003). These trans-
formations obviously imply the gradual decline (and transformation) of ‘land-
based’ activities, resulting in what some call ‘de-agrarianization’, a phenomenon
that is observed virtually everywhere in the developing world (Bryceson et al.
2000; Rigg 2006). While some scholars consider this process a threat to the
‘rural poor’, understood as the mass of smallholder farmers who struggle under a
‘neoliberal regime’ (Bryceson 2000), many political economists consider this a
longstanding stylized fact of capitalist development in most societies, with its
progressive features and contradictions (Byres 2003; Amsden 2012; Chang
2010).16 In this narrative, transformations result in processes of social differenti-
ation in rural areas, which are intimately related with the growing dependence
on wage employment, especially for the most disadvantaged labour market
entrants whose bargaining and fall-back positions are weak (Lenin 1982). The
changes take time and the capacity of emerging industrial and service sectors to
absorb the growing labour supply may be limited, thus making the rural labour
market a potentially important survival option for impoverished farmers, should
employment opportunities arise, through expanded agricultural commodity pro-
duction, public work programmes, and non-agricultural growth (especially as a
domestic servant or in petty services, trade, and transport).
The heterodox narrative, which is usually empirically grounded in extensive
field research, presents a number of alternative assumptions and stylized facts
about the ‘rural poor’ (Sender 2003; Lerche 2010; and contributions in this
volume by Cramer et al., Oya, Petit and Rizzo, Mueller, Selwyn, and Pons-
Vignon). Thus very poor households tend to: have very little land and hardly any
productive assets; contain men and especially women who have failed to com-
plete many years of education or are illiterate; contain a relatively high propor-
tion of women who have started to have children as teenagers; have high child
mortality rates and malnutrition; contain few adult males who regularly earn
some income (hence women in these household are often divorced, abandoned,
or widowed); possess far fewer assets (e.g. radios, bicycles, watches or other
basic assets, including livestock) and have more precarious dwellings than those
found in less destitute rural households; belong to vulnerable or discriminated
social groups (as in Dalits in India); and contain household members (often
Introduction 11
women) who perform manual agricultural wage labour and earn wages that are
crucial for the survival of their households. The fundamental tenet supported by
the evidence presented in this literature and most contributions in this volume is
that the standard of living and the rate at which the poorest poor rural people can
escape from poverty will be determined by the quantity and quality of wage
employment they manage to find, in a context of highly insecure and casualized
jobs. As will be argued in the concluding chapter, interventions designed to
tighten rural labour markets by boosting demand for unskilled agricultural and
non-agricultural wage labour and strengthening workers’ bargaining power are
more likely to directly affect the poorest rural people, whether in Asia and Latin
America, where there is more acceptance of these arguments, or in Africa, where
recommendations to promote self-employment continue to dominate. However,
for any intervention to be appropriately designed, the evidence base on rural
wage employment must be substantially improved, especially in the poorest
countries where statistical systems are weak and under-resourced.
3 The challenge of capturing rural wage labour in

developing countries: invisible wage workers?17
It is undeniable that labour market statistics are generally poor in developing
countries, and especially in Africa. This is claimed not only by contributors to
this book (especially Petit and Rizzo, Cramer et al., Johnston, Mueller, Pons-
Vignon, Jha, Zhang, and Ortiz), but also by an increasing number of publications
that have belatedly started to pay more attention to labour issues in the develop-
ing world. There is an increasing, albeit still tenuous, appreciation of statistical
and analytical bias even among leading international development institutions.
The UK Department for International Development calls for more attention to
labour market institutions, health and safety inspectorates and ‘decent work’ in
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (Morrison and Murphy 2004). In its 2008
WDR on Agriculture, even the World Bank has acknowledged the paucity of
data on rural wage employment (World Bank 2007) and generally huge gaps in
labour statistics (World Bank 2012). The World Bank (2007, 202) indeed main-
tains that ‘Making the rural labour market a more effective pathway out of
poverty is . . . major challenge that remains poorly understood and sorely neg-
lected in policy making.’
In the context of Africa and countries where the officially estimated incidence
of rural wage employment is low, there are a number of conventional hypotheses
and arguments attempting to explain this phenomenon. The underlying structural
conditions like high land–labour ratios and low population densities have often
been mentioned as being a disincentive to and constraint to accumulate and hire
labour, since labour productivity is so low (Berry 1993; Barrett et al. 2005;
Mellor 2014).18 Another argument refers to the idea of ‘uncaptured peasantry’,
that is, the persistent ability of the ‘peasantry’ to resist capitalist penetration.19
This thesis is complemented with the idea that most labour hiring in African
contexts, for example, takes the form of reciprocal labour exchange in the form
of collective workgroups.20 While there is some contested evidence on this
occurrence, total avoidance of market compulsion to work for wages is unlikely
(Bernstein 2010; see also Zhang on China in this volume). Evidence shows con-
vincingly that as capitalism develops and income per capita increases, the pro-
portion of self-employment is substantially reduced (Schaffner 1993; Gindling
and Newhouse 2012). An alternative hypothesis is that in many developing
countries, particularly in Africa, data collection systems (including official sta-
tistics and independent micro-level surveys) are inadequate and have failed to
capture the significance and nature of rural wage employment (Oya 2013, Mwa-
madzingo 2003, 31; White et al. 2006; Cramer et al. this volume; Zhang on
China, this volume), which is examined next.21
3.1 Factors contributing to the invisibility of rural wage employment

The paucity of labour force surveys (LFS) that cover the rural sector and small-
scale enterprises; the growing marginalization and simplification of questions on
labour and employment in nationally representative household surveys biased in
favour of the collection of consumption data; the inadequacy of some statistical
conventions, definitions, and survey practices; and the issues surrounding the
definition and boundaries of the ‘household’. These are the key factors that con-
tribute to the invisibility of agricultural wage labourers in the developing world,
and Africa in particular (see Oya 2013).
First, the scarcity of in-depth (rural) LFS in Africa is striking (see ILO:
www.ilo.org/global/statistics-and-databases/lang--en/index.htm), especially in
comparison with Latin America and Asia (Sender et al. 2005; Mwamadzingo
2003). Even in Latin America and Asia, income and expenditure surveys of
the Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS) type have overtaken tra-
ditional LFS in terms of frequency as the mainstream poverty agenda has
expanded in all developing regions. In Africa, some countries have not had an
LFS since the 1970s. Generally, the priorities of international aid agencies –
which often contribute a very large proportion of budgets to African statisti-
cal agencies – have shifted in favour of income–expenditure surveys or
integrated household surveys. These are both extremely costly and time-
consuming and potentially affected by large measurement errors, particularly
for estimates of income and consumption in poor agrarian areas. Multiple
donor agendas and under-resourced statistical agencies have thus combined to
squeeze the funding available for employment-focused surveys.22 The paucity
of detailed employment data, especially for rural areas, has another con-
sequence. Much research on poverty and rural development ignores labour
issues because data are non-existent or scarce in secondary datasets, espe-
cially those coming from official agencies. Since most mainstream develop-
ment economists base their work (usually econometric analysis) on secondary
data and rarely engage in direct data collection and fieldwork, it is not surpris-
ing that this bias is carried through to research by the development economics
research community.
Introduction 13
The low quality of the employment data collected exacerbates the problems
caused by infrequent national surveys. A common problem is the usual reliance
on the tricky notion of the ‘main job-holding’, designed to give a single classifi-
cation for every individual surveyed. Unfortunately, in contexts of occupation
multiplicity, irregularity, and strong seasonality, the interpretations and use of
the concept of ‘main activity’ are influenced by the biases of both respondents
and enumerators. This prevents the useful investigation of the complete set of
economic activities in which individuals engage over an extended period of time
(e.g. 12 months) and the relative importance of each of them for their subsist-
ence. A large body of literature on the RNFE, and most contributions in this
volume, confirm the importance of occupation multiplicity and the contingency
of the dominance of one particular activity or another. In China, most rural
people are engaged in more than one activity – farming and off-farm employ-
ment but, as Huang maintains (2013, 359): ‘[they] are categorized statistically
according to the activity in which they are engaged for more than 6 months a
year’. This statistical category is particularly misleading in contexts where land
is abundant, resulting in either respondents or enumerators emphasizing own-
account farming at the expense of other more irregular but perhaps more remu-
nerative activities. This is not news for statisticians. As clearly put by Sender
(2003, 414):
[In] most developing economies no efforts at all are made to collect time-
series data on the wages of those employed in small-scale farm and non-
farm rural enterprises, especially on the wages of those who are irregularly,
seasonally, or casually employed. In most of these economies, in fact, there
is no reliable data on the number of people or households that depend upon
earnings in these types of employment; it is simply assumed that the rural
poor are, or will become self-employed.
Second, reference periods are problematic. Many countries still rely on

