Paper Short Abstract:

By tracing the material progression of injury, this paper argues that 'fitness to work' in occupational health settings isn’t just a tool to measure bodily ability vis-à-vis work but a tool to maintain workers’ fitness just enough to keep them working.

Paper Abstract:

Occupational health systems interpret injury to determine worker’s ‘fitness to work’ and legal claim to compensation. The private-public occupational health system in Pakistan called PESSI is responsible for not just determining workers’ fitness to work but maintaining it for specific factory jobs. The semi-government system is responsible for providing healthy workers to private factories while implementing the country’s labor compensation laws. This is done by interpreting injury’s impact on work and changing workers’ work position or strengthening specific muscles that quickly enable worker to return to work. By tracing how a worker’s injury was interpreted at PESSI, I show how the process of maintaining his fitness kept him going between PESSI and his workplace. This movement between work and PESSI makes the injury heal unevenly, reoccurring often and impacting the workers’ body over time. At the intersection of disability studies and anthropology of work, I ask: what can the unstable character of injury reveal about ‘fitness to work’ as a tool for measuring bodily ability? How being in between work and care make hybrid identities of patient-workers? Therefore, by tracing the material progression of injury both at PESSI and at work, this paper argues that fitness to work isn’t just a tool to measure bodily ability vis-à-vis work but a tool to maintain workers’ fitness just enough to keep them working.