Work That Causes Harm: Violent Labour and the Ecology of Suffering

In this article, “violent labour” is framed as work that causes harm: work that is necessarily situated in overlapping global contexts of contemporary technological capitalism, and harm that is always itself ecological, in the senses of distributed, relational, and complex. To explicate these senses, I sketch a political ecological case study of the harmful effects of global high-technology industries through the entirety of a causal spectrum that has mineral extraction in central Africa on one end, office jobs in California in the middle, and globally distributed e-waste processing on the other end. Conventional philosophical, legal, and common-sense perspectives that feature intention as the central salient component of violence are critiqued. A consequentialist and phenomenological alternative is proposed wherein the suffering of sentient beings within broadly conceived relational ecologies replaces the violent intent of discrete actors as the key metric for understanding the impacts of work that causes harm, or violent labour.