standard questions with a seven-day reference period which, in contexts of
strong seasonality, irregularity of activities and occupation multiplicity, can lead
to significant statistical biases. The use of relatively short timeframes therefore
compounds the biases introduced by the reliance on notions of ‘main activity’
when this is defined in terms of time. Third, the concepts of employment status
and the distinction between wage employment and self-employment are often
superficially treated, often leading to unnecessary conflation of occupation and
status, whereby a particular occupation (e.g. street vendor) is automatically
related to a given status (e.g. self-employment) without the required probing.
The statistical categories, and the way they are taught in enumerator training
programmes, are also affected by the idiosyncratic use of the terms ‘employees’
and ‘labour’, influenced by the overlaps between different historical traditions.
For instance, Huang (2013, 349) argues that Chinese statistics reduce wage
workers to: ‘[a] high-status category of regular “employees-workers” that
excludes the great majority of the labouring people of present-day China’.
Wuyts (2011) and Breman (2006) also argue that large segments of ‘informal
workers’ often classified as ‘self-employed’ in Africa and Asia are in reality part of
disguised forms of wage labour. Fourth, certain types of wage jobs that are particu-
larly relevant for the most deprived rural people – characterized by severely exploit-
ative conditions, even forms of bondage – are highly stigmatized and can, for that
reason, easily be under-reported and overlooked. Mueller (this volume) gives con-
crete examples in relation to one of the most widely used terms for casual wage
work (kibarua) in Tanzania, which is easily under-reported or unreported alto-
gether, as shown in his comparison between official statistics and micro-survey
data. Oya (2013) and Chand and Srivastava (2014) provide other examples and
sources that document a similar phenomenon, sometimes affecting female casual
wage workers more than other vulnerable groups. Fifth, conventional statistical cat-
egories and concepts are usually translated into the vernacular for the purposes of
national household surveys, and the translations may be inadequate if they restrict
the interpretation of key terms like ‘salary’ or ‘wage’, ‘gainful activity’ or ‘remu-
nerated activity’ to limited sets of activities and jobs because of what respondents
(and interviewers) usually understand by those terms (Rizzo et al. 2014). A number
of recent studies cited by Oya (2013) have demonstrated the central importance of
appropriate wording in labour questionnaires and how a poor translation or a misin-
terpretation of key terms leads to measurement error and bias.23 The need for addi-
tional probing questions is also important. Therefore, rather than just asking
respondents if they have been ‘employed’ during the reference period, or if they
have had a ‘salaried job’, it is important to operationalize the concept of employ-
ment through questions that are easily understood by respondents. Sixth, labour
market statistics are also dependent on definitions of key sampling units such as
‘households’. In rural areas of developing countries, the definitions of ‘household’
and its ‘residents’, and the economic ‘boundaries’ of the village or ‘community’ are
especially blurred and fluid, especially in contexts of high personal mobility.
Workers ‘on the move’ may not be found in the standard dwellings where house-
hold surveys take place. In fact, many people, especially migrant labourers, are
missed out from official statistics because the sampling process only allows lists of
households provided by village chiefs or by local administrations and permanent
residential units listed by the authorities (Cramer et al. 2014, see Johnston in this
volume).24 Likewise, many ‘informal’ urban migrants in China and Vietnam may
be wrongly classified as ‘farmers’ as their official residence stays in the village they
left because of strict implementation of the household registration (hukou) system
(see Zhang in this volume; Huang 2013; Pincus and Sender 2008). People in work
dormitories, temporary shacks, or living in the backyard of other houses as poor
tenants are very likely to be invisible to national statistics teams (Sender et al. 2005;
Breman 1996; Akresh and Edmonds 2010; Cramer et al. 2014). Johnston, in this
volume, argues that official labour statistics in Southern Africa use a narrow house-
hold definition which would normally exclude non-resident individuals.
In sum, survey design, and particularly sampling procedures and conventions,
questionnaire design, and the training and supervision of enumerators, matter
enormously for the quality of employment statistics.
Introduction 15
3.2 Evidence from case studies in this volume on statistical and
methodological issues
Building on a heterodox tradition of field-based research that focuses on labour
relations and work conditions, the case studies collected in this volume provide a
fresh perspective on the study of rural labour markets and offer a number of
methodological lessons to capture their characteristics, evolution, and signifi-
cance for poverty reduction, which are discussed in the final chapter of this book.
By and large, the case studies make use of mixed methods in micro-level
surveys, and place emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity and the specif-
icities of each type of labour relation in each context. The research methods used
by many contributors are innovative in so far as they find ways to better capture
nuances and concealed aspects of labour relations, labour market participation,
and workers’ mobility. This is not simply done through a judicious use of mixed
methods, and careful integration of quantitative surveys and in-depth qualitative
research focused on longitudinal aspects and processes of change. The design of
the questionnaires, the sampling decisions to capture the ‘hidden populations’,
the selection and the training of interviewers are all aspects that have received
careful attention. Questionnaires have focused on different aspects of rural
labour relations, paying particular attention to capturing occupation multiplicity
and avoiding imposed notions of ‘main activity’. Moreover, most contributors
have used an ‘economic’ definition of the household, allowing for the tracing of
respondents and members of the households who are ‘on the move’. The design
of survey tools was particularly sensitive to the specificity of cultural contexts.
Repeated testing as well as scoping research have been central to refining ques-
tionnaires, the way interviews were conducted and the way people were
approached. For example, knowing ex ante any negative connotation attached to
a particular activity was important to design questionnaires and train and super-
vise enumerators accordingly, as Mueller and Oya point out in this volume.
A particular thread emerges in many chapters of the book, concerning the
shortcomings of official statistics, and the contrasting picture that emerges from
fieldwork and the examination of micro data. Mueller, writing on Tanzania,
contrasts the result of his survey in the West Usambaras Mountains, where
nearly 60 per cent of rural households had at least one member engaged in wage
employment, with the official figure of national Integrated Labour Force
Surveys (ILFS), which report only 11 per cent of such households in 2000/01.
Furthermore, around 22 per cent of rural adults are engaged in wage labour
during the reference period of his study, compared to the 3.3 per cent of waged
or salaried workers in the economically active population, as stated by the
2000/01 ILFS. He argues that rural labour market activities and wage workers –
especially migrants and those employed on a casual or seasonal basis – are con-
sistently and systematically under-enumerated and therefore rarely appear in
Tanzania’s ILFS and other large-scale labour market surveys. Yet, these
surveys continue to be sources for the country’s official labour market data.
Petit and Rizzo, writing on Ethiopia and Rwanda, also dispute conventional
statistics and the representations of rural poverty. According to their analysis in
both countries, official data depict small independent farmers as constituting the
bulk of the poor. By contrast, micro-studies (based on mixed research methods)
suggest that the poorest individuals, while retaining access to small plots of
land, critically rely on casual earnings in the labour market for their liveli-
hoods.25 In selected regions of Ethiopia, for instance, these authors find that
working for other people is the single largest source of income (in cash or in
kind) for very poor people, far exceeding the importance of own-account
farming. In various regions of Rwanda, they find evidence of very poor ‘agri-
cultural wage labourers’ with insufficient landholdings for the subsistence needs
of their families, who are forced to seek wage employment outside their own
farm. In Gikongoro and Kibuye, for instance, waged farm labour represents 95
and 80–90 per cent, respectively, of the income for the ‘very poor’ working for
others. The implications are not merely statistical. In both countries key eco-
nomic policies and poverty reduction strategies are fundamentally shaped by
the predominant representations of poverty. Pons-Vignon, while acknowledging
that the quality of employment statistics is probably better in South Africa than
in the rest of Africa, argues that official statistics tend to overestimate the role
of self-employment (including subsistence farming). He points out that abun-
dant micro-level research has shown the importance of wage labour for poor
rural South Africans, including many women, and emphasizes the spectacular
growth of labour casualization in rural employment (see also du Toit and Ally
2003). Yet, LFS data on seasonal and contract workers within agriculture does
not appear to have changed significantly since 2000. In his view, this phenom-
enon has to be also partly ascribed to ideological biases, notably the influence
of neoclassical neo-populism in policy research and circles, and its reluctance
to acknowledge the demise of ‘pre-capitalist Africans’. The statistics are also
disappointing in relation to migrant labour. Johnston concludes in her chapter
that: ‘despite the fact that the Southern African region has a long history of
labour migration, official surveys in many Southern African countries were
inadequate to understand employment and migration’. She documents important
problems and biases in South African statistics, particularly about illegal migra-
tion, or casual or seasonal workers, which affects the picture of rural poverty
and employment of many people, especially women from neighbouring coun-
tries like Lesotho, where a good part of the population is significantly dependent
on remittances. Oya, writing on Senegal and Mauritania, finds a striking con-
trast: on the one hand, there are official statistics and institutional reports where
it is hard to find any mention of wage employment in rural areas and especially
in agriculture; on the other hand, in the real world of villages and rural towns, a
diversity of local terms exists for a variety of wage jobs in agriculture alone,
particularly casual wage jobs. Not surprisingly, many of these jobs are per-
formed by migrant workers, mostly internal migrant labour. But there are also
many others who work for neighbours on a casual basis but are usually classi-
fied as own-account or unpaid family workers on their own farms in the official
statistics.
Introduction 17
Although rural employment statistics are particularly problematic in Africa,
as argued in this book, important evidence also emerges from China and India
on the systematic under-reporting and mis-characterization of irregular employ-
ment. Jha, writing on India, one of the developing countries with the best statisti-
cal systems for capturing wage employment, is concerned by how official
surveys fail to capture the extent of migration and its changing dynamics; and
how definitions of ‘gainful activity’ or ‘work’ are not systematically applied or
sufficiently adapted, which results in potential biases in estimates of labour
market participation, especially among women workers. Writing on China,
Zhang argues that the proportion of wage labourers is grossly underestimated in
official statistics. First, ‘hired agricultural workers’ do not exist as a statistical
category, and thus, there is no straightforward way of knowing just how large
exactly this group is on a national or regional scale. Zhang also contests the
method of using unreliable data on costs of hired labour input to infer labour
market participation in agriculture, thus questioning the estimates of agricultural
wage employment presented by Huang et al. (2012), whose work is based on
national statistics. Zhang, however, points to important caveats that make these
estimates an inaccurate depiction of the extent of wage labour use in Chinese
agriculture. In addition, he points out that averaged-out figures of hired labour
input used in these national surveys conflate different types of wage labour use
that range from day labourers hired by small family farms during peak time,
migrant workers employed seasonally by entrepreneurial farmers, to year-round
wage employment in corporate farms. The conflation of distinct categories of
wage employment for purposes of simplicity is certainly a common problem in
many statistical systems collecting information on employment.
4 Rethinking theory: towards a political economy of rural

