Debate

A Plantation Precariat: Fragmentation and Organizing

Potential in the Palm Oil Global Production Network

Oliver Pye

ABSTRACT

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

INTRODUCTION

This article looks at the palm oil industry from a labour geography (Herod,
2001) perspective. Palm oil has become one of the archetypal globalized
‘agri-food production circuits’ (Dicken, 2011: 272) of the 21st century. A
multi-billion dollar industry, palm oil encompasses the globe, connecting oil
palm plantations and mills in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America to

The author would like to extend his thanks to the referees; his research assistants, Yuyun
Harmono, Ramlah Daud, Tatat and Kartika Manurung; collaborating NGOs; and the workers who
were involved in the project. The project ‘The Making of Social Movements under Conditions
of Precarity and Transnationalism in Southeast Asia’ was funded by the German Research
Foundation.

Development and Change 0(0): 1–23. DOI: 10.1111/dech.12334


C 2017 International Institute of Social Studies.
2 Oliver Pye

refineries and processing plants in China, Europe, India and North America
to food, cosmetic and chemical factories around the world. As a flex crop
(Borras et al., 2014), it is not only at the centre of the convergence between
agri-food, chemical and energy industries, but it is also tied up with political
regulation of agrofuels and with speculation by the global financial markets
(Dietz et al., 2015). Less understood, however, is how the palm oil global
production network (GPN) spatially links millions of workers across Asia
and beyond ‘in the friction of the commodity chain’ (Tsing, 2005: 51).
The concept of GPNs aims to balance a capital-centred view of the new
production chains by stressing their social and political embeddedness and
by complementing the vertical chain of analysis with a closer look at the
horizontal networks that shape the vertical links in the chain (Coe et al.,
2008). One element of this is to include non-firm actors such as nation
states, civil society and labour in the analysis. Viewing GPNs from the
perspective of labour builds on basic tenets developed by labour geographers
such as Andrew Herod, David Mitchell and Noel Castree (see Castree,
2007; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010 for critical overviews). Herod contrasts
a discussion of labour from a capital perspective (‘geography of labour’)
with a ‘labour geography’ which seeks to understand how workers ‘actively
produce economic spaces and scales’ (2001: 46). More recently, scholars
have started to apply a labour geography approach specifically to GPNs
(Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Coe and Hess, 2013; Cumbers et al., 2008;
Hale and Wills, 2005; McGrath, 2013; Selwyn, 2012; Wad, 2013). Rather
than seeing labour from the perspective of capital, either as a commodity
or as a factor for accumulation strategies within GPNs, labour geographers
see ‘the social relations of production, class conflict and resistance . . . at
the core of an analysis of capitalism and its spatial logic’ (Cumbers et al.,
2008: 372). In this way, GPNs are ‘ultimately networks of embodied labour’
(ibid.).
The study draws on extensive qualitative research with Indonesian mi-
grants who work or worked in the palm oil industry in Malaysia. Malaysia
and Indonesia account for around 85 per cent of global palm oil production.
Governments from both countries and the industry itself consider palm oil
to be one of the main engines of development, something belied by the
miserable wages paid to the workers that are at the heart of its profitabil-
ity. A social-ecological landscape made up of estates and palm oil mills
now dominates Peninsular Malaysia and the islands of Borneo and Sumatra,
and plantations are expanding into the Philippines, Southern Thailand and
other parts of Indonesia. A regional scale of production has emerged which
is dominated by transnational corporations from Malaysia, Indonesia and
Singapore, where mass migration to the plantations and mills in Malaysia is
a defining feature. By looking at migrant workers’ experience at these two
important ‘vertical links’ in the palm oil GPN (plantations and mills), this
analysis hopes to fill some of the gaps in GPN research identified by Castree
(2007), including workers in the global South, migration, the role of the
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 3

state, ‘moral geographies’ (ibid.: 860) and a more holistic view of working
people’s lives.
The article is also an intervention into the debate among ‘GPN labour
geographers’ about the potential of labour as a political force at the global
scale. Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010), Coe et al. (2008) and Cumbers et al.
(2008) all stress the fragmentation of labour through the reorganization of
production along GPNs. Coe et al. (2008: 284) for example assert ‘a clear
spatial asymmetry between place-bound labour and polycentric GPNs’ and
that ‘overall labour is far less mobile than capital’. The assumption is that
GPNs have structurally weakened the internationalist project of the labour
movement. Herod’s work on labour geography (2001), in contrast, empha-
sizes the power of labour as a global agent and new forms of international
labour solidarity (although he by no means ignores the spatial contradictions
involved). Evans develops a detailed critique of the argument that global
labour solidarity has become structurally near impossible and asserts that
globalization ‘facilitates the mobilization of labor solidarity at the trans-
national level as well as the construction of transnational labor movement
organizations and networks’ (Evans, 2010: 356). He calls for ‘shifting the
discussion from lamentations over a supposed structural logic of impossi-
bility to a debate focused on strategies and structures’ (ibid.: 368).
This contribution starts by exploring the fragmentation and the precariti-
zation of palm oil labour. It adapts concepts from economic geography such
as strategic coupling and path dependency to explain the palm oil labour
regime as a political project that was constructed upon the legacy of a his-
torical defeat of the plantation labour movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
Drawing on Standing’s work on the precariat (2011), the article shows how
this political project is based on social and political precarity produced by
‘othering’ migrant workers as ‘denizens’ (ibid.: 93). It discusses how work-
ers react to different forms of precarity by producing space in pursuit of their
own spatial strategies of social reproduction (Herod, 2001). Migrant work-
ers use extensive transnational networks in order to circumvent or challenge
capital’s strategies of spatial control. These spatially and temporally contin-
gent networks that link specific places in Indonesia with ones in the palm oil
landscape are used to avoid national border controls, to abscond and switch
employers and to organize collective bargaining and wildcat strikes. In this
way, fragmentation provokes a counter-reaction by workers, who scale up
everyday resistance strategies, producing the potential for new spatialities
of solidarity.
The article argues that these networks and practices of everyday resistance
should be viewed as a potential basis for organizing new networks of labour
activism (NOLAs). While workers in the palm oil industry might be objec-
tively linked along the GPN via their work, this does not mean that they
are politically linked in trade unions or in transnational labour campaigns.
In fact, workers and their organizations play no role in the many campaigns
now targeting palm oil production (Pye, 2010). The NOLA approach is a
4 Oliver Pye

useful starting point to re-orientate NGO activism around palm oil and also
to think about what workers and unions ‘could or ought to do’ (Castree,
2007: 861). This analysis argues that the grounded, everyday practice of
workers could become the basis for more explicit, transnational organizing,
and perhaps the start of spatial strategies that could scale up the GPN in a
more coherent way.

