'Kidnapping go build back we economy': discourses of crime at work in neoliberal Trinidad

Drawing on participant observation in garment factories in Trinidad, West Indies, this article explores circulating discourses of crime among shop-floor workers, managers, and factory owners during a national `epidemic' of kidnappings-for-ransom. As sites of inescapable social heterogeneity, garment factories were experienced as places of potentially risky mixture between antagonistic categories of people. Kidnapping talk communicated this fear of social proximity while simultaneously heightening it. The everyday politics of labour under a neoliberal regime is shown to be not a universalizing experience but instead a deeply local and situated one.