Global Production Networks As Sites Of Worker Discontent: A Sociospatial Analysis Of Two Decades Of Anti-sweatshop Campaigns In The Global Garment Industry

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Subcontracted labour has long been paradigmatic in the garment industry, resulting in serious consequences for labour in terms of wages and conditions, security of employment, and power relations. Transnational outsourcing and offshoring have in the long term not only undermined traditional forms of trade union organising and collective bargaining associated with large, vertically integrated firms and state regulatory frameworks, but have also led to massive barriers that have hampered the emergence of trade unions. The organisational complexity of global production networks (GPN) provides a huge organising challenge for workers and their representatives who seek to pursue their causes on a broader socio-geographic terrain. Despite these barriers, global production networks are, as Neil Coe argues, ‘as much systems of embodied labor as they are interlinked systems of firms’ and thus each individual site provides a potential starting point for (collective) worker discontent. This paper will discuss, namely, workplace-centred contestations in global garments, and look at disputes that are initiated and rooted in particular sites but ‘escalate over space’. This includes struggles for a living wage, trade union recognition, stronger labour laws and rights, shorter working hours, the right to strike or demonstrate, health and safety conditions, safe transport from home to factory, housing, longer breaks, the pace and rhythm of work, severance payments, holidays and so on. The widening of the geographical range of protest provides workers and allies with a means to pressure (relatively) intransient actors, be it the direct employer, an export processing zone authority or the government. It is part of a body of literature that explicitly seeks to understand how labour operates as a spatial agent, and how workers and allies developed ‘strategies that shift the capitalist status quo in favour of workers’. However, rather than merely focussing on successful cases, which David Lier identifies as the bias of many of the earlier labour geography studies, this paper will not only be sensitive to both the strengths and limitations of single-site campaigns to advance social justice in global production networks, but will also attempt to place these forms of GPN discontent into broader spatial, conceptual and historical contexts.

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Merk Jeroen