Projects per year
Abstract
Worker hostels or dormitories are common in labour-intensive industries staffed largely by migrant labour and have long been associated with exploitative practices. More recently, hostels have come under scrutiny due to accusations that they are used to restrict workers’ freedom in ways that are tantamount to modern slavery. Drawing on a qualitative study of a garment hub in South India where such claims have frequently arisen, we explore the conditions of freedom and unfreedom in worker hostels and how suppliers who run such hostels respond to competing expectations about worker freedom. Our findings show that hostels perform three interrelated functions: restriction, protection, and liberation, which together constitute a complex mix of freedom and unfreedom for migrant women workers that we term hybrid (un)freedom. As a result, we problematise the binary understandings of freedom and unfreedom that predominate in the modern slavery literature. We also develop a new way forward for examining freedom in the context of hostels that considers the system of relationships, traditions, and socio-economic arrangements that workers and employers are locked into and which prevent meaningful improvements in the freedom of women workers.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1928-1960 |
Number of pages | 33 |
Journal | Human Relations |
Volume | 75 |
Issue number | 10 |
Early online date | 4 Feb 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2022 |
Keywords
- Freedom
- Modern slavery
- Migrant workers
- Global supply chains
- Gender
- Textile industry
- Hostels
- Garment industry
Projects
- 1 Finished
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Combatting modern slavery through business leadership at the bottom of the supply chain
15/11/17 → 15/03/19
Project: Research
Prizes
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Best paper in Business & Society discipline 2022
Crane, Andrew (Recipient), Soundararajan, Vivek (Recipient), Bloomfield, Michael (Recipient), LeBaron, Genevieve (Recipient) & Spence, Laura (Recipient), 2023
Prize: Prize (including medals and awards)