Frayed social safety: Social networks,stigma,and COVID-19 – The case of Sri Lankan garment workers

Abstract

Sri Lankan garment workers have navigated a terrain where their initial status as stigmatized labour were re-casted as empowered workers through various industry-led initiatives in the recent past. Rearticulation from disposable to empowered workers, however, did not rest upon living wages or a hike in wage packets; instead, various management interpellations were attempted onsite and offsite factories. Without a material basis for these initiatives in the pre-CoVID-19 period, the vacuity of these tropes became particularly evident during the pandemic. Workers had to come to terms with shabby social support and stigma that worsened their economic lives, with tattered social safety systems compelling labour rights organizations and kin to step up. Using worker testimonies, I speak to the politics of empowerment to underline how the recasting of workers as stigmatized resulted in the cost of social reproduction to borne by kin networks and labour activists too. These frayed social safety nets and public support continue to echo against the country’s worst economic crisis.

Introduction: Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, Sri Lanka was heralded as a beacon of low economic growth and high social development and was often touted by development economists as a paradigmatic case for equitable and gender-sensitive social development (Humphries, 1993; Klasen, 1993; Sen 1981). This meant for its populace at the minimum long-life expectancy and high literacy levels – often comparable not just to other development lodestars, such as India (Kerala) or Cuba, but also to Western European nations. Sri Lankan apparel has made use of this podium: highly educated, healthy workers and a strong legislative structure to make considerable headway in crafting a position as an ethical sourcing destination (Goger, 2014; Perry, 2013).

This setting, however, was constantly chipped away at during the past four decades and is ongoing – and like elsewhere, ranges from efforts to weaken protective labour legislation to reduced social welfare spending (Biyanwila, 2011; Dunham and Jayasuriya, 2000; see also Griffin, 2023; Ruwanpura, 2023). Development scholars have gone so far as to point out Sri Lanka’s internecine ethnic war on the frayed social fabric, removal of subsidies and increased inequality (Dunham and Jayasuriya 2000; Venugopal, 2018). Remarkably, however, this troubled backdrop evaded affecting a successful garment industry to boom through years of conflict, war, and ethnic tension (Athukorala, 2018). Nonetheless, gradual militarization in the country percolated to Sri Lankan apparel and the lack of living wages persisted (AWFA, 2021; Hewamanne, 2009; Lingam, 2019; Ruwanpura, 2023). The once-upon-a-time story of Sri Lanka started to flop with the pandemic. Debt default, endemic corruption linking the government with the corporate sector and the public protesting, an authoritarian regime verifies multiple and unfolding failures. The tell-tale signs, however, were years in the making and often neglected. With the façade cracking apart, what specifically did a deteriorating social welfare system mean for garment sector workers during the pandemic?

In this paper, I use worker testimonies to trace how social stigma and tattered social safety nets became pronounced during the initial stages of the pandemic, compelling labour rights activists and organizations to support workers. My empirical data outlines how stigma and stigmatization resurfaced in numerous spaces during the pandemic, which also constrained women workers' ability to live safely and healthily. This was the case whether it is in their immediate neighbourhood’s residence or their village settings. Differently from existing and yet sparse scholarship within feminist geography on garment women workers and stigma, women workers across the age and marital spectrum faced this devaluation. Moreover, with the COVID-19 pandemic in tow, it was not limited to workers; it also trickled over to their families with a multiplicity of effects on everyday life. The upshot of absent social welfare and stigmatization resulted in the cost of social reproduction being borne by kin networks and labour activists too. These tenuous social safety nets continue to have salience in Sri Lanka’s current debt default, the first in its post-independence history, and worsening economic situation.

My purpose is to speak to feminist contributions to the COVID-19 crisis, which has rekindled attentiveness to the costs of social reproduction. These feminist contributions have highlighted the fluctuating balance between the productive and reproductive domains during the pandemic (Arslan, 2021; Cohen and van der Meulen Rodgers, 2021; PhamMinh-Ha, 2020; Stevano et al., 2021; Tejani and Fukuda-Parr, 2021). While these concerns echo early Marxist-Feminist thought to impel their resonance at the current juncture and highlight costs to social relations, more research is needed to be attentive to spatial factors that shape social reproduction. This focus is critical to appreciate the sociability that occurs through a “variety of collective activities” that extend beyond the community union schemes and speak to labour politics from below (Griffin, 2021: 27; see also Dutta, 2022; Fischer et al., 2022). Spatializing and grounding labour politics includes the need to be attentive to the contradictions and complexities therein (Griffin, 2023), with the spatial transformations that stemmed from COVID-19 both foreclosing and opening possibilities for collective actions, as Herod (2022) outlines. In the literature reviewed in section three, I focus primarily on contributions by feminist scholars to draw attention to the gaps that persist.

