Hybrid (un)freedom in worker hostels in garment supply chains

Abstract

Worker hostels or dormitories are common in labour-intensive industries staffed largely by migrant labour and have long been associated with exploitative practices. More recently, hostels have come under scrutiny due to accusations that they are used to restrict workers’ freedom in ways that are tantamount to modern slavery. Drawing on a qualitative study of a garment hub in South India where such claims have frequently arisen, we explore the conditions of freedom and unfreedom in worker hostels and how suppliers who run such hostels respond to competing expectations about worker freedom. Our findings show that hostels perform three interrelated functions: restriction, protection, and liberation, which together constitute a complex mix of freedom and unfreedom for migrant women workers that we term hybrid (un)freedom. As a result, we problematise the binary understandings of freedom and unfreedom that predominate in the modern slavery literature. We also develop a new way forward for examining freedom in the context of hostels that considers the system of relationships, traditions, and socio-economic arrangements that workers and employers are locked into and which prevent meaningful improvements in the freedom of women workers.

Freedom, work and organizations in the 21st century: Freedom for whom and for whose purpose?

“…Four of its five articles report on qualitative studies into specific contexts for the expression or experience of freedom. 7 They include community agroecological work sites in the Philippines (Jack et al, 2022), women’s business network blogs (Villesèche et al, 2022), hostels in a garment production cluster in India (Crane et al, 2022), and a set of three alternative forms of organizing in the UK (Dahlman et al, 2022). The fifth article is a conceptual exploration of the mechanisms of the regulation of academic labor in the neoliberal university (Fleming, 2022).…”

“…Their analysis illustrates how, even when the status quo is rejected and more liberating forms of organization are being developed, practices can be appropriated from within or outside of the organization in ways that prevent worker freedom from emerging. In addition, the undermining of freedom happens at worker hostels, as uncovered by Crane et al (2022). Their research on migrant women workers living in hostels in a garment hub in South India illustrates how hostels restrict movement outside the hostel, as well as autonomy and self-determination inside the hostel.…”

“…Several articles in this special issue also elucidate ways that freedom at work can be experienced in perhaps unexpected ways . The research of Crane and colleagues (2022), for example, reveals that garment worker hostels can offer certain freedoms for the women that they might not otherwise obtain if they had stayed in their villages with their families, where unfreedom ensues from arranged marriages, conflicts within the family, and patriarchal oppression. By contrast, at the hostel, in spite of the restrictions imposed upon the women but freed from their previous socio-economic conditions, the women experience freedom in their enjoyment of communal recreation and creation of opportunities for self-improvement.…”

“…Regarding the context-specific nature of freedom, Crane and colleagues (2022) problematize the binary understanding of freedom versus unfreedom that prevails in the literature on unfree labor and modern slavery. From the perspective of female garment workers, their families, employers, and other stakeholders, the authors argue, freedom is not experienced in terms of either/or, as either present or absent, but as a hybrid of (un)freedom: the experience of simultaneously being free and unfree.…”

“…Villesèche and colleagues (2022) illustrate how women’s online business networks, seen primarily as venues for women to share strategies for seeking equality in the neoliberal status quo, can also be political arenas for broaching the realization of emancipatory ideas and strategies. Finally, the research of Crane et al (2022) conveys how female garment workers in hostels experience a hybrid (un)freedom that simultaneously comprises elements of both unfreedom and freedom, each of which needs to be seen in the context of the gendered nature of prevailing social and economic relations.…”