Thiefing a Chance
Thiefing a Chance
Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad
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.
In Thiefing a Chance, Rebecca Prentice places the contestations and contradictions of capitalist morality at the center of a sophisticated analysis of neoliberalism’s uneasy conjunction with Caribbean creole economics—all the while regaling her readers with evocative ethnographic detail. It is rare that one book accomplishes so much.’
—Kevin A. Yelvington, University of South Florida, author of Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace
‘Thiefing A Chance takes readers on an eye-opening adventure inside a Trinidadian garment factory where women display ingenuous and often cooperative ways to make garments for their own clients alongside their legitimate work. In this innovative ethnographic work, Prentice uses lively stories and robust cultural theory to broaden and deepen our understanding of both the forms and meaning of Caribbean cunning and pride’.
—Katherine E. Browne, Colorado State University, author of Creole Economics'[A] quite intelligent and enjoyable book. . . . Thiefing a Chance is a worthwhile contribution.'
—David Eller, Anthropology Review Database
Rebecca Prentice is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Her research on garment workers in Trinidad was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Royal Anthropological Institute.
