‘Worn out’: Hunger, debt discipline, and the gendered contingencies of the COVID-19 pandemic amongst Cambodian garment workers

Drawing on over 200 quantitative surveys and 60 interviews with women workers in Cambodia, the talk presents empirically-grounded research from garment workers on the financial challenges of navigating the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ReFashion study shows how in the making of clothes to be worn by Western consumers, poorly paid garment workers are reducing their eating to repay long-term debts and those newly taken on to cope with wage reductions resulting from factory closures, suspensions and cuts in working hours. In its examination of this phenomenon, the talk provides insights into the gendered contingencies of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘wearing out’ of garment workers through their attempts to reproduce life under (pre-existing) conditions of privation. We argue that the hunger-debt nexus is not new but reflects problems within Cambodia’s capitalist development, and capitalism itself, as the costs of social reproduction and risk are privatised and financialised in the body politic. The COVID-19 pandemic is consolidation relations with financialised life such that they will outlast its duration and have long-lasting implications for workers and their families globally.