Life Stories of Garment Workers in India: Toward a Labor-Centric Labor Regimes Framework

This article contributes to a recent wave of literature formulating a renewed labor regimes framework as a means to understand the processes, relations, actors, and institutions through which conditions of work are produced under contemporary capitalism. This scholarship (partially) incorporates a feminist lens highlighting the centrality of social reproduction to the construction and persistence of particular labor regimes, and further calls for “labor-centric” analyses to counter a “capital-centric” tendency. We take up this call through analyzing the life stories of three garment workers in India, centering their own perspectives about their labor and motivations for entering and exiting particular labor regimes. We contribute to the labor regimes framework through: considering aspects of workers’ lives prior to and beyond the labor regime; demonstrating how workers’ actions can be viewed as an inherent critique of the labor regime; and using workers’ life stories as a methodological tool for constructing a more “labor-centric” analytical framework. Because working lives are as much shaped by the “needs and rhythms of social reproduction” as they are by relations of production, analyses of labor regimes can be enriched by going beyond their borders to attend to key moments and spaces in workers’ social reproductive trajectories.