labour markets in poorer countries
Better data are necessary but not sufficient for a deeper understanding of the
nature and dynamics of rural labour markets. Asking appropriate research ques-
tions, deploying suitable conceptual frameworks and navigating across discipli-
nary boundaries are also essential elements. However, theory and empirical
concepts of labour are contested, context-specific, and fluid, as Section 1.1 of
this chapter illustrates.
The debates, questions, and evidence in this book suggest that orthodox
labour market theory – and in particular the notion of labour market equilibrium
in all its variations and deviations (as in Rosenzweig 1989; Binswanger and
Rosenzweig 1984) – is ill-suited to the analysis of labour markets, particularly in
poor, largely agrarian economies, but also more generally, as convincingly
argued by Prasch (2004). Other mainstream economists have echoed this conclu-
sion when reviewing labour market research in developing countries. For
example, Fields (2007, 55) asserts that ‘[u]nfortunately, few existing labour
market models begin to capture the rich empirical realities of developing coun-
tries’ labour market conditions’, that there are ‘distinct labour market sectors that
work in different ways from one another’, and that there are extremely complex
interrelationships among these sectors (Fields 2007, 55). This excludes the pos-
sibility of a universal labour market model or the maintenance of simplistic
assumptions about labour supply and demand.
However, even less simplistic and restrictive variants of labour market theory
in mainstream economics, such as segmented labour market theory – which pos-
tulates that the labour market consists of various segments with qualitatively dis-
tinct types of employment – tend to assume a generally applicable theory across
discrete sectors divided by properties relatively homogeneous within each sector.
The historical contingency of labour relations and workers’ agency, whether
they are embedded in a capitalist system of accumulation or not, for instance, is
ignored in analytical approaches that take a particular form of capitalism for
granted. The mainstream economics literature on rural labour markets, as argued
in this volume by Cramer et al., Pons-Vignon, and Ortiz, for example, therefore
fails to capture the degree and kinds of historically specific variation in labour
market relations, processes, and outcomes (see also Rao 1988; Bharadwaj 1989;
Fine 1998). A third strand of critique of the neoclassical apparatus – and one that
challenges its very theoretical foundations – has been developed by radical polit-
ical economists. In this strand, the belief is that labour markets are not only
structurally differentiated from one another – in the sense that they are seg-
mented – but also internally structured in different ways. The focus of the ana-
lysis here is on labour market structures, relations, and processes attached to
their reproduction and transformations, and how they relate to and are shaped by
broader processes of long-term change and social, economic and political trans-
formations (Fine 1998). As Bharadwaj (1989, 1) puts it, employment is seen ‘as
an integral aspect of the process of accumulation; i.e. [as] the interaction
between changing labour-use patterns and systems and the accumulation
process’. In short, understanding wage labour relations requires a careful ana-
lysis of the processes of and constraints on accumulation and labour productivity
growth. Two implications arise. First, in a poor, predominantly agrarian
economy, the process of formation of the labour market entails a closer study of
the interaction of survival strategies of households – mostly but not only
dependent on selling their labour – and the strategy of the appropriators of
surplus (employers tout court) in the process of development (Bharadwaj 1989,
1), shaped by state interventions. Second, the formation of the labour market
cannot be analysed in isolation from development in the wider economy as a
whole, as Zhang, Johnston, Ortiz, Pons-Vignon, and Cramer et al. show in their
chapters.
Methodologically, conceptual precision is shaped by historical context as
well. For example, Marx understood the wage contract as an intrinsic feature of
the capital–labour relation under capitalism, and ‘free labour’ as a defining
aspect of capitalist transitions, which tend to be starting analytical points for
many political economists and heterodox researchers of labour relations. But
some nuance and openness is still necessary in order to account for blurred
boundaries and counterintuitive findings, since stark dichotomies (free–unfree or
Introduction 19
wage vs self-employment or wage vs bonded labour) obscure more than they
reveal (Banaji 2010; Lerche 2010; Ramachandran 1990).26 Thus, wage-based
labour relations could exist well before capitalism was established, i.e. from the
late antiquity onwards, at the same time as capitalism may operate with a range
of labour relations that may not be the standard wage contract but rather take
forms that disguise the true nature of the relation (Breman and van der Linden
2014; Banaji 2010). Especially in poor, predominantly agrarian economies, it is
therefore challenging to understand the dynamics of rural labour markets while
uneven agrarian transitions are still under way, with some uncertain outcomes,
which depend on both internal and external forces.
Through the collection of articles presented in this volume, the aim is thus to
emphasize the specificity of rural markets for labour power, without imposing a
particular and reductionist notion of ‘wage labour’; the horizontal and vertical
differentiation of labour markets; the historically contingent ways in which poor
people move in and out of the rural labour market with a diversity of outcomes
in terms of working conditions; and, above all, the importance of history in the
analysis of labour market formation, structures, functioning, and impact on
workers’ welfare.
Many contributions in this volume echo the kind of analysis pioneered by
Bharadwaj (1989; 1990), who, drawing on both the tradition of classical political
economy and the experience of South Asia, analyses the changing characteristics
and particular forms of labour as the accumulation process proceeds. The central
issues in her analysis of rural labour markets are the growth of wage labour,
which is deemed ‘tardy’ in agrarian economies experiencing industrialization
(with examples from different places in Oya, Ortiz, Selwyn, Zhang, Johnston,
Jha, and Pons-Vignon in this volume); the pace of commercialization and capi-
talist development in agriculture, with a particular focus on patterns of land
tenure and labour use (e.g. the persistent survival of petty cultivators alongside
landless or near-landless households), a theme that cuts across different exam-
ples in this book; and the heterogeneity of labour and the coexisting multiplicity
of exchange systems and labour hiring modes, again a recurrent theme in many
of the contributions to this collection. Indeed, ‘old’ and new forms of exploita-
tion, for instance bonded labour, and ‘free’ forms of wage contracts coexist in
parts of South Asia, but change is possible and is occurring (Jha, this volume;
Ramachandran 1990; Bardhan and Rudra 1986). Research questions asked by
most of the authors in this volume are linked to one or more of these themes. In
particular, the contributors focus on the formation and differentiation of different
(rural, peri-urban) labour markets in different economic sectors; the diversity of
rural labour relations, forms of payment and employment (in)security; the place
and role of women workers and migrant labour; and the role and impact of col-
lective action.
In processes of long-term socio-economic transformation, rural labour rela-
tions are thus significantly transformed and give rise to sets of more hetero-
geneous forms of labour use and mechanisms of social reproduction, making the
rural–urban divide more fluid and various forms of labour use compatible. For
example, on China, Zhang argues that wage employment has penetrated deeply
into rural households’ livelihoods to become a central pillar in the rural
economy. While rural industrialization, rural-to-urban migration, and the rise of
capitalist agriculture have propelled the growth of wage employment, this
process has not yet resulted in a thoroughly proletarianized rural labour force
and the dissolution of family farming. Instead, wage employment and family
farming are closely bonded to each other in rural China on multiple levels,
through both the household-level division of labour and the individual-level cir-
culation of labour between the two. These highly variable and fragmented
experiences with both wage employment and family-based petty commodity
production have, Zhang argues, failed to make wage work the basis for creating
united class consciousness or alliances.27 Instead, wage work is generating social
differentiation and class fragmentation. It is interesting that this process of
change, which in its speed and specific forms is somewhat unique to China, is
also seen in other ways and at different speeds in other parts of the developing
world, certainly in India, but also in many African countries, as chapters by
Pons-Vignon on South Africa, Cramer et al. on Mozambique, and Mueller on
Tanzania show. A key difference is the greater speed of industrialization and
level of state support to agriculture in China.
In India, Jha concludes that ‘a typical rural labourer in India is best conceptu-
alized as a miscellaneous worker, or a worker engaged in a fairly diverse range
of economic activities, not only in rural but also urban areas’. This is not only
the result of several decades of gradual shifts in agrarian structures as a result of
the development of capitalism, but also as the outcome of policy shifts in more
recent times and notably the move towards a more deregulated regime since the
1990s. Contradictory tendencies are common in processes of change associated
with capitalism. India represents a good example in so far as positive change
towards the enhancement of formal freedom for rural labourers and the decline
in the worst forms of degradation and oppression that labourers were subjected
to, coexist with uncertain and precarious options on a daily basis and sluggish
performance in the creation of rural wage employment.
Ortiz illustrates how particular stories of agricultural commodity expansion in
different social formations with their own socio-political, demographic, and cul-
tural realities, give rise to distinct patterns of labour mobilization and different
outcomes in terms of working conditions. The supply and bargaining power of
rural labour in these different contexts (coffee in Colombia and citrus in Argen-
tina) depend on the specific configuration of factors, from changes in inter-
national markets, to pressure on land, technological developments (such as a
higher-yielding variety of coffee in the 1970s), to shifts in legislation and the
emergence of different political alliances. All the contributions on Latin America
in this book show how the state has played an important role in helping establish
new zones of high-value export agriculture, creating sites of competitive agrar-
ian accumulation. The proliferation of these zones has led to the generation of
new rural labour markets. There is much literature that demonstrates
how workers in these new zones of export agriculture are often subject to
Introduction 21
hyper-flexible, very precarious, and highly exploitative employment conditions,
but Ortiz and Selwyn (Brazil) illustrate mechanisms of collective action that
have led to better working conditions, and Lee (Costa Rica) documents the role
of migrant networks in facilitating the integration of new migrant labourers in
agricultural commodity export fronts.
In South Africa, long-term trends in workers’ bargaining power are also
shaped by the particular evolution of labour relations in the post-apartheid era,
which have been characterized by the transformation, rather than disappearance,
of paternalism. Looking at the forestry sector, Pons-Vignon argues that eco-
nomic coercion through outsourcing and task payment practices has replaced
direct control over workers, which was enforced by employers in the past, as the
influence of trade unions progressively declined and forestry workers became
increasingly ‘informalized’.
Other contributions discuss emerging topics in the study of rural labour
markets in some detail – including inter alia: (1) the heterogeneity of working
conditions in rural labour markets; (2) the well-established but still growing
‘casualization’ of labour; (3) the centrality of migration in rural wage employ-
ment; and (4) the place of gender in rural wage employment analysis. These
topics are briefly summarized in Section 5.
5 Key features of rural labour markets and contemporary

