Labor Recruitment and Coloniality in the Agricultural Sector: On Plantation Archives,Underclassing,and Postcolonial Masculinities in Switzerland

Abstract

This study provides insights into mechanisms of underclassing in modern society based on interviews with recruiters of agricultural workers in Switzerland. I show that narratives that racialize and ethnicize workers are nurtured by colonial legacies. This reveals that plantation practices and discourses have shaped Switzerland and remain as powerful means of enforcing agricultural racial capitalism. Furthermore, I argue that postcolonial masculinities drive these intersubjective relations. Tracing and situating these postcolonial subject formations on farms allows one to see how caring narratives entangle with a dehumanizing grammar and how this colonial logic is incorporated into social consensus on extractive labor practices. Finally, this reveals how coloniality operates in a postcolonial country that claims political neutrality.

Introduction

—Can you tell me what your job is about and what exactly you do at the Swiss Farmers’ Union?

—People have been doing this job for a long time. (. . .) Earlier, you just needed to bring workers here. For example, the man before my predecessor—he’s still alive, he’s nearly 100—he took the train to Portugal and came back with a carriage full of people. (. . .) People came out of the train and they—like they used to do with cows—they inspected their teeth (laughs). No, not like this, more like that—I’ll take him! Sometimes someone was left over, he wasn’t needed, maybe for five or six days, but then he was also placed/ taken care of [versorgt]. That’s how it worked. And today we take care of everything. We don’t just connect with workers who come here by themselves—we help with all the formalities. (. . .) Mainly we want to ensure that the working relationship functions properly. We do not want to leave ourselves open to criticism that we don’t keep people in good conditions (. . .). (Interview conducted in June 2017)

This paper discusses interviews with people who mediate the arrangement of agricultural workers in Switzerland. The reference systems that these recruiters activate when talking about agricultural workers from abroad show glimpses of how power relations manifest themselves on Swiss farms. While scholars have emphasized the colonial roots of living and working conditions in the globalized capitalist food supply chain (Cohen, 2019), reflections on the continuing nexus between racialization and agricultural (re)production and the mobility of ‘agricultural racial capitalism’ (Manjapara, 2018) are absent in relation to Swiss agriculture. Moreover, studies on the recruiters of agricultural workers are rare. Therefore, the research question addressed in this study is whether and how recruitment and treatment of agricultural workers are enmeshed with the larger question of subjugation under modern power structures.

This study aimed to examine practices and cultural repertoires that are used in the Swiss context to establish consent for agricultural racial capitalism. My investigations reveal how Swiss agriculture is tied to colonial legacies that are visible in recruiters’ ‘cultural archives’ (Said, 1993). Using the decolonial framework, I will show how recruiters’ thinking-like-the-market reinforces ‘coloniality’ (Boatcă, 2013; Grosfoguel, 2011; Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2001) through a White, colonial culture and more specifically, through what I call the plantation archive. Based on interviews and on ethnography, the findings indicate that plantation practices and discourses also shaped Switzerland by materializing it in working and living conditions and incorporating it into the self-representation and subject formation of recruiters and others.

To situate my analysis, I will elaborate on the agricultural sector in Switzerland to give some brief insights into key developments. Neoliberal policies have intensified competition among farmers. The 2015 report from the Swiss Federal Office for Agriculture stated that one-third of Swiss farmers live in an economically precarious situation. Furthermore, working conditions can be very demanding, such as long working hours (48–66 hours per week; Federal Statistical Office, n.d.). When farms are shut down (around 1000 per year), the land is mostly passed on to neighboring farms, leading to structural changes from small farms to medium- and large-scale companies that increasingly employ workers from abroad on a short-term basis (Chau et al., 2015). Around 35,000 people from abroad are estimated to be employed annually in Switzerland around the harvest season (Bopp and Affolter, 2013). Recently, most work permits in the agricultural sector have been issued to workers from Poland, Portugal, and Romania. Bigger farms tend to have a workforce with a more globalized composition which is based on their different legal statuses. Most people are employed in short-term work. Contracts generally last for 3–9 months, but labor arrangements for as little as a few weeks at a time also exist. The precariousness of these workers is caused by their ‘hypermobility’ (Bolokan, 2023a, 2023b) and they have little chance of settling in Switzerland (Bolokan, 2020: 59). These workers face labor regimes of rotation, as they are forced to work at different farms in various European countries under multiple contracts or sets of arrangements. They are excluded from employment protections, social security, and rights to which local workers have access (Bolokan, 2020: 58). As Swiss farmers are challenged to produce food amid a capitalist logic of competing national economies and liberalized markets, their demanding conditions are passed on to temporarily employed workers. This entails outsourcing the costs of (re)production of the workers to themselves and to their communities (Bolokan, 2021). The agricultural sector is, therefore, not just subsidized by direct payments, but also heavily relies on both the unpaid (re)productive labor of communities of workers in global peripheries and nuclear family members, especially farmers’ wives. This unwaged labor on farms and the international division of (re)productive labor builds the ground for the underclassing of Swiss society, allowing the Swiss lower and rural classes living and working conditions that are less precarious, or even have upward socioeconomic mobility.

The rest of this article is divided into three parts. The first part presents key historical entanglements which help trace recruiters’ repertoires for sense-making and situate evoked imaginaries in global, transregional, and local histories. In this part, the empirical background and key theoretical and methodological concepts are presented, and Switzerland is briefly introduced as a postcolonial space. The second section analyzes interviews with agricultural workers’ recruiters. Based on interview transcripts, I elaborate on the patterns that recruiters activate when they talk about their work, agricultural workers from abroad, and their communities. Here, I elaborate on the politics of naming and the patterns of Othering. The third part will expand on the concept of ‘cultural archives’ (Said, 1993), which I reframe as plantation archives, thereby situating recruiters’ reference systems in the entangled histories presented in the first part. Furthermore, I will reflect on recruiters’ self-representation and intersubjectivity and describe the way agricultural workers’ recruitment is inherently marked by ‘coloniality’ (Boatcă, 2013; Grosfoguel, 2011; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018; Lugones, 2007; Quijano, 2001) and the Swiss particularities of postcolonial masculinities.

