Crisis and retirement

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The recent crisis in the tea industry has devastated the livelihood of the Dalit workforce in the South Indian state of Kerala. Retired workers were worst affected, since the plantation companies—under the disguise of the crisis—deferred their service payout. This article seeks to understand the severe alienation of the retirees as they struggle to regain lost respect, kinship network, and everyday sociality in the plantations and beyond. I argue that the alienation produced through their dispossession as wage laborers and the discrimination as Tamil-speaking Dalit must be understood as an interrelated process, whereas the source of alienation cannot be reduced to production or categorical relations alone.</jats:p>

Ageing bodies, precarious futures: the (im)mobilities of ‘temporary’ migrant domestic workers over time

“…Those who become unable to work fall between the cracks of social protection schemes and have to rely on a mix of faith-based and kin networks for a safety net, mutual support, and to navigate rigid bureaucratic categories. These examples serve as a reminder of how state and institutional anxieties about workers' immobile or 'dependent' bodies, and the broader neoliberal logics underpinning mobile labour regimes, generate precarious futures for ageing migrants, many of whom are unable to fully retire and who return to the poverty of their youth (Parreñas 2015;Silvey and Parreñas 2020;Raj 2020;Ray and Qayum 2009). Equally, it is clear that institutionally defined categories do not always reflect embodied experiences of age, body, work, and life transitions.…”