This is a study of the contracting practices of lead firms, who are buyers of garments, in the global market. Based on a survey of garment manufacturers in three clusters in India it reveals the trend to falling margins, reduced lead times, etc. for these contracted suppliers. These contracting practices are shown to connect, often directly, with labour outcomes, such as low wages, high workloads and forced overtime, in supplier factories. Within a joint but differentiated responsibility between lead firms and garment manufacturers, it argues for the prime responsibility of lead firms to provide for adequate wages and reduce the pressure for forced overtime in supplier factories.

In the global production system, there is a division of labour, based on a division of knowledge between lead (headquarter) firms and contract suppliers. While lead firms have, so far, largely been located in the Global North, some countries of the Global South have advanced along to progress from supplier to headquarter firms. This paper studies the manner in which the skill requirement or educational composition of the workforce changes in this process of technological advancement. The countries studied are China, India, and South Korea with the United States of America (USA) taken as the comparator country. The paper starts with the overall trajectory of technological upgrading in these countries. It then analyses the ways in which firm-level research development (R D), taken as the indicator and driver of firms’ technology development strategies, is related to changes in productivity and the educational composition of the workforce. The paper shows that there is a broad positive correlation between the three variables, R D investment, labour productivity and educational composition of the workforce. It points to the need to advance this analysis to look at other workforce indicators, such as the gender composition, wages, the quality of employment and the nature of supervision. At a methodological level, the paper argues that it is necessary to look at the role of a firm within a global value chain (GVC) to understand the composition of its workforce.

In the absence of adequate social security for migrant workers, the recession forced the mass exodus of millions of circular migrants supported by their rural households of largely left-behind women. Our article looks at what happened after that. How did the returned migrants manage to survive and retain their capacity to work till they were required back in urban employment? This article argues that gendered rural households functioned as safety nets in the severe recession in the Indian economy which highlights the weakness in the state policy and lack of resources in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were safety nets not only for workers directly working in food value chains but also for reverse migrants. Overall, the recession did not just result in a temporary loss of income but also increased inequality and strengthened the oligopoly structure of the Indian economy.

Social work is a discipline envisaged to work with people inculcating their values, culture and traditions to bring about the development of the target groups. Hence it is needed for the social work training to be in a manner where the professionals are groomed to appreciate and work with people of different culture. One of the biggest challenges for social work practitioners is to come to terms with the role of theory in the practice of their discipline - a discipline that is fast-paced, but increasingly focused on dealing with one client at a time, and often reduced to a dyad emphasis in practice: that of client and worker. The paper attempts to identify the importance of cultural competency in social work education system paving way to respect and understand the various cultures and be professionals to cater to the need of the hour.