Empirical, Historical, and Methodological Background

Talking with Recruiters

While I was working on Swiss farms between 2011 and 2019, parallel to this ethnographic research, I talked to agricultural workers, farmers, and recruiters to understand the challenges faced by agriculture and the political economy of labor migration in the sector from different angles. In this article, I analyze interviews with 10 recruiters who mediate the arrangement of workers to farms. The criteria for choosing recruiters were that they either worked for the farmers’ union or facilitated asylum seekers within state-financed programs to work in agriculture.

Focusing on recruiters employed in state-financed institutions resulted in a homogeneous group in terms of gender (male), ¹ citizenship (Swiss) and background (rural). Those to whom I talked worked in different German-speaking cantons, were between 47 and 62 years old, and held views from across the political spectrum, from left to right. Most mediated the arrangement of workers as part of their gainful employment, and one of them who was unemployed for a long time arranged work for asylum seekers at orchards as part of his volunteering. They mainly recruited workers for small- and medium-scale farms (most widespread), as big farms employed staff specifically for this task.

When I was reaching out to the recruiters for interviews, I expressed my interest in their work and the overall challenges they identified in the sector. The interviews were conducted in German and Swiss German; they were transcribed and partially translated into English. When coding the interview transcripts, I was guided primarily by the question: What characterizes the recruiters’ patterns and politics of referring to agricultural workers?

Global Entanglements and Coloniality

Coloniality of Labor

Cedric Robinson (1983) coined the term ‘racial capitalism’ to point out that capital-driven exploitation has evolved from racial slavery and settler farming (Vekemans and Segers, 2020) and is therefore based on racialized violence and the west’s coercive extraction of raw materials and labor from the colonized parts of the world (Frank, 1967; Wallerstein, 1979). Elaborating this point further, Kris Manjapara (2018) shows that the formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to a ‘new system of slavery’ (p. 375), thereby spreading the plantation complex on a worldwide scale. This means that, through the institutions of capital and the control over land and labor that were first initiated on Caribbean plantations and were spread to other parts of the world through racialized categorizations of workers, capitalist modes of production were stabilized and ‘agricultural racial capitalism’ was established worldwide (Manjapara, 2018: 375).

The decolonial school of thought allows us to theorize the continuities of these global power relations using the concept ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2001) grasps the past and current power matrices that constitute these modern societies. Building on Anibal Quijano’s ‘coloniality of power’, Manuela Boatcă (2013) deepens the concept of ‘coloniality of labor’ to encompass co-existing modes of labor control over time and space. Boatcă (2013) also shows that the extraction of raw material from ‘Eastern’ Europe by ‘Western’ Europe, which had already existed in the mid-15th century, was accompanied by rural coercive labor in ‘Eastern Europe’. Boatcă (2013) draws parallels between different systems of coercive labor relations over centuries in Abya Yala and Europe (first/second slavery and first/second serfdom) (p. 321). This allows us to situate the ‘quasi-colonial relationships’ between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe in the global, colonial context (p. 305) while deepening a local perspective on ‘racial capitalism’ within Europe.

The perpetuation of this colonial logic and the ‘East–West’ relationship within Europe beyond the 15th century was also evident in the history of ‘internal colonization’ (Ha, 2008) in Prussia, for example, at the beginning of the 20th century. Discourses and practices during the Wilhelmine Period demonstrate the adaptation of a ‘plantation logic’ (McKittrick, 2013) to these specific political conditions. The time was characterized by high industrialization, making Imperial Germany a major capitalist power through both external and internal colonization and by the rise of the workers’ movement. In the period leading up to World War I, the German Reich became the second largest labor-importing country in the world, just after the United States. In 1910, 1.26 million workers came from abroad, with two-thirds of them from the Polish regions of Austria-Hungary and Russia (Ha, 2008). The historian Klaus J. Bade has argued that these regions became the ‘free hunting grounds’ of Prussia. While the colonial nation was establishing rule in its colonies, Prussia employed workers from ‘Eastern Europe’ under conditions that amounted to the ‘existence of lawless wage slaves’ (Ha, 2016; Herbert and Hunn, 2007).

Within this context, workers were racially marked as ‘low-ranking Slavs’, humiliated as ‘submissive’, ‘stupid Polacks’, and classified as ‘born earth workers’ (geborene Erdarbeiter) and as ‘Wulacker’ (from the German word wühlen, to grub). Thus, the position that these workers were expected to occupy within society was naturalized by ascribing a ‘race’/ ‘ethnicity’ to them and arguing that these ‘Slavs’ were particularly well suited to heavy work in the fields. Such racist narratives served to legitimize exploitation and the exclusion of the recruited workers from rights to which local workers had access. Later, the National Socialists adopted this plantation logic and further developed these narratives. Degraded as ‘Slavic subhumans’, ² now called the Fremdarbeiter, were seen as those who must work for the Aryan ‘master race’.

Agricultural labor relations in Europe since the mid-15th century reveal similarities and differences in overseas plantation regimes and give insights into how coloniality and the inherent racialized/ethnicized international division of (re)productive labor evolved within Europe and parallel to ‘the Maafa’ ³ (Ani, 1994: 583). Thus, the notion of ‘coloniality of labor’ includes global colonial power relations beyond the ‘world plantation belt’ ⁴ (Courtenay, 1980). Furthermore, it empathizes that plantation regimes and colonial logics continue to be an integral part of the contemporary global division of labor (Grosfoguel, 2002).

