The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed global capitalism’s fault lines and the deep vulnerabilities built into its functionings. This article investigates how Pakistan’s informally employed women homeworkers, who labor at the bottom of global production networks (GPNs), fared during the first year of the pandemic. It empirically demonstrates how the GPN’s disruption wiped out the limited livelihoods of women homeworkers, which significantly jeopardized the social reproduction of their households, devastating entire communities. Through all of this, women homeworkers’ agency was evident in the everyday practices of social reproduction. The pandemic also revealed a collective solidarity that had community and extended family dimensions. The struggles and solidarities should be viewed as agentic acts of survival, against the economic and socio-political conditions of dispossession that come out of laboring in the Global South, as informal workers.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in early 2020, caused unexpected and severe disruptions in global supply chains, provoking one of the largest transnational recessions since the Great Depression (Meyer et al., 2021; Yeung, 2021). As strict lockdowns and travel bans were imposed, the pandemic exposed the fragilities of the global economy, which is characterized by “increasing extension, interpenetration and interdependence of production systems, corporations, markets and networks” (Martin et al., 2018: 5) structured along global production networks (GPNs).

Embedded in an unpredictable transnational environment, with intense competitive pressures and high levels of financial risk, the GPN heightens spatial hierarchies, by creating “zones of accumulation” and “spaces of dispossession” (Trauger and Fluri, 2021). This happens as upstream buyers, mainly located in the Global North, continuously press downstream suppliers to drop prices in order to maintain their own competitiveness (Paiva and Miguel, 2021). A 2017 ILO survey documents that more than half of GPN suppliers in the Global South sign contracts to produce goods at a loss in order to secure future orders. To keep their costs low, the suppliers subcontract and outsource to homebased producers, to such an extent that this type of informal production has become a core part of the GPN (Beneria and Floro, 2006; Broembsen and Harvey, 2022).

Economic geographers argue that these developments have led to uneven territorial development and precarious gendered labor regimes (Coe and Yeung, 2015, 2019; Werner, 2019), for alongside labor informalization is the feminization of work, as GPNs overwhelmingly rely on the low-waged labor of women in the Global South (Breman and van der Linden, 2014; Ghosh, 2012). In Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Ong (1987) documented, more than 40 years ago, global capitalism’s preference for the “docile labour of women.” The International Labour Organization (ILO) subsequently confirmed that “while more and more women are working, the great majority of them are simply swelling the ranks of the working poor. [Their] economic activities remain highly concentrated in low-wage, low-productivity and precarious forms of employment.” (ILO, 1996, as quoted in Brennan, 2003). In South Asia, for instance, over 80% of women in the non-agricultural sector are informally employed (UN Women, 2016).

Whereas the recent pandemic has wreaked havoc in the lives and livelihoods of workers along the whole GPN, the worst hit have been those who serve the GPN by laboring in the informal economy as women homeworkers in the Global South, where state sponsored social supports are almost entirely missing. Women homeworkers are often the poorest and least paid of informal workers, even as they are pivotal to the functioning of GPNs (ILO, 2017; Mezzadri, 2020).

Around the world, homeworkers live in tiny, poor quality homes of one or two rooms at the most, making it difficult to work especially since they share the space with family members. Many are migrants into the cities and rent their homes, which are often part of informal settlements, with little basic infrastructure such as a proper road network, transport, and sewerage system (Chen, 2014). In Pakistan, women homeworkers are often given work on piece-rates by middlemen or middle-women, while bearing the risks and costs of the workspace, utilities, and economic uncertainty (Chen, 2014; ILO, 2018). Most are part of garment, leather, sports equipment, and bangle supply chains (Sayeed and Vanek, 2013). Given their meager wages and the precarious nature of their work, they structurally face a crisis of social reproduction. Social reproduction includes the affective and material labor that goes into the birthing and raising of children, caring for other household members, and all other activities that constitute the maintenance and sustenance of the household and the broader community (Fraser, 2016). The COVID-19 pandemic sharply escalated the crisis of social reproduction because of the severe supply chain disruptions that have characterized it.

In this article I empirically examine the deregulated lives of Pakistan’s women homeworkers during the first year of the pandemic, when their work abruptly came to a halt, and with it their paltry wages. For the conceptual framework, I combine the GPN approach with feminist political economy. The GPN approach explores “livelihoods embedded in ongoing social relations of production that are explicitly associated with economic activities organized through global production networks” (Yeung, 2021: 432). Feminist political economy, on the other hand, documents “how the restructuring of global relations of production under neoliberalism has negatively affected the conditions of social reproduction for much of the world’s population” (Bakker, 2007; Roberts and Zulfiqar, 2019: 4). A feminist political economy analysis of social reproduction acknowledges the social relations of production and reproduction as two sides of the same coin under capitalism, for the home is the site not just of reproduction but also of the working class’ exploitation (Baglioni, 2021).

