Abstract
This article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the ‘sweatshop economy’ have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between ‘global’ and ‘local’ feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above – calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance – can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to ‘save’ women workers.
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Notes
This is a revised version of the keynote address delivered at a symposium on Neo-liberalism in South Asia: Gender, Labor and Culture organized by the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2004. I would like to thank the organizers and the audience for their comments on my presentation.
See Siddiqi (1991), Siddiqi (1996), Siddiqi (2000) and Siddiqi (2004).
Trying to present a more complex picture is an uphill battle. In 1999, I was invited to speak at a workshop at the University of Pennsylvania organized by the local chapter of United Students against Sweatshops. My refusal to recount the horrors of Bangladeshi factories and insistence on critically assessing the collusion between rights discourse and neocolonial relations of domination were met with a studied silence from an audience eager to ‘set things right’.
‘Memorandum of Understanding between BGMEA, UNICEF and ILO Bangladesh regarding the placement of child workers in school programmes and the elimination of child labor’. 4 July 1995.
Interview, Dhaka, 11 August 2008.
Interview with Nasimul Ahsan, Advocacy Chief, INCIDIN Bangladesh, 21 August 2008.
For critical analyses of micro-credit policies, see Fernando (1997) and Karim (2008).
See for example Amin et al. (1998), Begum and Paul-Majumder (2006), Hossain et al. (1990), Kabeer (2002), Kibria (1998). The literature on the garment industry is vast, and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Not all the news is dismal. In the intervening years, there have been improvements in key social indicators. In fact, Bangladesh has outperformed its neighbours in key social sectors, especially in primary and secondary education for girls. However, these statistics tell only a partial story. For details, see ‘Whispers to Voices: Gender and Social Transformation in Bangladesh’. Development Series, Paper No. 22. Dhaka: The World Bank, 2008.
Mike Davis (2004) argues that today's slums represent urbanization without growth and are the legacy of a global political and economic conjuncture.
Arguably, garment workers in Bangladesh have a fundamentally solid grasp of the exigencies and fluctuations of the global trade regime. Their social location – directly affected by global restructuring – gives them first hand experience of the workings of systemic power. They possess potential for what Chandra Mohanty calls epistemic privilege (see Mohanty, 2003: 515).
The timing of the pressure on Bangladesh raises some questions, however. One is tempted to speculate that something other than protecting the constituency represented by the AFL-CIO was at stake, since protectionist discourse in the US seemed to be focused on outsourcing jobs to India at that time. It could be a situation of competition between an established hegemonic power and emerging and potential challengers.
As Rehman Sobhan (2003) puts it: ‘How much is Bangladesh willing to pay to get access to US markets and what kind of rent will the US extract to allow duty free access?’.
Daily Star, Friday 26 March 2004.
In 2007, the AFL-CIO filed a petition with the US government seeking cancellation of GSP facilities because of alleged violations of national and international labour laws. The Daily Star 18 September 2007, 1
Interview with six leaders of garments workers’ federations, representing 36 unions, at the office of the NGO Incidin, 21 August 2008. Names withheld for confidentiality.
See The New Age, 24 May 2006.
Akter is a former child worker whose fiery personality and organizational skills drew the attention of the Asian-American Free Labor Insitute (funded by the United States Agency for International Development), whose task it was to organize workers in the garment sector in Bangladesh in the 1980s. She quickly became president of Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers’ Union (BIGUF), an organization formed with the financial support of the AFL-CIO. Other trade unions in the industry initially dismissed BIGUF as a front for advancing US trade interests, although its political legitimacy has increased somewhat over the years. Akter resigned from BIGUF several years ago, citing disenchantment with the lack of autonomy in her post. Her accounts suggest that BIGUF's activities within Bangladesh were dictated as much by political considerations in the US as actual conditions in Bangladeshi factories. Akter went on to found the Awaj (Voice) Foundation, a place with functions similar to those of BIGUF. I have heard Akter make this comment several times in public fora, most notably during a consultation on the future of the garment industry organized by a local think tank, the Centre for Policy Dialogue in 2003.
Siddiqi, fieldnotes, 1992.
The highly visible presence of hundreds of thousands of working-class women in spaces coded male, in a global industrial landscape that has marginalized male labour and destabilized gender hierarchies, also restructures the experience of masculinity, especially of subaltern masculinity. Arguably, women's bodies in public and at work are testimonials to male failure or inadequacy. The policing of (poor) women's bodies on the streets is carried out not by religious extremists – as prevailing stereotypes of national politics would indicate – but by those men who have been excluded from the economic circuit, from the promises of globalization.
The disciplinary regimes in these factories resemble the practices of modernity, self-regulation and internalization described by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality. For details, see Siddiqi (1996), Chapter Five. I am grateful to Shima Das Shimu of UBINIG's Sram Bikash Kendro for reminding me that workers in the bangla factories have much more flexibility with regard to their bodies and to their general mobility compared to those in the EPZ.
In relation to Muslim women, Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that rather than seeking to ‘save’ others (with the superiority it implies and the violence it would entail) we might better think in terms of working with them in situations that we recognize as always subject to historical transformation and considering our own larger responsibilities to address the forms of global injustice that are powerful shapers of the worlds in which they find themselves (Abu-Lughod, 2002: 783).
In her analysis of consumption practices in South India, Priti Ramamurthy argues that personal consumption experiences are always already transnational and contradictory, and that feminists need to interrogate the question of the subject in transnationality (Ramamurthy, 2003: 525).
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films
The Global Assembly Line (1986) directed by Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly et al., New Day Films.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nasimul Ahsan, Nazma Akter, Hasan Ashraf, Firdous Azim, David Ludden and Amal Treacher for their help with and comments on various drafts of this essay.
Additional information
I take my title from Lila Abu-Lughod's (2002) insightful and much-cited essay, ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’.
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Siddiqi, D. do Bangladeshi factory workers need saving? Sisterhood in the post-sweatshop era. Fem Rev 91, 154–174 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.55