I bring feminist interventions from the pandemic phase into conversation with the literature on stigma and stigmatization around garment sector workers from before to COVID-19 period (Goger, 2013; Herath, 2021; Siddiqi and Ashraf, 2022; Silvey, 2010;). The literature on the stigma of garment sector workers, however, is sparse within feminist geography. In the specific case of Sri Lanka, garment sector workers have been rearticulated from stigmatized and disposable to empowered (Goger, 2013; Gunawardana, 2013). Yet, the pandemic phase upended empowerment tropes with the resurgence of stigmatization (see also Herath, 2021). Using empirical data, I try to understand intersections between spatial and material elements that factored into stigmatization, given the absence of living wages and meagre social welfare systems. These connections burden social reproduction (SR) but as I evidence, SR is not necessarily only limited to households.

The next section of the paper starts with a brief overview of the fieldwork. I then review feminist writings on COVID-19 and social reproduction as a generative basis for exploring spatial dimensions to encompass social reproduction beyond the household. Since households in the global South are not always nuclear and incorporate extended families and wider kin, capacious readings of social reproduction are pivotal. Moreover, the pandemic pressed labour rights activists to step up and fill the vacuum created by the anaemic social support system due to poverty wages and stigmatization that befell garment sector workers. Grasping the gamut of social reproduction providers is likely to offer a multi-scalar perspective on how care work was shared during the pandemic but not without extracting costs. These aspects are explored using fieldwork and empirical material in sections four and five. The analysis of the empirical material feed into section six to deliberate on the agentive practices on the ground that nourishes commonalities but are also scarred by divergences and differences. The discussion in the penultimate section is the basis for conclusions to be drawn. Next to the nature of research amidst a pandemic.

Pandemics and research

The pandemic was unprecedented in multiple ways, with knock-on effects also seeping into questions of how to do research amidst it. The need for innovation was frequently raised. For those doing research in the global South, fieldwork is recurrently fluid, dynamic and requires flexibility – meaning that we constantly adapt and innovate (Biswas, 2022; Dutta, 2020). Digitized forms of data collection and large-scale survey, for instance, was preferred in gathering data during the pandemic as it was deemed safe, and able to cover large samples or distances (Brickell et al., 2022; Hughes et al., 2022). In the Sri Lankan context, as a researcher, it made more sense to draw on the same resource that the country’s apparel sector draws on – its highly educated and literate workforce. Via a women’s rights organization that I have been liaising with for over a decade, a decision was made to request written testimonies on their experiences during the initial phase of the pandemic.

In July 2020, Sri Lanka was 4 months into the initial phase of the pandemic, and it was an apt time to gather worker experiences in this way. Health considerations also factored in, including the fact that at the time stringent lockdown measures were in place. Garment sector work was soon counted as essential workers, requiring labour rights organizations to continuously provide support and do community outreach, with recurrent interactions with workers. Through conversation with a labour rights group, we reached out to 20 workers and obtained written testimonies. Additionally, we also obtained an additional eight testimonies from labour rights activists that were working in different parts of Sri Lanka. The data sources for this paper draw on these written testimonies.

Most testimonies were handwritten, with a handful typing theirs. Each written testimony was on average at least two pages, while some were long as four pages – sometimes reflecting the handwriting and at other times a result of detailed expositions. They were valuable sources of information. WC, the labour rights organization, sent the testimonies electronically to me – either as scans or photo images. I started to analyse the testimonies by reading them at least twice and re-reading again in drafting this article. On the second occasion, the testimonies were evaluated for repeated topics and dynamics that affected workers during the inception of the pandemic. However, as I show through my analysis, there were also limits to this research method, as I was not always able to do follow-up lines of questioning. For instance, for purposes of this article, while I knew the pronouns of the supporters, I was unable to gather detailed information on their identities, social location, jobs held or income levels. And so, while I was able to deduce how support came from social networks and the nature of it, speaking in any detailed way to the sources of sustenance and their characteristics was not possible. ¹

WC has been present in the first Free Trade Zone (FTZ) of Sri Lanka, Katunayake, since the early 1980s and is now active in the zone as well as in different parts of Sri Lanka. Their branches or sister organizations were also drawn upon to access workers from several areas – and testimonies from labour rights activists also reflected this spread. The locations of workers and the rights activists stretched from the deep south (Koggala) to the North (Kilinochchi). Worker testimonies also came from workers labouring for factories in areas in between – and these included Maharagama, Vavuniya and Wathupitiya; and both zonal and non-zonal located factories. The testimonies gathered also and in turn, supported the outreach activities of WC and evidenced their endeavours around mutual aid – including respondents becoming activists of WC (Mould et al., 2023).

