“Fit to Work”: Repairing Injury and the Making of Bodily Ability in Industrial Pakistan

Ramsha Usman
Anthropology
UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation is an ethnography of industrial workers’ experience of disability, labor, and biomedical care in Pakistan, as they navigate their work and life after workplace injury. Workplace injuries have increased with the expansion of transnational investment and industrial activity in Pakistan. Investors have scrutinized the occupational health conditions while expecting increased industrial output. Notably, as injuries have increased, recorded rates of “disability” have decreased. I argue this is the impact of a combined biomedical and industrial regime where injuries are managed and treated to make workers “fit to work,” defined according to specific factory tasks, and shaped to meet occupational health expectations. My ethnographic research showed that this form of socio-medical fixing of bodies—which I call “repair”—often denied full rehabilitation or the status of being “disabled.” I trace workers’ navigation of “repair” on the shop floor, at the worker-welfare hospital, and at a labor union to highlight how workers’, doctors’, and factory staff’s definitions of an able body interact. Drawing on anthropological work on disability, labor, and care, I show how workers are made “fit to work,” focusing on how “ability” and “disability” as institutional categories and embodied experiences are produced through the management of workplace injury.