This article empirically contributes to the GPN literature by demonstrating how COVID-19’s disruption of the GPN wiped out the limited livelihoods of women homeworkers, that labor at its very end in the Global South. It also empirically contributes to social reproduction scholarship by showing how the crisis significantly jeopardized the social reproduction of homeworker households, ravaging low-income migrant communities. Third, the narrative includes important lessons on agency during a pandemic, which was evident in the everyday practices of social reproduction. The crisis also revealed a collective solidarity with community and extended family dimensions. The struggles and solidarities should be viewed as labor’s agentic acts of survival, against the economic and socio-political conditions of dispossession that are directly related to the GPN’s production circuits. This leads to the article’s theoretical contributions to the GPN and social reproduction literatures. First, it shows how the precarious terms and conditions of informal wage work at the low end of GPNs undermine the social reproduction of workers on whom the GPN’s capital accumulation rests. Second, I show that homeworker struggles, strategies, and solidarities are a form of labor agency as they face the fragility of their social reproduction.

The gendered geographies of dispossession

Spatially dispersed and organizationally fragmented, GPNs are the backbone of the new global economy. Their driving factors are cost, flexibility, and speed. The proliferation of flexible production systems is the key for sustaining the competitive advantage of the GPNs’ lead firms in the North, and this depends crucially on sub-contracted work. The advantage of subcontracting to the Global South is not only that wages here are low, but also that there is little danger of legislation promoting unionization, wage increases, and regulating working conditions (Coe and Yeung, 2015; Lund-Thomsen, 2013).

GPNs have rapidly transformed Asian economies in apparel, leather, and other industries. The feminization of the workforce in the region and elsewhere in the Global South comes from the demand for cheaper, more flexible labor (Munir et al., 2018). Given the far lower wages of homeworkers as compared to shop floor workers, factory work has morphed into short-term contracts, with much greater reliance on women’s homework at the bottom of sub-contracting chains (Prasad, 2022). At the same time, the competitive pressures on export oriented production has made the demand for homework highly volatile (Custers, 2012; Ghosh, 2012). The processes of labor feminization have worked to exploit the subordinate status of women homeworkers, marking them as intrinsically disposable (Wright, 2006). This is a direct result of what Massey (1994: 149) has termed the “power-geometries of time-space compression” whereby different social groups and people are placed unequally along the nodes of global economic flows and interconnections, depending on their gender, class, race, and place (Zanoni, 2021). In other words, while some groups are more in charge of mobility, initiating flows and movement, others are at the receiving end (Massey, 1994). With this differentiated mobility and control over flows, marginalized workers such as informally employed women homeworkers in the Global South are effectively imprisoned by their meager wages, conditions of work, and the variability of their piece-rate contracts. This is also described as the vertical constraint of GPN governance, while horizontal constraints include the spatial location of workers, gender and class norms (Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Lund-Thomsen, 2013; Lund-Thomsen and Coe, 2015).

It cannot be denied that neoliberal globalization degraded workers’ rights and increased precarity across the North, by pressuring nation-states to weaken income supports, labor regulations, minimum wage standards, and unionization (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018; Pulignano, 2018). Nevertheless, there still exist institutions of workers’ representation that seek to guarantee worker rights and the enforcement of labor contracts, to an extent. In the South, on the other hand, globalization has allowed transnational corporations to feed off of the existing vacuum in worker rights (Beneria, 2001). Beginning in the 1960s, this occurred as formality and informality began to be structurally integrated with one another along the GPN. The process involved changing not only the geography of production from the North to the South in search of cheaper, “more docile” labor but also replacing formal waged workers with informally employed women homeworkers. The latter can be used flexibly by capital, which renders large swathes of workers within and across the GPN disposable and, therefore, vulnerable (Phillips, 2011). The informal economy is, thus, a site of precarity even as it is a primary source of income in the South. GPNs exploit the resource accumulation strategies of workers across the globe in ways that reinforce their exclusion from protected forms of waged labor through a process of “adverse incorporation” (Coe and Yeung, 2015; Phillips, 2011).

The crisis of social reproduction and agency

In her monograph Globalization and its Terrors Brennan (2003) argues that deregulation allows GPNs excessive flexibilization in setting terms of trade in order to facilitate a dehumanizing speed of acquisition, whereby accumulation is materialized at the cost of social reproduction of worker households (Alamgir et al., 2021). Social reproduction includes all activities aimed at producing labor power as well as the worker (Bhattacharya, 2017), or as Mezzadri et al. (2021: 3) argue, it is the bridge between “producing and reproducing, labouring and working, capitalism and life.”

In other words, the social relations of production and reproduction are structurally related (Roberts and Zulfiqar, 2019; Zanoni, 2021), for capital not only extracts unpaid labor from waged workers but also from unwaged domestic caregivers (Federici, 2019). It is argued that the division between production and reproduction is capitalist fiction (Fortunati, 1981). This is certainly the case with women homeworkers, for their paid and unpaid labor is simultaneously extracted from within the confines of their homes. In the next few sections, I will demonstrate the criticality of acknowledging the embeddedness of women homeworkers in the global social relations of production and reproduction.

