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Getting home during lockdown: migration disruption, labour control and linked lives in India at the time of Covid-19

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posted on 2023-06-10, 04:23 authored by Grace CarswellGrace Carswell, Geert De NeveGeert De Neve, Nidhi Subramanyam
This paper uses the Covid-19 induced migration disruption in India as a lens to interrogate what this acute moment reveals about the precarity of India’s migrant workers and their experiences of work in ordinary times. Interviews with interstate migrants from north India employed in the Tiruppur region in the southern state of Tamil Nadu present their narratives of being stuck at work when lockdown began, their subsequent struggles to get home, and finally their plans to return to Tamil Nadu later in 2020. Migrant accounts of migration disruption shed light on (1) the local labour control regime at destination that routinely keeps interstate migrants locked into highly exploitative work environments, and that was intensified during lockdown, and (2) the ways in which this labour regime thrives on the spatio-temporal separation of productive and reproductive spheres in migrants’ linked lives. The Covid-19 disruption also reveals how this labour regime flexibly adapted to produce the simultaneous disposability and unfreedom of circular migrant workers. Drawing on critical literature on labour control regimes, and on the separation of productive and reproductive labour under contemporary capitalism, we show how the Covid-19 pandemic disruption was anything but a transformative moment for India’s vast circular migrant workforce.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

ISSN

1369-183X

Publisher

Informa UK Limited

Page range

1-19

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2022-08-03

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2022-08-03

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2022-08-03

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