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From dispossessed factory workers to “micro-entrepreneurs”: the precariousness of employment in Trinidad’s garment sector

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posted on 2023-06-09, 09:02 authored by Rebecca PrenticeRebecca Prentice
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.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Berghahn

Page range

289-308

Pages

436.0

Book title

Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism: Precarity, Class and the Neoliberal Subject

Place of publication

New York

ISBN

9781785336782

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Jonathan Parry, Chris Hann

Legacy Posted Date

2017-11-27

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-11-24

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