struggles of rural labour
This final section briefly introduces four key themes running through various
chapters of this collection. These are important longstanding features that cut
across a variety of contexts and time periods. Overall, the combination of these
features provides a ‘stylized’ picture of rural wage jobs that are heterogeneous
and diverse, despite being generally insecure and ‘informal’, highly segmented
by sector, activity, location, gender, and origin of workers, in countries charac-
terized by substantial diversity in forms of labour mobilization and hiring
arrangements, experience of collective action, and uneven capitalist develop-
ment. The following short introductions to these themes can only be ‘tasters’ of
the abundance of evidence and variation reported by the case studies presented
in this collection.
5.1 Diversity and multiplicity in rural wage employment

One of the striking findings of research on rural wage employment is the sub-
stantial heterogeneity of wage labour relations, types of employers, sectors,
modes of payment, wage levels and trends, working conditions and their deter-
minants, levels of mobility, types of labour market segmentation, drivers of job
creation, and forms of collective action. This diversity underscores the challenge
of debating ‘rural wage employment’ in broad aggregate terms as suggested at
the beginning of this introductory chapter. As Cramer et al. argue, even in con-
texts of widespread poverty and precarious working conditions it is possible to
distinguish between relatively ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs, which sometimes represent
the difference between bare survival and emancipation. Differences in wage
levels for fairly similar types of jobs are striking, as shown by Petit and Rizzo
for Rwanda and Cramer et al. for Mozambique. These differences are deter-
mined by complex combinations of factors, but sometimes boil down to the
employer’s discretion and bargaining power.
In agriculture it is possible to find a whole range of jobs, from permanent
positions with benefits and job security in large-scale agribusiness plantations
(particularly in agriculture; see, for example, Ortiz on lemon production, Selwyn
on Brazil export grapes, Cramer et al. on Mozambique’s tobacco and horticul-
tural farms), which constitute a minority segment, to the worst-paid casual jobs
in agriculture, typically for small employers, or forms of bonded labour in
domestic work (as illustrated by Cramer et al., Oya, Petit and Rizzo, Mueller,
Jha, and Pons-Vignon). A wide variety of jobs fall between these two extremes.28
Rural labour markets can be fluid, dynamic and straddle territorial boundaries, or
circumscribed to the limits of the ‘village’ economy, depending on the context,
economy-wide features and the nature of prevailing labour relations (Oya, this
volume; Rao 1988; Ramachandran 1990; Kevane 1994).
This heterogeneity affects hypotheses about the relationship between poverty
levels and participation in rural labour markets. To be sure, most contributors
here and other observers of poverty and wage employment in rural areas will
agree that many if not most of the poorest segments of rural society in develop-
ing countries tend to be more dependent on casual wages and insecure employ-
ment, as their assets, especially land, are insufficient for bare survival (Lanjouw
2007; Kevane 1994; Hill 1970; Sender 2003; Lennihan 1987). However, as
argued in previous sections, the ‘rural poor’ are highly differentiated and engage
in a wide range of economic activities that are historically contingent and
context-specific. In addition, whereas in some cases poor people may be stuck
on low casual wages and live in what is often referred to as ‘poverty traps’, other
rural labour market participants can do well from wage employment and manage
to improve their living standards substantially, as Cramer et al., Oya, Selwyn,
and Ortiz argue in their case studies. Sometimes access to better jobs is socially
determined as relatively ‘better-off ’ rural people may face significant advantages
compared to very poor people in searching and bargaining for the best available
employment, because of their education, ability to move, household connections,
and previous work experience. Thus, while rural labour market outcomes are not
pre-determined, some basic factors and stylized facts (from individual character-
istics, to types of jobs, sectors, nature of collective action, and state interven-
tions) help us understand the social differentiation associated with uneven access
to the best of the available rural wage employment opportunities.
5.2 Casual and ‘informal’ jobs

