Paid Work, Care Work, and Workers’ Health in South Asia: Perspectives from the Garment Industry

This chapter focuses on the health and wellbeing of women workers in South Asia’s garment and textile industry. Women in this industry are recruited young into low-wage work, often as sewing machine operators or helpers, which they juggle with gendered responsibilities for care work at home. Routinely working under conditions that adversely impact their physical and mental health, women often quit factory-based work either because they are unable to manage (under-) paid work with childcare responsibilities or because the strenuous work in factories has “run them down.” Addressing health and wellbeing challenges faced by garment workers, therefore, requires not just health interventions tailored to their working hours and days of rest, with attention paid to health clinic timings and locations, but also tackling underlying working conditions that determine women’s health and wellbeing. At a minimum, the following critical determinants must be addressed: (a) low wages; (b) the disproportionate burden of care work on women; (c) unreasonable production targets (and associated over-work to supplement low-wage work); and (d) unsafe working conditions and workers’ lives after what is described as “forced retirement.” While laws, policies, and programs in producer countries are crucial to addressing these determinants, wider supply chain legislation in the home countries of big brands and retailers is equally important. It is, after all, the business practices of such brands and retailers that critically shape unhealthy and unsafe working conditions for women in garment and textile factories that are primarily located in the Global South.