RESEARCH WITH MIGRANT WORKERS IN THE PALM OIL INDUSTRY

This article is based on research conducted in the context of a project on

precarity, transnationalism and social movements between 2010 and 2012
in Malaysia and Indonesia and followed up in 2014 and 2015. A series of
biographical interviews, subsequent in-depth interviews and finally group
discussions was conducted with 10 groups of workers who represented dif-
ferent qualitative contexts and experiences. Five groups of workers were
interviewed in their home villages and neighbourhoods in northern Suma-
tra, central Java, Lombok and Makassar (Sulawesi) after returning from
Malaysia. Further biographical interviews were conducted on a ferry carry-
ing migrant workers from Surabaya and Sulawesi to Nunukan, a transit town
for workers entering Sabah, Malaysia. Where possible, these workers were
visited in the plantations in Sabah, leading to further in-depth interviews and
group discussions. Five groups of mill workers and plantation workers were
interviewed in the same way in Sabah, Malaysia.
The research method was designed to reflect the multi-local experience
of the migrant workers (Marcus, 1995) and to place their work experience
within their other livelihood and social reproduction contexts. The goal was
to uncover everyday practices of workers who were in the main not politically
organized or trade union members. The project followed a grounded research
approach with the aim of developing inductive categories and ideas rather
than applying a priori categories on to the workers. The evaluation started in
2010 with biographical narratives that encouraged the workers to relate their
life stories as they saw them themselves and with minimum intervention by
the interviewers.
These narrative interviews generated insights into the life planning and
biographical precarity of workers and into everyday coping and resistance
strategies to the different forms of precarity they had experienced. A year or
so later, we revisited the workers to conduct follow-up, in-depth interviews
that aimed to uncover in more detail the way they framed their experiences
and their political consciousness on reflection. In order to do this, we first
conducted a ranking exercise of problems identified by all the workers in
the narrative interviews, and followed these through with an exercise we
called ‘positioning and repositioning’. Here, workers identified persons and
institutions responsible for and impacted by their chosen key problems and
repositioned them to explore possible solutions. Later, during a third visit
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 5

Table 1. Group Discussions of Workers Discussed in the Article

Workers Places and Networks Issues in Group Discussion
Group
Women Area of Makassar networked to Sabah Family breakdown, flight, bonded
Workers labour, health and education
Male Workers Village near Medan networked to Disappointed hopes, role of the labour
Peninsular Malaysia agent, reform of migration regime
Work Gang Felda area in Sabah connected to area Benefits and problems of working as
in Sulawesi outsourced gang
Mill Workers Mill in Sabah networked to different Experience of wildcat strike
places in Sulawesi

Source: Group discussions with male workers in village near Medan on 4 March 2012, with work gang in
Sabah on 1 July 2012, with mill workers in Sabah on 6 July 2012 and with women group in Makassar on
14 July 2012.

in 2012, we organized group discussions among the workers (usually four

to five people) on topics that they would identify themselves, where they
were encouraged to analyse the problem, discuss key demands and to think
about solutions. Because of the prior work and reflection the workers had put
in, first in recounting their life stories and then in analysing key problems,
these discussions were often quite thoughtful and controversial, generating
interesting dynamics between the workers themselves.
The empirical argument of this article is based on general insights from
the research conducted and on the different experiences of four groups of
workers from the project (Table 1). The first group of women workers from
a poor part of Makassar on Sulawesi had recently returned from working
in the plantations in Sabah, and were part of a women’s self-support group
coordinated by the NGO Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) — Women’s Solidarity.
Their experience reflects the different dimensions of precarity built into the
migrant labour regime. The second group consisted of male migrant workers
from a village in North Sumatra, who had worked in Peninsular Malaysia for
different lengths of time. Their group discussion focused on the problem of
recruitment agents, as one of the workers had returned home and recruited
three of the other workers, leading to major tensions within the group. The
third group was a ‘gang’ of workers working as freelance subcontractors in an
area of Sabah dominated by FELDA, the state land and development agency
(and now a major plantation corporation). Their discussion illustrates the
relationship between the structural constraints of outsourced work and the
agency potential of the workers. The fourth group was made up of workers
in a mill in Sabah. Their group discussion revolved around a wildcat strike
(mogok) they had conducted a few days before.

PRODUCING A PLANTATION PRECARIAT

The palm oil industry in Southeast Asia is highly profitable because it ex-
ploits a precariatized workforce that is fragmented and loosely organized.
6 Oliver Pye

