This article explores the experience of formal and informal steel labour in the contexts of the
factory, the family, and the neighbourhood in 'Endcliffe', an ex‐industrial district of Sheffield,
UK. The article reiterates Claude Meillassoux's claim, in his book Maidens, meal and money,
that the informal economy is an ideological space for the cheap reproduction of labour in the
interests of capital. Nevertheless, it also examines subjective and ethnographic
understandings of the meanings of 'capital'and 'labour'and of the political nature of their …

This article explores the experience of formal and informal steel labour in the contexts of the
factory, the family, and the neighbourhood in'Endcliffe', an ex-industrial district of Sheffield,
UK. The article reiterates Claude Meillassoux's claim, in his book Maidens, meal and money,
that the informal economy is an ideological space for the cheap reproduction of labour in the
interests of capital. Nevertheless, it also examines subjective and ethnographic
understandings of the meanings of'capital'and'labour'and of the political nature of their …