When an IMF-backed program of liberalization opened Trinidad’s borders to foreign ready-made apparel, global competition damaged the local industry and unraveled worker entitlements and expectations but also presented new economic opportunities for engaging the “global” market. This fascinating ethnography explores contemporary life in the Signature Fashions garment factory, where the workers attempt to exploit gaps in these new labor configurations through illicit and informal uses of the factory, a practice they colloquially refer to as “thiefing a chance.”Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, author Rebecca Prentice combines a vivid picture of factory life, first-person accounts, and anthropological analysis to explore how economic restructuring has been negotiated, lived, and recounted by women working in the garment industry during Trinidad’s transition to a neoliberal economy. Through careful social coordination, the workers “thief” by copying patterns, taking portions of fabric, teaching themselves how to operate machines, and wearing their work outside the factory. Even so, the workers describe their “thiefing” as a personal, individualistic enterprise rather than a form of collective resistance to workplace authority. By making and taking furtive opportunities, they embrace a vision of themselves as enterprising subjects while actively complying with the competitive demands of a neoliberal economic order.Prentice presents the factory not as a stable institution but instead as a material and social space in which the projects, plans, and desires of workers and their employers become aligned and misaligned, at some moments in deep harmony and at others in rancorous conflict. Arguing for the productive power of the informal and illicit, Thiefing a Chance contributes to anthropological debates about the very nature of neoliberal capitalism and will be of great interest to undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty in anthropology, labor studies, Caribbean studies, and development studies.

Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad

The discursive tactics of neoliberal development in small Third World countries

Our understanding of the socio-economic and geographical impacts of structural adjustment has not kept pace with the transformations, and this paper responds to this problem. Faced with massive foreign debt and a collapse of traditional exports, governments throughout the developing world have agreed to World Bank- and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-prescribed structural adjustment and to its component industrial free zones. The zones are designed to attract foreign manufacturers to produce for export, and thereby generate hard currency for governments and jobs for young women. Jamaica, which has experienced a greater foreign debt burden and more structural adjustment agreements than virtually any other third world country, provides a case study of free zone policy. The research employs a political economy approach (Barnes 1993, whereby conventional wisdom that free zones contribute positively to Third World development is initially scrutinized. Free zones are examined with respect to the historical, social, and spatial contexts in which they are imbedded, and social groups affected by free zones are disaggregated by class and gender to expose power relationships and differential impacts. Most evidence is drawn from internal Jamaican government records and interviews with public and private managers involved with the free zones. The findings indicate that the costs and benefits of free zone promotion are distributed very unevenly with respect to class, gender and location.

Distributional Impacts of the‘Free Zone’Component of Structural Adjustment: The Jamaican Experience

Despite impressive success in improving living conditions in many Caribbean countries, poverty still persists throughout the region This study seeks to improve our understanding of poverty in the Caribbean and the current efforts to address it It analyzes the causes and characteristics of poverty in 15 Caribbean countries and reviews the experiences with the poverty and alleviation efforts that countries have pursued Prepared for the 1996 meeting of the Caribbean Group for Cooperation in Economic Development, this report provides recommendations on how macroeconomic and social policies can be further oriented to reduce poverty and promote human resource development

Poverty reduction and human development in the Caribbean

The small islands in the Caribbean have always been externally-dominated. During the post-WW II period, the State and the people have struggled with their changing circumstances: often misguided, mismanaged, and mistake-ridden, but adaptable and resourceful nevertheless. This paper reviews past experiences and draws upon them to suggest paths more likely to bring about appropriate development of these small island's societies than Core-capitalism's self-serving directives of neo-liberalism.

Pursuing an Appropriate Development Model for Caribbean Small Islands: Can Past Experience help Subvert the Neo-Liberal Agenda ?

Preface Introduction The Background to the Economic Crisis in the 1980s and the Prospects facing Caribbean States Issues in the Reform of the Policy Framework Savings, Investment and Growth Trends and Determinants in Selected Caribbean Countries in Recent Years Further Aspects of the Public Finance Issues The Issue of Privatization The Exchange Rate Controversy Selected Issues and Problems in External Adjustments The Capital Transfer Problem Concluding Observations Appendix I: Trinidad and Tobago's First Letter of Intent (Nov. 16, 1988) to the IMF Appendix II: Trinidad and Tobago's Second Letter of Intent (March 14, 1990) to the IMF Bibliography Index

The challenge of structural adjustment in the commonwealth Caribbean

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The challenge of structural adjustment in the commonwealth Caribbean