Disciplining of Roma workers through predatory debt in Czechia

Looking at the entrapment of Roma workers in unpayable debts in Czechia, this article discusses the relationship between racialisation, predatory debt and labour disciplining. Drawing on long-term ethnographic data and socio-legal analysis, it develops an argument that household indebtedness reproduces racialised labour precarity. With time, the role of unpayable debt in the Czech political economy extended beyond Roma workers as it was converted into a mechanism to discipline labour as a whole. Situating the analysis in the post-socialist context, in a country characterised by high industrial employment, this intervention uses the racial capitalism framework to build an understanding of race and class formations in East Central Europe.