The vulnerabilities of women homeworkers and their households, as well as those who labor under similarly vulnerable conditions across the Global South, have considerably increased in the era of global market and financial liberalization. Beginning in the late 1980s, development support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank became subject to “the conditions reflecting ideas about ‘sound finance’ that required countries with balance of payments deficits to cut public expenditure to reduce these deficits, irrespective of the implications for social goals.” (Elson, 2002: 27).

This led to rapidly rising inequalities between the capitalist class and the rest who maintain themselves through incomes earned from the public and private sectors, the informal economy, cash transfers, and unpaid care work (Elson, 2010). Elson (2002: 5) calls this the “downloading of risks to the kitchen” for it is women that end up bearing the burden of funding social reproduction as financial crises are mitigated by large government bailouts, which in turn are financed by cuts in public expenditure. This has pushed women workers to invest their waged and unwaged time and effort ever more intensively into the everyday activities of biological reproduction and the maintenance of human life (Bakker, 2007; Roberts, 2013).

This is also why we cannot assume that even the most vulnerable of workers are passive factors of production in the capitalist landscape. A nuanced analysis requires us to reconnect capitalist accumulation to worker practices for survival and reproduction. Simply put, labor retains agency, even though it may not involve traditional elements of collective action or formal institutionalization (Carswell and De Neve, 2013). In any case, the agency of workers needs to be viewed as embedded within the social relations of production and reproduction that bound their potential (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011). Within these constraints, attention must be paid to the everyday micro-struggles of workers in order to take action for their own and others’ self-interest (Rogaly, 2009).

Katz (2001, 2004) contends that local responses to global capitalism’s restructuring, transforming and disrupting are analytically distinct. She categorizes these as resistance, reworking and resilience. Resistance is the most potent of these, for it involves challenging the status quo. Katz (2001) provides the example of successful tenant union resistance in rural Sudan in the early 80s to a global development scheme that threatened traditional landholdings and food security. Reworking is about people making the effort to materially improve their condition, such as those in the South reworking the altered geographies of globalization through migration and the changing gender roles that come with it (Katz, 2001). Resilience, is the most diffuse form of agency and refers to social practices that involve coping and getting by rather than overcoming oppressive circumstances. Thus, while resistance draws upon and produces critical consciousness to confront conditions of exploitation, reworking “reorders and sometimes undermines the structural constraints that affect everyday life” to make it more livable (Katz, 2004: 251). Resilience, on the other hand, is a strategy of endurance that people adopt in their daily living that does not change their dire circumstances (MacLeavy et al., 2021). These strategies are not always mutually exclusive, for instance, Katz (2001) describes the strategy of migration among Sudanese youth in the 80s to evade military service during the war as a form of resistance and reworking.

Nonetheless, the debates concerning labor agency only come full circle when there is serious engagement with the sphere of social reproduction and its links to production, for as noted above, labor agency needs to be viewed as being located both within and outside the domain of production. This is a move away from the traditional but much narrower conceptualization of it being either a form of resistance or empowerment (Carswell and De Neve, 2013).

Context and methods

Early research confirms that the strain on employment and social reproduction has rapidly worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic (Mezzadri, 2020, 2022; Stevano et al., 2021). The aim of the present project was to examine the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the GPN’s disruption on the lives of Pakistan’s women homeworkers, when their work and incomes came to an abrupt halt, putting pressure on their social reproduction responsibilities.

Pakistan has an estimated 4.37 million homeworkers, out of which 3.59 million or over 82% are women. The number of homeworkers has been steadily increasing, from 3.59 million in 2013/14 to 4.37 million in 2017/18. This increase is primarily accounted for by women homeworkers, since during the same period the percentage of men homeworkers declined from 26% to 18% of the total (Akhtar, 2020).

Most homeworkers are part of the manufacturing supply chain, producing garments, leather products, shoes, carpets, bangles, sports equipment, and other goods (Sayeed and Vanek, 2013). A 2015 survey found that homeworkers in the garment sector, where most homework is concentrated in Pakistan, work 12.3 hours every day, 6 days a week, to make an average monthly income of only Rs. 4342 (US$ 42). Even this amount is overestimated, because it includes the unpaid labor of other family members assisting the primary homeworker. Women homeworkers typically belong to the lowest income groups, are rural migrants to the cities, and have access to nearly no formal education or social protections (Akhtar, 2020; Zhou, 2017). These factors explain why women homeworkers have little capacity to negotiate better piece-work rates. In fact, an ILO survey found that 99% of women homeworkers rely entirely on a single contractor for work (Zhou, 2017).