This is not a structural given, but was and is a political project, the result
of how the powerful transnational corporations that dominate the industry
constructed and regulated its labour regime. The palm oil industry emerged
out of a ‘path dependence and lock-in’ (MacKinnon, 2012: 232) from a pre-
existing plantation industry set up by the British and Dutch colonial regimes.
At first, workers were extremely marginalized and fragmented indentured
‘coolies’, imported from China, India and Java (Breman, 1990). But from
the 1930s onwards, workers organized themselves to create powerful labour
movements that conducted waves of strikes and occupations (Ramasamy,
1994; Stoler, 1995). Tragically, the rise of militant labour movements in the
plantations was met by a wave of anti-communist repression with which
employers and the state were able to crush the workers’ movement.
In Malaya, European and Chinese plantation owners went on a counter-
offensive in 1948. Independent trade unions were denied registration, strikes
were made illegal, hundreds of trade union activists were imprisoned, thou-
sands deported, and prominent leaders were hanged or shot (Ramasamy,
1994: 86). In Indonesia, reactionary forces within the army led by General
Suharto orchestrated a bloodbath in 1965, in which up to one million commu-
nist party members and other activists were killed (Kammen and McGregor,
2012). In North Sumatra, members of the plantation union Sarekat Buruh
Perkebunan Republik Indonesia were the main target. Tens of thousands
of union activists were killed and the organization was totally destroyed
(Stoler, 1995: 163; White, 2016).
The historic defeat of the plantation labour movements in Malaya and
Sumatra explains the ‘path dependence’ (McKinnon 2012: 232) of the labour
movement in the palm oil industry. Not only were the combative trade unions
crushed, but their backbone, i.e. militants organized in a radical political
party, were repressed or, in the Indonesian case, physically liquidated. In
the aftermath, state-controlled unions such as the Serikat Pekerja Seluruh
Indonesia (SPSI) in Indonesia and the ethnicized ‘yellow’ union NUPW
in Malaysia discouraged and sabotaged strike action, ensuring ‘harmonious
industrial relations’ (Ramasamy, 1994: 172).
The palm oil industry was constructed on these historically embedded
social-ecological plantation landscapes. A new ‘strategic coupling’ (Mac-
Kinnon, 2012) emerged, in which new capital formations and the nation
states of Malaysia and Indonesia played a major role. In close cooperation
with state entities such as the Malaysian Palm Oil Board and the Ministry
for Plantation Industries and Commodities, state capital and private trans-
national corporations (TNCs) from Malaysia now dominate the industry and
downstream processing plants in Europe and North America (Pye, 2008,
2016). In Indonesia, conglomerates with close ties to the Suharto regime play
a similar role, while Singapore, as a site for shipping and refineries, hosts
the largest palm oil TNC of them all, Wilmar International. With Wilmar
and Malaysian TNCs operating hundreds of plantations and mills across
Malaysia and Indonesia, a new regional scale of production has emerged.
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 7

Palm oil production has been expanded throughout southern Thailand and
West Papua, as well as the regions of Jambi and Riau in Sumatra, Kalimantan,
Sarawak and Sabah in Borneo, and Mindanao in the Philippines.
If the expansion of the palm oil industry into landscapes hitherto charac-
terized by small-scale farming and forests represents a spatial fix for capital
(Harvey, 1981) and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003: 137), a
‘labour spatial fix’ became necessary to supply the plantations and mills with
workers. Here, the ‘continuing centrality of nation-states’ (Coe et al., 2008:
282) in regulating GPNs becomes clear in the way they implemented spe-
cific labour regimes via labour laws, arbitration systems, courts, police, and
through their territorial control of national boundaries. Both the Malaysian
and Indonesian nation states play a role in constructing a regional labour con-
trol regime that is a ‘historically contingent and territorially embedded set
of mechanisms which co-ordinate the time-space reciprocities between pro-
duction, work, consumption and labour reproduction’ (Jonas, 1996: 325).
Reminiscent of the import of ‘coolies’ in the colonial era, workers are
now recruited from among the ‘surplus population’ (Li, 2009: 68) in rural
Indonesia. Indonesian workers make up to 90 per cent of palm oil workers
in Malaysia, and the Indonesian areas of expansion are also characterized
by new migration movements. The Malaysian state plays the crucial role in
implementing a migrant labour regime in which workers are issued work
permits for two to three years. This ‘flexible labour regime’ (Saravana-
muttu, 2012: 120) aims to regulate labour in a way that provides labour
power without social reproduction costs (these are outsourced to Indonesia).
Workers are not allowed to switch employers, get married or bring their
children or spouses. They are subjected to regular health checks (and are
repatriated to Indonesia if they get ill or pregnant), and can be imprisoned,
caned and deported if found guilty of infringements such as a lack of proper
documentation (Pye, 2015).
Labour recruitment is organized by labour agencies, both formally and
informally, who then deduct the costs from workers’ wages. An estimated
50 per cent of the workers in Malaysia have no official papers and, consid-
ered illegal by the state, are more vulnerable vis-à-vis the employers and
the police. There are also huge differences in the types of contracts that
workers receive, ranging from a three-year contract with the mill or planta-
tion company to flexible employment with subcontractors and outsourced,
freelance workers who work on an informal basis for smallholders or who
work in gangs that are paid per hectare harvested (Pye et al., 2012). The
result is intense fragmentation: different ethnicities, formal and informal
contracts, legal and illegalized workers, degrees of precarity, working for
different labour agencies in the same location, freelancers and ‘gangs’, and
new forms of indentured labour arising from debt bondage scams, etc (see
Table 3 below). The workforce is also highly gendered, with women workers
in more precarious and badly paid positions (Pye and Julia, 2014).
8 Oliver Pye

Table 2. Forms of Precarity Recounted by Migrant Workers in the Palm Oil

Social Precarity
Hard work, long hours
Low wages
Debt accumulated through trip
Landlessness (back home)
Poverty (back home)
Substandard housing
Access to health care
Temporary contracts
Outsourced and piece rate work
Industry
Political Precarity Psycho-Social Precarity
Documentation (or lack of) Separation from the family
Power of the labour agent Experience of violence
Power of the manager Breakdown of families
Treatment by foreman Gendered dependency
Being sold from agent to agent
Repression by police
No education for the children

Source: Compiled from 45 biographical interviews with migrant workers in the palm oil industry in
September and October 2010 and February and March 2011.

In addition, the short-term contract system and high turnover create ‘tem-
poral fragmentation’, that is, workers do not develop long-term, place-bound
ties. In their biographical narratives, workers discuss various forms of social,
political, psycho-social and biographical precarity (see Table 2). As dis-
cussed elsewhere in greater detail, the situation they encounter in Malaysia
depends on their position in their place of origin, on the networks that brought
them into Malaysia and on their biographical precarity (Pye et al., 2012). The
latter is particularly relevant for women migrants, whose migration experi-
ence was often one of ‘fleeing’ (lari) from a difficult situation back home.
Biographical breaks connected to their status as women, such as being left
by their husband, eloping with a man against their parents’ wishes, or losing
family members and having to survive as single women, prompted them to
search for a new beginning or a better life in Malaysia.
Social precarity characterized the experience of all the workers to various
degrees. A recurring theme was the low wages, which were generally well
below expectations. This is usually because costs for the work permit, for
brokering the job and for travel expenses are deducted from the wage packet,
and because prices for food and basic amenities are higher than expected,
particularly in the shops run on the plantation estates. Cahaya,1 from the mill
worker group, recounted how he was earning 10 MYR per day (just over 2
Euros), after a trial period where he was getting 8 MYR, making about 400–
500 MYR per month with overtime. But he was charged 200 MYR for the
work permit and spent 300 MYR a month on food and cigarettes, meaning
he was left with nothing. This is a typical story, and a serious problem for
migrant workers who officially only have three to five years to save enough
to change their livelihood back home.
The temporality imposed by the permit system adds to the social precarity
of the workers. A three- to five-year contract does not offer a long-term

