Do Bangladeshi Factory Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood in the Post-Sweatshop Era

Abstract

This article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the ‘sweatshop economy’ have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between ‘global’ and ‘local’ feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above — calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance — can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to ‘save’ women workers.

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi, Pakistan

“…Within India, whether women or men make up the bulk of the workforce varies according to region (De Neve 2005;Mezzadri 2014a), suggesting that cultural factors and local institutions may engender or inhibit the type and kind of women's participation in the formal or informal spheres of the apparel sector (carswell and De Neve 2013). In the two South Asian countries dominated by Muslim communities -Pakistan and Bangladeshthere is variation, yet again; in Bangladesh it is predominantly women (Kabeer 2004;Siddiqi 2009), while for Pakistan it is predominantly men who dominate employment in the manufacturing sector (LundThomsen 2013). Around 70% of garment factory workers in Pakistan were men prior to the GENPROM initiative (GENPROM Pakistan 2006).…”

“…And it is through a combination of these that worker subjectivities are constructed and articulated. It is this theme that we hope to explore in our article because what we found is the ways in which corporate social responsibility commitments of buyer(s) combine with global and national discourses around gendered participation to construct and articulate particular labor identities (see also Siddiqi 2009). 4 To discuss our findings, our fieldwork in Karachi, Pakistan is outlined next.…”

“…She talked about the increasing poverty rates that afflict Pakistani society, breaking down the traditional male breadwinner model and compelling other family members to find, supplement, or substitute income. In other words, despite the patriarchal contract, economic circumstances may propel a collapse of its idealized form and force women to become income earners -even among Muslim women (see also Rao 2014aRao , 2014bRuwanpura 2004Ruwanpura , 2006Ruwanpura and Humphries 2004;Siddiqi 2009). The implication of her intervention was that their group of factories was capitalizing on a dramatically changing economic situation, which was making women enter the formal labor market in Karachi.…”

“…Feminist scholars working on South Asia have frequently probed whether economic resources alone have the capacity to shape women's agency (carswell 2013;Rao 2014a;Siddiqi 2009). Moreover, Ali (2012), by specifically focusing on women garment sector workers' -as a subset of the working class neighborhood he studied -notes the challenges they face both on-and off-site.…”

A Sociological inquiry on women's well-being and waged-work

“…As the emphasis was placed on the emergence of non-class identities in the global era, emphasis in the literature has shifted towards exploring complexities in women's lives that cannot be charted under the subordination of women perspectives (Chua, Bhavnani, and Foran, 2000;Singh, 2007;Siddiqi, 2009). In its initial period, gender and globalization studies mostly focused on the exploitation of women by multinational capital and its ability to take advantage of female stereotypes associated with women workers: docility, nimble fingers, youth, often of rural origins from developing countries acceptance of low wages and poor working conditions (Lim, 1984).…”