Of the 20 worker testimonies, most (9) came from the Katunayake FTZ, and given that this zone employs no more than 10% of garment workers, this is an imbalance. However, the experiences of Katunayake FTZ-based workers highlight geographies of stigma, as they capture underlying structures untying empowerment tropes. These claims never hinged on living wages and underline limits to management mobilization of empowered workers. Follow-up interviews were done with the same and different workers in July 2021, January, and February 2022; and in keeping with research and ethical protocols, alias names are used throughout. However, this paper primarily draws on the data from worker testimonies, where I draw on the specific themes of interest to this paper rather than the entire spectrum of issues raised in the testimonies. ² This helps to appreciate the centrality of social reproduction during the initial phase of the pandemic, which was made worse by a debt crisis, as harrowing images from Sri Lanka disclose. The next section of the paper helps accentuate feminist scholarship on social reproduction and how it troublingly has resonance from the pandemic to the current debt crisis.

Pandemic and a care crisis

The pandemic was a multi-faceted care crisis foremost because contracting covid meant receiving healthcare at hospitals, where it was often women nurses on the frontlines. The care crisis, however, extended to families and households. These works are important, as they reveal the hidden costs of the pandemic – and offer a valuable analytic to interrogate Sri Lankan apparel, even though it took an atypical road and at inception was beating the odds. A few words on this.

Sri Lankan apparel was staying ahead during the pandemic by switching to PPE production, with attentiveness to health protocols (Ruwanpura, 2022a; Ruwanpura, 2022b; see also Wickramasingha and De Neve, 2022). Moreover, there were other notable achievements – namely a tripartite agreement attempting job security along with wages without annulments while workers were furloughed (IndustriALL, 2020). ³ On top of these benefits, the WHO (2021) credited Sri Lanka for effective pandemic management for the initial one and ½ years and a vaccination programme. After a shaky and slow start, commendably covered the entire country via its extensive public health networks – and worryingly with military involvement (Fernando, 2020). And yet, Sri Lankan apparel sector workers came under the spotlight for struggling to live and were caught up in unhygienic housing conditions (Herath, 2021; Hoskins et al., 2021; HRW, 2021). It locates the requisite need for feminist analysis; especially as Sri Lanka’s ongoing debt catastrophe has unveiled the care crisis into the public sphere.

Social reproduction and its centrality to labour and work have been highlighted by feminists writing on COVID-19 and global labour markets (Arslan, 2021; PhamMinh-Ha, 2020; Stevano et al., 2021; Tejani and Fukuda-Parr, 2021). They explicitly and implicitly invoke early Marxist-Feminist debates on SDGs to underscore how social reproduction is embedded in the economy (Barrett, 1989; Elias and Rai, 2019; Humphries, 1977; McGrath, 2018; Rai et al., 2019). The co-constitution of the everyday and its manifestations in the global economy are denoted out, with specific calls for writings on economies to apprehend the pluriverse that underpins economic geography (Dutta, 2022; Islam, 2022; McGrath, 2018; Narayan and Rosenman, 2021; Stevano et al., 2021; Werner, 2012). These feminist calls extend to an insistence on the public nature of the economy to others that posit that “gendered effects of the pandemic… (within) GVC” needs attentiveness (Tejani and Fukuda-Parr, 2021: 663; see also Narayan and Rosenman, 2021). Although most feminist tracts have underlined the temporality and spatiality of the productive and reproductive continuum, which extends to the writing by Maria Mies (2018), the diverse spatialities of social reproduction need study.

Calls for public economic geographies acknowledge the multiple spatialities produced by continual negotiations and articulations of differentiated power relationships, including in the realm of labour geographies (Herod, 2022; Islam, 2022; Narayan and Roseman, 2021). Never made more apparent than the aftermath of COVID-19, these articulations and interpellations are spillovers from before. Tropes of empowerment were mobilized by apparel industrialists in the past decade in a bid to recruit and retain workers – and to stymie stigmatization that pervaded their lives (Goger, 2013; Gunawardana, 2013; Herath, 2021; Hewamanne, 2008; Kabeer, 2002; Lynch, 2007).

Using visual artefacts and management interviews, feminist scholars have decoded employer efforts at repairing the image of exploitative work conditions and stigmatized identities. However, Gunawardana (2013) argues these attempts are more about reframing bad jobs as good jobs by promoting ‘empowering’ aspects of employment. The orientation is towards communicating with global retailers and consumers – and developing individual corporate brands as well as industry-led initiatives, explicitly Garments without Guilt (GWG). She focuses on MAS Holdings and BRANDIX – and their “Women Go Beyond” and “Care for Our Own” programs that gloss over the lack of living wages, freedom of association and work-life balance for most workers. Her take home is that from the mid-2000s, employers deployed different sets of tools to appease global buyers while also seeking to draw in the hearts and minds of workers and their families to lure and keep them at work.

The concerted effort by Sri Lankan apparel to change adverse attitudes around devalued and stigmatized workers is also picked up by Goger (2013). She underlines how ‘empower’ women worker programs were funded by Gap Inc, for instance, with Sri Lankan employers attempting to recalibrate factory workers (blue-collar work) as professional women. These shifts were attempted through lean production and teamwork, which were packaged as professionalizing the shop floor. These same factories, however, were staunchly oppositional to trade unions, living wages were absent and promotional opportunities were scarce. Goger’s underlying concern is that CSR agendas mobilizing empowerment discourses are underpinned by organizational changes that bear upon the labour process – which is more often detrimental than empowering of workers.