Despite the observed heterogeneity discussed above, most rural wage jobs in
both low- and middle-income countries tend to be insecure and of an ‘informal’
Introduction 23
nature, in the sense of not being protected, registered, and enumerated by any
state agencies. Indeed, a common thread in some of the articles in this volume
concerns the casualization of work, especially in middle-income economies
(Pons-Vignon, Jha, Zhang, Selwyn). This is not surprising, as argued by Breman
and van der Linden (2014), since the ‘formal’ wage employment that has charac-
terized the rise of welfare states in advanced capitalist countries has so far been
the exception rather than the rule in capitalism.
While most contributions maintain that casual agricultural wage labourers are
among the poorest segments of the population, the casualization of work has
evolved differently in changing socio-economic landscapes. In South Africa, for
instance, Pons-Vignon argues that in the post-apartheid era a process of ‘author-
itarian restoration’ has taken place in the agricultural sector, particularly in for-
estry. He argues that employers use various forms of economic coercion to assert
their power over workers – notably the practice of task payment – rather than
extra-economic coercion or violence, as they did in the past. In most cases, espe-
cially in South Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the increasing reliance on out-
sourcing and labour brokers has also contributed to an increase in the insecurity
faced by workers and in their exposure to the vagaries of markets and state
actions affecting agricultural investment.
Writing on India, Jha also points to increasing casualization of rural labour
during the 1990s, propelled essentially by three factors. First, most of the jobs
created through public works programmes in rural areas have been casual in
nature. Second, there has been a steady decline in the number of attached labour-
ers, in itself a positive achievement.29 Third, due to the increasingly difficult con-
ditions in small-scale agriculture many small and marginal farmers have moved
out of agriculture and joined the ranks of casual workers. The process of casuali-
zation of labour continued into the 1990s, albeit at a slower pace, as the labour
absorption capacity in both farm and non-farm sectors became severely curtailed
during the post-1991 reform era. The evidence, however, is not wholly
conclusive.30
A key challenge for policy makers, trade unions, and international agencies
therefore remains: how to support the creation of rural wage labour opportun-
ities, in contexts of an expanding labour supply, without exacerbating the levels
of insecurity, casualization, and powerlessness, especially for the poorest and
most vulnerable labour market entrants (Breman and van der Linden 2014;
Standing 2006; Heintz 2014; du Toit and Ally 2003).
5.3 The importance of migration and footloose labour

Most chapters in this collection confirm a well-established stylized fact in rural
labour market participation in developing countries: this is the combination of
farming and labour migration, ‘hoe and wage’ as Cordell et al. (1996) called it,
which is particularly important for the very poor, but also cuts across class
boundaries. Oya’s account of processes of rural labour market formation in
Senegal and Mauritania echoes the realities of other parts of West Africa
described by Cordell et al. (1996), Hill (1970) and Austin (2005), among many
other contributors.31 Labour mobilization in these areas has historically been
strongly associated with the long-distance movement of labour within countries
and across borders. The expansion of cash crop export production, i.e. cocoa,
cotton, and groundnuts as the most significant examples in much of West Africa,
went hand-in-hand with a rapid incorporation of migrant labourers, hired in
groups, as labour tenants, sharecroppers, or simply seasonal wage workers. In
this region the movements across borders were very important during the colo-
nial period. In additioninternal rural–rural labour migration also became signi-
ficant in the past 40 years, as documented by Oya’s fieldwork in Senegal, where
much of the seasonal labour force today working in central Groundnut Basin or
in the horticultural production areas of the Niayes originates from other parts of
Senegal, especially the drier areas in the north and east.
Several other chapters in this book pay special attention to the realities of
migrant labour, especially in agriculture, and its role in processes of capitalist
accumulation.32 Most contributions to this volume illustrate the diversity of
experiences and types of migration. Although the realities of rural labour
markets are particularly affected by rural–rural migration, rural–urban migration
may also be crucial to understanding the mobility and fluidity of ‘households’ as
Zhang, Johnston, and Jha suggest in their chapters (see also Breman 1996 in the
Asian context). There is also a whole range of situations in relation to the time
horizon of movements and important distinctions to be made between perma-
nent, seasonal, and circular movements, as Oya argues on West Africa and
Zhang, Ortiz, and Lee illustrate in the cases of China, Argentina–Colombia, and
Nicaragua–Costa Rica, respectively. Furthermore, not all labour migration
stories refer to voluntary movements. In fact, the process of rural labour market
formation and concomitant rural class formation have been sometimes deeply
shaped by the realities of violent conflict, and how forced migration contributes
to proletarianization and footloose labour through dispossession of the means of
production and compulsion to move in search for jobs (Cramer 2008; Pérez-
Niño 2015).
In the case of South Africa, Johnston and Pons-Vignon stress the centrality of
migrant labour in the process of accumulation and industrialization, which
spurred varied trajectories of proletarianization across borders and the creation
of labour reservoirs within South Africa and in neighbouring countries (notably
Mozambique, Malawi, and Lesotho).33 A similar scenario, albeit in clearly dif-
ferent historical and political circumstances, is found in Central America, with
Costa Rica having become an important locus for agricultural migrant labour
from neighbouring labour ‘reservoirs’, such as Nicaragua (Lee, this volume; see
also Luetchford 2008).
A shared view among many authors writing about intersections between
migration and labour market structures is that migrant labour contributes to seg-
mentation and fragmentation by creating distinct fractions of workers paid and
treated differently despite not being very different in terms of skills, experience
and productivity (see also Bardhan and Rudra 1986; Rao 1988). The use of
Introduction 25
migrant labour (especially from other countries) is thus seen as a tool to depress
wages by creating different factions of workers, where non-class identities, dif-
ferent interests and time horizons contribute to undermining collective action
(Breman 1996; Standing 2006; Rutherford and Addison 2007; Lee, Johnston,
and Pons-Vignon, in this volume).
5.4 Gender relations and labour market participation

