Epistemic Injustices in Islands of Conscious Power: Outsourcing and Epistemic Barriers in Claim-Making

Abstract Outsourcing has increasingly become a dominant trend in global production, as firms disintegrate vertically by externalizing non-core functions and procuring these services from the market. This process increasingly organizes production through inter-firm contracting arrangements, shifting hierarchical control from internal managers to external buyers who leverage market power. This article examines the epistemic injustices that workers face in the context of such transformations. Adopting a worker-centric perspective, it theorizes the epistemic barriers workers encounter when asserting their rights after outsourcing. These barriers include exclusion from internal norms, ultracomplex accountability chains, eroding incentives to speak out, and searching for an effective audience. The central claim is that outsourcing, as presently organized, often foreseeably produces epistemic harms from which firms benefit. An epistemic injustice lens helps bring this neglected dimension of labour injustice into view.