By prising apart empowerment tropes, they highlight the banality of employer efforts. In this paper, I want to pursue this angle further in the context of the pandemic – and disentangle platitude architectures. Employers were attempting to counter localized ethical concerns, moral anxieties, and lose independent women workers, which often resulted in women workers being stigmatized (Hewamanne, 2008; Kabeer, 2002; Lynch, 2007; Wickramasingha and De Neve, 2022). Social stigma started to affect recruitment and retention; consequently, national-level drives were initiated by employers to stymie stigmatization (Goger, 2013; Ruwanpura, 2018, 2022a). The success of these initiatives is, however, always incomplete. Silvey (2010) noted for Indonesia how the emergence of crisis moment results in stigma intensifying, while Siddiqi and Ashraf (2022) writing about the pandemic phase in Bangladesh, underline workers' framings oscillated between stigmatized and essential. Similarly, in Sri Lanka stigmatization resurfaced, despite decades of efforts at recasting workers as empowered.

Herath (2021) writing on the Women's Centre activities during the pandemic, with their enduring labour right activism, bring in a spatial emphasis to claim that the stigmatization of garment sector workers eroded with both FTZ’s and garment factories expanding throughout the country. The study also note when the “working population was no longer limited to young single men and women” (2021:24), moral panics around debauched behaviour started to seize during the pandemic. Nonetheless, the Women’s Centre along with other labour rights organizations have recurrently noted how low wages make workers susceptible to various forms of societal opprobrium, with social stigma resurfacing during the pandemic.

Feminist writings around the pandemic help grasp the specificities of Sri Lanka when read in conjunction with previous scholarship on stigma and (dis)empowerment. They ground the gendered constructions and contestations in the Sri Lankan context as an amplified moment of dis/articulation. These framings make it possible to scrutinize poster child claims around ethical sourcing and empowered women workers – and the limits to such assertions. The vacuity of assertions around empowered workers becomes especially evident when we consider the multiple spaces of social reproduction that carried the burden of an absent state and the poverty wages of workers (see also Herath, 2021; Wickramasingha and De Neve, 2022). It is to these cradles of care that the paper now turns.

Cradles of care

At the inception, the Sri Lankan government announced that each working-class family would be provided dry rations for family meals amounting to Sri Lankan Rupees 5000.00, a repeated broadcast during various phases of the pandemic (ADRC, 2020). However, none of the testimonies by women workers attested to these benefits in a systematic way, with the few that did get provisions having to struggle for them (Herath, 2021; see also Carswell et al., 2018). Women workers living in boarding houses revealed that owners were recipients but not them, although line rooms are often located adjacent to the main house. Furloughed women workers turned to other sources of sustenance, as their reduced wage packet – ½ of their average wage or basic wages, whichever is higher, was insufficient to pay rent, electricity bills and eat food. Depletion was their lot, but it did not mean agentive practice was absent.

Da Bindhu, Stand Up, RED (Revolutionary Existence for Human Development) Sri Lanka, and the Women’s Centre were some organizations at the forefront of supporting garment women workers (Herath, 2021). On occasion, a couple of women had written how welfare committees within the FTZ stepped into providing dry provisions. For workers that returned to villagers, it was their extended kin or neighbours that stepped in – but due to the stigma attached, this was a varied experience.

Labour rights organizations, often consisting of mobilized former or current women workers, were a notable source of sustenance across different parts of Sri Lanka. The care they offered was repeatedly praised, with several workers writing about it – including those that had returned or resided in rural areas (see also Herath, 2021). Shivi, who usually works at the FTZ in Katunayake, mentions the care labour rights organization provided by saying: “From Tangalle, my hometown, officers at WC frequently speak to us and assess our challenges…. It is through these discussions that they sourced and provided two workers with all our food provisions.” She reveals that while she had returned to her natal village, the labour rights organization through their informal channels, phone calls and networks were offering support to workers. Another worker, Suri, from a factory in southern Sri Lanka, Koggala, mentioned that their only source of support was through a labour rights organization: “X provided dry rations; this was the only support that we received”. These accounts establish that irrespective of factory locations, where labour rights organizations were actively present, there was a consistent effort at supporting workers. A labour rights activist said as follows: “When the wages of workers fall by at least 50%, where does the state or employers think worker families are going to find resources during a pandemic? People have their monthly commitments too. They are like us; we had to mobilize community support and provide dry provisions.” The relief that workers felt in obtaining this sustenance is captured by Riika, who was a married woman worker boarded with her family near the Katunayake FTZ, when she had penned “It is through X that our family received supplies; this is such a huge relief for us.”

