Livelihood Transitions and Coping With Shocks: Women in the Ready-Made Garment (RMG) Sector Coping With COVID-19

Abstract

One of the challenges that have been posed by COVID-19 is the trade-off between lives and livelihoods. The Financial Times once wrote about it as a macro-level issue in an article headed “The Covid-19 conundrum: lives versus livelihoods,” where it spoke of the difficult choices facing policymakers about whether they should prioritize public safety or open up their economies, the health of their citizens or the health of their economies (Dodd, 2020). The relationship between lives and livelihoods has also been a concern at lower levels of analysis, in the daily lives of real people. At this level, however, it is very clear that the relationship has not been a uniform one. Instead, it is mediated by workers’ positions in the hierarchical structures that characterize labour markets across the world. In the context of the COVID-19 economy, we can distinguish between different groups in the population-based on how they experienced the relationship between lives and livelihoods.