Abstract
Social Justice in the Globalisation of Production: Labor, Gender, and the Environment Nexus is a well-written, engaging and insightful book by Md Saidul Islam and Md Ismail Hossain on the theme of neoliberal globalization. The book discusses the precarity and uncertainty associated with neoliberal globalized production including the changing contours of international divisions of labour and capital accumulation. The interesting aspect of the book is that it situates the problem around globalized production within the society–environment relations discourse, and highlights how contemporary environmental issues are not isolated, and result from a complex interaction of ideas, and processes between the global North and the global South. Although the subject of globalization of production and gender has attracted attention from scholars for a while now, the gap this book fills is linking these core aspects with environmental implications of increased globalized production. More importantly, the book also links these concerns with how much of the burden of degraded and polluted environment is borne by societies in the global South. This dimension links well with the current climate change discourse and negotiations where powerful countries of the global North have pushed for countries like China and India to have binding targets for reduction of carbon emissions. The book helps us to see how the globalizing project of ‘development’ has created a distinctly dichotomous pathway: whilst the makers of the ‘rules of the game’ through the Bretton Woods institutions benefit from ‘capital accumulation’ and are largely located in the global North, those who must implement these regulations experience worsening environmental quality as well as the erosion of workers’ rights and are mostly based in the global South.
From the start, the book establishes a firm foundation by providing a comprehensive background on the subject of neoliberal globalized production and the different approaches that could potentially provide an analytical framework to address this complex, yet inter-related, subject of labour, gender and environment. I think that the compilation of the different theoretical approaches on the triangular nexus of labour, gender and environment is quite useful, potentially for those who are interested in researching this subject, just in terms of getting a head start in how to approach this complex and multi-layered subject. The five different approaches, namely political economy, feminist political economy, global value chain, human rights and social justice, are spelt out very succinctly in the book, and the authors settle for the social justice framework. The aspect of the social justice framework, which the authors use, is Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’. The methodology is largely ethnographic in nature, and grounded largely in the disciplines of sociology, history, economics, politics and philosophy. Secondary data literature and findings from other countries are also used to buttress the findings of the book.
The three central arguments that this book makes are: (a) gendered labour employment in the globalization of production offers paradoxical outcomes, wherein the opportunity for enhancing the economic stake of women in the globalized economy comes with costs at many levels; (b) the limitations around (re)presentation through any kind of unionization activities results in the (re)production and perpetuation of the exploitative conditions under which workers in this globalized ‘world factory’ subsist and survive; and (c) for social justice to become a reality in the ‘treadmill of globalized production’ both state and non-state actors such as the workers, employers, state, environmental NGOs, consumers and social justice organizations have to work in tandem, in a way that restores labour, gender and environmental justice.
The book has many strengths. First, the rich empirical data from different countries in the global South (including Bangladesh, India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Kenya) on topics as wide ranging as the ready-made garments industry, the Green and Blue revolutions of industrialized agriculture and shrimp aquaculture, and migrant labour for care services, highlight the common thread of tensions and contradictions associated with neoliberal globalized production. Second, through the insightful discussion of the specific case study of the Rana Plaza disaster of 2013 in Bangladesh—the biggest industrial disaster in modern times—the authors underscore the informality, precarity and viciousness of the exploitative work conditions in the global South. The authors also highlight how erosion of workers’ rights and pollution-creating tendencies are not necessarily different in the contexts of export processing zones (EPZs) and non-EPZ factories, or large or small firms. In the former, this is the case even though ‘codes of conduct’ of fair business practices exists as part of standard operating procedures. However, the nexus between ruling political class, labour officers and industry owners often enables a convenient bypassing or overlooking of processes that accentuate the precariousness of worker’s rights and conditions of work. Overall, the different case studies in this book provide a structural and institutional understanding about free markets, and their contentious operations and outcomes. The other aspect which the authors effectively demonstrate is how, since the rise of neoliberal globalization, the international division of labour and the industrial trajectories of developing countries have changed dramatically—largely in ways which can be considered as anti-labour, anti-women and anti-environment.
The only area where I had difficulty in feeling convinced about the argument on social justice is the inadequate explication of Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’—the analytical framework on which the authors base their arguments. The question that I am concerned with is in what way Sen’s ‘capabilities approach’, which largely focuses on ‘the individual’ and individual capabilities (agency, ability and freedom to choose and be), enables workers situated in the neoliberal globalized production to deal with the unequal power relations and entrenched interests of the corporate sector? Although the authors on different occasions underscore the need for collective bargaining with the involvement of all possible stakeholders and actors, they, however, do not fully tease out the argument. At different points in time, the individual is conflated with the collective and vice versa. Some of the literature that could potentially augment the argument is the critique and extension of Sen’s work, such as in the ‘collective capabilities approach’ (Evans, 2002; Ibrahim, 2006; Stewart, 2005). ‘Nexus’ thinking from geography could be the other set of literature that could provide the necessary lens to see the various inter-connections and (the existing and potential) trade-offs between labour, gender and environment, in ways which are fair and just (Stringer et al., 2014; Leck et al., 2015). What this book misses completely is the use of child labour in most of the industries under consideration which, I think, could further embolden the argument in favour of social justice.
Overall, the book is a good read. The major achievement of this book is the intelligent mix of theory and empirical case studies along with a reasonable blend of qualitative and quantitative data that provides a succinct understanding of the core issues around globalization of production and its socio-ecological consequences. The book is an important addition to the literature on gender, globalization and development, environmental sociology, international development, economic and development geography amongst others.