Just-in-time brokerage: commodifying women’s casual labor in China’s capitalist agriculture

Abstract What social processes are required not only to recruit workers, but to repeatedly assemble and deliver labor power as a usable commodity in the specific quantity, quality, and timing demanded by capitalist production? In the commercial mushroom cultivation in rural China studied here, this problem is solved through a distinctive form of informal intermediation – just-in-time brokerage – carried out by female labor brokers who organize the supply of village women’s casual labor. Drawing on qualitative field research, we show that brokerage here goes beyond recruiting semi-proletarianized rural women into wage work and revolves primarily around “provisioning”: assembling packages of labor power in the right volume, coordinating rapid deployment at the right time, and maintaining the labor reserve. Conceptually, this paper theorizes brokers’ “commodification work” – the procurement and provisioning of casual labor for employers – as a form of social reproductive labor that is gendered and under-paid, helps make capitalist agriculture operational, and subsidizes capital accumulation.