Struggle in the garment sector

Abstract

This article considers what struggle means for the international garment worker of today. The typical worker will most likely be a woman who is experiencing exploitative and harsh conditions in a sector where, internationally, employers generally seek to crush independent trade unionism. The article briefly reviews the garment industry's history, including advances made to working conditions by the mid-twentieth century, and the erosion of working conditions that has been associated with capital's relocation and the internationalisation of production from the late 1970s onwards. It outlines the challenges of becoming a trade unionist and engaging in struggle under the very real threat of intimidation and violence. Article: In 1909, Clementina Black and Nancy Meyer published The Makers of Our Clothes-a detailed first-hand account based on twelve months' research into conditions in the clothing workshops of Britain. At the end of their study, intended as a contribution to the movement for Trade Boards for the sweated trades, they wrote that 'to go among them [women garment workers] is to be at the same time gratified by a deepening sense of human worth and oppressed by the weight of human burdens' (Black and Meyer, 1909: 11). Little has changed. Today, more than a century later, conditions in clothing workshops in Britain and around the world are as bad as ever they were. This article considers what struggle means for the garment workers of today in the overtly hostile conditions that face activists and trade unions in the international garment sector. It begins with a brief review of the garment industry's history and notes the advances that had been made by the mid-twentieth-century as a result of unionisation and state regulation-improvements in working conditions that have since been deliberately rolled back as part of capital's relocation and internationalisation of production. The article then briefly considers the structure of international supply chain as a context for garment workers' struggle, before considering case examples from India which highlight typical conditions facing workers wherever this industry settles.

Employment Relations Past, Present and Future: Demise or Resurrection in India?

“…Contemporaneously, within ER literature, much of the substantial intersectional ethnographic work done and published is primarily done by western scholars such for instance to name a few Jean Jenkins (2013, 2020), Jenkins and Blyton (2017), Alessandra Mezzadri (2017), Mark Anner (2019) and Indian scholars working in western universities such as Smitha Radhakrishnan (2020, 2011) on the Indian IT industry and Asiya Islam (2020) on Indian women workers in malls.…”

Uneven Development, Uneven Response: The Relentless Search for Meaningful Regulation of GVCs

“…2020; Jenkins 2013). For example, in 2018, at a first tier clothing factory in India, supplying major US and American brands, workers identified as having spoken to a local trade union were dragged in front of other workers by the management team, who then incited them to beat the trade union sympathizers as people whose activism would close the factory down (Jenkins 2020a). In this case, exposure through an independent investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium resulted in action by the brands supplied by the factory, yet to that point neither the state nor the standard voluntary corporate systems of auditing had addressed systemic violation of rights to freedom of association.…”

“…Examples of transgressions are legion and appear in tier one firms with relatively close connections to the lead firm just as much as in second and third tier workplaces further down the supply chain (e.g. Anner 2019; Hammer and Plugor 2019; Jenkins 2020a,b; Jenkins and Blyton 2017; Kuruvilla et al . 2020; Mezzadri 2014).…”

Rights without remedy: the disconnection of labour across multiple scales and domains

“…Solidarity, arguably the foundation for the assertion of rights-based claims by workers, is hard won in an industry that traditionally employs socio-economically disadvantaged groups across a range of production relations, from wage employment in large factories to informal piece-rate and homework (Hale and Wills, 2005). Irrespective of place, workplace labour violations are endemic to the sector (for example, Anner, 2015a;Jenkins, 2020;Hammer and Plugor, 2019;Mezzadri, 2017;Tartanoglu, 2018). 'Weak' states and 'areas of limited statehood' (Bartley, 2018a: 39) have been implicated in the creation of a transnational 'governance gap' that allows such conditions to persist.…”