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From dispossessed factory workers to “micro-entrepreneurs”: the precariousness of employment in Trinidad’s garment sector
Ever since recession and trade liberalisation led to the demise of Caribbean garment production in the 1990s, Trinidadian garment workers have seen job opportunities shrink and increasingly enter a casualised, informal sector. This chapter explores the devolution of garment work from factories to workshops and workers’ homes in relation to state-led policies to combat unemployment and poverty through microenterprise development. The chapter argues first, that microenterprise development has had a depoliticising effect on labour struggle; second, that a felicitous discourse of enterprise culture presents the rewards of self-employment as superior to wage employment; and third, that the transformation of factory workers into home-based micro-entrepreneurs succeeds by concealing women’s uncompensated domestic labour. By drawing attention to the neglected relationship between global post-Fordism and state promotion of microenterprise, I show how they are mutually reinforcing in ways that obscure labour politics.
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Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Publisher
BerghahnPage range
289-308Pages
436.0Book title
Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class and the Neoliberal SubjectPlace of publication
New YorkISBN
9781785336782Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Jonathan Parry, Chris HannLegacy Posted Date
2017-11-27First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2017-11-24Usage metrics
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