Workplace, emotional bonds and agency: Everyday gendered experiences of work in an export processing zone in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

This article advances labour geography’s understanding of worker agency by examining how women actively remake the workplace by forming emotional bonds and community on and off the shop floor. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research with women workers in a Nokia cell-phone factory, I prioritise attention to the ways that women act, live, work and struggle in their attempt to ‘rework’ or resist their work-life situations in a patriarchal capitalist system. I show that in the everyday practices and experiences of work and work life, women form complex feelings towards their workplaces, including a sense of self-worth and feelings of belonging and mutual care. Work is more than just a job. The research urges greater recognition of the ways in which: (a) agency is produced in the workplace through the everyday social practice of care and emotional bonds that women form with each other and, through that, to their work; (b) that agency acts both as a form of resistance and as a form of attachment to the workplace; and (c) for women, work is not just about wages – nor is it just about social reproduction through the family – it is also about the social reproduction of new identities and forms of community that are forged at work, which both shape and are shaped by their experiences as workers.