This research cluster is in the process of being shaped and developed. It will bring together different strands of the current, ongoing and future research of different members of the SWOP community whose work focuses on different aspects of wage labour and its place in the development and history of capitalism; poverty; unemployment; the changing nature of work and its futures; land and its relation to questions of dispossession, work, survival and life; social welfare; alternative forms of survival and life that do not rely on access to jobs; and the relationship between political subjectivity and land, as well as understandings of it in relation to wage labour, and poverty.