Protecting Workers? : Crisis, COVID-19, and South Asia

Abstract

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.