Microenterprise development, industrial labour, and the seductions of precarity

Microenterprise development is underpinned by an ideology that the solution to poverty is the integration of the poor into market relations. This article addresses the paradox that its ‘beneficiaries’ may be dispossessed industrial workers who already have a long history of participation in the capitalist economy. Exploring the transformation of garment workers in Trinidad from factory employees to home-based ‘micro-entrepreneurs’, I argue that working conditions and labour rights have deteriorated under the protective cover of seemingly laudable policies to promote economic empowerment via self-employment. Showing how microenterprise initiatives contribute to women workers’ ‘adverse incorporation’ (Phillips, 2011) into global production networks, this article calls for renewed attention to the labour politics of microenterprise development

The Paradoxes of Tunisian Women’s Liberation

This chapter introduces readers to the research which focuses on gender and work in Tunisia. The author’s own experiences are important to the research. This chapter describes the popular discourse of the already-liberated Tunisian woman and how it depicts women’s rights as stemming from Tunisian legal codes. The introduction introduces skepticism around the ways in which women’s rights can obfuscate the realities faced by many women in the labor force and in the family, the two social institutions that are most closely scrutinized throughout the book. Further, liberated Tunisian women are the subject of societal anxiety about women’s sexuality and power