Suchergebnisse

In this paper I discuss the work in Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment industry by focussing on the work process itself, on the moralities surrounding it as well as the spatial and temporal structures framing it. My aim is to show how relations of authority, inequality, gender and class are made on the shop floors of the garment industry by managers, supervisors and the workers themselves and how this "making" is shaped by demands from global corporations, i.e. the ever faster and cheaper production of garments. These demands result in extraordinary intensive and long work-days and in the spatial arrangements allowing for the tight control of the workforce, which garment workers describe as "garment-time" and "garment-world". I will argue that these notions of the industry's distinct world and time indicates its distinctly non-local, global character.

This article explores the relationship between labor unions and labor precarity in Bangladesh's garment industry. After a string of high-profile factory disasters—including the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building—Bangladeshi labor unions have played a central role in new global initiatives to improve factory safety. These initiatives have provided an opportunity for unions to influence the governance of labor standards in a context of low levels of factory unionization. We argue that such global initiatives have deepened an existing divide between the conciliatory stance of mainstream, politically connected Bangladeshi unions and workers' more radical responses to precarity. Militant protests have advanced workers' interests historically, but are increasingly delegitimized and subject to violent crackdowns. This article contributes to our understanding of the fraught relationship between precarious workers and traditional labor unions by showing that when unions devote themselves to the technocratic improvement of labor standards without confronting the structural conditions of precarity itself, workers can be made more vulnerable—a situation that becomes heightened in a context of fast industrial expansion.