Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: Setting a new research agenda

Abstract

Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers' health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers' health and wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic research on garment workers across South Asia, we argue against a narrow, technocratic, and depoliticised emphasis on physical infrastructures and building safety, and advocate instead a more holistic and politically-engaged research approach to the everyday health and wellbeing of workers. A conceptual focus on health and wellbeing offers a window onto workers' employment experiences and reveals how routine work pressures, exhaustion and ill health are shaped by the dynamics of global supply chains, even well after workers have disengaged from these global circuits. Understanding how garment work affects workers' wellbeing and their prospects for a fulfilling life requires research that moves beyond the workplace and covers the entire life course.

Sufferings in silence: Violence against female workers in the ready-made garment industry in Bangladesh: A qualitative exploration

“…However, another important aspect this study revealed was that when various stakeholders were considering workplace health and safety, they put more emphasis on improving building safety issues such as good electric wiring, setting fire alarms and establishing fire protection doors. 52 , 53 Furthermore, pressure of production targets contributes to an abusive working environment and the government officials accepted that when the supervisors cannot cope with this stress, they may transfer their aggression onto the female workers. Thus, for the male stakeholders, violence at work appears to be an acceptable and appropriate measure to ensure that unrealistic daily production quotas are met.…”

Meaningful stakeholder engagement: Bottom-up initiatives within global governance frameworks

“…As a result, impact assessment processes tend to be designed and implemented under the dominating approaches of the organisations that drive the process rather than the communities that are affected. Hence operate under a more managerialistic and or potentially even depoliticized manner (Prentice et al, 2018). Jointly, this diverse literature underscores the need for bottomup driven approaches to providing knowledge for institutional investors to help them assess impacts and use their influence to exercise leverage with invested companies.…”

“…Based on reports of persisting problems, such as an increase in environmental justice conflicts and reports of business-related human rights abuses by business (Ejatlas, 2019, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, 2019), critiques have been levelled against such global governance frameworks. They are alleged to encourage an apolitical and technocratic interventions (Prentice et al, 2018), in turn supporting a 'de-coupling' of economic growth from ecological impact (Fletcher, 2017). Yet, global governance frameworks are here to stay, at least in the immediate future.…”

Garment worker rights and the fashion industry’s response to COVID-19

“…The increasingly globalized, multi-mediated landscapes of GPNs complicate capacities to implement hyper-localized systems of support. The financial hardships facing garment workers as a result of COVID-19 fall outside the remit of previous employment support schemes-real or imagined-as these focused only on measures for compensation in the context of workplace injury or death, further signaling a need for more nuanced understandings of wellbeing (Prentice et al, 2018). For example, the needs of garment workers are notably absent from brand press releases, and while they may be a part of private closed-door conversations as a result of pressures from campaigners, their needs in this time of crisis have yet to be addressed.…”