1. Biographical interview, mill worker, Sabah, 25 November 2011. Names have been changed
unless workers wanted their own names to be used.
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 9

Table 3. Labour Contracts and Related Dynamics of Fragmentation

Types of Contract ‘External’ Political Internalization of Fragmentation
Relations Control Performance Dynamics
Pressure
Employed directly by ‘Permit repression’; Piece rate system; Differentiation between
the palm oil health checks; threat targets; overtime different groups of
company of illegalization workers and gender
discrimination
Employed by labour Workers at same site work
agency for different employers
Outsourced Power to withdraw Risk and performance Separation into groups
quasi-self-employed contract based income passed working ‘for
on fully to the themselves’; delegation
workers of control to workers
and subsequent
hierarchization
Indentured Physical violence; debt Pressure to pay off debt Physical fragmentation
debt-bondage accumulation; threat to regain freedom
dependency of illegalization; fear

Source: Compiled from 45 biographical interviews with migrant workers in the palm oil industry in
September and October 2010 and February and March 2011.

perspective to the migrant workers. In practice, workers are confronted with

a myriad of different forms of contracts, payment systems and employers.
Plantation workers employed directly by the company are paid differently
according to different tasks: harvesters get a piece rate (with bonuses or
deductions connected to targets), or a piece rate for a group made up of
a harvesters and carriers, while women workers tend to be paid a lower
daily wage for spreading fertilizer or applying herbicides (but also with
targets that have to be met). The mill worker group, who had the most
stable kind of contract directly with the company, were paid different wages
according to seniority (13–19 MYR), gender (women getting 1.5 MYR
less than men) or arbitrary decisions by management, for example when
management needed new workers and had to offer better daily rates. This
led to lengthy discussions among the workers, why that worker was earning
more, and that one less, and also cemented divisions between different groups
and between men and women (gender discrimination regarding wages was
accepted as normal). The three workers recruited by a neighbour in the
village in North Sumatra were actually employed by a temporary staffing
agency and then rented out to different employers who were members of the
Rubber Planters Association (RISDA) and now involved in palm oil. This
led to a situation where workers at the same plantation were working for
two or three different employers, each with different rates and deductions.
The gang of workers led by Edo, on the other hand, was employed as quasi
self-employed, paid a previously negotiated sum per tonne harvested.
All these mechanisms that divide workers are exacerbated by the politi-
cal precarity that is part of the labour regime (see Tables 2 and 3). ‘Legal’
10 Oliver Pye

workers were reluctant to speak up against wage discrepancies because em-

ployers often kept hold of their passports and because they were structurally
bound to them by the work permit, something Doni2 characterized as ‘permit
repression’. Illegal workers without official documentation are even more
vulnerable. Tri3 recounted how, after getting work at the mill, she had asked
the manager to organize a ‘passport’ for her (i.e. a work permit). He initially
refused, arguing that her wages were enough for her and her child to eat and
that she shouldn’t complain, but she persisted. At that time, there were many
raids against migrant workers, and she had to sleep in the ‘forest’ to avoid
being arrested. After the shift, she would take her son and go the plantation.
It was dark and they would be wet, scared and plagued by mosquitos. She
was finally allowed to go to Nunukan to get a passport and the work permit.
Living on the run (lari-lari) was a permanent state of affairs for her and her
son for several months.
Political precarity reinforces social precarity in indentured labour types
of power structures. Asizah,4 from the women’s group in Makassar, and
her husband were sold by their agent and resold again, working for sev-
eral companies for no money, just for food that would be credited to
them in the local plantation shop and that ended up contributing to fur-
ther debt. After being sold several times and then running away (lari), they
ended up working for FELDA in what Asizah called the ‘Tongko sys-
tem’ (that area of Sabah is called Tungku). By this time they had accrued
about 4,000 MYR of debt and were being worked by labour agent thugs
to ‘pay it off’ and were physically coerced to stay there to do so. With
both herself and her husband working, they made only 37 MYR a month
after ‘debts’ were deducted and could barely pay for food. Working for
the contractor was hard, from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m. each day, even on Sun-
days, with one day off a month, and also physically demanding: planting
seeds or distributing fertilizer. Social and political control was very phys-
ical, with the foreman checking the houses during the day and forcing her
to work even when she was sick, watching the couple if they left their
house or the plantation and holding on to their small child to prevent them
absconding.

NETWORKS, EVERYDAY RESISTANCE AND THE TRANSNATIONAL

SCALE OF EXPERIENCE

The powerful strategic coupling between state and capital in the palm oil sec-
tor, the associated fragmentation of palm oil labour in a precariatized labour
(migration) regime and the path dependency of the trade union movement

2. Biographical interview, migrant worker, village near Medan, 28 September 2010.

3. Biographical interview, mill worker, Sabah, 25 February 2011.
4. Biographical interview, migrant worker, Makassar, 12 October 2010.
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 11

