Multiple crisis, multiple challenges: labouring for global garments in debt-ridden Sri Lanka

Intersecting and interlocking crises mark a global polycrisis, with its manifestation in Sri Lanka reflecting internal and temporal contradictions long in the making, given the country’s unmediated integration into the global economy. The debt crisis the country is undergoing is acute for the working classes. Our article focuses on the impact of these crises on garment sector workers, to engage with feminist scholars who have written about the social reproductive angles. This feminist literature has linked social reproductive angles with subjectivising, while we underline an attendant angle: the relationship between bodily depletion and modalities of vulnerability that austerity programmes bring upon communities already under distress. To do this, using written testimonies and focus group discussions, we tease out the viewpoints of women labouring for Sri Lankan apparel to underline how the burden of the debt crisis and its recovery is placed on working-class communities.