Abstract
‘Global Displacement: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean’ by Marion Werner elucidates a spatially contested, timely and rich account of ‘uneven development’ through the experiences of Caribbean garment workers, whose lives are at constant crossroads of ‘dominance and subordination’ (Massey cited in Werner, 2016: 1), euphoria, hope and hopelessness of ‘global production as a stage of development’ (p. 6). The contested lives of the garment workers from across different geographies shed light on how they are being ‘transformed’ and reproduced in the ‘global production arrangements’ within the emerging Caribbean garment industries beginning in the 1980s and onward. In doing so, Werner foregrounds the concepts of ‘uneven development’ that explains transformation of the Caribbean economy not just as a ‘process of capitalist accumulation’ but how the accumulation ‘reproduced spatial unevenness’ of livelihoods across the Caribbean. The central aim of the book is to examine the ‘contemporary process of restructuring of the global factory’ (p. 5) that also underscores the centrality of colonial influence on the garment industry in the Caribbean. To this end, Werner deftly navigates through the spatially divergent lived experiences of the garment workers whose lives are constantly shifting through policy, process and socio-cultural ‘geographies of work’ marked by the uncertainties of migration and demand for cheap labour (Taylor and Rioux, 2018).
In situating the case for migration and cheap labour, Werner discusses the politicization of the garment industry in the Caribbean region in chapter two. She argues that the (re)structuring of the garment industry in the Caribbean takes place as a result of ‘flexible production’, politics and ‘neoliberal trade reforms’ (p. 47). Her argument is grounded in the context of development that explains how the effects of globalization of the garment industry are merged with the local economy and livelihoods in the Caribbean. In this vein, Werner charts through the history and influence of local and global politics aimed at accumulating capital that not only creates but also reproduces ‘livelihood strategies’ for garment workers in the Caribbean region. She also explains the effect of ‘urban modernity’ on poor and unskilled Caribbean garment workers who migrate to Haitian border trade zones for better jobs. Yet, they manage to get only the jobs that are available to them by the garment factories which come ‘at a high cost’ to the workers. These jobs, Werner argues, do not provide any benefits nor do they have any long-term contracts. Without any job security, these migrant workers often fell victim to ‘messiness’ of their lives that are ‘not of their own choosing’ (p. 7).
In chapter three, Werner critically interrogates the contested view of livelihoods of the Caribbean garment workers through the lens of gender and feminism. She introduces the uneven lives of female garment workers who come across harsh realities of exploitation by the industry and their diminished euphoria of finding ‘independence’. Here, Werner grounds the experiences of female workers with gendered labour discourses and gender politics. She discovers in light of her own research experience that gendered labour is just not about hiring labour but how ‘meanings and practices’ about labour are perceived in the ‘local network of production’ (p. 56) in the Caribbean culture. She also discovers that these ‘meanings and practices’ of labour are often unexplained and unexposed because they ‘appear as either natural or outside the proper domain of capital production’ (p. 56). Werner contends that gender politics is inherently masculine in Caribbean culture which also remains unexplained. However, Werner’s research shows that this inherent masculinity is transferred into labour practices for firms to maximize their profits by way of hiring male workers who seem to be a better fit for specialized work. For example, Werner discovers that a number of men in the garment industry often occupy higher paid jobs while women occupy jobs in the ‘lower rungs’ and experience ‘more rapid retrenchment’ (p. 182).
The gender perspectives of female garment workers are more profound in chapter four, in which Werner underscores the sources of reproduction and contestation of their lives through the lens of race and ethnicity and peculiar spatial dimensions of perceived social status due to the ‘whiteness’ and/or lack of it in Caribbean culture.
In chapter five, Werner places the ‘process of global expansion’ within the border towns of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to explain the challenges of the geography of workers. In doing so, she foregrounds a colonial lens to underscore the contested lives of the garment workers that are being produced and re-produced as a result of the expansion of global production networks. The global expansion of networks, Werner argues, is associated with ‘patterns of exploitation’ and ‘domination’ necessary for capital accumulation which is produced through ‘sociospatial’, social relations, class struggles and uneven development. In this view, ‘coloniality is materialized spatially’ (p. 135), forcing economically and socially marginalised Dominican workers to migrate to a new trade zone in culturally contested neighbouring Haiti. The emergence of the new border trade zone, as Werner argues, is designed to promote ‘global production arrangements’ through ‘social and spatial divisions of labor’ (p. 6).