While homework is poorly remunerated, represents the most informal of informal employment, and often involves tedious repetitive jobs, it is important to situate it in the specificities of the local context in order to understand why women’s homework continues to rise. In Pakistan, women still face “factory girl” stigma when they step out of their homes (Ali, 2012; Munir et al., 2018). This is also why women are prevented from working outside the home by household members (World Bank, 2006). Moreover, there is an ever present threat of social and bodily violence, so that women’s experience of public space, especially in low-income neighborhoods across urban areas, is governed centrally by khof or fear (Ali, 2012). Against this context of restricted mobility, homework often provides the only economic opportunity open to women.

In order to uncover the lived experiences of Pakistan’s women homeworkers, I interviewed 52 of them between July 2020 and October 2020, through semi-structured phone interviews and three in-person focus groups with between 8 and 10 women each. The 19 phone interviews were conducted during July and August with women from Karachi and Hyderabad, it’s neighboring city, as well as women from Lahore when travel during the lockdown was banned. I met the rest of the participants in Lahore, while conducting in-person focus groups across different communities, between August and October 2020.

Access to the workers came from having engaged with the Home Based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF), HomeNet Pakistan, and FACES Pakistan over the past few years through a previous research partnership. HBWWF is a labor federation of women homeworkers, headquartered in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and the capital of Sindh province. HomeNet Pakistan and FACES Pakistan are both NGOs, based in Lahore, the second largest city in the country and capital of the largest province, Punjab.

At the outset I explained the aim of the research to the women homeworkers, asked for their informed consent, and assured them that they could terminate the interview at any stage. All worker names have been changed to pseudonyms. As an academic researcher, I am conscious of my privileged position vis a vis my research participants, which bell hooks calls the “great gulf.” While I can never set aside this privilege, I have attempted to mitigate it by consciously suspending judgment while in the field, and making sure that I stay true to participant voices and accounts.

In addition to the homeworkers, I also conducted key informant interviews with the General Secretary of the HBWWF, the Executive Director of HomeNet Pakistan, and a key HBWWF leader from Orangi Town, Karachi.

The participants were involved variously in bangle making, tailoring, embroidery, crocheting caps, stitching trousers and shirts, clipping threads from machine embroidered cloth, recycling bottles, sewing on badges on shirts, and jewelry making. While some women were self-employed, such as those involved in tailoring or jewelry making, most were piece-rate workers that worked with material brought to them by middlemen or middle-women from factories or wholesale markets. The male family members of the participants had been working at factories before the pandemic hit, or as rickshaw drivers, mechanics, car washers, contractors, plumbers, painters, and fruit or vegetable vendors. Several women had daughters and/or daughters-in-law that assisted them unpaid on the piece-rate work.

For the analysis, I initially followed an inductive approach, while keeping in view disposability within GPNs, social reproduction, and labor agency during the pandemic. As broad themes began emerging, I developed second order coding categories from the GPN and social reproduction literatures. For instance, within the first order category of social reproduction, the data was further divided into second order categories of food insecurity, inability to pay for utilities and medicines, difficulty in pay rents and evictions, and domestic violence. The process was iterative, involving significant back and forth between the literatures and the transcripts. In the following sections I organize the findings by these categories.

Informality, COVID-19, and GPN disruption

Among the participants, women homeworkers from Karachi reported earning between Rupees 2000 (US$12.5) and Rupees 5000 (US$31.25) per month, while those in Lahore reported earning between Rs. 4000 (US$25) and Rs. 6000 (US$37.5) per month, before the lockdown. The minimum wage for the province of Sindh, of which Karachi and Hyderabad are a part, is Rupees 25,000 (US$146 per month) and for Punjab, of which Lahore is a part, is Rupees 20,000 per month (US$ 119.23). Once the lockdown was imposed, even these meager incomes dried up. In the words of Saeeda Khatoon, from Orangi Town, Karachi:

The lockdown began on March 20, the income accrued by homeworkers and factory workers between March 1 and March 19 was never paid. And then all work disappeared: those doing zardozi (embroidery), putting zips for local and international brands, making chappal (slippers). . .everything just stopped.

Razia, a widow, together with her married daughters, removes bottle caps and labels from used soda bottles for a coke factory near her home. They would get paid Rs. 200 ($1.25) per mann (approximately 40 kilos). Razia explained that it takes a group of 4–6 people to get through 2–3 mann a day. Razia and her family members lost their work when the factory stopped sending them material during the lockdown.

It is usual for impoverished households to maintain multiple income streams, homework being one of them. This is not just because each income stream is inadequate on its own to support the household but also because multiple incomes serve as an insurance, if one of them dries up or becomes more erratic, another one can support the household in the meantime. The pandemic caused an economic shock that was all the more severe because every income stream seemed to dry up at the same time, as men and women alike lost their jobs, piece rate work disappeared, and microenterprises were forced shut. The general secretary of the Home Based Women Workers Federation (HBWWF), explained the situation for factory workers:

Factory workers usually find jobs in other factories if they are laid off from one, but in this case all options dried up. Workers were not paid their dues. At one garment factory they were made to sign a paper saying they were entitled to only one month’s wages and nothing else.

