Wither Labor and Human Rights?: Precarious work, and informal economies in the Post-COVID-19 Global South.

This chapter focuses on women workers within global production in Sri Lanka to comment on how the pandemic resulted in workers losing hard won labor rights. It also highlights how the pandemic put to stop some positive initiatives in the realm of legal and rights education of workers and argues that the pandemic would lead to reversing positive policy outcomes that resulted from decades of labor protests within Sri Lanka’s informal economy. In 2018 and 2019 the author collaborated with two local NGOs to conduct educational workshops on occupational health laws and practice. These multi-day workshops also provided general education on labor laws and rights. As a result, several working groups among workers of several factories and boarding clusters were formed to assess, educate and support when labor and occupational health laws were violated. The first wave of COVID-19 infections in Sri Lanka saw factories shuttering with little to no warning for few months. By the time the factories re-opened around May/June 2020 the rapid unravelling of global production networks were being felt at the ground level. While the western buyers put the financial burdens of the non-claimed products on the local factories, they in turn outsourced the fallout to the factory workers in the form of drastically reduced salaries and non-payment of bonuses and incentives. The economic fallout of the lockdown saw the opportunities in the informal economies disappear making the available global factory work very attractive, even under sweat-shop like conditions. This chapter demonstrates that the pandemic had been detrimental to the legal empowerment and the advancement of labor rights within the global production networks and argues for rethinking of informal economies beyond the neoliberal development models which have not being conducive to legal and labor rights empowerment even during pre-COVID-19 days.