Coloniality of Migration

Coloniality is also inscribed into migration as it established colonial empires and settler societies. Through the colonial migrations after World War II, the coloniality of power was structuring metropolitan areas. As Ramón Grosfoguel (1999) points out: ‘No colonial Caribbean migration passed unnoticed in the European imaginary’ (p. 414). According to him, people migrating from former colonies

are colonial not only due to their long colonial relationship with the metropole, but also due to their current stereotypical representation in the European imagination which is reflected in their subordinated location in the metropolitan labor market (Grosfoguel, 1999: 414).

Grosfoguel thereby emphasizes that the most marginalized and exploited classes in colonial settings have always had a sub-proletariat from the colonized, global peripheries and that this division continues structuring societies through labor migration management.

Grasping these dimensions and the inherent colonial logic within asylum policies and migration regimes in modern societies, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018) has introduced the concept of ‘coloniality of migration’:

Migration regulation ensures that the Other of the nation/Europe/the Occident is reconfigured in racial terms. The logic generated in this context constructs and produces objects to be governed through restrictions, management devices, and administrative categories such as ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’, or a variety of migrant statuses. The coloniality of migration operates within this matrix of social classification on the basis of colonial racial hierarchies (p. 24).

Amy Niang (2020) even argues that enslaved people from the past and migrant workers from former colonies today are connected through their status as stranded bodies, which share the ontological condition of atomized and ‘erased subjectivities’ (pp. 5, 7). She elaborates:

The distinction between ‘Africans’ and ‘migrants’ is immaterial for ‘slaves’, ‘Africans’ and ‘migrants’ are vague categories that are caught in the same ontological, temporal lapse. Africans and other black and brown migrants carry their colonial condition, thus their former subject position as a liability that stands in the way of the recognition of a legal subjecthood. They are permanent outsiders, if not reliquaries of the human category. (Niang, 2020: 339f)

Such ‘erased subjectivities’ are institutionalized in Switzerland into a legal regime called Nothilfe (emergency aid) for persons with a legally binding negative asylum and deportation decision. Whoever comes under this regime of aid must live under devastating conditions in emergency camps and is not allowed to engage in gainful employment. Therefore, people are legally prevented from realizing their dreams and living in dignity and community. These places have been described as spaces of internal border demarcation, as they partially include rejected refugees in the welfare system, while their status excludes them from society (Marti, 2023). While these processes of confinement come along with the processes of Othering and ‘demonization’ (Marti, 2023: 186), they are discursively accompanied by the inability in public debates in Switzerland to name the racism and disenfranchisement of asylum seekers (Wilopo and Häberlein, 2023: 92). As the regime of Nothilfe represents a regime of postcolonial aid in which welfare and confinement intersect, this regime is a mode of how coloniality operates in a postcolonial country that claims political neutrality.

The asylum-migration nexus allows us to see how asylum and migration policies produce hierarchical legal categories by marking and managing some people on the move as migrants and others as refugees. The coloniality of migration framework emphasizes the continuities of managing and controlling people within orientalist/racialized/ethnicized practices.

Coloniality of Gender and of Being

Not only did ‘a European/ capitalist/ military/ Christian/ patriarchal/ white/ heterosexual/ male’ arrive in the Americas (Grosfoguel, 2011: 8), but this very subject formation also impacted the colonizing societies. From a decolonial feminist perspective, the analysis of the modern subject formations must be intersectional. Gendered oppression, in this understanding, is neither separable nor secondary to racialized oppression—both are constituting each other (Lugones, 2007; Mendoza, 2015). In a dialog with Oryuronke Oyewùmi (. . .) and under the term ‘coloniality of gender’, María Lugones (2007) argues that gender as such is a colonial imposition on the colonized; colonialism it not only erased manifold conceptualizations of sexualities and gender in colonies, but it also imposed new ones (p. 186).

While these gendered and racialized interlocking systems of oppression produce various colonial subjectivities, some are deprived of their subject status within this process through enslavement and owing to the colonial matrix of power:

In using the term coloniality I mean to name not just a classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings. (Lugones, 2010: 745)

Accordingly, the evolution and global enforcement of entangled global hierarchies to justify European colonialism was a dehumanizing force. This will to colonize, according to Enrique Dussel, is a highly gendered will. He argues:

The European subject who begins in the mode of ‘I conquer’ and reaches its climax in the ‘will to power’ is a masculine subject. The ego cogito is the ego of a male. (Dussel, 1977 in Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 264)

As the condition of the modern subject formation is inherently colonial, they can be seen as having an ontological prescription, which led Maldonado-Torres (2007) to utilize the ‘coloniality of being’ as a framework to grasp the way coloniality has entered all spheres of human being, sustainably shaping modern subjectivity: ‘In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday’ (p. 243). Moreover, he elaborates,

The role of skepticism is central to European modernity. And just like the ego conquiro predates and precedes the ego cogito, a certain skepticism regarding the humanity of the enslaved and colonized sub-others stands at the background of the Cartesian certainties and his methodic doubt (p. 245).

This ‘imperial attitude’ of ego conquiro, which claims ownership over people, has defined the ‘modern Imperial Man’ and constitutes current modern being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 245).

Colonization forms diverse modern subjectivities. Gendered hierarchies have been imposed on colonized societies in a way that had not existed before colonization, and a modern European identity evolved around the ‘ego conquiro’—‘a phallic ego’—that has been formed and fabricated around the ‘certainty of the self as a conqueror’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 245). This modern European identity is characterized by a permanent suspicion of the humanity of those who are pushed toward the bottom of entangled global hierarchies.

Local Configurations of Coloniality: Postcolonial Switzerland

As early as 90 years ago, there have been arguments that, owing to its politics of neutrality, Switzerland profited more from imperialism than the great European colonizing nations (Behrendt, 1932). Almost a century later, many studies have elaborated on the involvement of Swiss actors in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people and goods, their participation in plantation economies, and in fighting uprisings of enslaved people, such as in Haiti (Brengard et al., 2020; Cooperaxion, n.d.; David et al., 2005; Fässler, 2005). Furthermore, scholars have investigated the history of Swiss settlers and their civilizing missions overseas and the cultural and non-material aspects of Swiss ‘colonialism without colonies’ (Purtschert et al., 2016). In addition, researchers have increasingly analyzed colonial legacies and the manifestation of uneven racialized power relations in current society. They offer insight into structural and everyday racism in Switzerland (Wa Baile et al., 2019) and the daily reproduction of Whiteness and White ⁵ supremacy (Iso, 2008). However, no studies on colonial legacies in agriculture exist.

