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Entrapped Entrepreneurship: Labour contractors in the South Indian garment industry*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2014

GEERT DE NEVE
GEERT DE NEVE*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

As neoliberal restructuring leads to the rise of labour market intermediaries globally, labour contractors are being vilified as unscrupulous recruiters and as wicked figures who exploit and harass. Based on long-term ethnographic research among workers and contractors in the Tamil Nadu garment industry, this article argues for a more careful and grounded analysis of labour contractors’ role and position under neoliberalization. Evidence is presented of contractors’ precarious position at the tail end of global production networks and three conclusions are drawn. First, contractors reveal themselves to be a remarkably unrecognized source of entrepreneurship, flexibility, and skills acquisition, which facilitates manufacturers’ participation in global markets. Second, despite their resourcefulness and resilience, contractors find themselves trapped between management and the workforce, and in an overall situation of vulnerability as a result of the informal nature of their activities and the vagaries of the neoliberal market. For many of them this results in a highly fluid and unstable class experience, in which they struggle to materialize aspirations for upward mobility. Finally, neoliberal conditions tend to undermine rather than enhance contractors’ entrepreneurial success and to weaken rather than intensify their power with regard to both capital and labour.

Type
FORUM: Class Matters: New Ethnographic Perspectives on the Politics of Indian Labour
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 1302 - 1333
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

The research upon which this paper is based was supported by an ESRC-DfID research grant (RES-167-25-0296). I am grateful to Priya, Arul, and Muthu for research assistance in the field. The paper was presented at the ‘Ethnographic Perspectives on Work and Labour’ seminar at the London School of Economics in March 2010 and benefited from comments made by the participants. All shortcomings remain my own.

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