The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

by Jason Hickel

A humanitarian catastrophe soon followed. The vast majority of the retrenched workers were women, many of whom had no choice but to turn to sex work to keep afloat. A survey of sex workers in the city of Manzini in 2005 found that most of the women were newcomers who had been fired when the textile factories closed. ‘We are not happy with the work we are doing but we have to make a living,’ one was quoted as saying; ‘the number of people working here is increasing at a high rate, which is evidence that people are desperate for money and there are no jobs.’ As one might imagine, this only added to Swaziland’s already crippling HIV/AIDS crisis. Indeed, much of the disease burden that Swaziland bears today can be attributed to the spike in women’s unemployment after 2005.