During the lockdown all transport was banned, some of the women’s husbands, who were rickshaw drivers, could no longer work. While their rickshaws were parked outside their homes, the batteries were stolen and had to be replaced for Rs. 5000 ($31.25) each. A few young women in Lahore explained that their mothers had put them through school and college with their meager earnings from homework, and that they had subsequently found work as teachers in local low-fee private schools. Once the lockdown began, the schools closed down, several going out of business, and the teachers were dismissed without pay.

Samina, whose homework involves clipping threads off of machine embroidered cloth for Rs. 2 ($0.0125) per thann (100 m), shared that while her own work was disrupted, “the factory is closed and the middlemen tell us there is no work,” her husband also lost his job as a labor contractor for the coke factory. This was because he had failed to bring the required number of workers to the factory because of the ban on intercity travel. Some women described what it was like when they tried to bypass the lockdown out of desperation: “They fined us for going out, for trying to sell our products. We didn’t have anything and we still had to pay the fines the police exhorted from us.”

Serena described the long term ramifications of the lockdown on their work: “It takes so long to establish something, to get settled but it can all get ruined so quickly and then there is all the loss to bear.” Some homeworkers were able to find work, but it was even more poorly remunerated than before. Shazia, from Chungi Amar Sidhu, Lahore explained:

I was able to find piece-rate work that involved stitching shirts but then they said we have to iron the shirts we stitched and we would only get paid Rs. 3 per shirt ($0.019). Then our electricity bill came out to Rs. 4000 ($25). All the hard work went to waste because of the increased electricity charges.

Shazia’s account shows how the pandemic increased exploitation, as more tasks were added which also added to the cost of production, without a commensurate increase in the piece-rate.

Focus groups and interviews conducted after the first complete lockdown in the country had ended indicate that men were able to return to the factories and to their previous occupations, but homeworkers found their work orders much more erratic than before. The women explained that it had been irregular even before the lockdown but now they only received orders for 15 days out of the month due to the ongoing disruption of the GPNs.

This was a time when the complete lockdown had shifted to a partial lockdown, and some factories and shops were allowed to reopen, but the women reported struggling to get work or remuneration for the work they had already done: “They (the middlemen) say ‘how do we pay you? We don’t have money. Our goods aren’t selling. How can we pay you for them?’”

Sadia, from Lahore explained that she was unable to find worthwhile piece-rates even after the first lockdown ended, and resisted taking up work that was extremely poorly remunerated:

When we call them, they say that we aren’t receiving orders. There are already so many products waiting to be sold. The money and orders are both still blocked for us. We tried looking for other work. I found this shop where they package chewing tobacco. They ask you to put a sticker on the packet. I was told I would get Rs. 100 ($0.50) rupees for going through a huge bundle of those stickers. It would probably have taken me 6 days to do it. So what is the point of doing such work?

These accounts demonstrate the fact that women homeworkers are integrated in GPNs as informal, disposable workers in a context that does not offer material protections, which is why they were disproportionately hit by the disruption of GPNs due to COVID-19. They lost their jobs, and still have not completely recovered from this as the disruption continues, yet receive no support.

The breaking down of livelihoods

To grasp the nature of precarity of homeworker households, it is important to understand the households’ other income streams. As already mentioned, the husbands and older children of women homeworkers are also low-wage earners, most are casual laborers such as mechanics, welders, painters, vegetable vendors, though some had stable factory jobs before the pandemic. For many, even before the lockdown, household incomes were barely enough to meet monthly expenditures, especially since most participants were migrants from rural areas and were living in rented homes in urban slums. Rents in the mega cities of Karachi and Lahore run very high; the monthly rent for a one-room home with a small courtyard can easily go up to Rupees 10,000 (US$62.50).

During the pandemic, food security was the biggest factor accounting for household vulnerabilities, which shows the very low capacity homeworker households have for bracing a severe economic shock. Most participants insisted they didn’t receive any food rations under the government’s COVID-19 emergency “Ehsaas Ration Program” nor did they get the Rs. 12,000 ($75) eligible households were expected to receive under the federal government’s welfare program. When they applied for the benefits, many were told they were not eligible for assistance. Hunger became a daily reality. As Shaheena from Lahore put it:

Hunger has definitely increased. There has also been a lot of inflation. Atta (flour) is at Rs 75-80 ($0.50) per kilo. When the husband is sitting at home and our own incomes have stopped, what can we do? Even vegetables have become expensive. We can only eat if we have money.

Others reported cutting back on their own food, demonstrating how women workers invest their own resources ever more intensively during crises to maintain their households. Rehana from Chungi Amar Sidhu, Lahore said “Look at me, I have become so thin. I now eat one roti (bread) instead of two. What can I do?” In another focus group in Lahore, Rasheeda stated:

“If we were eating thrice a day before the lockdown, we now eat only once.”

There was pressure from landlords who insisted on timely rental payments:

The landlords threw people’s things out from their homes. Right in this very street, it happened here! They shouted at the tenants and hurled abuses at them.

