Category Work
Covid-19 in Tamil Nadu: Textile livelihoods under threat
by Geert De Neve **Reprinted by permission from the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme.** On the 24th of March 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a complete national lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19 on the subcontinent. While this brought the movements of more than 1.3 billion people to an almost immediate halt, many […]
How are Foreign Domestic Workers Implicated in the Pro-Democracy Protests in Hong Kong?
by Charlotte Brill ‘’My eyes were very painful’’, said an Indonesian migrant worker who was caught in a cloud of tear gas on her day off. This tear gas came from nearby pro-democracy protests, which rapidly intensified since they started in June 2019. Riddled with fear, over 380,000 Foreign Domestic Workers (FDWs), comprised predominantly of […]
Our ‘Fashion Fast’: Week 3
by Alfred Lewis **Read about the first, second, and fourth week of our ‘fashion fast.’ If you can, please donate to our efforts to raise money for the labour rights charity Labour Behind the Label.** Tadaaa… Here are my 6 items of clothing. I decided on two shirts, one puffer jacket, one pair of jeans and a pair of pyjamas. […]
Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Today, the 25th of March, marks the anniversary of New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers lost their lives. The fire occurred in 1911, only one year after New York’s streets saw the Uprising of the 20,000—a successful strike of the primarily Jewish immigrant women who worked in the garment sector. That strike […]
The Story of our Fashion Fast!
by Rebecca Prentice, Hannah Amey, Maeve Devers, Rifka Fehr, Olive Howland Milne, Alfred Lewis, Phoebe Marsh, Joana Pereira and Amelia Yates As eight first-year anthropology students and one lecturer at the University of Sussex, we are doing a ‘fashion fast’ between now and Easter. This means we commit to wearing only 6 items of clothing for 6 weeks, […]
Freedom, Probation, and The American Dream: Some Thoughts from a New Mexican Factory Floor
by Jonny Craig In his 2016 release, Interstate: Hitchhiking through the State of a Nation, travel-writer Julian Sarayer chronicles his unorthodox and remarkable journey from New York to San Francisco. As with many — perhaps all — great travel books, Sarayer’s account is as much about those he encounters along the way as it is […]
A Rise in Vulnerability? Academic Studies, Paid Work and Mental Health
**This is the second of three posts on student experience, debt and austerity in higher education; see post published on October 8th.** by Anne-Meike Fechter In the last few years, a slew of reports voiced concerns about a rise of mental health problems among university students, in the UK and elsewhere. While there is debate about […]
How Does the Necessity of Paid Work Impact Our Students?: Learning from the Global Studies Student Employment Survey
by Paul Robert Gilbert **This is the first of three posts on student experience, debt and austerity in higher education; the second post was published on October 15th.** There is little more grating, for those of us who work in Higher Education, than those portions of the British media who insist on propagating lazy stereotypes of ‘work-shy […]
No Paninis for Poverty Pay
by Rebecca Prentice Throughout the UK yesterday restaurant and food delivery workers walked off their jobs to protest low wages, zero hours contracts, and unpredictable work schedules—including those from Brighton’s two JD Wetherspoon restaurants, The Post and Telegraph and The Bright Helm. Writing in The Guardian, Owen Jones and Katie Southworth describe these strikes as […]
Union revitalisation and women workers at the intersection of gender and class
by Hannah Loosley **A version of this post was published at ecnmy.org.** Women working in care, catering, cleaning, cashier and clerical jobs (the 5 Cs) have long been neglected in trade unions and politics. Their jobs are seen as ‘extras’ – helping other people be fed and cared for, so they can do their ‘proper’ […]
