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Ever since recession and trade liberalisation led to the demise of Caribbean garment production in the 1990s, Trinidadian garment workers have seen job opportunities shrink and increasingly enter a casualised, informal sector. This chapter explores the devolution of garment work from factories to workshops and workers’ homes in relation to state-led policies to combat unemployment and poverty through microenterprise development. The chapter argues first, that microenterprise development has had a depoliticising effect on labour struggle; second, that a felicitous discourse of enterprise culture presents the rewards of self-employment as superior to wage employment; and third, that the transformation of factory workers into home-based micro-entrepreneurs succeeds by concealing women’s uncompensated domestic labour. By drawing attention to the neglected relationship between global post-Fordism and state promotion of microenterprise, I show how they are mutually reinforcing in ways that obscure labour politics.
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