People had to leave their homes and some returned to their villages. The landlords said it doesn’t matter if you eat or don’t eat, you have to pay your rent.

They explained that it was also hard to pay their utility bills. At the beginning of the lockdown the government announced a 3-month moratorium on the payment of gas and electricity bills, but after 3 months they reported that the pro-rated bills they received seemed so high that it became almost impossible to pay them off. Given that these bills became payable during the extreme heat of the summer months, women homeworkers said they had to take loans or sell off their belongings in order to make the payments, to prevent their power from being cut off. Sofia, from Chungi, pointed to Shazia, her neighbor sitting next to her and explained her situation:

She lives on the first floor, and I live on the ground floor. She pays Rs.15,000 ($93.75) in rent and I pay Rs. 10,000 ($62.50). There are eight people in her home, she has not had any work these past few months. Her son makes Rs. 18,000 ($112.50) a month. They have to pay Rs. 15,000 for rent, Rs. 10,000-12,000 for their electricity, Rs. 2,000 for gas ($12.50) and Rs. 2,500 ($15.60) for water. How will they pay for groceries? The boy has four sisters, they used to get paid as teachers but have since been fired. Both parents have chronic conditions but how do they pay for medicines?

The lockdown forced all members of the family to stay home, increasing time spent in proximity to each other, in dire economic circumstances. Domestic violence is endemic to most contemporary patriarchal societies, and according to an estimate between 70% and 90% of women in Pakistan face some level of domestic abuse, physical, verbal, and/or psychological (Pakistan Federal Ministry of Human Rights, 2020). During ordinary times, more than half of abused women in Pakistan do not report or share incidences of violence with others (Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey, 2017–18). During the pandemic the situation only became worse.

Women homeworkers expressed that domestic violence increased during this period. Saulat, from Hyderabad explained, “When there is no income coming in and people are sitting at home, they will get angry and fight.” She mentioned that she had put up with physical violence all her life by her husband but now with grown children in the house it had finally stopped. Another woman described her sister’s case, who was used to beatings before the pandemic but was suffering more than ever now.

Women homeworkers across Lahore and Karachi corroborated this account, “The children ask their mother for food, the wife asks her husband to give money for groceries, and when there is no money they will argue and fight, and there will be violence.” Sameen from Chungi stated, “Men have been home and are not going to work, so they are beating their wives. Some are threatening to leave and others have considered suicide.”

These accounts indicate the direct link between carework and domestic violence, as well as how the pandemic worsened these dynamics, for as Fauzia, from Lahore, explains:

Money is the main issue here. Many people have gone into depression. Two women attempted suicide and two others were divorced during the lockdown in our neighbourhood. Violence during the lockdown has increased because everyone is stuck at home with no money.

Another participant explained that “Some of our men don’t work at all and it is the women that earn, but now since the women are unable to earn anything, they are being beaten more than before.”

The economic and domestic anguish the women were experiencing was clear when some claimed that the pandemic was a political fabrication. Rehana from Chungi lamented, “There is no COVID. This is Imran Khan’s [the Prime Minister’s] concoction. He claimed he will put an end to poverty, he is killing us with hunger to end poverty.”

Several others mentioned that the coronavirus was a hoax. Some said that while they knew that the virus was a reality, the lockdown had done more harm than good. Fareeda from Akram Park, Lahore explained that the real issue was that homeworkers and their families survived on daily wages and the lockdown caused a sudden end to their incomes. Sadia said:

Yes, the virus is present. I am not saying that there is no virus. I watch news, and I know that the virus is spreading. But everybody is crying because their work is gone. People have to eat, so what can they do? The one who was earning Rs. 400 ($2.50) daily is now sitting at home and has to pay rent, what will he/she do?

Most participants felt that the fear of contracting the virus was much less worrisome than the hunger they had to contend with. Zareena from Karachi said “We will not die from COVID but from hunger. We are ready to go out even if there is a threat of contracting the virus.” Abida Parveen from Lahore shared a similar sentiment, “Had there been no strict lockdown, the poor would have been able to earn and eat.” In the words of Suraya, a homeworker from Karachi:

People like us have to earn daily in order to eat. It does not even matter whether the virus is real or not, because pait ki dozakh bujhani hoti hay (we have to put out the fire of hell that is burning in our stomachs).

Shazia Yaqub from Karachi expressed a similar sentiment, “The time of death is already determined so what is there to fear? If there was no lockdown, we would have been able to go out. If people do not get killed by the virus, they will be killed by poverty.”

There was widespread fear among the participants about a second lockdown that would be worse than the first. They said that they had already emptied their reserves to care for their families and would not be able to survive a second lockdown.

“There is talk about a second lockdown, and that it is going to be very dangerous.

Some people helped us this time, nobody will help us again. The second wave is coming and then a third. . .”