all seem to confirm the picture of a fragmented, place-bound working class

versus transnational and globalized capital. The situation appears even more
dismal if spatial strategies of spatial control are factored in. In his discussion
of industrial estates in export zones of Southeast Asia, Kelly (2002: 398) ar-
gues that space is used to control workers by confining them to the ‘industrial
estate as a denationalized and desocialized space’, limiting their organizing
potential and preventing mobility by making it illegal to switch employers
— all of which could also apply to palm oil estates. He concludes that ‘the
processes through which labour politics are played out are constructed in
such a way that any form of labour collectivity is precluded’ (ibid.: 409,
emphasis added).
But looking only at the spatial control strategies of capital fails to acknow-
ledge that these are contested by workers. Following Herod (2001: 36), ‘it is
the conflicts over whose spatial fix (capitalists’ or workers’) is actually set in
the landscape that are at the heart of the dynamism of the geography of capi-
talism’. Workers don’t just passively accept low wages, precarious working
conditions, permit regulations, national borders, illegalization by the state
or separation from their families (i.e. the outsourcing of social reproduc-
tion). Rather, they develop their own individual and collective strategies to
circumvent, adapt to and challenge these conditions imposed upon them by
capital. Our empirical research with palm oil workers unearthed a plethora
of different ‘coping strategies’ and everyday resistance that is connected to
a ‘transnational scale of experience’ produced by workers in pursuit of their
own spatial fix.
Perhaps the most important aspect of workers’ production of space —
and the basis for all the other forms of everyday resistance — is that they
create networks. While the palm oil industry might assume that it employs
labour power for a restricted two or three years, in actual fact it employs
human beings who have relations to other human beings. Workers who
seek work in the plantations do not do so as individuals but rather follow
other workers — friends, relatives, workers returning from the plantations to
their villages in rural Indonesia to recruit other workers etc. These pathways
link workers from specific places in non-palm-oil landscapes (Flores, Java,
Lombok, Sulawesi) to places in the palm oil economy (in different parts of
Malaysia, in Sumatra, in Kalimantan and West Papua). As time goes by, these
connections create socially embedded networks of knowledge, experience
and contacts. Because of family ties, workers who go forth into the world
to find work (a concept referred to as merantau by migrant workers) are
place-bound to their original village or city — not to the mill or estate where
they work.
Cahaya’s story,5 from the mill workers group, illustrates this type of
space–time contingency well. A relative of his came back to the village in

5. Biographical interview, mill worker, Sabah, 25 November 2011.

12 Oliver Pye

Bone, Sulawesi, after working in a mill in Sabah, with the aim of recruiting
further workers for a labour agency operating in Sabah and Nunukan. He
managed to recruit eight workers, whose group was joined by a man fleeing
some kind of trouble in another village, whilst boarding the ship to Nunukan
(a transition town that is the ‘migration gateway’ to Sabah). This group
travelled together, had to wait for 19 days in the labour agent’s house
in Nunukan, and were then brought into Sabah, where they worked for a
contractor who hardly paid them anything, because he was ‘subtracting’ the
cost of passage and recruitment first. Although one worker eventually fled
and returned home, the others ended up working for different plantation
companies and some of them in the same mill. Similar narratives of their
migration journeys were told by many other workers in our research project.
Shared experience of this kind creates small collectives, either in one place
or as a small network.
Workers’ networks are ambiguous and can be characterized by unequal
power relations, but they form the basis for everyday resistance. One
widespread practice and a major problem for employers is absconding from
work. While Kelly (2002: 408) claims that ‘the contractual prevention of
job-hopping impedes the mobility of workers’, this is not the case — at
least in the palm oil context. Workers do switch employers and move from
plantation to plantation to mill. The term ‘lari’ actually means ‘to run away’
or ‘to flee’ and, as described above, workers use it in this sense, either
when describing their flight (and migration) from adverse circumstances
in their home village or their experience running away from debt bondage
gangs, abusive foremen or non-paying employers. But others use it in a
more active and less victimized sense to depict their search for better em-
ployment conditions. Workers use their networks to exchange information
and to compare wage differences, working environments, physical attributes
of the plantation (gradient of the hill, height of the palm), living conditions
(water, electricity) and management behaviours (respect shown, payment
reliability), and to arrange for a placement before moving to better pastures.
This does not mean that workers are constantly on the move. If employment
conditions are relatively acceptable, they prefer to stay as long as possible.
But the mobility potential of workers is far greater than the labour regime
allows for.
Of course, the lari strategy contradicts the terms of the work permit, and
implies that workers have to put up with an illegal status as a consequence.
Many accept this as a necessary trade-off, but many others are illegal to
start with. Again, networks are key. Living under the state radar becomes
second nature to many workers. This starts with circumventing the national
border — entering from side roads or up non-patrolled rivers, ‘smuggling’
themselves in (Idrus, 2008), entering with a tourist visa and then going
underground, falsifying documentation etc. It continues with workers work-
ing without permits, exchanging information about police raids and check-
points, and hiding out in the forest or in the plantation. This underground
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 13

life is characterized by extreme hardship and fear at times, but can be more
relaxed, as companies are often willing to organize the necessary documen-
tation retrospectively. Here, workers are able to capitalize on the tension
between a repressive labour regime (with tightly regulated permit quotas,
deportation waves etc.) and the dependency of the plantation sector on mi-
grant workers. This allows workers to overcome the structurally imposed
temporary nature of their contracts. A surprising result of the research was
that rather than the stipulated three- to five-year contracts, a large number
of workers had been in Malaysia for as many as 10, 15 or even 20 years.
Lengthening their stay is a key strategy of workers to counterbalance the low
wages and to increase the amount they can save before they return home.
Living off the grid is not without difficulty, but it forces workers to respond
to the challenge by becoming resourceful social networkers. Similarly, the
isolation of the estate — being located in remote areas without public trans-
port or private cars — produces a countermovement by workers. In order
to go anywhere, whether into town, to see a doctor, to meet up with rela-
tives and friends, or to abscond, workers have to create their own mobility
networks, using private ‘taxis’ operated by locals (Cooke and Mulia, 2012)
or mopeds, or hitching a ride with the many truck drivers transporting fruit
bunches back and forth from plantation to mill. All this involves social inter-
action, thereby contributing to the construction of more intense and intricate
networks.
The most personal injustice experienced by workers is the repression of
family life and the treatment and future of workers’ children. Outsourcing
social reproduction can seem to be an economic and impersonal category,
but the consequence of regulations restricting family migration and pro-
hibiting children from accompanying their parents, or of couples having
children, are long and painful separations that can result in family break-
down. Again, this is not accepted passively by workers, who often opt to
enter illegally so that they can travel with their families. Workers also defy
the regulations by having children on the plantation, or bringing in fam-
ily members at a later date — a practice often tolerated by management
who appreciate the stability this offers to skilled and experienced workers.
But the legal ‘othering’ by the Malaysian state continues despite this, the
most severe consequence being the exclusion of ‘illegal’ children from the
state education system. In some plantations in Sabah, workers might be
lucky to benefit from schools operated by the NGO Humana, but after the
first four years of schooling, parents are faced with the question of how to
provide further education for their children. This is often a priority, as edu-
cation is seen as a way out of the cycle of poverty connected to blue-collar
work.
Usually, workers adopt some kind of transnational education strategy,
either by sending their children over the border to a boarding school, by
sending them back to their home village to live with their grandparents, or
by one parent returning home. By developing these kinds of cross-border
14 Oliver Pye

strategies, workers produce a transnational scale of social reproduction and a

transnational scale of experience. This is not only a result of a more intensive
communication and transfer of funds between the workplace and home, but
also a more intense ‘thinking’ about the family across the border. Connected
as this is with questions about the future — how long will the separation
last, how to secure a livelihood back home, how much money can be saved
during the migration work, where and how will the family be together again
— it encourages a comparative and transnational perspective. In this way,
state labour regime regulations that use national and territorial othering in
order to ensure the fragmentation and compliance of plantation labour result
— through the active construction of space by workers — in its opposite,
producing a transnational plantation precariat.

