ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. This paper explores this kind of reverse transition, that is, when the Lewisian dream of having an industrial job comes to an end, and workers are forced into a reverse migration. Specifically, the paper focuses on the post-industrial experiences of former Indian garment workers leaving the National Capital Region and moving back to Bihar. Emphasis is placed on workers' reasons for leaving the industry and their current employment and reproductive strategies. Findings are based on a sample of 50 former workers, identified in urban industrial hamlets and traced back to their place of origin. Respondents' experiences are analysed based on semi-quantitative questionnaires and life histories. Findings reveal that upon leaving the factory, workers find alternative informal employment through caste or social networks whilst using land as safety net. They suggest that farming and informal work are not alternative but rather complementary income and work strategies. By adopting a life-cycle approach to studying labour transitions across formal and informal employment domains, this analysis contributes to policy debates on decent work.
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a reading of the COVID‐19 crisis through a social reproduction lens, with a focus on the restructuring of reproductive sectors, the world of work and the generation of differentiated surplus populations, and considers the implications of this reading for global development debates on inequality and informal labour. Learning from the pandemic and the social reproduction of the surplus populations it generated, the analysis argues that debates on inequality should be re‐centred on its existential nature and its embeddedness in social oppression, and that labour relations should be considered as key reproducers of inequality. It also argues that informal labour should be increasingly understood as playing the reproductive role of ‘global housework’ in contemporary capitalism. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Development & Change is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
This article portrays the COVID-19 pandemic as a planetary crisis of capitalist life and analyses it through the feminist political economy lens of social reproduction. Celebrating the plurality and distinctiveness of social reproduction theorisations, the article deploys three approaches to map the contours of the present conjuncture;namely Social Reproduction Theory, Early Social Reproduction Analyses and Raced Social Reproduction approaches. These provide key complementary insights over the planetary crisis and reorganisation of life, work and death triggered by the pandemic. Through the compounded insights of social reproduction theorisations, the article argues that the pandemic does not represent a crisis of neoliberalism. Rather, it represents its outcome, and deepening of its logics, an argument which is substantiated by exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the reproductive architecture of neoliberal capitalism;on the world of work;and on racialised processes manufacturing different kinds of surplus subjects. In conclusion, the article discusses the political implications of this social reproduction-centred reading of the pandemic for a progressive post-pandemic politics to move beyond pandemic neoliberalism.