Sweatshop Regimes In The Indian Garment Industry

"Analyses the politics of production and labour control characterizing the Indian readymade garment industry since its entry into the global arena"--

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry's impact on workers' well-being and examines the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety.

The 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh, killed over a thousand workers and injured hundreds more. This disaster exposed the brutal labor conditions of the global garment industry and revealed its failures as a competitive and self-regulating industry. Over the past thirty years, corporations have widely adopted labor codes on health and safety, yet too often in their working lives, garment workers across the globe encounter death, work-related injuries, and unhealthy factory environments. Disasters such as Rana Plaza notwithstanding, garment workers routinely work under conditions that not only escape public notice but also undermine workers' long-term physical health, mental well-being, and the very sustainability of their employment. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry to examine the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety. Contributors analyze both the labor processes required of garment workers as well as the global dynamics of outsourcing and subcontracting that produce such demands on workers' health. The accounts contained in Unmaking the Global Sweatshop trace the histories of labor standards for garment workers in the global South; explore recent partnerships between corporate, state, and civil society actors in pursuit of accountable corporate governance; analyze a breadth of initiatives that seek to improve workers' health standards, from ethical trade projects to human rights movements; and focus on the ways in which risk, health, and safety might be differently conceptualized and regulated. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop argues for an expansive understanding of garment workers' lived experiences that recognizes the politics of labor, human rights, the privatization and individualization of health-related responsibilities as well as the complexity of health and well-being. Contributors: Mark Anner, Hasan Ashraf, Jennifer Bair, Jeremy Blasi, Geert De Neve, Saydia Gulrukh, Ingrid Hagen-Keith, Sandya Hewamanne, Caitrin Lynch, Alessandra Mezzadri, Patrick Neveling, Florence Palpacuer, Rebecca Prentice, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Nazneen Shifa, Dina M. Siddiqi, Mahmudul H. Sumon.

This book puts Indian garment workers and their organisations at the centre of the analysis. Taking the Bangalore export-garment cluster as a case study, the book explores the conditions that enable but also constrain the capacities of garment workers’ unions to build collective power vis-à-vis employers and thereby improve their conditions. Drawing on theoretical concepts from labour geography, relational economic geography, and Global Production Network (GPN) analysis, the book highlights, on the one hand, how the complex labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster poses manifold challenges and constraints for workers’ and unions’ collective agency. On the other hand, the book illustrates the various networked agency strategies that local garment unions in Bangalore have developed over the years to overcome these constraints by tapping into coalitional power resources from worker, consumer and labour rights organisations in the Global North. This book is therefore highly relevant for economic geographers and other scholars interested in dynamics of labour and development in GPNs as well as for unionists and labour rights activists committed to improving working conditions in the global garment industry. This is an open access book.

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