Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia examines how the South Asian region has confronted the challenges of safeguarding labour rights and ensuring health provisioning for workers during and right after the COVID-19 pandemic. Bringing together comparisons across countries and regions, the volume draws on cases from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These cases illuminate how states at multiple levels of government responded to COVID-19 and the ensuing economic crisis. With attention to the profound effects of cascading crises on workers’ lives, individual chapters employ a wide range of methods – from statistical analysis to oral histories, written testimonies, and ethnographic accounts – to weave together state-level strategies with ground-level experiences of workers and labour collectives.
Contributions from a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, spanning political science, economics, anthropology, human geography, sociology, and labour activism, provide a rich, multidimensional view of the pressures facing South Asia’s working poor. Together, the chapters offer fresh insights into the region’s diversity and the shifting relationship between states and societies during times of upheaval. The volume captures both the evolving nature of the political state and the resourcefulness, mobilization, and claim making capacities of workers seeking recognition, protection, and justice.
Contributors to the volume are Iffat Jahan Antara, Naomi Hossain, Touhidul Islam, Himanshu Jha, Priya Sajjad, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, Papia Sengupta, Chanchal Kumar Sharma, Jeevan Sharma, Maheen Sultan and Aardra Surendran along with the editors, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden.
“An indispensable resource for anyone interested in the relationship between states and workers—particularly precarious workers—during and since the Covid-19 pandemic in South Asia. This interdisciplinary volume offers crucial insights into varied responses of collaboration, compromise, confrontation, and contestation in state-worker dynamics across the region in the midst of a global health crisis. It presents concrete examples that demonstrate how preexisting political economies of health and labor can protect or endanger workers when a healthcare crisis erupts and demonstrates the co-imbrication of health, political and economic crises across time. More hopefully, the authors demonstrate that such mutually produced crises can give rise to resistance and activism, charting pathways to strengthen systems of governance that uphold the dignity and health security of workers in South Asia and beyond.”
Professor Cecilia Van Hollen, Georgetown University
