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Family farms practicing organic agriculture often struggle to make a profit. Unable to pay wages, farms are increasingly recruiting laborers who agree to work without pay, instead receiving food and accommodation. To date, there has been little research examining everyday life in farm households shared by familial owner-operators and non-waged laborers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at organic farms in the southeastern United States, this thesis describes how farm work, housework and consumption are organized in these households. Situating my analysis within debates on the agrarian question, I investigate how the recruitment of non-waged labor affects the ability of farm-family households to reproduce themselves. My findings suggest that, though farm owner-operators recruit non-waged laborers with the expectation of solving labor challenges, their recruitment produces numerous conflicts internal to the household. I analyze how farm owner-operators deploy scale constructions to defend and legitimize arrangements of productive and social-reproductive work which preserve the ability to self-exploit. I also show how laborer’s bodies are identified as both the problem and the solution in conflicts over consumption. Through attention to the lived experiences of farmworkers, this thesis contributes to debates concerning the social sustainability of organic farming.

This study focuses on the relationship between global economy and women&rsquo / s labor within a feminist standpoint by examining the personal and occupational experiences of immigrant women doing domestic work in Turkey. The main concern of this study is to investigate how working and living experiences of immigrant domestic women workers in Turkey are shaped by their illegal worker and immigrant status. The aim of this study is to listen to the personal experiences of immigrant domestic women workers from themselves, and understand their working conditions and social life experiences in Turkey. There emerged a trend in trading domestic workers between the poor and rich countries since 1990s where many parties, including governments, illegal recruitment agencies, and individual employers benefited. The high unemployment, poverty, shortfalls in living standards, and loss of government-sponsored public services due to the IMF policies implemented by the governments of developing countries severely affected poor and women. For their family survival, women of developing countries forced to migrate in order to seek domestic work in richer countries, where there is a high demand of middle class women for domestic workers. On the other hand, since domestic work is devalued as informal work, policy-makers do not pay sufficient attention, and provide a legal framework regulating the recruitment process and protecting the rights of immigrant domestic women workers. Therefore, immigrant domestic women workers are in a vulnerable position and open to exploitation due to their illegal and immigrant status. Turkey has been one of the domestic worker exporting countries since early 1990s mostly from post-Soviet countries. However, she neither has bilateral agreements with the sending countries nor a legal framework protecting the rights of immigrant domestic women workers. Hence, immigrant women are subject to arbitrary treatment and exploitation both in their workplace and outside, and remained invisible.