This article explores the relationship between labor unions and labor precarity in Bangladesh's garment industry. After a string of high-profile factory disasters-including the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building-Bangladeshi labor unions have played a central role in new global initiatives to improve factory safety. These initiatives have provided an opportunity for unions to influence the governance of labor standards in a context of low levels of factory unionization. We argue that such global initiatives have deepened an existing divide between the conciliatory stance of mainstream, politically connected Bangladeshi unions and workers' more radical responses to precarity. Militant protests have advanced workers' interests historically, but are increasingly delegitimized and subject to violent crackdowns. This article contributes to our understanding of the fraught relationship between precarious workers and traditional labor unions by showing that when unions devote themselves to the technocratic improvement of labor standards without confronting the structural conditions of precarity itself, workers can be made more vulnerable-a situation that becomes heightened in a context of fast industrial expansion.
This article explores the perspectives of two user groups, general practitioners (GPs) and consultant radiologists (CRs), on the rollout of picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) within acute trusts and eventually to primary care as part of the electronic patient record. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 CRs and 31 GPs. Analysis was carried out using a grounded theory approach. Radiologists expressed positive views about the implementation of PACS in secondary care, but were wary of GPs accessing radiological images. GPs expressed concerns about the added burdens that PACS might bring to primary care, but most felt that sharing images with patients could benefit doctor-patient communication and increase patient satisfaction. This study highlights both impediments and pathways to the implementation of PACS in primary care, and illustrates the importance of regarding PACS as socially embedded and users as culturally disparate.
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.
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