Dhaka, Sept. 4 -- COVID-19 has shown how some states, when motivated, can institute compassionate, sweeping and radical changes that remake society and its relations between workers and their organizations. However, integrating novel interventions into our everyday life demands that we think beyond the reactive impulse to address chronic problems.

When technology is used as a short-term fix to address what appears to be an immediate problem, it can mask the need for more sustained institutional reforms. We see such a tension arising in the case of e-payments made to workers in the readymade garments (RMG) sector in Bangladesh, a measure that appears to be benevolent and timely, but on closer examination reveals a range of conflicts that ...