Mental Health Among Garment Industry Workers in Tamilnadu

Abstract

Joel John

The garment industry of Tamil Nadu forms part of the significant portion of the Indian manufacturing sector based on exports and the many workers, mainly of the female gender, which work in the sector under precarious labour conditions, challenging work hours, piece-rate quota and informal employees’ relations. This paper looks at psychosocial and mental health aspects of work in the garment industry in Tamil Nadu, and places the distress of workers into the frameworks of labour-process and gendered and value-chain. It relies on the data which is available at the national and industry-level (World Health Organization, International Labour Organization) and regionally-specific garment industry study, and asserts that the approach to mental well-being of workers should extend beyond individual counselling to include the structural situations of work, wage insecurity, gendered double burden and industrial relations. The article ends up with the policy recommendations of how to introduce mental-health assistance into the occupational safety regimes in the garment clusters of Tamil Nadu.

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