Modern, Liberal Subject Formation, and Postcolonial Masculinities

Patricia Purtschert has shown that Swiss history cannot be grasped without colonial and gender history. Purtschert (2019) demonstrated that the discursive production and hegemonic enforcement of new gender norms in the 20th century in Switzerland were based on different ‘colonial fantasies’ and specific Swiss ways of Othering (p. 304). The development of a common Swiss national identity based on the heroic images of White colonial masculinities is of particular interest to this study.

In the 1950s, Swiss mountaineers entered the international fray by first ascending the highest mountains in the world. Competing in the male-only sphere of the so-called ‘death zone’ in the Himalayas enhanced traditional colonial images of the White masculinity associated with adventure, courage, and claims to leadership and ownership. Popular reporting on Himalayan expeditions postulated similarities between Sherpas and the Swiss. The neocolonial division of labor between the Swiss and the Sherpas was overwritten with a new variant of a colonial imaginary. According to Purtschert, relations between European and non-European men appear in that context to be a particular type of neocolonial register marked by partnership and friendship, while the colonial asymmetry between these men was maintained and remained unquestioned. Performing partnership and friendship made it impossible for the Swiss to surrender their white supremacy. This mirrors the position that Swiss actors sought to occupy after decolonization ended formal colonialism: the position of being neutral mediators free from colonial entanglements, of engaging in a globalized world while claiming their White supremacy in the most natural way (Purtschert, 2019: 70).

On Servitude and ‘Internal Others’ in Switzerland

Purtschert (2019) also proposes a postcolonial reading of the violent Swiss history of administrative detention (Administrative Versorgung) and the existence of Verdingkinder (indentured child laborers) (p. 320). Schär (2007) similarly argues for the need to understand the history of Yenish people in Switzerland as being entangled with colonial racism, and thus the need for reflecting on policies and practices that have created internal Others in Switzerland (p. 14).

Since 1926, Yenish children have been taken away from their parents to be ‘educated’ into becoming settled and ‘hard-working’ citizens (Galle, 2016: 15). Following the strategy of re-education as a civilizing mission, they were placed (plaziert) in institutions or with foster parents (Fremdplatzierung). Though this happened to many impoverished children in Switzerland, it occurred in Yenish families systematically—children were taken away and brought to farming families, where they had to work and were indeed enserfed as Verdingkinder (Galle, 2016: 487). Josef Jörger, a racial hygienist, published the journal Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (archive for racial-and social biology) in which Yenish communities are characterized as ‘Vagantenstamm’ (vagrant tribes). He said, ‘those who came into a healthy environment at an early age, or whose mothers came from well-behaved families, have for the most part found their way back to the human community’. Jörger thus explicitly excluded the Yenish from the category of human (Leimgruber et al., 1998: 35, 60). While these children became farmhands (Knechte), their parents were sent to prisons, so-called labor and correctional institutions, (Arbeitserziehungs- und Korrektionsanstalten), or even psychiatric clinics and forced to undergo eugenic sterilization. While the aim to erase the ‘inferior categories of the population was a strongly gendered practice’ (Mottier, 2006: 258); so were dehumanizing discourses. Yenish mothers’ love for their children was described as ‘very primitive, not to say animalistic’ (Leimgruber et al., 1998: 35) or as ‘monkey love’ (p. 36).

As Swiss history is marked by the practices of serfdom that carry the inherent colonial logic of dehumanizing Otherness, I argue that this specific culture of sense-making by placing certain groups in society as ‘not-yet-humans’ and enforcing their assimilation with so-called welfare policies shows how practices of dehumanization and care can intersect. This form of Othering-through-dehumanizing-care or care-Othering (VerAndern durch VerSorgen) represents a specific Swiss way of Othering, where welfare policies are intertwined with eugenic practices and servitude. Thus, where welfare intersects with racism, care is not innocent. The term placing people for care practices and the accompanied cultural repertoires in Swiss history are deeply entangled with dehumanizing worldviews related to the civilizing mission and enforcing hegemony and a protestant work ethic onto Othered people.

These insights into Swiss history show the unique experiences of assimilation and annihilation that have been talked about in public for some years. They also reveal similarities in motives and motivations globally. Further instances of child removal, such as those in Australia, where indigenous children were kidnapped, assimilated, and exploited for their labor (see ‘Stolen Generation’), supports the need for reading caring narratives against their grain and situating practices in global colonial legacies. This proves that cultural repertoires in Switzerland are local instances of coloniality and colonial care.

The Plantation Archives

I conceptualize the plantation archives to grasp the daily presence of colonial aftermaths on farms. I rely on Grada Kilomba’s (2010) concept of ‘plantation memories’ and Edward Said and Gloria Wekker’s ‘cultural archive’ (Said, 1993).

Based on Essed’s notion of everyday racism and on Sigmund Freund’s theory of memory, Kilomba (2010) developed the notion of ‘plantation memories’. She thereby connects what she calls ‘episodes of everyday racism’ in Germany to its colonial history (p. 132). On this basis, I theorize the plantation logic in the Swiss context. According to Kilomba (2010), plantation memories do travel. In these moments,

. . . the colonial past is memorized in the sense that it was ‘not forgotten’. Sometimes one would prefer not to remember, but one is actually not able to forget. Freud’s theory of memory is in reality a theory of forgetting. It assumes that all experiences, or at least all significant experiences, are recorded, but that some cease to be available to the consciousness as a result of repression and to diminish anxiety; others, however, as a result of trauma, remain overwhelming present. One cannot simply forget and one cannot avoid remembering (p. 132).