As Ortiz points out in her chapter, the ‘feminization of agriculture’, associated
with globalization and flexible accumulation, appears as a strong feature of agri-
cultural wage employment in the developing world. As the agricultural commod-
ity export frontiers expand across countries, the search for cheap workers who
are willing to take up short occasional jobs compatible with their other social
needs means that the presence of women in fields and packhouses continues to
grow.34 Selwyn also documents the important presence of women in the work-
force of some of the most dynamic agricultural export sectors in Brazil and
worldwide. In China, where a significant concentration of production of certain
crops occurs in particular regions (e.g. cotton in north-western areas), peak
period labour shortages call for state-sponsored ferrying of large numbers of
migrant workers, with a high proportion of rural women in their ranks, as docu-
mented by Zhang in his chapter. The contributors to this book also show that the
nature of the crop in particular contexts is strongly associated with a greater or
smaller presence of women wage workers, with horticultural ‘greenhouse’-type
production as well as perennial export crops like tea typically relying on women
more than other crops do. However, it is also the case that their presence is sub-
stantially under-reported, particularly in the case of women migrant workers, as
Johnston reports in her chapter.
Women are also found in a wide range of other non-agricultural wage jobs. In
Mozambique, Cramer et al. emphasize the gendered nature of particular seg-
ments of the rural labour market, from the worst-paid jobs in domestic work,
often the place for very young girls to find a paid job outside their village, to
slightly better jobs in rural hotels, markets, and small restaurants. In Costa Rica,
Lee documents the important role that women play in nurturing the networks of
migrant agricultural wage labourers by working as farm worker caretakers or
‘cuida peónes’, offering domestic services (mainly cooking and laundry) and
rented accommodation with food. Their presence makes the influx of large
groups of male workers to horticultural production areas more viable.
There are important barriers to women’s entry into rural labour markets. Official
statistics, as reported in Section 2.1, tend to show a much lower proportion of
women employed for wages in rural areas than men. Micro-level surveys also
confirm this tendency, although they manage to capture much more wage employ-
ment among women than official statistics do, as argued in previous sections. Some
barriers are socio-cultural and relate to widespread patriarchal control, which
attribute negative connotations to women’s work outside the household, especially
for neighbours or badly paid jobs, or simply block women’s entry in the labour
market (including better jobs in plantations) because of women’s assumed repro-
ductive roles within the household, as in the case of Mozambique (Cramer et al.,
this volume), Tanzania (Sender and Smith 1990), Senegal-Mauritania (Oya, this
volume), Nigeria (Lindsay 2003) and Cameroon (Konings 2012).35 These studies
document a very high proportion of unmarried women, mainly divorced/separated
and widows among the ranks of women workers in rural wage employment (Oya
and Sender 2009; Konings 2012, 50; Lindsay 2003). In other words, the power of
husbands and fathers to determine whether a woman will enter or not the local
labour market or even to migrate is a major aspect of the gendered nature of rural
wage employment (Gordon 1996; Konings 2012). Women may, however, attempt
to negotiate with patriarchy to enter the labour market and gain some economic
independence within the limits of the culturally conceivable (Kandiyoti 1988), so
the nature and quality of a promised job may affect their bargaining power.
However, women’s labour market participation, especially in rural areas, can also
be determined by physical violence and ostracism, something that bargaining
models fail to theorize (Oya and Sender 2009; Konings 2012). Lee also gives evid-
ence of other types of barriers to women’s participation in the rural labour market.
For example, Costa Rican law requires young children to be supervised in the
home and the state threatens to place children in foster care if found unattended. In
this context, many Nicaraguan women migrants find that childcare costs prevent
them from accessing agricultural wage work, unless they find work in coffee har-
vesting, which allows women working alongside their children in jobs that require
less strength, more manual dexterity, and can be performed by children.36
Despite many of the barriers described above, women are not always stuck in
the worst-paid jobs or totally powerless. In Mozambique, Cramer et al. in this
volume analyse job differentiation and how some women manage to access
better-paid jobs, especially offered by foreign investors in dynamic export crops
(see also Oya and Sender 2009).37 Education is often a powerful tool to help
women access better jobs or even engage in collective action, as the chapters by
Cramer et al. and Selwyn suggest, although even women without schooling may
join in informal and collective actions in contexts of plantation agriculture (e.g.
Konings 2012). Selwyn pays particular attention to the gendered nature of col-
lective action in the São Francisco Valley and how rural trade unions succeeded
in incorporating women, thereby strengthening the movement’s overall col-
lective power to strike better conditions for everyone. These gains, however,
may come at a cost, as Selwyn illustrates by showing how exporting firms
change their traditional gendered division of labour and limit women’s presence
in the workforce precisely to reduce non-wage costs, which had increased as a
result of successful collective action. In short, class struggle in contemporary
agricultural commodity export production is highly gendered.
6 Concluding remarks
This introductory chapter has attempted to provide an overview of the main
analytical themes and issues contained in this book. One of the key objectives
Introduction 27
was to discuss the linkages between the literature on labour and the literature on
rural poverty, making a case for the significance of rural labour market studies
for poverty analysis. The study of rural labour markets in developing countries
presents a number of complex theoretical, methodological, and policy chal-
lenges. The case studies selected for this collection engage with these various
challenges and propose ways forward. The relative lack of adequate quantitative
evidence and policy attention on rural labour markets and employment strategies
for poverty reduction are disappointing, if not new, findings, but this book is the
first systematic attempt to reveal these gaps with field-based comparative evid-
ence. However, much more high-quality field-based research and much more
methodological and theoretical openness to different (old and new) ways of
looking at rural labour are needed. The case for interdisciplinarity, survey design
innovations and adjustments and conceptual rethinking cannot be overstated. It
is frustrating that, after so many decades of research and policy work on rural/
agrarian development and rural poverty, we still know so little about the nature
and evolution of rural/agricultural labour markets. What are the current agricul-
tural money wage rates in Senegal, Mozambique, Brazil, or China? What have
been the trends in real wages over the past 30 years? To what extent and why do
rural women access what type of casual and seasonal wage jobs? Why are there
such variations in rural working conditions within countries and sectors? These
and other questions might perhaps be answered if more resources had been dir-
ected to fund carefully designed LFS and independent research on rural wage
employment. Even a fraction of the funding provided by aid agencies and inter-
national NGOs to engage villagers in participatory exercises and to produce
poverty indicators together with highly contested poverty lines would make a
difference to our understanding of rural labour relations.
Addressing the theoretical and methodological challenges is also crucial to
start engaging more productively with policy issues and policy priorities for
poverty reduction. The concluding chapter of this book puts forward a number
of policy proposals that may strengthen the prospects for an improvement in the
living standards of some of the poorest and most vulnerable segments of the
rural working population in the surveyed areas. Given the heterogeneity of rural
wage working classes and the specificity of contexts, the aim here cannot be to
provide universal policy blueprints; rather, through comparative evidence, to
help readers think about the realistic range of policy options to improve the
quantity and quality of rural wage employment, and their political feasibility in
each context.
Notes
1 In this book rural wage labour refers mainly to agricultural (off-own farm) labour,
paid in cash or kind, permanent, seasonal, or casual.
2 This is particularly true for Africa. By contrast, in Latin America and the United
States there has traditionally been more interest and therefore more research, particu-
larly on migrations of agricultural labourers. See, for example, Cornelius and Martin
(1993) on Mexican rural migrants, Thomas (1992), and Wells (1996).
3 See Prasch (2004) for an extended discussion of the problems with neoclassical eco-
nomics’ treatment of labour as a commodity.
4 See Banaji (2010, 143–147) on a wide range of forms based on wage-labour in very
different contexts and epochs. Although nowadays unpaid apprentices are still
common in many developing countries, especially in poorer economies, there are
exceptions such as the case analysed by Ortiz in Argentina (this volume).
5 This is what Breman and van der Linden (2014) refer to as the ‘Standard Employment
Relationship’ based on regular salaried employment subject to regulations and a
variety of forms of protection.
6 See Banaji (2010) for a discussion of this argument, and Hilton (1976) for evidence
that wage labour was also present in feudalism even though as part of specific feudal
relations of production. In contrast, Wood (2002) and Cohen (2000) maintain that the
expansion of wage employment and the ultimate universal dependence on wage
employment, broadly defined, are defining and necessary conditions for capitalist
accumulation.
7 Pontara (2010) looks at the literature on the labour content of PRSPs in Africa,
whether policies/mechanisms are in place for creating employment opportunities;
improving the conditions of employment; targeting for employment purposes, at the
group, regional, and sector levels; and quantifying the impact of policies on different
dimensions of employment. Based on Nkurunziza (2007, 172), of the 21 PRSPs
examined up to 2004, only one displays a medium to high employment content:
Tanzania.
8 Paci and Serneels (2007) argue that despite the much-trumpeted importance of labour
market structures and outcomes for growth, the analytical work on this relationship
remains limited and heavily biased towards high-income countries. The existing work
on growth and poverty leaves the role of employment in transmission processes
largely unexplored, and remains outside mainstream labour economics.
9 Reardon (1997, 736) shows that in Africa, Latin America, and Asia ‘labor market
studies have tended to focus on cities and towns’. The edited volume on ‘informal
labour markets and development’ (Guha-Khasnobis and Kanbur 2006) is essentially a
book on urban employment as the notion of ‘informality’ is typically associated with
‘urbanity’.
