Suchergebnisse

Sri Lanka's apparel sector holds an enviable place in the imaginary of its competitors for having a niche position amongst global retailers, given its claims of producing 'garments without guilt'. Exploitative labour conditions are not part of the industry's portfolio - ethicality, eco-friendly production and unblemished conditions of work are. Sri Lanka's transition away from a protracted ethnic war has meant that the industry portrays itself as investing in the former war zone to create jobs without reflection on how its vaunted mantle, the deployment of ethical codes effectively, themselves may be under duress. This book uses an analytical framing informed by labour and feminist perspectives to explore how labour struggles in the post-1977 period in Sri Lanka provided important resistance to capitalist processes and continue to shape the industry both within and outside of the shop floor. It studies contextual moments in the country's recent history to rupture the dominant narrative and record the centrality of labour in the success of the country's apparel industry.

Provides a theoretical discussion and literature survey on the quality of women's employment in the South Asian and African regions. Explores factors that influence the links between gender and employment quality and identifies institutional and economic factors that increase women's participation in the labour force

Sri Lankan garment workers have navigated a terrain where their initial status as stigmatized labour were re-casted as empowered workers through various industry-led initiatives in the recent past. Rearticulation from disposable to empowered workers, however, did not rest upon living wages or a hike in wage packets; instead, various management interpellations were attempted onsite and offsite factories. Without a material basis for these initiatives in the pre-CoVID-19 period, the vacuity of these tropes became particularly evident during the pandemic. Workers had to come to terms with shabby social support and stigma that worsened their economic lives, with tattered social safety systems compelling labour rights organizations and kin to step up. Using worker testimonies, I speak to the politics of empowerment to underline how the recasting of workers as stigmatized resulted in the cost of social reproduction to borne by kin networks and labour activists too. These frayed social safety nets and public support continue to echo against the country's worst economic crisis.

Mezzadri, A. (ed.), Marx in the Field (London: Anthem Press, 2021), 246 pp. £80, $125, ISBN 9781785274497.

Sandya Hewamanne, Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Contentment (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 224 pp. $55, £44, ISBN 978-0-812-25240-8 (Hardback)

The early 1980s lead to a flurry of analysis regarding the role of women workers in the apparel sector. These incipient feminist interventions tended to hone in on the economic status of women workers to the exclusion of understanding the multiple ways in which their social and cultural lives was also transformed through this process. This research lacuna was primarily filled through the works of cultural and social anthropologists. The past three decades' academic debates then have witnessed an intellectual and scholarly transition from the economic to the cultural, alongside strident calls for ethical corporate codes in the apparel sector. This journey, however, has not necessarily had an abiding focus on feminist concerns to do with the gendered nature of work itself.