The transition of global production network from the Dominican Republic to Haiti represents the policy of ‘strategic blending of economic and social development’, which Werner explains through the lens of the ‘discourse of transition’ in chapter six. It is argued that rather than connecting the border trade zones between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the global production expansion sees an opportunity for capital accumulation through the transitioning of the production network into another city that opens up new opportunity for capital accumulation. In particular, Werner highlights the emergence of Haiti as a zone for development following the 2010 earthquake. One of the key points here is the colonial mind-set of the foreign donors. The development discourse in post-earthquake Haiti is focused on the Eurocentric development model that promotes ‘bilateral trade preferences’ between the recipient countries and the donor agencies. These practices exclude ‘efforts to transform the low-wage, export-oriented model into a … sustainable one’ (p. 157). However, Werner argues that despite the restructuring of the global production network in the border trade zones, the ‘collective struggles’ of the garment workers remain central to understanding how they navigate and reconstruct their livelihood strategies.
Chapter seven further highlights the ethical and political dimensions of uneven development through the epistemological lens of ‘crisis’ and puts it in the context of the Caribbean garment industry. To explain these, Werner problematizes uneven development by challenging the Euro-centric development policy and practices through a chronology of economic crisis events in the Caribbean. These events have had a ‘destabilizing effects’ on the lives of the garment workers. Werner also offers feminist and post-colonial views of crisis in which she challenges the social practices and the process of ‘neoliberal restructuring’ (p. 185). The ethical dimensions she foregrounds are an attempt to dislodge the ‘Eurocentric framing’ of crisis and the centrality of colonial domination of the ‘transnational production’ network that produces uneven development in the Caribbean.
Werner’s critical interrogation of uneven development through the discussion of the Caribbean socio-economic, cultural, and political discourses is thorough but it could have been sharpened had she juxtaposed Caribbean contexts with the epistemologically contested concept of urban informality. In chapter four she discusses informality of the garment workers’ lives that has resulted due to ‘rapid urbanization’ and ‘weak industrial wage’ (p. 89). The overall narratives of Werner’s informality seems to be ‘romanticizing’ (Iveson and Ruddick cited in McFarlane and Waibel, 2012) the marginal lives of the garment workers. An examination of ‘epistemological demarcation’ of urban informality which can be put to ‘work in different ways and contexts’ to think through the spatially contested and ‘urban development debates’ (McFarlane and Waibel, 2012: 3) could have further enhanced Werner’s arguments of uneven development in the Caribbean. Furthermore, the marginality of the garment workers could have been explained through an emergent yet contested lens of ‘precarity’ (see Bhan et al., 2018; Marques, 2018; Strauss and McGrath, 2016) and ‘precarious employment’ that interrogate various forms of job ‘insecurity’ and exploitation, particularly experienced by migrant workers and immigrants (Strauss and McGrath, 2016: 200).
Further, while Werner describes the lived experiences of the garment workers through ‘gendered geographies of uneven development’ which arises from ‘economic informalisation’ (Simone, 2018: 266) in the Caribbean, yet, these narratives could have also benefitted from the discussion of power relations not just among the garment workers, factory owners and global power brokers but also among the socially constructed, complex and often unexplained social hierarchies in the Caribbean. To this end, foregrounding discussion by the likes of Tom Brass (2014), Michel Foucault (1973), and Audrey Kobayashi (2009) about power dynamics and representation could have unravelled the discourses of uneven development and neoliberal practices in the Caribbean that affect the poor garment workers whose lives are inseparable from the incorrigible demands of the global production networks.
The narratives of contested development of global production networks in the Caribbean garment industry illustrates a timely and ongoing need for interrogating and challenging the capitalist accumulation process and how uneven development affects the lives and ‘everyday practices’ (p. 181) of the garment workers in the global South. Hence, Marion Werner’s book should pique the interest of academics from various disciplines such as geography – political and human – development studies, anthropologists and development economists, because it is an excellent resource for ongoing discussions and debates on development and global production networks in the global South.