Reporting
Refugees caught in Jordan’s campaign against informal work"In late April 2025, the Jordanian Ministry of Labour announced that the government had deported over 3,000 foreign workers for violating labour laws in the country. This followed a wave of inspections targeting non-citizens working without permits in sectors such as domestic work, garment production, agriculture and construction.... Officially, refugees are not featuring in the rhetoric of this campaign. Ostensibly it only targets informal migrant workers. But in practice, many people who originally came to Jordan for protection are also falling into its net. This new campaign has made their lives more precarious than they already were."
Katharina Grüneisl et al. reveal in OpenDemocracy (14 October 2025).Trump’s tariffs: poor workers in countries like Cambodia will be among the biggest losers
"Politicians and economists have been pretty vocal in their response to the ongoing saga of Donald Trump’s tariffs. But much less has been heard from the world’s poorest workers about how they will be affected. For when the US president first set out his reciprocal tariffs – later paused for 90 days – some of the highest rates were for countries like Vietnam (46%), Bangladesh (37%) and Cambodia (49%). These are places that make huge amounts of the clothes we wear, and even the reduced 10% tariff could be a big blow to their economies – and the people who depend on them. Because aside from the well known sweatshop conditions suffered by many workers in these places, brands and manufacturers often offset new costs by passing them on to workers in the form of lower wages and higher demands."
Sabina Lawreniuk explains in The Conversation UK (25 April 2025).“We Escape to the Roof to Breathe”: Inhabiting Jordan’s Dormitory Migrant Labor Regime
"This article provides intimate insights into workers’ everyday experiences of inhabiting Jordan’s dormitory migrant labor regime. It uses illustrations derived from participatory mapping and drawing workshops with garment workers of diverse nationalities who live and labor in Jordan’s two largest clothing production zones. The mundane and embodied experiences of the dormitory—captured in the maps, drawings, and workers’ accounts that detail the spatial and material conditions of dormitory life—open up an immersive understanding of how life actually unfolds in a workers’ dormitory. In doing so, these materials expose some of the ways in which the labor control regime in Jordan’s garment industry expands from the factory shopfloors to the workers’ private living environment."
Katharina Grüneisl and Heba Zakarnah explore in Jadaliyya (15 March 2025), an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute.Hanging by a Thread—The Red Sea Blockade and Jordan’s Fragile Garment Industry"On a Tuesday morning, Farnaz and her Bangladeshi female colleagues crouched in a line against the crumbling back wall of their worker dormitory in Ad-Dhulayl—the sprawling town adjacent to one of Jordan’s largest industrial zones for export-oriented clothing production. It was April 2024, and the women should have been at work in the two-story factory across the road where they sew sports and outdoor clothing for large US brands like Timberland and The North Face. Instead, they were forced to take annual leave because their factory’s warehouses were empty. Similar scenes played out across Jordan’s industrial zones during the winter and spring of 2024. Ongoing attacks on military and merchant vessels, first launched by the Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement on November 19, 2023 in response to Israel’s brutal onslaught on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7, had hampered the transit of raw materials needed for the garment industry."
Katharina Grüneisl and Taher Labadi report in MERIP (Winter 2024), the Middle East Research and Information Project.Do we have enough clothes for the next six generations?"A huge quantity of clothing is produced every year around the world. But is so much made that there are already enough tops, trousers, skirts and all the rest to clothe humanity for decades into the future?That’s a claim that has been percolating around the internet recently, that there are already enough clothes for the next six generations. Tim Harford and Beth Ashmead Latham explore the source of this claim and, with help from Sabina Lawreniuk from Nottingham University, find that the evidence behind it is far from persuasive."
Sabina Lawreniuk discusses on BBC Radio 4's More or Less: Behind the Stats (9 November 2024).