Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

Prentice, Rebecca

doi:10.5876/9781607323754

Cited by 28 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…This analysis adds to the work of other scholars who have examined individualizing policies and structures in the neoliberal industrial workplace (Dunk ; Dunn ; Pozniak ; Prentice ; Rolston ; Rudnyckyj ; Shever ). The problem‐solving practices and disciplines of machine care that GIA implemented on the production floor in Appalachia are similar to those of many multinational corporate manufacturing plants that depend upon flexible structures of production.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Is High‐Tech Manufacturing Resocialing Work in Appalachian Kentucky?

Hayes

2018

Anthropology of Work Review

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Is High‐Tech Manufacturing Resocialing Work in Appalachian Kentucky?

Hayes

2018

Anthropology of Work Review

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“…As in other transnational factories around the world (Fernandez-Kelly 1983;Mills 1999;Freeman 2000;Salzinger 2003;Ngai 2005;Prentice 2016), Katunayake factories demand maximum output for minimal wages in exploitative working conditions and practice a distinctively late capitalist form of gendered working relations. About 80,000 young rural women from economically and socially marginalized groups work as machine operators in the FTZ's 92 factories and a similar number work for subcontracting factories located around the zone (Sri Lanka Board of Investment, n.d).…”

Section: Background/research Methodsmentioning

confidence: 95%

Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

Hewamanne

2017

Identities

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These village people, they can be nice when they want to, but can turn vicious at any moment. I tread carefully here, at least until I have two, three children and a good economic foundation. Trying in-your-face FTZ mod in these backward villages will not bring us any power. I try to get my way by putting on the sil redde. Shanika, a former Free Trade Zone (FTZ) worker now residing in her marital home, said this with a laugh. Sil redde is the white shawl worn when observing Buddhist disciplinary principles on poya days. Shanika's comment is interesting at two levels: because as per early nationalist discourses, white signifies purity (De Alwis 1997); and because Shanika was deftly combining this notion with a Buddhist accoutrement (the sil redde) to perform discipline. While all newly married women devise strategies to endear themselves to in-laws, Sri Lanka's former FTZ workers find doing so more challenging given the stigma attached to their prior employment. Many rural households have daughters or nieces who worked in the FTZs and relatives generally claim these women did so to help their families survive economically. I got quite used to hearing people say their daughter 'was not like all those other garment girls who behave without any shame-fear.' However, almost all mothers had qualms about their sons marrying a FTZ worker. This article explores how former garment factory workers negotiate new lives and identities after 5-6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. Most marry a year or two after leaving the FTZ and move to their husbands' villages. Based on ethnographic research

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“…Labour regimes emerge from the interplay of subjectivities within work and home spaces (Prentice 2015 andHann andParry 2018). Workplace subjectivities are linked to identities and obligations within the home and community, which unions both shape and help workers fulfil (Sanchez 2016).…”

Section: Union Relationships Economic Anthropology and The Anthropolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

McNamara

Spyridakis

2020

Dialect Anthropol

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This special issue seeks to understand how unions resist and are reshaped as they confront global capital and neoliberal austerity. It was born out of panels at the annual conferences of European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropology Association and through ongoing conversations about the similarities and differences between the challenges unions face from austerity in the Global North and from Global South aspirations for national 'development'. The papers explore unions' interactions with 'actually existing neoliberalisms', where the state and other actors express extreme faith in markets as policy devices, and in the superior efficiency of the private sector (Rizzo 2017). We describe unions responding to the growing criticism (from the right) that they imped the economic growth that would assist all of society and (from the left) that they represent a privileged and increasingly irrelevant minority of workers. While we explore unions' attempts to dispute these narratives, our special issue is equally invested in detailing how unionism is re-constructed inside a community and, through this, how unions respond to, and co-create, legal, economic and cultural structures. In analysing how unionism shapes and responds to economic practices and workplace subjectivities, we foreground that the obligations and entitlements of being a 'unionist' and a 'worker' are negotiated through intra-community expectations and political histories. We therefore link unions to recent breakthroughs in the anthropological study of capitalism, where political economies are enacted through sociality and subjectivity (cf. Bear et al. 2015 andHann andParry 2018). Unionism is only beginning to be analysed using this framework, yet we show that unions are crucial to the concepts of self and relationships that shape and enable intra-national capitalisms (c.f. Kasmir 2014 and Lazar 2017). We explore how unions guide and respond to what it means to be a miner, steelworker or longshoreman, while simultaneously influencing what it means to be Zambian, Congolese, Greek or Dialectical Anthropology

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Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

Cited by 28 publications

References 78 publications

Is High‐Tech Manufacturing Resocialing Work in Appalachian Kentucky?

Is High‐Tech Manufacturing Resocialing Work in Appalachian Kentucky?

Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

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