Thus, in moments when people experience racism, they are thrown back into a colonial setting with its total asymmetry of power. The dichotomy of being the master and being enslaved is symbolically restored. In these moments, colonialism is experienced as real. This suddenness and unpredictability that characterizes the experience of everyday racism is a central characteristic of trauma. The past becomes the immediate present (Kilomba, 2010: 95).

In White Innocence, a work on the dominant White Dutch self-representation, Gloria Wekker uses Said’s concept of cultural archives to analyze colonial legacies in everyday life and says,

. . . the cultural archive is located in many things, in the way we think, do things, and look at the world, in what we find (sexually) attractive, in how our effective and rational economies are organized and intertwined. Most important, it is between our ears and in our hearts and souls. (Wekker, 2016: 19)

All spheres in the present society are therefore to be proven for their colonial content and ‘their racialized common sense’ (p. 19). The cultural archive is ‘silently cemented in policies, in organizational rules, in popular and sexual cultures, and in common sense everyday knowledge, and all of this is based on four hundred years of imperial rule’ (p. 19).

Therefore, the plantation archive is understood as a specific cultural archive derived from plantation regimes and is deeply incorporated into society by various means, such as modern food production regimes and agricultural practices under capitalism. Nurtured by (de)coloniality, it impacts meaning-making repertoires and the everyday on farms. Plantation archives carry memories that reveal not only the forms of exploitation but also resisting practices against subjugations. Since plantation archives impose hegemony and traumatize or empower people, they shape thinking and organizing principles.

Recruiters of Agricultural Workers Talking About Their Work

Politics of Naming

Agricultural workers are referred to by their nationality (e.g. ‘the Swiss’, ‘people from Afghanistan’), their continental origin (e.g. ‘those from Africa’), their legal status (e.g. ‘refugees’), their anticipated racialized/ethnicized belonging (e.g. ‘those Slavic guys’, ‘ethnic Germans’ from Romania) and/or explicit stereotypes (e.g. ‘southern type of guy’). They are seldom referred to as individuals but as differently Othered and homogenized groups.

Reference making was also based on outdated terms about workers’ positions such as ‘Knechte’ [farmhands]. Here, I asked what the recruiter would look for when he would employ people from abroad, and he said:

You must have different skills as a farmhand [Knecht] (. . .) and are not merely useful as a harvester. (Interview conducted in March 2018)

In this example, uneven power relations manifest themselves. Arguably, workers cannot be ‘just’ harvesters but must aim to become ‘real’ employees by adopting ‘different skills’. The logic of this narrative is that even if workers acquire these skills, they remain ‘farmhands’. Though this statement is constructed without the explicit intention of devaluation, it shows a patronizing attitude toward ‘non-Swiss’ workers: Being a ‘farmhand’ is the position agricultural workers from abroad ought to occupy.

Workers from abroad were also referred to as Fremdarbeiter [foreign workers/alien workers].

We depend on foreign workers [Fremdarbeiter]. Especially in the vegetable and fruit sector. No Swiss wants to work for this wage and under these working conditions. (Interview conducted in December 2017)

While the recruiter describes that the Swiss citizens do not work for ‘this wage’, he reduces farm workers not holding Swiss citizenship to their ‘foreignness’ using World War II terminology.

Furthermore, the recruiters mentioned workers’ families from abroad and their communities as ‘Sippe’ [tribes]. Such references did not appear when recruiters talked about Swiss citizens; nor did they mention them as ‘Knechte’. Fellow citizens have another status: that of employees or members of a nuclear family. The terminology for workers from abroad implies a relation marked by uneven dependency, which derives from past serfdom-like rural power relations that do not exist legally anymore but are unconsciously invoked.

Patterns of Othering

Three essential ways of Othering emerged in the interviews: the logics of reification, dehumanization, and racialization/ethnicization. Although Othering narratives varied, they were tied to generalizing statements. The common logic of reification appeared with an objectifying use of language and a technical kind of thinking and reference to individuals, groups of people, or entire regions as if they were commodities. One person said:

Bulgarians and Romanians—those are the cheapest countries to get the people. But they will also be exhausted soon. (Interview conducted in May 2018)

Moreover, the objectification comes with dehumanization, using a language that originated from animal husbandry:

Mainly, we want to ensure that the working relationship functions properly. We do not want to leave ourselves open to criticism that we don’t keep people in good conditions (. . .). (Interview conducted in June 2017)

This logic of dehumanization was framed in diverse ways but did not differ in its conclusion. Here, again, dehumanizing narratives did not appear in explicit devaluating statements. They were couched in a caring habitus, meaning that the Swiss farmers, the Farmers Union, or the Swiss system took good care of the workers. In some cases, the line between implicitness and explicitness in the narratives blurs, and they are interrelated as follows:

My brother also gave them lunch and in the end a tenner. (. . .) They are human beings after all (. . .). (Interview conducted in March 2016)

Here, the logic of dehumanization within the narrative appears implicitly. Though the human status of those workers is explicitly recognized, the fundamental fragility of their humanity is implied.

Workers are Othered through a racializing/ethnicizing logic and through a perceived cultural and biological regime of truth making. The justifying narrative was mainly constructed regarding perceived work ethic. Additional narrative constructions addressed the legal status, presumed corporality, and abilities such as ‘mind-set’, language skills, or nationality. For example:

In the East—in Eastern countries—you can feel quite a difference. People from former Yugoslavia—they can really work. Those Slavic guys, right?! The Portuguese are much more like the southern types of guys. (Interview conducted in November 2017)

Othering narratives did not always follow strict patterns, nor were the constructed storylines consistent or coherent. They were, however, guided by certain rules and shared several dominant discourses. While individual statements appeared arbitrary, ‘racial grammar’ (Wekker, 2016: 105) that established hierarchies among workers was consistent throughout the narrative. The operating logic of ‘grammatical rule’ is that the narratives put workers into hierarchical relations in which they place themselves and fellow citizens at the top of the constructed hierarchy. One such instance is the following:

We have a different work ethic. We work harder. It’s just like that. (Interview conducted in March 2017)

The dominant, but not persistent, line of division was made between ‘those from the east’ (Recruiter)—often referred to as ‘the foreign workers’ [Fremdarbeiter]—and ‘those from Africa’ (Recruiter)—mostly addressed as ‘the refugees’ (Recruiter). Both groups were constructed according to their presumed values, work ethic and abilities. A good work ethic was often emphasized when talking about workers from ‘the east’:

What is now coming from the east is not political, it is the wage gap. (. . .) I think those further up are more hardworking. (Interview conducted in November 2017)

One recruiter emphasized that the best workers come from specific ‘tribes’.

