In the afternoon of 30 September 2023, as a youth leader & activist in my district (Mayuge), I received a phone call from Muwanga Mark, Kato Kennedy & Mutesi Joan my village mates and OB and OG respectively complaining about their subjection to beatings and other forms of torture including hurling insults on claims of mismanagement of company property, possessing phones etc by their Indian ‘General Manager’ of Mayuge Sugar Ltd, a company processing sugar and other related products.  Across the company, things had been no less violent against the black workers coupled with dismissal threats.  Using this case as an entry point into the debate on human rights, politics and work violence, I seek to understand the concrete social conditions under which people claim rights in an ethnicized, gendered, classed, racialised political environment. I seek to understand how intersectional categories that determine access to not only rights but broadly resources, claims to power, justice and opportunities become complicated. In other words, how do claims to “rights” [in this case labour rights] create subjectivities when they interact with gender, race, class, and ethnicity among others in workplaces which are not given priority by the modern state yet they act as centres of violence protected in the name of human rights? Does solving the question of race [in this case Indian and Chinese as a different category of identity according to the employees] subjectivation resolve the subjectivities in an already gendered and classed environment like Uganda [a capitalist and neo-liberal]? If not, then how do we think of the subjectivation beyond the canons of race? The basis for this is that we cannot come to grips with the politics and dynamics of rights if we don’t subject such rights to categories that define conditions of work, that shape individuals and societies and that define these very rights. This paper seeks to analyze the context and dynamic under which Ugandan [racialized and ethnicized] workers interact with their employers and how this interaction shapes their subjection to violence. It seeks to show that the subjectification is historical, political and contextual—multifaceted. This violence against the workers goes unrecorded with the aid of the state machinery [mostly police] which is meant to protect and safeguard the so-called rights. It proves that the state is mired with and a perpetrator of violence to people who face multiple subjectivities and multiple identities. The biggest question for me becomes, is the thinking and decision of the police to subject those workers to unfair treatment out of a vacuum or is it structural and systemic? The state considers all workers as workers having similar rights and groups them in one category [workers] but not all workers go through similar situations. I take inspiration, from the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of Lisa, Marie Cacho (2012), Yuval-Davis and Floya (1992), Suárez-Krabbe, Julia (2014), Rancière, Jacques (2009), Costas Douzinas (2007) and Dhawan Nitkita (2014). For instance, Suárez-Krabbe argues colonial subjectivity is directly related to modern subjectivity…as it becomes the modern [yet gendered] form of subjectivity that erases the “Other” through exploitation and violence. For Yuval-Davis and Floya argue that economic processes are very distinct albeit related concepts but understanding the link between the two doesn’t necessarily require the postulation of class. For Cacho race doesn’t work in isolation to create subjectivities and marginalities, human value is understood in ways which are racialized, sexualized, spatialized and state-sanctioned violence.  Costas Douzinas (2007) argues that “the privileged subject of rights are the powerful; those with political and economic muscles, and that rights are racialized, classed and gendered, thus making rights political, contextual and historical.

Keywords: Labour Rights, Workplace Violence, Subjectivity, Intersectionality, State Power and Structural Violence.