These accounts show that the GPN’s disruption was at the cost of social reproduction of worker households, demonstrating how the social relations of production and reproduction are structurally related (Roberts and Zulfiqar, 2019; Zanoni, 2021). The homeworkers were right, as fieldwork ended the second wave had already begun and then came successive waves.

Homeworkers’ survival strategies and pandemic solidarities

Women homeworkers listed the different ways they tried to manage their household expenses when the lockdown began and incomes dried up. The first of these endurance strategies was to draw down their personal savings. Given their paltry earnings, they had few savings to fall back upon, but some had been saving for a while. Salma, a widow in Lahore, described her situation:

I had saved up about one hundred thousand rupees ($625) to set up a barber shop for my son. But during the lockdown we used up all of it. Yes, all of it. I even had to borrow money, because my daughter is sick. Her medicine costs about Rs. 20,000 ($125) per month. And then we have to buy milk for her children, because she is not living with her husband and I am taking care of her children as well.

Similarly, Maliha described how her daughter had saved Rs. 50,000 ($312.50) from her teacher’s salary to buy gold for her dowry, but these savings were used up to pay for food and rent.

Another agentic act of endurance was taking on debt. Many women homeworkers mentioned taking loans from extended family members to tide them over during the lockdown. The loans varied between Rs. 1000 ($6.25) and Rs. 20,000 ($125).

Most were able to buy groceries on credit, as this is the norm in low-income communities across the country, but rents and utilities had to be paid for in cash. Repaying the loans is always a problem when incomes remain low or non-existent, as Rubina put it: “Even if you take loans, it gets difficult to pay back since we don’t earn much.” Saira from Akram Park described a similar situation,

Everyone has taken a loan because there is no work for the men or women. My husband is sitting at home for the past five months. He keeps borrowing from people here and there, sometimes two thousand, sometimes less, so that the children can get to eat. It is clear that we are going deep into debt.

Fareeda, also from Akram Park, Lahore said she sold her home appliances to pay for groceries and rent. Women homeworkers in Chungi, Lahore mentioned selling their household items as well. Shazia said:

How did we survive? By selling things from the house, our possessions. We had to eat something. Whatever we had in the house that could be sold is gone.

Obviously we had to feed our children. We sold our charpoys (beds) for Rs. 200 ($1.25). My son even sold his bicycle for Rs. 200 ($1.25).

Other homeworkers also listed the household items they ended up selling. Rehana said “I sold my sofa, my dresser, now I only have a bed. My room used to be full of furniture before the lockdown.” When asked if they thought they got their money’s worth they said they did not because these were distress sales, they were desperate to eat.

The majority of homeworkers from Akram Park, Lahore described themselves as rural migrants from South Punjab. They explained that when the lockdown began many of them moved to their villages to live with their parents or in-laws. Wasifa said she, her husband and children moved back to live with her mother, who is a widow and has no income source herself. Most families returned once the lockdown eased, hoping to go back to their livelihoods.

Homeworkers in Chungi, Lahore explained that they did not move back because moving was an expense in itself, “We couldn’t just leave. We would still have to pay rent and the bills. And then we would have to hire a truck to take our stuff and the family back to the village. It was better to stay here.” Solidarities among extended families were also clear when several homeworkers mentioned that their parents in the villages sold their livestock to send money to the city so they could buy food for the family, “Our parents could not stand to watch us in distress so they sold their animals for us.”

While most stated that they were unable to get any government aid during the lockdown, those who were members of HBWWF were provided food rations three times during the lockdown by the Federation in Karachi and Hyderabad. HomeNet Pakistan also arranged a food ration drive during the lockdown in Lahore. The ration bags lasted between a week to 15 days, but of course were not sufficient to cover the duration of the lockdown.

Evidence of agency and solidarities were clear as women homeworkers described how extended families and neighbors shared food with each other. Saeeda Khatoon, who lives alone, said she bought ration out of the pension she receives for her son’s accidental death in a garment factory fire, to share with members of her community.

Homeworkers also tried new avenues to try and earn some money. These attempts at reworking their circumstances included vending dahi baray (dumplings in yogurt) on street corners, as Fauzia did with her son. There were times when he did not want to go because the baray would often go unsold but Fauzia urged him to keep trying. Others said they did not try new ventures because they did not have enough money to buy the material required to prepare food or other items to sell, indicating that reworking itself requires resources.

HomeNet Pakistan provided its members with cloth to make face masks. Selling face masks provided a new avenue for earning money and many women said they made and sold dozens of face masks during this time. Not everyone was able to sell everything they made, but they said it provided an opportunity to make at least some money. For the self-employed tailors, the two Eid festivals during the lockdown provided a short respite, but they felt these Eids weren’t as busy for them as in regular years, “There was very little work this Eid because of COVID.”

Razina was able to get a 3-month contract from the Government of Punjab for its dengue awareness campaign. She said she had some contacts in the government and was able to secure the work after bribing the officials she knew.

The accounts of everyday micro-struggles for survival and reproduction are evidence of endurance and reworking, as well as of solidarities, and represent homeworkers’ labor agency.