Those are far from the east. There are such tribes, two or three, close to China. They also look Chinese. (. . .) I met someone from Georgia. (. . .) with caliber. (Interview conducted in May 2017)

When recruiters talked about workers from ‘Africa’, their weak position as ‘refugees’ within the agricultural labor market was brought forward, but was not reflected in power relations:

I think that migration from Africa will increase for a long time, but today we cannot really imagine how, (. . .) But I have not yet found any jobs for Black people on a farm. But it is easier to motivate people from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now we cannot employ these people [legally], except as refugees. But I am convinced there is potential, though we do not know how to profit from this situation. (Interview conducted in April 2016)

I also know farmers who say ‘I certainly wouldn’t employ a refugee, even if I could have him for free’. (Interview conducted in March 2017)

Though the reason for this refusal is racism, it was never called racism; instead, the difficulty in meditating the arrangement of ‘[Black] refuges’ is posed because they lacked motivation:

I just don’t believe they are so motivated to work in agriculture. (Interview conducted in December 2017)

In many narratives, good workers could be anyone but ‘[Black] refugees’. They could enter the sphere of labor relations only if they explicitly ‘obeyed’ (Recruiter):

One farmer heard that we have willing asylum seekers that obey [parieren]. He employed one. But then, our association promised [the asylum seekers] that they would also talk together and eat together, which was travesty [Hohn] in this farm. (Interview conducted in May 2017)

Here, the recruiter’s narrative points to the manifestation of racism when he says that the farmers were even prevented from eating and talking together; it reveals how structural and institutional racism is maintained by individual and interpersonal racism. What is also reflected here is the recruiter’s self-representation. He can identify racism or at least read the contemptible behavior. However, he reproduces it by constructing asylum seekers as submissive people and by marking a kind of ownership over them ( ‘we have’).

Establishing hierarchies between workers is a crucial rule within racial grammar. Hierarchies are also established between national educational systems and the quality of work in general. Thus, not only is the Swiss agricultural educational system winning the race, but within this grammar, recruiters construct the ‘Swiss’ themselves as the winning, unmarked ‘race’.

In summary, the main rule of this racial grammar was to create hierarchies between workers. This was facilitated by assigning different abilities and work ethics to homogenized, racialized/ethnicized, differently Othered, and even dehumanized groups. This order assigned fixed places to workers, thereby enabling the non-racialized ‘Swiss’ to remain at the top and creating the self-image of Swiss people as those with the best work ethic and most knowledge about farming. Two forms of racism were dominant: anti-Black racism and anti-Slavic racism.

Tracing and Situating Plantation Archives

On the Entangled Histories That Nurture the Plantation Archive

In the quote with which this manuscript began, the first image that came up in the recruiter’s mind when I asked him to reflect on his work was that of his predecessor and his experiences. He says: ‘People came out of the train and they examined their teeth as if they were cows (laughs)’. This is the traditional line of recruitment practices in which he chose to inscribe himself. This supposed joke recalls selection practices in times of enserfdom and enslavement. Moreover, it reminds us of the settlers’ attitudes and the dehumanizing ways of referring to those whom they subjected. Thus, the narrative becomes the practice of taking reference, which Fanon (1963) describes as follows: ‘In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms’ (p. 42). Here, it is not a zoological language but the language of cattle breeding ( ‘keep people in good condition’, see quote).

While this reveals the colonial legacy of recruitment practices and a colonial-racist mind-set, making a joke in this context functions as a ‘master suppression technique’ (Ås, 2004). According to Wekker (2016), ‘one of the characteristic ways to bring racist content across is by using humor and irony’ (p. 26). Wekker’s description in the Dutch context is also relevant to Switzerland, where the production of racism through humor has a long tradition (Jain, 2014), one that is deeply inscribed in Swiss culture and passed on from childhood (e.g. Globi and the ‘white n’. in children’s books, Purtschert, 2012). This joke here can also be interpreted as an initiation ritual, as it occurred at the beginning of our conversation when affinity and sympathy could be created. As a joke between White people—the recruiter perhaps assumes our common Whiteness—it represents a moment of possible consent-making, of checking out a shared but unmarked ideological disposition. However, the so-called guest workers experienced the mentioned practice as humiliating at that time (Aeschlimann, 2007).

Experiences of dehumanization were not limited to such moments. People worked in poor conditions, thereby strengthening the Swiss national economy, filled social insurance funds, and, at the same time, were labeled ‘uncivilized and wild foreigners’ (see Jain, 2020). The logic of the plantation archive enabled colonial-racist insults, such as ‘Spaghetti-Indianer’ (Spaghetti Indians) and ‘braune Söhne des Südens’ (brown sons of the South) (Jain, 2020). Signboards stating ‘Italians and dogs forbidden’ (Jain, 2020) were placed. These iterations show how people adapted the plantation archive to different times and places. This way of thinking about external Others, crucial to the plantation archive, returns in different shades today. As for Switzerland, Christina Späti (2022) has argued that anti-Slavic racism overlaps with antisemitism.

