Global Labour Studies in the Pandemic: Notes for an Emerging Agenda

Doing the Right Thing? COVID-19, PPE and the Case of Sri Lankan Apparels

“…Yet, as Bryson and Vanchan (2020) remark, global production processes and supply chains are not immune from risks or precarity, with COVID-19 highlighting and heightening these odds. As they argue, stocktaking is essential to ensure "context-based approaches to understanding globalization and localisation" (Bryson and Vanchan, 20201: 531; see also Cook et al, 2020). It is also as a glaring moment of dis/articulation for a country often considered to be at the forefront of value creation and upgrading (Bair and Werner, 2011;McGrath, 2018).…”

“…Reports of factory closures were frequent at the start of the pandemic, from Bangladesh to Cambodia, with costs borne by workers with job losses, lost wages and non-payment exposed (Carswell, De Neve and Yuvaraj, 2020;Cook et al 2020;Toppa, 2020). The early days of the pandemic were a blow to labourers.…”

Engels’ ‘proletarisation’ and ‘great towns’ vis-à-vis dispossession, and gendered work in an informal economy

“…First, it is established that social reproduction is coconstitutive of value production by migration/circulation of labour, housing spaces of workers, and the impossibility of removing productive and reproductive time, activities and contribution (Cook et al, 2020;Mezzadri, 2020;Mitchell et al, 2012). The relations of social reproduction and networks of workers hold importance in securing few benefits and assurances at workplaces.…”

“…These small forms of resistance do not lead to a labour movement but do define landscapes of work. Cook et al (2020) discuss the increasing organisation of workers in the West during the pandemic to save their lives rather than their jobs. Similar instances have been seen in India during the Covid pandemic where migrant workers have resorted to walking to their villages from cities in the absence of any income during the pandemic (Mukhopadhyay and Naik, 2020).…”

COVID-19, Health and Vulnerable Societies

“…This editorial cannot even begin to explore all the issues just raised. Rather, it focuses on one aspect of neoliberalism, namely the changing world of work that has long-term health implications and has, with exceptions, largely escaped serious attention in the COVID-19 debate ( Cook et al , 2020 ).…”