Prentice R and De Neve G (eds.),Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers (2017)

Reviewed by: Shamel Azmeh, University of Manchester, UK

More than five years have passed since the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, which caused the death of more than 1100 workers. Despite intense academic, policy, and corporate initiatives and debates in this period, the wider issue of working conditions in global value chains (GVCs) remains largely unresolved (Anner et al., 2013; Lund-Thomsen and Lindgreen, 2014; Posthuma and Rossi, 2017). Questions about causes, responsibilities, legal frameworks and responses remain largely unanswered at both a national level and an international level. Is this an issue that should be left to national governments with international support through capacity building in areas such as labour inspection? Or should it be part of the global trade architecture through inserting strong labour rules in the trade regime? Or is a stronger mechanism at the International Labour Organization the preferred venue? Or should this issue be tackled by ‘private governance’ through policies of global corporations such as codes of conduct?

As these debates continue in academic institutions, the global machine of production and consumption continues, resulting in forms of more routine exploitations to millions of workers in many parts of the world. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop: Health and Safety of the World’s Garment Workers edited by Rebecca Prentice and Geert De Neve aims to highlight this latter form of exploitation. The volume, as the editors put it, aims to move the discussion beyond the public outcry that follows disasters such as Rana Plaza to the everyday health and safety of garment workers. The aim of the book is to provide a political analysis of health and safety in the garments industry, though critiquing depoliticized approaches to health and safety in GVCs.

The book provides an important contribution to discussions on health and safety in the garments industry and, more broadly, to debates on working conditions in GVCs. Overall, the book contributes to the growing body of literature that questions the recent portrayal of private governance as a solution to poor working conditions in GVCs (Locke, 2013). While Bangladesh is used as the starting point, and is the key focus of analysis, the discussion is relevant to debates beyond Bangladesh and, indeed, beyond the ‘global south’.

The first part of this book offers three contributions on the issue of labour standards in GVCs. Jennifer Bair, Mark Anner and Jeremy Blasi provide a comparative discussion of the historical parallels between the garments industry in Bangladesh and the garments district in early 20th century New York. Following the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York in 1911, two factors were key in achieving vast improvements in working conditions in New York. The first was the role of the government, under pressure from workers and their allies, to implement meaningful reforms to worker protection laws. The second was a binding agreement between the industry union and the lead firms in the industry, known as the ‘Jobbers’ agreement’. The authors compare these two factors to the situation in Bangladesh today, particularly by examining the National Action Plan adopted by the Bangladeshi government, and the Accord on Fire and Building Safety agreed between global firms sourcing from Bangladesh, trade unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Similarities exist between the two cases. Nonetheless, contrary to the role of the government in case of New York, there are still concerns about the willingness and ability of the Bangladeshi government to implement serious reforms and enforcement of workers protection. Similarly, whilst the Jobbers’ agreement in New York focused on a wide range of issues related to working conditions, the Accord in Bangladesh has a narrower focus on health and safety. Building on these historical parallels, Bair and her co-authors argue that the Accord represents a massive step forward and, if successful, it could usher a new paradigm for the enforcement of global labour standards.

A different take on the issue is offered by Florence Palpacuer in her chapter. In addition to her critique of voluntary regulations on working conditions, she questions the role of global advocacy networks in promoting and diffusing such soft law instruments. Over the last two decades, such advocacy networks have focused a large part of their efforts on global corporations and often worked together in partnerships with corporations. Such partnerships with corporations, Palpacuer argues, had the ‘paradoxical effect of increasing the symbolic power of global lead firms as regulatory institutions that nevertheless remain devoid of democratically controlled mechanisms both in decision making and in accounting for the social outcomes of their activities’ (p. 79). The price of such partnerships, Palpacuer argues, has been relinquishing the power to intervene in the trade cycle through tools such as strikes and boycotts which weakened such advocacy movements and allowed corporations to respond through market-friendly CSR tools.

The problematic nature of the focus on global corporations becomes more evident going through the following chapter by Caitrin Lynch and Ingrid Hagen-Keith. Examining the case of School House, a US-based collegiate apparel company committed to ‘ethical clothing’, Lynch and Hagen-Keith show the difficulties facing ‘ethical retailers’ in a cut-throat marketplace such as apparel and how the different elements of what constitute ‘ethical’ (eco-friendly, locally sourced, living wages) makes it difficult for companies committed to those values to survive and expand.