Testimonies from married women workers, such as Riika’s, where they resided in boarding houses with husbands and children show how owning their own property was not feasible. It gives weight to the precarity of workers that do not earn a living wage – and so despite years of marriage and work in the sector are still boarders and live in dense housing conditions (Herath, 2021). Garment sector worker living conditions echo the status of pauperized workers during the British industrial revolution (Humphries, 2010), which became a breeding ground for virus circulation and as Herath (2021) notes “posed a significant threat to infection control within zones” (2021:17; see also Herod, 2022). Boarding conditions also exposed another axis of convergence of spatial and material imbalances that reveal a power nexus that renders the marital status of workers and age less crucial and highlights the locational politics and indigence faced by working-class communities.

All labour rights organizations took the lead in supporting and providing dry ration to ensure the upkeep of workers. Facebook sites and local newsletters chronicled these community outreach activities, with video clips that recorded mutual aid drives. The video footage was a powerful and vivid way of raising awareness of the difficulties faced by garment sector workers – and obtaining additional support. It helped create localised food banks attracting and mobilizing donations from a wider community and was a source of sustenance for garment sector workers. The circumstances of these workers paralleled that of migrant domestic workers languishing outside Sri Lankan embassies in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region. Neither working-class group obtained support from the Sri Lankan government, despite these working groups being the primary source of foreign exchange. They were left to languish, with support coming from organizations that had the closest proximity to the realities of workers' lives, often by peers living equally threadbare existences. And this sustenance sometimes also extended to advocating for correct payment of wages, where some employers were evading or paying lower than the stipulated amount. The presence of RED Sri Lanka, Da Bindhu, Stand Up and Women’s Centre in the forefront was then a boon for working-class women labouring in the apparel sector – and duly acknowledged by such by the workers themselves (see also Kumarage, 2022; Griffin, 2023). Gunawardena and de Silva (2021) too outline how this agentive action by peer labour rights groups was a bulwark that workers needed and had to draw on.

The fact that workers could not stand on their own two feet despite being paid furlough wages – unlike their peers in Asia or South Asia broadly – is indicative of poverty wages earned or wage theft (AWFA, 2021; Kumarage, 2022). Absence of living wages for most workers push them into a perilous place with any wage cut; their precarity is compounded by the fact that social safety nets are non-existent for the working poor in Sri Lanka (Hewage and Pathirana, 2021; Herath, 2021). And the proclaimed government support ended up being erratic, targeting the elderly or miscommunicated, with workers often raising how patronage politics trumped the needs of communities (Herath, 2021; Ruwanpura and Women’s Centre 2021). Promoting or championing the interests of workers was not the priority of the government. As events have unfolded in Sri Lanka since then, the deep economic distress we witness has roots that stretch beyond the pandemic, once considering the growing inequality in the past decade in Sri Lanka (Knoema, 2020; World Bank, 2020).

The care work fell on labour rights organisations, often spearheaded by women, but it also stretched to kin, fellow workers, and friends – although this is also where tensions and issues of stigmatization arose. Workers corroborated on the differentiated treatment they had to contend with during the pandemic and hence how support was constrained. I now turn to the excerpts from the testimonies.

Thala, who works at the Katunayake FTZ and resides there, shared her experiences of community support by writing: “Our neighbours realized that we were not getting any consistent provision or support from the state; occasionally, we would secure a few items from various organizations, but this was not consistent. Although everyone was facing difficulties associated with COVID-19, it is our neighbours that stepped up”. In sharing these experiences, Thala is firstly accentuating the negligence by the state, which Herath (2021) notes as “the state authorities did not treat people based on principles of equity” (2021:27; see also Carswell et al., 2018). Next, the fact that support from mutual aid has its limits is also underlined in her reflections (Arslan, 2021; Kandiyoti, 2012; Mould et al., 2023). She is indicating that state withdrawal from working-class communities cannot be filled by stop-gap solutions; mutual aid is momentary assistance that is unable to take the place of the state because of the sheer scale of support needed. She goes on to say. “For me, during the CoVID pandemic, the big people were the neighbours that helped us” – the big people, as Thala, puts it, because their daily survival was contingent on this help. Support from nearby residents and acquaintances was also necessary and, in this and similar ways, the tasks of social reproduction fell on local community members as well.

The support from kin, neighbour and community is also detailed by other workers – and many even embraced the initial phase of what was to become a protracted liminal space. Kala, who is a manpower worker and before the pandemic hit used to work at the Biyagama zone (located in the interior of Sri Lanka), had written about her varying experiences of support from friends and villagers evoking the simple indulgences of village life when she writes:

“Our village grew manioc from yesteryears. When I came home, Although I did not have any money in hand, we were able to eat. We did not always look for rice to eat; we ate manioc, breadfruit, and jackfruit. Although our lifeblood was being sucked out, we villagers supported each other. We pooled our food daily and shared it with each other. Even though there was no money floating around, it was a convivial time in the village. Yet, not everyone had it like us; I have friends in other villagers who was not able to eat more than one meal”

Kala’s testimony was particularly poignant because as a manpower worker, she also carefully delineated the exploitation she and others like her faced. Her script outlines: how some factories halted hiring manpower workers (day labourers) if they got work how they had to purchase their own masks (PPE) unlike permanent cadre. The poverty of their daily wages meant that with a freeze on their employment they did not have savings to dip into. In their desperation, she says:

“Blessings to the jackfruit tree located at the boarding house; we ate boiled jackfruit…. Since the boarding was on a large compound, some started to produce moonshine (kassippu), others plucked coconuts surreptitiously and sold in the neighbourhood, while others still collected and boiled olives to eat.”

