Between exploitation, expropriation and depletion: An exploration of the gendered and racialised migrant farming workforce in Provence, France

The thesis examines the severe exploitation of migrant workers within the Provençal agricultural sector in Southeastern France, focusing on how social power dynamics, specifically gender and race, perpetuate exploitative practices. Through a Marxist Feminist Political Economy lens that centralises the interplay of race and gender, the thesis demonstrates how gendered and racialised systems of oppression are integral features of the processes of labour exploitation and accumulation in the sector.

In addition to wage theft, mobility restrictions, administrative hyper-precarity, labour rights violations, and racial and gendered forms of subordination and violence, the thesis explores how exploitation colonises all dimensions of these workers' lives, extracting value from their labour and bodies beyond the workplace. It finds that racial and gendered forms of exploitation occur through the dispossession of health and social provisions and through depleted and differentiated social reproductive conditions in employer-owned workers’ accommodations, which altogether appropriate, exploit, and sacrifice workers’ lives.

The thesis makes an original contribution to Marxist Feminist Political Economy and Political Economy of Unfree Labour, extending research on labour exploitation by foregrounding the role of gender-racial systems of oppression and the interrelation of exploitation with dynamics of expropriation and depletion.

The research adopted a mixed qualitative approach, involving in-depth interviews and observations with farmers, migrant workers, industry stakeholders, and public agents over an extended period of fieldwork in Provence. This year-long immersion facilitated the collection of situated knowledge and everyday experiences, allowing the study to uncover the embedded dynamics of social oppression within Provençal agriculture.