Social Protection as Technocratic Fix?: Labour Precarity and Crises of Capitalism after Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza Collapse

Abstract

After the 2013 collapse of Bangladesh’s Rana Plaza garment manufacturing building, the Rana Plaza Arrangement (rpa) provided work-injury compensation benefits to injured survivors and the families of those killed, funded by global apparel brands. This article draws upon qualitative interviews with international stakeholders—including global brands, activists, and the International Labour Organization (ilo)—who developed and implemented the rpa, and survivors who claimed compensation payments. We analyse the rpa as an experiment in transnational social protection, which attempted to recentre labour rights and state responsibility after three decades of neoliberal labour governance. Arguing that social protection can be a technocratic “fix” to restore and make tolerable an injurious economic system, we demonstrate the inherent paradox of attempting to integrate precarious labour into decent and dignified social protection. The rpa’s many failures suggest that state commitment to regulation and organized labour power are necessary ingredients for successful transnational social protection.

Reconfiguring labour and welfare in the Global South: How the social question is framed as market participation

“…What is at stake by such framing is the ‘hollowing out’ of political reasoning within public institutions (Bear, 2017) and the political will to address the precaritization of labour (Prentice and Sumon, 2023) induced by new dynamics of value extraction and intertwining crises (Fraser, 2014; Rydstrom, 2022; Lin et al, 2023). Above all, such framing contributes to the failure to recognize the need to collectively manage future uncertainties (Esposito, 2011), which has led to repeated financial crises that destabilize the very social foundations of livelihoods and wellbeing, with severe repercussion on labour, often in gendered ways (Walby, 2015).…”