Her testimony is an acknowledgement of their existential fragility, compelling workers to extract resources from allotments that stretched from the licit to the illicit. Jackfruit, which also substitutes for rice, and is high in starch was their source of nourishment, as were the olive and coconut trees. These assessments by workers highlight not just the “new…solidarities on…more interrelated views of labour and environmental issues” (Fischer et al., 2022: 27). Workers weave together mundane spheres that connect the organic to the material; a socio-ecological awareness stemming from below. Moreover, from their viewpoint, dipping into proscribed activities of producing moonshine was a justifiable venture, given poverty wages and lack of public welfare (see also Da Costa, 2016). These detailed testimonies hence offer a snapshot of the different contexts navigated during a disruptive time: capturing vicissitudes of the pandemic at boarding houses or villages and various sources of support. They also disclose how social reproduction, even across multiple spheres is carried out by marginalized communities. It reveals the unequal power terrain that workers along with their social groups from kin to neighbours and friends need to navigate and the differential power relations of delegated social reproduction – from a corrupt state to people living on the margins. ⁴

Cradles of care extended from labour rights activists to kin, neighbours, and friends; everyday living and even existence were reliant upon social reproduction – the procreation of societal norms of giving, sharing, mutuality, and helping. The very factors that ensured women workers, sometimes inclusive of their families, had food to eat and groceries to cook with. Social reproduction stretched from within the family and household to neighbours, kin, friends, and labour rights organizers – signalling the diverse spheres that workers draw on for their survival. Such vignettes echo and extend Humphries (2010) observation that “extended households cannot be dismissed as short-lived responses to crisis” (2010:75). My findings go further to underline how social reproduction extends beyond the family or household to pull support from mostly women (although not always only) from a range of realms. Therein also lies the potential pitfall: In all contexts, women workers also underlined the isolation or creeping stigmatization they faced – and how this added an extra layer of constrain to their difficult lives (see also Herath 2021; Siddiqi and Ashraf, 2022; Ruwanpura, 2007, 2008; Wickramasingha and De Neve, 2022). Quotidian practices reflect structural constraints that people must negotiate. Dutta (2022) captures an angle of working women’s lives when she remarks how they use their experiences to theorize power using familiar social reproductive acts – which sit along the axis of care, emotions, and empathy (see also Fischer et al., 2022). Nonetheless, women workers are also acutely conscious of how communities of care are easily disrupted, kin alliances shift and waiver to also withdraw support by disgracing them. Instead of limiting ourselves to “…difference…a fruitful starting point for rethinking workers in GVCs, worker organizing” (Fischer et al., 2022: 25), it is also important to be attentive to distinctions that hinder and constrain labour agency. Actualization of empowered workers is enmeshed in grounded politics with fluctuations that both enable and constrain women: the politics of empowerment is best understood within these slivers. Equally, recognizing divergences across the spectrum offers a more encompassing view that compromises a feel for the inequities that everyday entails. The next section of the paper turns to how social stigma started to resurface and consequently, tensions and conflict with community would emerge.

Societal stigma, community conflict

Nila had returned to her village with the onset of the pandemic – and while she too writes of kin and community assisting, in her view returning to the natal residence resulted in contestations. There was the prevalent view that workers were bringing the virus to rural communities, and this caused many workers sadness and strain, with Herath (2021) reporting for the Women's Centre noting how “they were treated as vectors of the deadly disease and… were ostracized from society” (2021:24). She writes of support from a sole relative, uncle when she says: “An uncle from the village really assisted us a lot. He is the one that went to the store to get our provisions” – as the local kade (corner shop) refused to serve anyone from the family once she returned home. The social isolation also took other forms. “Our relatives without coming into house, would leave cooked food outside…. “The children of our older sister, who did not even visit us, were avoided by their village playmates, as their parents stopped them from doing so.” No one in the family, including Nila had covid at the time; and yet relatives and neighbours secluded her and her family from associating with others simply because Nila returned to her village.

