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Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: setting a new research agenda

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posted on 2023-06-09, 08:57 authored by Rebecca PrenticeRebecca Prentice, Geert De NeveGeert De Neve, Alessandra Mezzadri, Kanchana N Ruwanpura
Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers’ health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers’ health and wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic research on garment workers across South Asia, we argue against a narrow, technocratic, and depoliticised emphasis on physical infrastructures and building safety, and advocate instead a more holistic and politically-engaged research approach to the everyday health and wellbeing of workers. A conceptual focus on health and wellbeing offers a window onto workers’ employment experiences and reveals how routine work pressures, exhaustion and ill health are shaped by the dynamics of global supply chains, even well after workers have disengaged from these global circuits. Understanding how garment work affects workers’ wellbeing and their prospects for a fulfilling life requires research that moves beyond the workplace and covers the entire life course.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Geoforum

ISSN

0016-7185

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

88

Page range

157-160

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Sussex Centre for Migration Research Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-12-14

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-01-01

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-12-14

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