Discussion and conclusion

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world economy to a sudden and screeching halt, it exposed the fault lines of global capitalism and the deep vulnerabilities built into its functionings (Alamgir et al., 2021). These vulnerabilities were most clearly visible in the gendered labor regimes within GPNs, that keep workers subordinated, exploited and barely able to subsist. In this paper, I empirically showed the heightening precarity experienced by informally employed women homeworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Informal labor, it is important to note, is not a state of exception but part and parcel of global capitalism, at the core of its process of accumulation (Phillips, 2011).

The findings show how COVID-19’s disruption of the GPN wiped out the limited livelihoods of women homeworkers, who labor at its very end in the Global South. In doing so, COVID-19 significantly jeopardized the social reproduction of their households, devastating entire communities. Through all of this, women homeworkers’ agency and solidarities were evident through their efforts at endurance and reworking (Katz, 2001, 2004).

One of the key contentions of this paper is that relations of production under neoliberal globalization magnify women homeworkers’ vulnerability, disposability and marginalization, and that this significantly worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is because, as opposed to formally employed workers within GPNs, homeworkers do not receive even the most basic of social supports from employers or the state, because of their status as informal workers. Drawing on the GPN approach (Coe and Yeung, 2015, 2019; Werner, 2019), I conceptualize homework in the South as that which occurs in the GPN’s “spaces of dispossession” (Trauger and Fluri, 2021). Women homeworkers are imprisoned by space, place, class, and gender (Massey, 1994), confined as they are in their low-income urban neighborhoods from a lack of education and restricted mobility. Homework is often the only accessible means to earn an income. This ties into the GPN’s insatiable hunger for higher profit margins and flexibilization, because of which upstream firms outsource to downstream suppliers that are able to tap into the growing supply of homeworkers (Beneria and Floro, 2006; Broembsen and Harvey, 2022; ILO, 2017).

The extreme precariousness of homework was dramatically clear during the pandemic when women homeworkers and their families were left to live or to die (Alamgir et al., 2021; Brennan, 2003), as neither the state nor the owners of capital took responsibility for their sustenance or survival. In the first year of the pandemic, women homeworkers saw their entire savings, incomes and assets wiped out. When they or their household members tried to break the curfew to earn an income, they were fined by the police. The state instead of providing relief through the COVID-19 emergency welfare program, only increased their misery.

The second concern of this article is women homeworkers’ social reproduction during the pandemic. For them, productive value is generated in such a way that it is indistinguishable from their reproductive activities, domains, and spaces, for the home is their workplace (Mezzadri, 2020). As primary caregivers living in poverty and without social support, their challenge has always been financing the social reproduction of their households, which is why they spend long hours doing such poorly remunerated, repetitive work in the first place. During the pandemic when their work and incomes abruptly stopped, they faced an acute state of emergency, as hunger, evictions, unpaid bills became an everyday reality. These accounts demonstrate how crises of work are in effect crises of social reproduction (Stevano et al., 2021). As the impact of the pandemic was “downloaded to the kitchen” (Elson, 2002: 5), women homeworkers reported a rise in marital violence, demonstrating the direct link between economic shocks and domestic violence (True, 2012).

The anxieties of social reproduction were obvious as women homeworkers either denied the existence of the virus or explained that even if it existed it did not matter because dying of hunger was a more real prospect to them than dying of the virus. In all of this, the absence of the state and a clear employer made the homeworker’s home a site of exclusion and vulnerability. Once the lockdown began to ease, their adverse incorporation into the GPN worsened (Phillips, 2011), as the work was more irregular and they found piece-rates under worse conditions and remuneration than before, reinforcing their poverty, desperation, and marginalization.

The exploration of the pandemic’s impact would not be complete without a reflection on labor agency, which was evident in women homeworkers’ individual and collective acts, as well as their everyday practices of social reproduction during the crisis. By selling off household items, drawing down their savings, taking on debt, and finding new ways to earn an income they were able to feed their families, delay or prevent eviction, and keep their utility connections from being cut off. Applying Katz’s (2001, 2004) categorization, while these may not be acts of overt resistance, they are certainly attempts at endurance and reworking. Given the structural impediments global capitalism imposes, which Massey (1994) terms “imprisonment,” these struggles are evidence of labor agency during an unprecedented crisis. They also lend credence to the notion that since the social relations of production and social reproduction are structurally related, labor agency is applied both within and outside the domain of production (Carswell and De Neve, 2013).

The pandemic also revealed a collective solidarity, with community and extended family dimensions, as migrant workers’ rural families sold off their livestock to send them money, provided room and board when they returned hungry to the villages, neighbors shared food and lent each other money, and the labor federation and NGOs distributed food rations to homeworker families and gave them cloth to make and sell face masks when other opportunities dried up. These struggles and solidarities should be viewed as agentic acts of survival, against the economic and socio-political conditions of dispossession that come out of laboring at the very end of the GPN in the Global South.