Geniality and camaraderie were also detailed to underline the superficiality of support, as practices of cheating workers surfaced. Spirits of amity, freedom, and camaraderie, which were high at the inception started to dissipate over time when the pandemic prolonged. Scepticism started to sneak in. Priya, who works at the Wathupitiya FTZ, had penned the fleeting nature of emancipation. She puts it down as follows: “For those of us, who were habituated into a working life, our immediate experience of the corona pandemic was one of freedom. We did not realize the gravity of the pandemic until later. So, at the start we were happy with our liberty, to be free from work. However, this joy did not last for long when we were confined to our boarding rooms for endless days and our usual bonus payments for April were withdrawn”. In her view, their initial sense of emancipation was snatched away when income withdrawal coupled together with confinement to their rooms took over. When Priya speaks of restricting herself to the room, she is also signalling how boarding houses informally imposed quarantine measures due to unfounded fears of workers spreading the virus – even though at the start they were on furlough and not going to factories. Workers hence had limited interaction with the outside world and the sporadic support that came about was on occasion bitter-sweet as she notes, “The boarding owner gave us three kilos of rice and Rs 1000.00. Afterwards, we got to know that the government support due to us was received by the boarding owner, and she gave a portion to us.” Confinement into boarding rooms ended up in their stigmatization and in them having to grapple with duplicitous upshots, which during a pandemic made workers feel despondent or led to tensions with boarding owners or conflictual community relations.

Community conflicts also arose because women workers reported how erratic and sporadic support from the government meant that neighbours would place blame on workers. Those that remained in their boarding homes recorded how the ire of the community was placed on them for not getting stated dry provisions with sentiments, such as “Our neighbours blamed us saying ‘you have not gone home to the village and because of this even we do not get provisions”. Workers that returned to their homes were subject to similar invectives. In those cases, the homecoming of workers has dented villagers’ prospects of being eligible for government-funded dry ration provision. These misperceptions surfaced creating tensions between villagers and communities that were all struggling in similar ways without easy access to livelihoods and mobility severely curtailed.

Societal stresses stemmed from an inability to acknowledge the failures of government and governance. Their ire was directed towards workers; partly since even when on furlough they were receiving wages. Wages, however, were a portion of average wages earned and in practice were in some instances unpredictable and erratic. Moreover, when workers had barely earned a living wage, a 50% drop in their wage packet often threw many into a perilous state – it was poverty wages workers had to reckon with. These facets were neglected by neighbours and villagers. Where deprivation abounded, holding each other accountable – even if unwarranted – was simpler than holding centralized power, i.e. the government or employers to account. These tensions surfaced and co-existed alongside the goodwill others spread. They were able to recognize the difficulties of others faced as also their own, a camaraderie based on their connection to humanity (manusakama) carried the day. Along with multiple sources of societal support and social reproduction, social stigma, and societal stress also co-existed; signalling the multiple manifestations of social reproduction when social networks are frayed and living wages are absent.

The difficulties workers encountered and the very reliance on numerous cradles of assistance to make it through daily pulls further apart tropes of empowered workers mobilized by employers. Often, they do not appear to exist, or economically empowered workers are rare or absent from working-class communities. Empowerment politics with an attentiveness to the economic base makes evident how gratuitous employer efforts are. To start with, the lack of living wages compels women workers to look for cheap accommodation, cramp themselves up in shared rooms and compromise sanitation practices. Fears around virus circulation by others then had a material basis for it – others in rural and working-class communities were aware that migrant women workers lived in shared spaces. A room of their own, working-class women did not earn enough to secure – and especially so for migrant women workers toiling in zonal factories. The lack of regulation of private living quarters is a contributory factor and more research is needed in this area – for Sri Lanka and elsewhere. ⁵ However, it would be outright denial to negate how wages also determine the type of rooms that workers can afford to rent in the first place, and this too needs emphasis. The absence of economically empowered workers was now brazenly evident outside factories – and a prolonged crisis in Sri Lanka, from a pandemic to debt, has exposed how women workers are short-changed (see also Herod, 2022; Mould et al., 2023). They, however, are the backbone of the country’s economy.

Agentive praxis: Commonalities, divergences and divisions

Divergent experiences scripted by women workers and their testimonies suggest that the scarcity of state support and a failure of a streamlined approach resulted in mutual aid initiatives kicking in. Working-class communities turned to activist organizations, friends, neighbours, kin and occasionally landlords, as factors of residence or paperwork requirements frustrated their efforts at eligibility. Social reproduction filtered via multiple social formations and not just the household or familial settings – and while mostly other women were mentioned as providing this support, it was not just women. ⁶ More centrally, our understanding of social reproduction must move beyond familial dynamics and settings to be attentive to the multiple spatial formations reproducing life.

Care, empathy, and emotions are important vectors of connections and support and expressions of social reproduction and solidarity politics (Arslan, 2021; Dutta, 2022; Stevano et al., 2021; Herath, 2021). However, informal support does waiver and oscillate, with layers of oppression readily resurfacing via the same social formations, whether it be kin, friends, or neighbours. These are dividing lines that also need to be verbalised to acknowledge the full spectrum of social realities that workers must navigate during crisis moments. Women workers’ self-reflexivity through their testimonies often captures the imbalance in social relations to address agentive praxis as dynamic and fluid. It is thus distinctive and nuanced from readings that highlight diverse moments of camaraderie and solidarity (Dutta, 2022). Such interpretations as crucial as they are, may miss out on the “diverse political antagonisms shaped through struggles and political practices”, which are also ensnared in complicated incongruities that come with promises and pitfalls (Featherstone and Griffin, 2015: 386; see also Griffin, 2023; Herod, 2022).