The recruiters subsumed workers as ‘the Slavs’ and argued that those from ‘the east’ were naturally laboring peoples, especially those from specific ‘tribes’ (recruiter’s terms). Thus, all these transregional histories of internal colonization that nurture the plantation archive are powerfully mobilized.

Here, discourses on ‘the laboring Slavs’ that put racialized attention on specific workers get mixed with those that justify external colonization. Recruiters’ mention of workers’ communities as tribes stems from the colonizers’ allocation during external colonization when all those communities were subjugated and marked as ‘uncivilized tribes’. But the mention of tribes also reminds us of the history of internal Others in Switzerland, as Yenish communities were marked as ‘tribes’ and researched within the context of eugenic sciences (see Sippenforschung (tribe research)). More local histories about the construction of internal Others, which impact the specific shaping of the plantation archive on which recruiters rely, appear when they talk about ‘platzieren’ (placing) and ‘versorgen’ (supplying/caring) (recruiters’ terms). These words carry worldviews that cannot be disconnected from the Swiss history of serfdom and forced (dis)placement (Fremdplatzierung and Administrative Versorgung) (see the ‘Local Configurations of Coloniality: Postcolonial Switzerland’ section).

As we have seen, the unfolding of the plantation archive in concrete terms is always subject to change, experiencing ruptures and (dis)continuities. I argue that stability results from a dehumanizing grammar which is key both to coloniality, in which the logic of racialization/ethnicization and reification is immanent, and in the notion of ‘coloniality of labor’ (Boatcă, 2013: 312), which connects different coercive labor relations outside and inside of Imperial Europe. Plantation archives are not bound to one specific plantation regime or to one form of enslavement or serfdom. In Switzerland, these archives have been nurtured by local histories of dehumanizing internal Others.

On Affects and Structures of Feeling in Plantation Archives

In the following example, I told the recruiter a story that a trainee had told me. A friend of his from Moldova returned home after only 2 weeks because he had to have lunch in the pigpen when it was raining instead of eating with the farmer’s family in the house—an experience that was obviously humiliating and that made him want to leave. I asked the recruiter what would happen to interns from abroad when they would complain about similar experiences. The recruiter told me:

In that case we place [umplatzieren] them somewhere else. However, if someone working on a farm with black cows says they want to go to a farm with brown cows, it will not be a reason for us to place them somewhere else. (Interview conducted in November 2017)

Despite the brutality in this example, the recruiter’s lack of outrage correlates with the solution to just place the worker somewhere else, while downplaying the situation with reference to the preferred color of cows. It is not a new farm with respectful people that he aims to find within his narrative. Instead, the narrative constructs the trainee as the problem. While the word placing mobilized here reminds us of the above-mentioned serfdom-like power relations in Switzerland, the ‘structures of feeling’ (Wekker, 2016: 2) or rather of not-feeling, are even more telling. This is what Wekker (2016) means when she says that White culture has given itself ‘a racial grammar, a deep structure of inequality in thought and affect based on race’ (p. 2). This structure leads to the affect of withholding emotions in response to the humiliation described. The affect then turns toward a technical solution.

This affect of emotional withdrawal or ‘suspended empathy’ (Purtschert, 2019: 130) represents a postcolonial gaze. It allows replacing people—like replacing an object—and intersects with the wider logic of reification and racialization. These structures of feeling, which avoid empathy, are crucial to the plantation archive and linked to what Aimé Césaire has called ‘thingification’. According to Césaire (2000), ‘no human contact, but relations of domination and submission turn the colonizing man into (. . .) a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production’ (p. 42). He, therefore, equates colonization as ‘thingification’ (p. 42). It is this kind of spirit that has been deeply inscribed into the modern subjects who utilize plantation archives that structure and constitute the recruiter’s mind-set. As neocolonialism remains tied to thingification, workers and their home regions remain instruments of production. Within these intersubjective relations, both the colonizer and the colonized become inhumane (Césaire, 2000: 42). This modern subject formation—that is, the ‘ego conquiro’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 245)—thus enters the sphere of inhumanity because he dehumanizes others by making them merely part of the wider infrastructure in the farms.

I argue that the example of ‘suspended empathy’ (Purtschert, 2019: 130) presented here mirrors a specific emotional regime deeply subscribed to Swiss culture. It is a dehumanizing gaze which comes along a caring patron habitus and represents a matrix reminiscent of the Swiss history of Othering-through-dehumanizing-care (see the ‘Local Configurations of Coloniality: Postcolonial Switzerland’ section). I propose to situate such moments of ‘suspended empathy’ as everyday instances of coloniality that, at the micro level, mirror the wider ‘superstructure’ (Marx and Engels, 1846: 36; Fanon, 1963: 40) called political neutrality.

‘I Am Not a Racist, But . . . ’: On Self-Representation and Intersubjectivity

What characterizes recruiters’ self-representation and intersubjectivity is what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls ‘racism without racists’. To illustrate its occurrence, I recall a moment from an interview where the recruiter says:

People from Africa very often [hesitates to complete his words]—I have to be careful here—they don’t have [again hesitates]. I am absolutely not a nationalist; I’m very open. I have worked abroad for a long time. They are not so motivated to work in agriculture. Many of them feel like, I can travel here and go like this, [snaps fingers] and I will make a lot of money. (Interview conducted in June 2017)

This recruiter repeated throughout the interview, ‘I am not a racist’ or ‘nationalist’. Similar formulations can be found in most interviews (e.g. ‘I have no prejudices, but . . . ’, ‘I am open. I come from a different canton, but . . . ’). According to Bonilla-Silva (2006), such narratives ‘act as discursive buffers’ (p. 57), which means that someone’s statement involves, is interpreted, or could be interpreted as, racist assumptions. With these buffers—crucial to today’s White culture—they fail to address racism, since ‘[c]olor-blind racism’s race talk avoids racist terminology and preserves its mythological nonracialism through semantic moves’.

