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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice Samantha King Rebecca Prentice, Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015. 248 pp. There has been growing recognition in recent years that the pressures associated with neoliberal governance models are actually promoting and expanding participation in alternative, illicit, and informal economic practice in a variety of social contexts. This dynamic has raised new and reinvigorated enduring anthropological questions related to the cultural meanings of economic practice and the role of hegemonic formations in both shaping and being shaped by local livelihoods. Thiefing a Chance: Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad by Rebecca Prentice offers a significant and nuanced contribution to these debates. This book presents an engaging ethnographic exploration of how women garment workers are negotiating neoliberal economic restructuring from the particular cultural and historical perspective of the Caribbean—a region often characterized as being on the losing side of globalization. In Trinidad, IMF-backed restructuring began opening protected national markets to intense global competition in the 1990s, a process that substantially reconfigured production requirements and employment opportunities in the local garment industry. As production became more unstable and demanding, a significant portion of garment work shifted to the informal sector. Today, Trinidad’s garment industry is comprised of a variety of dispersed, heterogeneous sites including factories, illegal sweatshops, independent workshops, and home-based enterprises. In Thiefing a Chance, Prentice demonstrates how the agency and flexibility of women has facilitated these transitions and in many ways enabled the local garment industry to endure. Her conclusions and analysis [End Page 975] are based upon 15 months of ethnographic research in Trinidad, which included nine months working on the shop floor at Signature Fashions, a pseudonym for a local garment factory that produces high-end fashions for the regional clothing market. What Prentice uncovers in the factory is a hidden world of productive labor through which illicit and informal practices have become integral, yet unacknowledged, aspects of the neoliberal order of work. Through such practices, known collectively by workers as “thiefing a chance,” women utilize the factory as a resource to surreptitiously engage in entrepreneurial activities such as training themselves on new machines, professionally finishing homemade garments, and copying Signature Fashions patterns for outside use. These types of covert strategies reference a cultural discourse common throughout the Black Atlantic that valorizes opportunistic and flexible economic practice as an expression of individual independence and creativity. Such endogenously derived forms of economic self-expression are intimately informed by the persistent need for Caribbean people to continually negotiate and adapt to capitalism’s enduring influence in the region—from plantation slavery through neoliberal economic restructuring. Yet recent anthropological work has also noted a substantial overlap between this historically informed subaltern expression of flexible self-reliance and the entrepreneurial ethos venerated by the contemporary neoliberal order. In this important book, Prentice seeks to ethnographically document this convergence and consider what it means. Thiefing a chance, she argues, represents a metaphor for local life under neoliberalism as the “expression of an individualistic, enterprising subjectivity” embraced and embodied by workers that “both subverts and con-firms” contemporary capitalist discipline (90). The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which draws upon rich ethnographic detail to further the anthropological analysis. The introduction highlights the main arguments of the text (as described briefly above) and outlines the theoretical and methodological approaches of the book. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the Signature Fashions factory and brand. Prentice begins by situating Signature Fashions within the political economic history of the garment industry in Trinidad and then moves to an analysis of the relations of production in the factory. This discussion interrogates the nature and practice of industrial flexibility, or the ability of production to respond to dynamic market conditions. While this has generally been theorized as a crucial achievement of the neoliberal [End Page 976] firm, Prentice convincingly demonstrates how, at Signature, flexibility is a complex and contested process that is often facilitated by the coordinated, covert actions of workers as opposed to the formal structure and deliberate planning...