Politics from below, the everyday and community level are bounded in an uneven terrain that structures the nature of agentive praxis encompassing commonalities, divergences, and divisions. Antagonisms and struggles, whether during crisis moments or otherwise also need recognition (see also Arampatzi, 2017). They bring into view dividing lines that workers must constantly confront, which are not limited to the evident formal/informal distinctions of workers. Social schisms and stigma shunting workers into isolation also erupt from the same social formations crucially supporting social reproduction – and are a mixed blessing in the absence of public welfare. Siddiqi and Ashraf (2022) observe that “COVID-19 conditions rendered it impossible to mobilize discourses of empowerment and upliftment” (2022:15). In contrast, I also want to claim that underlying conditions decades in the making that slowly eroded the social safety nets intensified worker pauperization and stigmatization.

Hence, frayed social safety nets that working-class communities are left with impoverished socio-economic lives in more ways than one when we cast the net wide to grasp the promises and pitfalls of social support. The potentialities of care and camaraderie ought never to be considered a substitute for public provisioning, given the challenges its withdrawal poses to working classes. Worker testimonies highlight the jagged conditions that shape agentive praxis, especially where public support is thin and eviscerating. Nonetheless, Sri Lanka also shows it is the household economy, stupid! that facilitates mass mobilization – as witnessed in the past and recent times (Ruwanpura, 2013). Empowerment imageries and rhetoric mobilized by Sri Lankan apparels to promote facets of ethicality have become undone with the pandemic and ongoing debt crisis simply because these statements stood on unliveable worker wages. Therefore, when spaces inhabited by workers are the focus, this is their first recourse during crisis moments, when a spatialized politics of disempowerment becomes visible. Invisible strains manifest in the visible terrain, with stigma, struggles and societal tensions fragmenting alongside the threadbare solidarity economies and mutual support that emerged. They are nonetheless worth cataloguing. As Arampatzi (2017) notes, “everyday practices of resistance and their multiplicities hold an empowering potential within broader social processes and ought to be treated as such, rather than thinking of struggles as unified abstractions” (2017: 48; emphasis is mine). Sri Lanka’s public protests (aragalaya) are emblematic of the unpredictable forces that came together – despite the odds.

Conclusion

Reliance on multiple sources of support was critical for social reproduction with the onset of the pandemic. An absence of coherent or systematic state support also meant that conflict or chicanery was not uncommon, given that the same sources of social reproduction – relatives, kin, and neighbours – were also facing socio-economic challenges. These unfolding facets also unravelled the poverty living conditions of workers and brought into sharp relief the frivolity of assertions around Sri Lankan apparel sector workers as empowered. To give emphasis and speak to the politics of empowerment requires assessing the material basis of women workers alongside their educational attainments and good health, at the least. The latter may make workers engage in claim-making and give voice but without living wages, financial insecurity is a constant companion. And where there is economic precarity, fragility abut the lives and livelihoods of women workers in a country and apparel sector that has well maintained its status and credibility as an ethical sourcing destination. Ethical sourcing and global governance architectures are then on thin ice as the pandemic has revealed for its poster child, Sri Lankan apparel. The sector has crafted decades of claiming Garments without Guilt but without ever making living wages a central platform, empowered workers are non-existent.

In part, this omission has much to do with the fact that employers draw on the value creation underpinned by multiple spheres of social reproduction. The pandemic necessitated a refocus on the reproductive sphere and the care crisis that spilt over from hospitals to homes. However, the care and reproductive work undertaken was not limited simply to families and households; acknowledging the hidden abode(s) in plain sight must go beyond limiting feminist analysis to households. Reproductive spheres extend from the household to the community, kin, and friends – and always have done; and especially so in the global South and during the pandemic (Islam, 2022; Narayan and Rosenman, 2021). The labour in its becoming a social form then draws on several spheres of reproduction and value creation that the state and employers ignore.

Feminist conversations on the reproductive/productive spheres need to hence be attentive to multiple spatial arenas of social reproduction for at least two-fold reasons. Reifying multiple social spaces that enable and engender social reproduction helps trace the connecting threads from the household to the community and beyond. The solidarity generated however is not to be deified because social connections, as pivotal as they are to working women’s lives, can both constrain and pillory their existence. It is for these reasons that effective social protection and universal social welfare must be continuously advocated. To do otherwise is to place the burden of the crisis on those with the narrowest shoulders and curtail the space of public economic geographies for those to whom it matters most. The ongoing aragalaya (Sinhala word for struggle) then stems from the everyday struggle of the working poor, given their penury existence they are making citizenship claims in the public realm to underline how public economic geographies matter.