Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article contributes to a recent wave of literature formulating a renewed labor regimes framework as a means to understand the processes, relations, actors, and institutions through which conditions of work are produced under contemporary capitalism. This scholarship (partially) incorporates a feminist lens highlighting the centrality of social reproduction to the construction and persistence of particular labor regimes, and further calls for “labor-centric” analyses to counter a “capital-centric” tendency. We take up this call through analyzing the life stories of three garment workers in India, centering their own perspectives about their labor and motivations for entering and exiting particular labor regimes. We contribute to the labor regimes framework through: considering aspects of workers’ lives prior to and beyond the labor regime; demonstrating how workers’ actions can be viewed as an inherent critique of the labor regime; and using workers’ life stories as a methodological tool for constructing a more “labor-centric” analytical framework. Because working lives are as much shaped by the “needs and rhythms of social reproduction” as they are by relations of production, analyses of labor regimes can be enriched by going beyond their borders to attend to key moments and spaces in workers’ social reproductive trajectories. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Publication Title
Annals of the American Association of Geographers
Publication Date
2025
Volume
115
Issue
3
First Page
603
Last Page
619
ISSN
2469-4452
DOI
10.1080/24694452.2024.2435933
Keywords
garment work, India, labor regimes, life stories, social reproduction
Repository Citation
McGrath, Siobhán and Dutta, Madhumita, "Life Stories of Garment Workers in India: Toward a Labor-Centric Labor Regimes Framework" (2025). Geography. 999.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/999
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Dutta, M., & McGrath, S. (2024). Life Stories of Garment Workers in India: Toward a Labor-Centric Labor Regimes Framework. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-17.