MORAL GEOGRAPHIES AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY

An important effect of all these survival and coping strategies is the

impact on the consciousness of workers. Workers are preoccupied with
documentation problems and wages and develop their own moral economy
(Scott, 1976) of what is just, and what is unjust. Border controls, police
checkpoints and extortion, and the bureaucratic and often arbitrary annoy-
ance of organizing permits and work extensions tend to be seen as problems
to be overcome by any means necessary. This also implies that the Malaysian
state, as the ‘scale of ideology’ (Taylor, 1982: 7), holds little legitimacy.
Wages — the whole point of undergoing the arduous ordeal of migration
— are discussed in minute and never-ending detail. Changes in hourly and
piece rates, wage differences between different groups of workers, withheld
bonuses for difficult terrain or higher palm fruit, deductions for permit taxes
or for brokerage fees — all these and more can be perceived injustices and
can trigger discussions with the foreman, petitions to the manager, work
stoppages or full blown wildcat strikes.
Whether coping strategies and everyday resistance lead to collective ac-
tion depends, among other factors, on workers’ ‘moral geographies’, i.e.
values and ideas of justice or rights that ‘come to the fore in particular
situations’ (Castree, 2007: 860) and places. Among the migrant palm oil
workers, these have a transnational dimension. Wages, working conditions,
the hardship arising from political repression, all this is set against the ob-
jective of returning home with enough savings to change their livelihood
perspectives. The group discussion among the workers from North Sumatra,
for example, developed around a comparative moral economy of the benefits
and otherwise of working in Malaysia. Workers started by problematizing
the situation in Indonesia (lack of jobs, necessity of bribing people to obtain
jobs), as the reason to set out to work in Malaysia. Doni, for example, framed
his migration as a ‘sacrifice’ that he was willing to make in order to pay off
family debts. While his wages were reasonable, he was very angry about the
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 15

200 MYR deducted per month for his work permit, which made it impossi-
ble to save enough to achieve his objective. An acceptable accommodation
would have electricity and running water and would be near a settlement
and not ‘in the middle of the forest’. A right to basic amenities is coupled
with the right to civilization, to interaction with other people. In this way,
he rejected the isolation that the housing facilities create that implies that
the workers are only seen as labour power and not as human beings. The
employer should provide pay and working conditions that he himself would
find acceptable.6
The group discussion between members of the ‘gang’ working as subcon-
tractors for FELDA illustrates the tension between internalizing performance
pressure and the potential for collective agency. At the beginning of the dis-
cussion, the group leader, Edo, reiterated the reason for dissatisfaction in
the gang.7 As subcontractors, they were paid 27 MYR per tonne of fruit
harvested and transported to the road. In the rainy season, when there was
more fruit, they would make 400 MYR per worker per month, but that had
gone down to 200 MYR. Edo called on the group to accept and grin and bear
the situation and to work harder to achieve their objective of saving money
for going back to the village:
Our output has decreased the last two months. So we need to make an effort to increase our
output next month. With the help of God, if the rain comes then there will be more fruit and
then we have to make an effort to increase the output. So our wages will increase as well. If
our output is higher, then our wages are higher. This is our problem.

But this internalization of performance objectives was contradicted by

other members of the gang, who compared the outsourced system to the
wage system. As a wage worker for FELDA, harvesters earned 20 MYR
per tonne, but they enjoyed additional bonuses, such as overtime, attendance
pay, a daily bonus and paid holidays. They developed a position that a
‘decent living wage’ should be 800–1,000 MYR per month, as this was the
minimum that they needed to renovate the house in their home village. In
the middle of the debate, the other gang members dropped the bombshell
that they had already decided to leave that particular plantation and look
for better contracts elsewhere. Edo, who had suffered in his early years as
an illegal worker, implored them to be patient and at least to wait until the
employer gave them back their passports. Although the others agreed to wait
a few days, their decision to leave highlights the mobile bargaining potential
that these outsourced subcontracted groups possess.
During the group discussion in North Sumatra,8 it emerged that all workers
in the group had had different experiences of collective bargaining and

6. Biographical interview, migrant worker, village near Medan, 28 September 2010.

7. Group discussion, FELDA work gang, Sabah, 1 July 2012.
8. Group discussion, migrant workers in village near Medan, 4 March 2012, names have been
changed.
16 Oliver Pye

protests that led them to adopt different positions in the debate. Mentari, who
had worked in Malaysia after the economic crisis in 1998, was involved in a
larger strike that led to a delegation of 100 workers visiting the Indonesian
Embassy to demand that it intervene on the issue of wages:
I was pretty impressed back then, there were over 30 people with friends from outside, we
were solid, and continued to respond to problems. If we conducted a strike, 30 people would
not work, creating a loss for the company. By our strike action earlier, and the solidarity
of our friends, we could solve our problems through our representatives there, maybe if we
were not solid enough, if only one or two people protested they may not have responded.