Expressions such as ‘I am not racist, but . . . ’ are everyday occurrences in farms and beyond and serve to initiate racist statements in daily interactions. While they are part of what Essed (1991) calls ‘everyday racism’, they also mirror people’s limited understanding of racism. In the case above, the recruiter says that he is an open person as he has worked abroad. In his understanding, going abroad and having contact with different nationalities prevents him from being a racist or nationalist. This limited understanding undermines structural racism and its colonial legacies, represented on farms as the division of labor and differentiated access to work permits, rights, and life perspectives.

While such moments mirror the limited will to face one’s own racism, one chooses to remain within the culture of ‘White innocence’ (Wekker, 2016). Furthermore, they represent instances that are caught in a ‘regime of raceless racism’ (Michel, 2015: 411), widespread in Switzerland.

The Subject Making Use of Plantation Archives: On Postcolonial Masculinities and on Performing Management of Civilization

Plantation archives transcend recruiters’ reference systems to manifest themselves on Swiss farms, seen both in ways that Swiss farmers mention workers and ways that farms are organized. In Meret Oehen’s (2020) interviews with farm managers in Switzerland, the same patterns of Othering are present (p. 48f). The interviewees talk about ‘placing people’ (p. 51) and refer to workers and their communities as ‘hoards’ (p. 61) and ‘tribes’ (p. 47). In one case, a farmer says:

We have several origins. Not just one tribe [sic]. Because, otherwise: if one of them is dominant and does not do well and you must send him away, others will leave too. (. . .) We do not just take (. . .) from the same tribe or from the same region. (Interview with farmer, see in Oehen, 2020: 47)

Here, the farmer argues that mixing ‘tribes’ (meaning people from different origins) helps him maintain sustainable control over workers because without such mixing there is too much solidarity. Another interviewee reveals a further dimension:

The men want to play the boss (. . .). Colleagues have also confirmed this to me. (. . .) I have had very good experiences with women, because women—they toil (laughs)—this is probably also the same in Polish culture. (see Oehen, 2020: 76).

Here, women from Poland are portrayed as submissive and naturally hard-working—a gendered and racializing discourse stemming from the above-mentioned internal colonization (see the ‘Global Entanglements and Coloniality’ section) and from coloniality. The farmer sees women as better to control as they do not aim to be the boss and, therefore, represent the best kind of workers.

Salome Günther (2008), who worked at one of the biggest organic farms in Switzerland and who conducted ethnography, explains how groups organized by farmers work together according to nationality. The Swiss farmer, who chooses the main responsible person in each of these groups, calls him ‘Häuptling’ (tribal chief) (Günther, 2008: 13). The workers on that farm have adopted this terminology, which is mirrored in the interviews (p. 31). The division of labor on this farm follows gendered, colonial fantasies. While the manager of the farm remains at the top of the hierarchy in structural terms, he additionally chooses to backdate his farm to the colonial era and to have a tribal chief he can control. Consequently, he then takes the position of the White, male settler. This adaptation of plantation regimes embedded in a globalized agricultural labor market serves to reconstruct the colonial situation on farms in Switzerland. The White, male subject who projects his self into the sphere of plantation economies to maintain order and control shows impressively how ‘settler-colonial masculinities’ (Connell, 2016: 307) that were adapted to subdue colonized people have been transferred to present times. According to Raewyn Connell (2016), such transferred masculinity is today represented by a new ‘transnational corporate masculinity’ (p. 312). To trace the genealogy of these modern subject formations and capital-driven management masculinities, I argue that, following Maldonado-Torres, the ‘coloniality of being’ is key to understanding these White postcolonial masculinities (Connell, 2016).

The reconstruction and unfolding of the colonial era as presented in the two studies resembles the colonial fantasies of the recruiters in my interviews. While the farmers reenact the roles of White settlers, the recruiters represent themselves as conquerors. In their narratives, they search for new sources (countries, continents); they know which regions have the potential to get new workers, and where the best ‘tribes’ (in recruiters’ term) can be found to work in agriculture.

Since the neoliberal agricultural sector turned farms into globalized enterprises and imposed international competition, the colonial projections of farm managers and recruiters serve to maintain their hegemony and follow colonial narratives and practices of managing globalized, racialized/ethnicized, and gendered underclasses. The transference of plantation logic has turned the dehumanizing trade with enslaved people into a neocolonial register, the management of ‘non-human’ resources.

The recruiters’ ‘certainty of the self as a conqueror’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 245) remains crucial for White-male-self-perception and impacts intersubjectivity beyond recruitment; it transcends into the everyday on farms. This certainty, which is inscribed within society and is key to White, postcolonial masculinity, empowers recruiters to recruit people into coloniality through jokes while they claim they are not racists.

Finally, I argue that recruiter’s statements such as ‘I am not a racist’ represent a deep desire to perform the management of civilization and to justify capitalist exploitation. With this statement, the recruiters remain within the logic of coloniality at the same time that they aim to rise above the moral ambiguities of the plantation archives and White, male, thinking-like-a-slaveholder (Truth, 1994 [1867]: 131) legacies.

Conclusion

As I have shown through looking into the recruiter’s interviews, thinking-like-the-market is thinking-like-the-settler/conqueror. As there is no public discourse in Switzerland on racism in agriculture, or academic reflection on the specific local manifestations of racial agrarian capitalism, this study contributes to the exchange of knowledge on present racism in the cultural imaginary and on neocolonial labor recruitment and living conditions in agriculture.

I have argued that forcing coloniality on the most exploited workers utilizes plantation archives that adapt to times and places. In the Swiss context, these plantation archives are based on the histories of external and internal European colonization and are shaped by local entangled histories of dehumanizing so-called internal Others. Therefore, the analysis allows me to take a geographical, discursive, and epistemic shift since the enforcement of the plantation logic has so far been located overseas. Looking into local configurations of plantation archives furthermore demonstrates that consent-making to underclassing and to coloniality relies on colonial caring narratives and practices. They are incorporated in postcolonial masculinities which manage and care while still dehumanizing and exploiting.