Health and Safety in Garment Workers’ Lives: Setting a New Research Agenda

Main author: Prentice, Rebecca
Other authors: De Neve, Geert
Mezzadri, Alessandra
Ruwanpura, Kanchana N.
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-25107
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description 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.
format Journal Article
author Prentice, Rebecca
author_facet Prentice, Rebecca
De Neve, Geert
Mezzadri, Alessandra
Ruwanpura, Kanchana N.
authorStr Prentice, Rebecca
author_letter Prentice, Rebecca
author2 De Neve, Geert
Mezzadri, Alessandra
Ruwanpura, Kanchana N.
author2Str De Neve, Geert
Mezzadri, Alessandra
Ruwanpura, Kanchana N.
title Health and Safety in Garment Workers’ Lives: Setting a New Research Agenda
publisher Elsevier
publishDate 2017
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/25107/