Tag: covid-19
-
Hanging by a thread: The unraveling of the garment industry in Bangladesh
[By Mohammad Sahid Ullah] Around 4.1 million workers of the Bangladeshi apparel industry that exports ready-made garments to more than 165 countries across the world is facing a severe crisis amid the COVID19 epidemic. Many of them continue working in factories, to meet shipment deadlines, defying the government shut down order. Meanwhile, many factory owners…
-
Technology for a social cause: TikTok and Asia’s mobile-first nations
[By Payal Arora] What does collective organizing look like in the digital age? Can we leverage on TikTok, the most downloaded app in 2020, to humanize the millions of informal laborers as they face unprecedented levels of precarity and help mobilize a global social conscience? Are there new geopolitical partnerships arising across governments, INGOs, the…
-
Building on empathy: can we broaden the conversation?
[By Usha Raman] As India imposed a near-complete lockdown in March, accompanied by social distancing recommendations, things began to fall apart for the millions engaged in daily wage labour across multiple sectors. To them, the sudden absence of work meant the inability to pay for shelter and food, the barest needs to sustain oneself in…
-
And so we begin, by organizing ourselves…
[By Payal Arora & Usha Raman] On January 27 2020, the team for ‘Feminist Approaches to Labour Collectives: Organizing Digitally in South Asia,’ a three-year grant funded project by the International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canadian agency, got together in Hyderabad, India, to launch this project. The goal for the meeting was to draw up…
FEMLAB 