The climax of the discussion was the moral economy of the calo, the
worker labour agent, in the person of Mego. Doni led the charge, accus-
ing him of being a ‘sweet talker’ who did not ‘take responsibility’ for the
promises he made once the workers were in Malaysia. This led to the ques-
tion whether it would be better for workers to migrate without the help of
a calo. Mego defended himself by describing the status quo: ‘Without the
calo, it would be more complicated, if I apply for passport without the calo,
it would take more than one week but with the calo, I can go directly to
immigration and sign it, I get it right away, so we have to pay a little bit
but everything goes smoother’.9 Mentari then differentiated between the
labour agency and the worker who comes home looking for new workers,
like Mego. The company PT Sahara uses a labour agency to recruit work-
ers. This adds to the cost. Mego only shared his experience, but because he
recruited workers for the agency, this added to the cost. Mentari and Doni
then developed the position that the government bureaucracy should be re-
formed so that workers could get jobs in Malaysia without labour agencies
and without work permits. Mentari argued that the Indonesian government
could negotiate this with Malaysia, because ‘they need us, if there are no
Indonesia people, the Malaysian economy would collapse, no one would
harvest oil palm, no one would tap rubber’. In this way, the reflection by
the group progressed from lamenting disappointing experiences, to blaming
individual actors, to developing a political demand for a reform of the labour
regime.
Collective action acts as a catalyst for workers’ consciousness, as pent-
up frustrations and injustices are brought out into the open, and because
workers break through patterns of internalization and submissiveness. A
good illustration of this is a wildcat strike conducted by the mill worker group
just before the group discussion took place. In the preceding biographical
narratives and problem-focused interviews, Cahaya and Tri had manifested
a rather fatalist and submissive world view. They had both internalized
the basic tenets of the labour regime and had positioned themselves within
debates with co-workers by emphasizing that they were grateful to have a
job and that workers should wait passively and patiently for wage increases.

9. Ibid.
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 17

Interestingly, the strike was triggered by a wage increase for office staff
(who are usually Malaysian citizens), while a promised hike for blue-collar
workers was not forthcoming. This was seen as a grave injustice by the mill
workers.
In the group discussion,10 workers moved quickly from the issue of wages
to the lack of respect shown to them as migrant workers. Workers discussed
years of pent-up grievances: police treatment; dashed hopes of saving suffi-
cient funds for a life back home; biographical insecurity imposed upon them
by temporary employment contracts; and the arrogant and rude behaviour
of the mill owner. In reflecting on life in the village (kampung) and in the
factory, workers develop a transnational comparative analysis. In their dis-
cussion, after voicing their frustration and anger at the way they are treated,
Tirta suggested returning home, but Cahaya thought that they would have to
leave again and find work elsewhere. Tirta contradicted him, saying that at
home people still have enough to eat, but that there, in the factory, they were
‘suffering, working day and night, being scolded like a dog’. The workers
complained that the assistant manager shouted at them and did not treat
them with respect. They joked that the assistant manager could not work the
machines and that ‘he should feel the steam’ of the machine to know what
it felt like. They compared different managers, from those who commanded
respect by being able to assist the workers if something went wrong and were
friendly and jokey with the workers, to others who demanded respect by na-
ture of their position, but were hopeless at actually helping out in the work
process.
The experience of the wildcat strike and of their power as workers gave
them a new self-confidence that expressed itself in their body language and
way of talking. The wage discrimination compared to staff sharpened their
sense of class. In the discussion, the workers developed a ‘hidden transcript’
(Scott, 1990: ix–xiii) in talking about management, whom they derided as
sitting around and ‘playing Facebook’. While the staff workers were given
a raise, the workers were not, even though, as they remarked, ‘we bathe in
sweat not water’. They felt that management did not put themselves in the
workers’ shoes and that they were treated unfairly. They did not respect the
fact that workers ‘have come a long way to look for an income (cari makan)
here’. Tirta resented that they were thrown out when no longer productive:
‘The boss only likes us while we are strong. When we lose our strength,
they don’t want us anymore’, but added that ‘if there were no workers, how
could he be boss?’. Joking about the clumsy attempts by management to
locate and punish the ‘ringleaders’, they described how the strike developed
from a general feeling of injustice and emphasized that Cahaya and Tri had
played a leading role in the strike.11

10. Group discussion, mill workers, Sabah, 6 July 2012.

11. Group discussion, mill workers, Sabah, 6 July 2012.
18 Oliver Pye

REINVENTING SPATIAL STRATEGIES: ORGANIZING IN THE PALM OIL

GLOBAL PRODUCTION NETWORK

To summarize, plantation workers are more mobile than it would first ap-
pear and, in reaction to the precarious labour regime imposed upon them,
can overcome fragmentation and develop collective agency. Rather than
just confirming a capital-centred view of a fragmented and place-bound
working class, empirical findings show that workers are co-producing the
social-ecological palm oil landscape. A labour perspective on societal em-
beddedness shows that workers are part of real and extended social networks.
They use these to circumvent and challenge the labour regime imposed upon
them by capital and, in the process, produce a transnational scale of expe-
rience. The palm oil landscape in Southeast Asia is characterized by high
exploitation rates and precarity, but also by widespread absconding (lari),
the undermining of territorial control and by collective action such as wildcat
strikes.
On the other hand, palm oil capital is not as mobile as it might like to be.
As Coe et al. (2008: 278) point out, ‘every element in a GPN — every firm,
every function — is, quite literally, grounded in specific locations’. Failing
‘to connect the processes of production, distribution and consumption to
the natural environment in which they are fundamentally grounded’ (ibid.)
misses the fact that oil palm plantations, mills and refineries are highly
immobile forms of capital. Workers first have to invest a lot of labour
into establishing a plantation, by clearing forest, draining wetlands, taking
care of nurseries etc. Once established, the palms take three years to bear
fruit, and then have a profitable life-span of 25 years. Plantation companies
cannot just ‘up and go’. The biological properties of palm oil also have to be
considered. Once ripe, the fruit bunches need to be harvested and processed
within 24 hours in order to prevent the build-up of fatty acids (Rahmat,
2015). This makes palm oil plantations exceptionally vulnerable to industrial
strike action (compared, for example, to rubber) and also explains why mills
and plantations are clustered together. Palm oil mills are thereby also very
immobile. While refineries can be established ‘anywhere’, they require a
substantial amount of investment upfront. Workers in the palm oil industry
are therefore potentially very powerful if organized.
The most important difference between the plantation workers today and
the powerful labour movements of colonial times is not structural but po-
litical. In both Malaya and Indonesian West Indies, militants organized
within very young communist parties played a crucial role in building active
and combative trade union movements in the plantation sector (Ramasamy,
1994; Stoler, 1995). The lack of labour unions with the politics and tradition
required to meet the challenges of social and political precarization in plan-
tation labour today has its roots in the path dependency of labour sketched
out above. In Malaysia, the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW)
has evolved into a rump trade union, with a small and passive membership of
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 19