The second part of the book offers three contributions that aim to go deeper into the structural factors shaping working conditions in GVCs. The editors argue that poor working conditions are not an exception but are reproduced at different manufacturing sites as a result of value capture and appropriation by actors higher up the value chain (p. 13).

The first chapter in this section by Patrick Neveling places the issue of health and safety within wider global processes that underpinned the expansion of export processing zones (EPZs). In what Neveling calls ‘the global EPZ regime’, health and safety has largely meant the health and safety of capital rather than that of labour. Capital mobility and industrial relocations are central to this EPZ regime especially in labour-intensive industry such as garments. In this political economy of EPZ, Neveling concludes, ‘it has and it will be impossible to arrive at standards that are sufficient to guarantee the long-term health and safety of workers in the textile and garments industry’ (p. 141). For that to happen, the economic rationale for these zones as tools for industrialization and development needs to be put to rest.

Mahmudul Sumon, Nazneen Shifa and Saydia Gulrukh move the discussion to Bangladesh showing how the depoliticization of public debates on industrial accidents is leading to a narrow focus on compensation. Drawing on direct involvement in these debates and campaigns, Sumon and colleagues show the problematic aspects of solely focusing on financial compensation and of ignoring the wider issues of justice and responsibility, including impunity to factory owners of the negligence that often lead to such disasters.

The final chapter in this section by Alessandra Mezzadri focuses on the Indian garments industry, particularly home-based work. Mezzadri argues that disasters in the industry should be analysed as part of the labour regime of the garments industry. From this perspective, she argues that such disasters are hardly exceptional and are shaped by the harsh and precarious labour relations. Through examining home-based work in Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, Mezzadri shows how attempts at implementing health and safety measures are undermined by the overlap between productive and reproductive time. Informalization, through the use of home-based work, is part of the externalization of social responsibility over health and safety. Mezzadri concludes that voluntary self-regulation of business has failed in its goals and is now part of the problem by delaying the discussions on the need for a binding national or international regime.

The final part of the book provides three contributions. The contributions by Kanchana Ruwanpura and Sandya Hewamanne move the discussion to Sri Lanka, a country that is widely considered a success story in regard to health and safety in the garments value chains. Ruwanpura shows us that health and safety issues are not only about building safety and facilities (the availability of on-site medical clinics for example) but about the negotiations, contestations and resistance that emerge around health on the shop floor. Understanding those issues is crucial to examine the impact of the relentless production regime on the physical and mental health of workers. Similar conceptualization of health and safety of workers is offered by Hewamanne. Examining the garments industry in Katunayake free trade zone, Hewamanne argues that disregarding issues such as cultural backgrounds, gender norms and immediate living environment ‘results in meaningless rules and regulations that have little impact on the workers once they leave the factory’ (p. 226). Lack of health and safety extends to issues such as stigma, discrimination and marginalization and extends beyond the factory space.

Hasan Ashraf brings some of this wider understanding of health and well-being suggested by Hewamanne and Ruwanpura into the case of Bangladesh. Ashraf argues that initiatives such as the Accord and the Alliance lack a broader understanding of everyday health and safety issues. These initiatives ‘depoliticise health and safety by removing it from the global dynamics of outsourcing and capitalist labour regimes, which comprise highly uneven relations of power and leverage’ (p. 251). Such technocratic approaches produce top-down solutions that are imposed on Bangladesh with limited contribution by workers in shaping these solutions, he argues.

Overall, through the different contributions, ‘Unmaking the Global Sweatshop’ offers important insights on the issue of health and safety in the garments industry. The book successfully shows the need for a broader understanding of the issue of health and safety beyond the crucial but insufficient focus on building safety and design. The book shows the need to go beyond focusing only on the physical aspects of health and safety in the workplace into a broader understanding of mental and physical health and well-being in the workplace and beyond. The perspective offered by the book will be useful for a wide audience. In addition to researchers and students working on labour issues, the book can be useful for trade unionists, NGOs and labour activists dealing with the issue of labour in GVCs.