Abstract
Breaking with analyses of the sweatshop that focus on shop floor dynamics between management and labor, Alessandra Mezzadri makes a convincing argument to conceive the sweatshop as a regime. The boundaries of this regime have to be cast widely in order to analyze how the sweatshop is made as a joint enterprise across global, regional, and local dynamics; urban and rural contexts; across industrial and non-industrial settings; through a range of free and unfree social relations; and mobilizes differences that pre-exist capital–labor dynamics. These themes already point to a much wider contribution of this book, namely, that of a very differentiated Marxist-Feminist political economy that draws on the works of Jairus Banaji, Henry Bernstein, and Silvia Federici.
The underlying research is based on recurrent fieldwork visits over almost a decade to various parts of India, from Delhi, Ludhiana, Bareilly, Jaipur, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, to Tiruppur and Mumbai, which represent different productive and commercial strongholds of the India garment mall, as Mezzadri calls it. Such extensive fieldwork has allowed insights into different strands of garment production, regional differences and dynamics of decentralization, as well as how work and labor relations are organized around non-factory labor and its realms of social reproduction.
At the beginning of the research, therefore, lies a fundamental acknowledgment of empirical and theoretical differentiation. As garments are marketed and sold in a range of markets, they are also produced and traded across other, fragmented, markets and brought together in composite production circuits. Equally, various stages and processes of production of a specific product occur across vastly different work settings. The underlying garment may be produced in a factory by migrants who, informally employed, circulate across factories and regions. More specific tasks, such as embroidery, might be “backshored” (as Mezzadri terms the decentralization of production to rural areas; see Chapter 4) and be dominated by forms of own-account and home-work, often organized by agents who not only circulate intermediate goods but also organize and control production through practices of neo-bondage (e.g., the payment of advances). Each form of employment draws on social relations and realms of reproduction in a different way in subjugating labor while, at the same time, externalizing the costs of social reproduction (until, after a few years, the laboring bodies are finally worn out and ejected back into rural areas).
Three points of this theoretical framework deserve specific attention. First, Mezzadri focuses on processes of surplus extraction, which can come in “multiple forms of exploitation, combinations of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ labor, as well as complex interplays between production and circulation” (p. 6; emphasis in original). This point is central to the analysis as it allows taking into account the many facets of disguised wage labor in India. Second, processes of accumulation draw on such differences within the workforce, meaning that contemporary processes of proletarianization result in different classes of labor rather than a unified class. Third, as various parts of the workforce labor under different social relations, their differential anchoring in realms of reproduction both establish and reinforce differences that play a crucial role in the way surplus is extracted. Following feminist writers, the research emphasizes how broader structures of oppression mediate processes of working-class formation and shape the capital–labor relations in the sweatshop regime. In this respect, Mezzadri argues that the counterposing of exploitation and commodification is a false dichotomy (pp. 74, 107–10), which is forcefully underlined through her thorough analysis of the interwoven dynamics between production and circulation, between industrial and commercial capital.
The historical and theoretical nuances of this framework prove valuable in analyzing the detailed dynamics of the garment sweatshop. For example, Mezzadri strongly qualifies any notion of the sweatshop representing a one-way Western import and, instead, emphasizes the multiple “lords of the sweatshop” (p. 4). While, historically, India’s garment industry has been strongly driven by commercial capital, the latter inter-linked with productive capital in multiple ways, often aiming to control the sphere of production in order to retain control in the sphere of exchange. Mezzadri identifies four co-existing trajectories of capital that combine production and circulation (pp. 128–30): the continued resilience of putting-out systems (characterized by the domination of circulation over production as regards surplus extraction); the progressive primacy of industrial over commercial capital (in which accumulation along a more commercial route was limited); backshoring in order to maintain profitability in the face of competitive pressures (requiring manufacturing capacity as well as a key role of commercial capital); and hybrid forms that eschew any clear label.
A revealing insight into the complex social relations as well as the complexities of the fieldwork is that “employers rarely know the exact number of workers in their factories. Instead they always know the number of machines they possess . . . due to the fact that employers own the machines but ‘not the work’” (p. 137). This, again, underlines the importance of analyzing sweatshops as composite realities, to appreciate the heterogeneity of actors, and to differentiate the functions of contractors and brokers in particular. It is the latter who connect factory and non-factory realms, inter-link functions of production and circulation, and perform interlocking practices of exploitation across the spheres of credit markets, labor markets, and reproduction. Looking at the organization of embroidery work in Bareilly, Mezzadri shows how contractors are able to construct women as low-skilled, cheaper workers as they are secluded in the household through practices of purdah.
The analytical concern with how labor is made ready to work constitutes a key line of argument, connecting with the way the body is depleted in the production process as well as how the latter is fundamentally linked with the sphere of reproduction. The immense corporeal price paid—directly at work from back pain, allergies, exhaustion, and chronic fatigue to severed fingers and loss of eyesight, as well as through workers’ living conditions, such as informal housing in colonies, slums, or the contractor’s unit itself—is analyzed in the context of class and gender structures that coalesce into differentiated forms of unfreedom: “[U]nder harsh forms of patriarchy, women are always socially unfree; both when they are the ultimately ‘free’ (read dispossessed) factory workers, or when they are locked into relations of petty commodity production” (p. 102–3).
The Sweatshop Regime makes an important contribution to research on the dynamics of the garment industry in India. Both its sharp political–economic analysis and its sociological depth provide the foundations for a critique of lead firm–driven corporate social responsibility. For example, seeing that intermediaries not only fulfill crucial functions with regard to the circulation of goods but also shape and manage a good deal of the productive dynamics, attempts to cut out the middleman fall short of a progressive labor-centered strategy. However, the significance of this book extends far beyond a differentiation of the India garment mall as it impressively draws out the interplay of production and circulation, sub-contracting, industrial and non-industrial work, unfree forms of labor, and social reproduction. Mezzadri’s analysis becomes even more poignant for analyses of work and employment relations in the global economy when she argues that the sweatshop is not the absence of industrial modernization but that “the sweatshop regime already is our industrial modernity” (p. 188; emphasis in original). The audience of The Sweatshop Regime, therefore, reaches far beyond specialist researchers on India; it should be core reading, across disciplinary boundaries, for anyone concerned with the political economy of contemporary work and employment, or the political economy of development and globalization.