10 Valdés et al. (2010) is a good example of the kind of generalizations of the rural poor
questioned by Sender (2003). It is also remarkable how key academic texts in devel-
opment studies make practically no mention of rural wage labour or agricultural wage
employment in sections on rural development, poverty, or even employment. An
example is Desai and Potter (2014).
11 There are plenty of examples in the literature of individuals who combine different
kinds of jobs in different sectors and also for the same employer. Chapters by Oya,
Cramer et al., Ortiz, Lee, and Zhang, for example, illustrate such cases.
12 See Lipton (2006) as a leading exponent of this tradition.
13 This is part of the RIGA (Rural Income Generating Activities) programme and data-
base (www.fao.org/economic/riga/riga-database/en), which is an unusual attempt to
extract more detailed labour statistics and specifically wage employment data from
existing national household surveys. Davis et al. (2010) and Winters et al. (2008)
report the key findings.
14 See Amsden (2010, 2012), and Sender (2003) for critical reviews of these mainstream
perspectives, which contain several references reflecting the mainstream view. See
also Bateman (2010) for a comprehensive critical review of microfinance.
15 A number of critiques have been levied against the ‘sustainable livelihoods’ and
income diversification approaches on conceptual and empirical grounds (see Fine
1997; Murray 2002; O’Laughlin 2004; Scoones and Wolmer 2003; Toner 2003).
16 ‘De-peasantization’ in Brazil has been examined in a more positive and progressive
fashion. Pereira (1997) analyses the rise of the labour movement in the 1980s in North
Introduction 29
East Brazil (Pernambuco). He maintains that the transformation of labour into a com-
modity corrodes old solidarities based on ties to the land but also opens up the possib-
ilities of new forms of solidarity and collective action and the achievement of
democratic rights. Rural labour can play an important role in fostering change in con-
texts where capitalist development in agriculture has begun to disintegrate the peas-
antry, but has not gone so far as that the rural proletariat has become insignificant.
Selwyn makes similar points in this volume.
17 This section substantially draws on Oya (2013) and will not develop some of the argu-
ments and debates presented in that article but will concentrate on a number of key
methodological questions.
18 See Oya (2013, 254 and table 2) for a critical analysis of this hypothesis.
19 See Hyden (2006, 138–160). For criticisms of this position, see classics like Kautsky
(1988), Kitching (1989), Wuyts (1978), Sender and Smith (1990), and more recent
field-based work in Tanzania presented in Mueller’s chapter in this book. Patnaik
(2010) also elaborates an argument, which is reminiscent of old-dependency theory
positions, that capitalism in the ‘periphery’ is not like capitalism in the ‘centre’, and
therefore will not be able to generate wage employment, at best jobless growth, and
the example of India is provided in that regard. For a critique of the employment pess-
imism with regards to India, see Dasgupta (2009).
20 See Swindell (1985, chapter 5) for a nuanced analysis of the nature, decline, and per-
sistence of cooperative/reciprocal labour exchange and the extent to which a col-
lective workgroup may conceal disguised forms of wage labour, when reciprocity is
not demonstrated and some individuals tend to benefit much more than others. See
also Whitehead (2006) for a similar point in relation to labour exchange in Nigeria.
21 The implication of data problems being at the heart of the misrepresentation of rural
wage employment in developing countries is that efforts at applying sophisticated
econometric techniques to analyse highly problematic national survey data may be
futile and reminders of the old computer science adage GIGO: ‘Garbage In, Garbage
Out’.
22 See Jerven (2013), who provides compelling evidence of the unreliability of basic
macroeconomic indicators in Africa, often used in econometric analysis, and docu-
ments the major challenges faced by national statistical agencies to produce enough
good-quality data on various aspects of development.
23 Rizzo et al. (2014) also provide detailed examples of the problems of questionnaire
design and specifically how questions on employment are ‘lost in translation’ in the
context of Tanzania, leading to a biased characterization of employment patterns for
informal labour.
24 See also their discussion of ‘residential’ versus ‘economic’ definitions of the house-
hold and how they affect rural labour market statistics (Cramer et al. 2014).
25 See also Erlebach (2006) for a rare in-depth study of rural wage employment in
Rwanda, which confirms the huge importance of wage jobs for the poorest rural
people.
26 See also a recent collection of essays on unfree labour introduced by Barrientos et al.
(2013).
27 For other views on this and more emphasis on realities of workers’ resistance, includ-
ing migrants, in China see Chan (2014) and Friedman (2014).
28 See also recent work on wage differences and segmentation across different types of
commercial farms in Ethiopia (Wendimu and Gibbon 2014).
29 Attached labour is a contract that typically involves tying of labour over specified
time periods and often such contracts are very fuzzy with reference to responsibilities
of workers. It is a form of ‘unfree’ labour of which there has been historically a signi-
ficant amount in India.
30 See, for a different view, Dasgupta (2009).
31 De Haan and Rogaly (2002, 1), writing on rural labour migration more broadly, argue
that despite the wealth of literature on migration in and from Asia and Africa, ‘too
little is known about this type of migration’, i.e. ‘of migration of rural people for
various forms of work elsewhere, often returning to the place they started from.’
32 For a more general account of migrant labourers in such contexts, see Stichter (1985)
and Wells (1996) for a lucid analysis in the context of California, United States.
33 Today labour migration to South African agriculture comes back to centre stage as a
result of the mass movements of migrant workers escaping the harsh realities of con-
temporary Zimbabwe and flocking to the gates of capitalist farms (Bolt 2013; Ruther-
ford and Addison 2007).
34 See the classic contribution by Elson and Pearson (1984) on the idea of ‘nimble
fingers’ and ‘docility’, often associated with the incorporation of women workers to
the labour market in export sectors in developing countries. See also Maertens and
Swinnen (2012) and Dolan (2004).
35 See Gordon (1996) and Stichter and Parpart (1988) more generally on the trajectories
of patriarchy under capitalism development in Africa.
36 See also Pearson and Kusakabe (2012) on Burmese women migrant workers in
Thailand.
37 On positive impacts of access to plantation jobs in Senegal, see also Maertens et al.
(2011), Maertens and Swinnen (2012) and Maertens and Verhofstadt (2013), who
produce evidence that women’s employment in agribusiness export sectors have
positive effects on their children’s schooling and especially on gender disparities in
schooling.
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du Toit, A. and F. Ally, 2003. ‘The Externalisation and Casualisation of Farm Labour in
Western Cape Horticulture’. Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies, University of
the Western Cape, Cape Town, research report no. 16.
Ellis, F., 2000. Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in Development Countries. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Elson, D. and R. Pearson, 1984. ‘ “Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers”: An Analysis
of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’. In For a New
Labour Internationalism, ed. P. Waterman, 120–141. The Hague: Ileri.
Erlebach, R.W., 2006. ‘The Importance of Wage Labour in the Struggle to Escape
Poverty: Evidence from Rwanda’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. School of Orien-
tal and African Studies, University of London.
FAO, ILO, and IUF, 2005. Agricultural Workers and their Contribution to Sustainable
Agriculture and Rural Development. Rome: FAO.
Fields, G., 2007. Labor Market Policy in Developing Countries: A Selective Review of the
Literature and Needs for the Future. Policy Research Working Paper 4362, World Bank.
Fine, B., 1997. ‘Entitlement Failure?’ Development and Change, 28: 617–647.
Fine, B., 1998. Labour Market Theory: A Constructive Reassessment. Routledge: London.
Friedman, E., 2014. ‘Alienated Politics: Labour Insurgency and the Paternalistic State in
China’. Development and Change, 45 (5): 1001–1018.
Ghai, D. and S. Radwan, 1983. ‘Agrarian Change, Differentiation and Rural Poverty in
Africa: A General Survey’. In Agrarian Policies and Rural Poverty in Africa, eds D.
Ghai and S. Radwan, 1–30. Geneva: ILO.
Gindling, T.H. and D. Newhouse, 2012. Self-employment in the Developing World. Policy
Research Working Paper 6201, World Bank.
Gordon, A.A., 1996. Transforming Capitalism and Patriarchy: Gender and Development
in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Guha-Khasnobis, B. and S.R. Kanbur, 2006. Informal Labour Markets and Development.
New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Heintz, J., 2014. ‘Jobs, Justice and Development: A Review of Working Hard, Working
Poor’. Development and Change, 45 (4): 799–811.
Hill, O., 1970. Rural Capitalism in West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hilton, R., 1976. ‘Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism’. History Workshop Journal,
1 (1): 9–25.
Huang, P.C.C., 2013. ‘Misleading Chinese Legal and Statistical Categories: Labor, Indi-
vidual Entities, and Private Enterprises’. Modern China, 39 (4): 347–379.
Huang, P.C.C., Y. Gao, and Y. Peng, 2012. ‘Capitalization Without Proletarianization in
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Hyden, G., 2006. African Politics in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Jerven, M., 2013. Poor Numbers: How We are Misled by African Development Statistics
and What To Do About It. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Introduction 33
Kandiyoti, D., 1988. ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Gender and Society, 3: 274–290.
Kautsky, K., 1988 [1899]. The Agrarian Question. London: Zwan Publications.
Kay, C. 2009. ‘Estudios rurales en América Latina en el periodo de globalización neolib-
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Kitching, G.N., 1989. Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective.
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Konings, P., 2012. Gender and Plantation Labour in Africa. The Story of Tea Pluckers’
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Maertens, M., L. Colen, and J.F. Swinnen, 2011. ‘Globalisation and Poverty in Senegal:
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Mellor, J.W., 2014. ‘High Rural Population Density Africa: What are the Growth
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Milonakis, D. and B. Fine, 2009. From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the
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Morrison, J. and Murphy, S. 2004. Agricultural Trade and Poverty Reduction: Oppor-
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and the Paternalistic State in China’. Development and
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World Bank.
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Gender and Development in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
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Markets and Development. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Heintz, J., 2014. ‘Jobs, Justice and Development: A Review