Malaysian citizens of mainly Indian descent. The leadership actively discour-

ages strike action, choosing instead to invest membership fees in business
ventures (Levine, 1997; Menon and Leggett, 1996). Rather than taking on
the challenge of organizing against subcontracting and outsourcing and or-
ganizing the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers (Fernandez, 2011),
the NUPW instead has welcomed deportations of illegalized workers with
the argument that they are taking jobs away from Malaysians (UCA News,
1985).
In Indonesia, labour has made important strides since the fall of Suharto
(Ford, 2009; La Botz, 2001), but in the plantation sector various unions
compete for membership and have so far failed to unite workers nation-
ally, let alone develop transnational organizing strategies. While in the for-
mer stronghold in North Sumatra unions are active and have developed
joint action platforms (such as the coalition Serikat Buruh Perkebunan In-
donesia) that organized protests against the Round Table on Sustainable
Palm Oil in 2011 (Pye, 2015), unions are virtually non-existent in the new
areas of expansion. The International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel,
Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations has hardly
any presence in the plantations and ‘has virtually no engagement with mi-
grant workers in Malaysia’ (Ford, 2013: 270). Migrant labour unions such
as the Serikat Buruh Migran Indonesia organize around general workers’
rights, but have not developed a sectoral strategy for the palm oil industry
(Ford, 2013).
In other words, there is a substantial gap between the potential that lies
within the everyday practices of workers and explicitly political strategies.
New approaches to organizing based on concepts of networks of labour ac-
tivism (NOLA) could fill this gap, both by embracing cross-organizational
networking and cross-border strategizing (see the Introduction to this De-
bate section). As Piper (2005) points out, the differences and constructive
alliances between trade unions, labour NGOs and other groups of activists
need to be carefully reflected on. The ‘concatenated diversity’ of different
actors in the palm oil industry and their ability ‘to interconnect different
forms in strategically effective ways’ (Evans, 2010: 367) can be seen by
an emerging loosely connected network of organizations that have started
collaborating on labour issues (see Table 4). Localized labour unions with
experience in grassroots organizing could benefit from the more mobile and
networked approach of migrant worker organizations, and from the interna-
tional and campaigning experience of environmental justice NGOs.
Due to the transnational dynamics inherent in the GPN, these emerging
coalitions cannot replicate territorial or national trade union organizations
of old (Waterman, 2015) but need to reinvent spatial organizing strategies.
Again, a NOLA approach could help to do this, but it is equally important
to build on the social practices that workers are already developing and
to recognize their ‘moral geographies’. On the question of wages, a trans-
national linking between trade unions would be a first step, but a more
20 Oliver Pye

Table 4. Emerging Cross-organizational Networking on Labour in the Palm

Oil Industry
Organization Focus of Work Added Value of NOLA
Serikat Buruh Perkebunan Trade unionism Grassroots organizing of palm oil precariat
Indonesia (SBPI)
Sabah Plantation Industry Trade unionism Migrant worker members, collective
Employees Union (SPIEU) bargaining
Tenaganita Women workers’ Rights-based approach, women workers in
rights Malaysian plantations, advocacy
Serikat Buruh Migran Migrant workers Grassroots organizing of migrant workers
Indonesia
Solidaritas Perempuan Women’s rights Feminist perspective to counter male bias
in unions
HAPSARI Women’s rights and Grassroots organizing of women
livelihoods
Sawit Watch Environmental and Analysis of palm oil industry and wider
social impact of social and environmental impacts
palm oil
WALHI Environmental justice International campaigning
Asienhaus Human rights, social Connection to Europe
and environmental
justice
IUF Trade unionism Global union federation

Source: Compiled from Hari Institute (2015), Pye et al. (2016) and own observations.

strategic targeting and organizing of workers in the same TNCs that span
Malaysia and Indonesia would be more effective. Coordinated strike action
between workers in the same transnational company — that in many cases
have scores of plantations and mills in both countries — would be a powerful
tool to fight for a decent living wage and thereby to contribute meaningfully
to a labour-centred development in the region (Selwyn, 2016).
The political precarity experienced by migrant workers must be addressed
at the ‘governance’ level (see the Introduction to this Debate section), that
is, with political demands that address basic human rights issues such as
education for children, illegalization by the state, the right to organize,
etc. Here, the transnational networks of migrant workers could be a point of
departure. The relation between ‘place’, in the sense of the ‘sending’ villages
in Indonesia, and ‘network’ could be potentially productive. The villages in
Indonesia represent ‘safe places’ that are more or less untouched by the
repressive control of the palm oil labour regime. As migrant organizations
have shown, they can be used for organizing purposes around political
demands relating to migration. A similar approach could be developed to
use them to develop transnational trade union organization (i.e. with a focus
on a particular industry, in this case palm oil).
In the longer term, a coherent transnational organizing strategy for the
palm oil GPN would need to scale up from the plantations and mills all along
the supply chain. This would include lorry drivers, dockers, oil tanker logis-
tics workers, workers in refineries, fat processing plants, biodiesel factories
Debate: Fragmentation in the Palm Oil Global Production Network 21

and energy plants, workers in food factories, cosmetics, chemical plants and
workers in retail and finance. A daunting task. Labour geography research
could contribute to building connectivity between workers by adopting a
transdisciplinary and action research methodology (Wills and Hurley, 2005)
and enabling workers to forge links in the production chain (Moody, 1998).
Such links could also help to identify ‘logistical choke points, areas of po-
tential exposure to consumer campaigns or a high dependence on workers
with unique skills’ (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010: 222) and thereby promote
a more strategic labour network analysis (Wad, 2013). This type of research
activity by scholars would be a valuable contribution towards developing a
labour geography of the palm oil (and other) GPN, not just as analysis of
what is, but of what could be.

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Oliver Pye (oliver.pye@uni-bonn.de) is a Lecturer in Southeast Asian Stud-

ies at Bonn University, Germany. His research focuses on political ecology,
the social relations of nature and social movements. His recent publications
include The Palm Oil Controversy in Southeast Asia: A Transnational Per-
spective, co-edited with Jayati Bhattacharya (ISEAS Publishing, 2012) and
A Political Ecology of Agrofuels, co-edited with Bettina Engels (Routledge,
2015).