of Working Hard, Working Poor’. Development and Change, 45
(4): 799–811.
Hill, O., 1970. Rural Capitalism in West Africa. Cambridge:

Hilton, R., 1976. ‘Feudalism and the Origins of

Capitalism’. History Workshop Journal, 1 (1): 9–25.
Huang, P.C.C., 2013. ‘Misleading Chinese Legal and

Statistical Categories: Labor, Individual Entities, and
Private Enterprises’. Modern China, 39 (4): 347–379.
Huang, P.C.C., Y. Gao, and Y. Peng, 2012. ‘Capitalization

Without Proletarianization in China’s Agricultural
Development’. Modern China, 38: 139–173.
Hyden, G., 2006. African Politics in Comparative

Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jerven, M., 2013. Poor Numbers: How We are Misled by

African Development Statistics and What To Do About It.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kandiyoti, D., 1988. ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’. Gender

and Society, 3: 274–290.
Kautsky, K., 1988 [1899]. The Agrarian Question. London:

Zwan Publications.
Kay, C. 2009. ‘Estudios rurales en América Latina en el

periodo de globalización neoliberal:¿ una nueva
ruralidad?’. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 71 (4):
607–645.
Kevane, M., 1994. ‘Village Labor Markets in Sheikan

District: Sudan’. World Development, 22 (6): 839–857.
Kitching, G.N., 1980. Class and Economic Change in Kenya:
The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie 1905–1970. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kitching, G.N., 1989. Development and Underdevelopment in

Historical Perspective. London: Methuen.
Konings, P., 2012. Gender and Plantation Labour in Africa.

The Story of Tea Pluckers’ Struggles in Cameroon. Bamenda
and Leiden: Langaa and African Studies Centre.
Lanjouw, P., 2007. ‘Does the Rural Non- farm Economy

Contribute to Poverty Reduction?’ In Transforming the Rural
Non- agricultural Economy: Opportunities and Threats in
the Developing World, eds S. Haggblade, P. Hazell, and T.
Reardon, 55–79. Baltimore, MD: IFPRI and Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Lenin, V.I., 1982 [1899]. ‘The Differentiation of the

Peasantry’. Reproduced in Rural Development: Theories of
Peasant Economy and Agrarian Change, ed. J. Harriss,
Lennihan, L., 1987. ‘Agricultural Wage Labor in Northern

Nigeria’. In State, Oil, and Agriculture in Nigeria, ed.
M. Watts, 248–267. Berkeley: Institute of International
Studies, University of California.
Lerche, J. 2010. ‘From “rural labour” to “classes of

labour”: Class fragmentation, caste and class struggle at
the bottom of the Indian labour hierarchy’. In The
Comparative Political Economy of Development: Africa and
South Asia, eds B. Harriss- White and J. Heyer, chapter 4.
London: Routledge.
Lindsay, L.A., 2003. Working With Gender: Wage Labor and

Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Lipton, M., 2006. ‘Can Small Farmers Survive, Prosper, or

be the Key Channel to Cut Mass Poverty?’ Electronic
Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics, 3 (1):
58–85.
Luetchford, P., 2008. ‘The Hands that Pick Fair Trade

Coffee: Beyond the Charms of the Family Farm’. Research in
Economic Anthropology, 28: 143–169.
Maertens, M., and J.F. Swinnen, 2012. ‘Gender and Modern

Supply Chains in Developing Countries’. Journal of
Maertens, M. and E. Verhofstadt, 2013. ‘Horticultural

Exports, Female Wage Employment and Primary School
Enrolment: Theory and Evidence from Senegal’. Food Policy,
43: 118–131.
Maertens, M., L. Colen, and J.F. Swinnen, 2011.

‘Globalisation and Poverty in Senegal: A Worst Case
Scenario?’ European Review of Agricultural Economics, 38
(1): 31–54.
Mellor, J.W., 2014. ‘High Rural Population Density Africa:

What are the Growth Requirements and Who Participates?’
Food Policy, 48: 66–75.
Milonakis, D. and B. Fine, 2009. From Political Economy to

Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the
Evolution of Economic Theory. London: Routledge.
Morrison, J. and Murphy, S. 2004. Agricultural Trade and

Poverty Reduction: Opportunity or Threat. London: DFID.
Murray, C., 2002. ‘Livelihood Research: Transcending

Boundaries of Time and Space’. Journal of Southern African
Studies, 28 (3): 489–509.
Mwamadzingo, M., 2003. Assessing the Decent Work Deficit in

African Agriculture: Priority Issues, International Labour
Organisation, Sub- Regional Office for Southern Africa,
Discussion Paper 21, International Labour Office, Geneva.
Nkurunzika, J., 2007. ‘Generating Rural Employment in

Africa to Fight Poverty’. In Towards Full and Decent
Employment, ed. J.A. Ocampo and K.S. Jomo. London: Zed
Books.
O’Laughlin, B., 2004. ‘Rural Livelihoods and Diversity in

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Rural Wage Employment in

There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the

Carlos Oya is Reader in Political Economy of Development, Department of

1 Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization

2 Peasants and Globalization

3 The Political Economy of Rural Livelihoods in Transition Economies

4 Agrarian Angst and Rural Resistance in Contemporary Southeast Asia

5 Water, Environmental Security and Sustainable Rural Development

6 Reforming Land and Resource Use in South Africa

8 Public Policy and Agricultural Development

9 Social Conflict, Economic Development and the Extractive Industry

10 The Ecotourism–Extraction Nexus

11 Rural Livelihoods, Regional Economies and Processes of Change

12 Rural Development and the Construction of New Markets

13 The Political Ecology of Agrofuels

14 Rural Wage Employment in Developing Countries

ISBN: 978-0-415-68649-5 (hbk)

1 Introduction: understanding rural wage employment in

2 Rural labour markets and agricultural wage employment in

4 Caught in the grip of the market: past and present of rural

5 Disguised employment? Labour market surveys, migration

6 Tanzania’s rural labour markets: the missing link between

7 The policy neglect of rural wage employment: the cases of

8 Labour conditions in rural India: reflections on continuity

9 Rural households’ social reproduction in China’s agrarian

10 Structuring rural labour markets: a case study from North

11 Employment instability and the restructuring of rural and

12 The ties made in the harvest: Nicaraguan farm worker

13 Improving the functioning of rural labour markets and

1.1 Employment status: key variables for selected regional

Christopher Cramer is Professor of Political Economy of Development at

Deborah Johnston is Reader in Development Economics at SOAS, University

This book is the outcome of a long, sometimes challenging, but ultimately

AgriBusiness SA Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa

1.1 Methodological approach and aims

1.2 A primer on key notions: ‘wage’, ‘employment’, and ‘rural’

2.1 The neglect of wage employment in mainstream poverty agendas

the growth–poverty reduction nexus cannot be taken as an axiom, not even

Wage and salaried workers Total self-employed

Average Median Average Median

Sub-Saharan Africa (34 countries) 28 20 70 80

3 The challenge of capturing rural wage labour in

3.1 Factors contributing to the invisibility of rural wage employment

Second, reference periods are problematic. Many countries still rely on

4 Rethinking theory: towards a political economy of rural

5 Key features of rural labour markets and contemporary

5.1 Diversity and multiplicity in rural wage employment

5.2 Casual and ‘informal’ jobs

5.3 The importance of migration and footloose labour

5.4 Gender relations and labour market participation

1 Introduction: understanding rural wage

Amsden, A.H., 2010. ‘Say’s Law, Poverty Persistence, and

Amsden, A., 2012. ‘Grass Roots War on Poverty’. World

Austin, G.M., 2005. Land, Labour and Capital in Ghana.

Banaji, J., 2010. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of

Bardhan, P. and A. Rudra, 1986. ‘Labour Mobility and the

Barrett, C.B., M. Besfuneh, D.C. Clay, and T. Reardon,

Barrientos, S., U. Kothari, and N. Phillips, 2013.

Bateman, M., 2010. Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The

Belchamber, G. and S. Schetagne, 2013. ‘Outcomes of the