Labour Control and Union Agency in Global Production Networks

Since the 1990s there has been a lively public and academic debate about the precarious and often hazardous conditions under which millions of workers, most of them women, labour in Asia’s export-garment factories. This debate has promoted public and private regulation mechanisms initiated by actors from the Global North, such as Codes of Conduct or – more recently – new supply chain laws as solutions for improving working conditions in the garment industry. However, far less attention has been paid to the role of workers in garment producing countries as agents capable of improving their own working and living conditions. This book puts Indian garment workers and their organisations at the centre of the analysis. Taking the Bangalore export-garment cluster as a case study the book explores the conditions that enable but also constrain the capacities of garment workers’ unions to build collective power vis-à-vis employers and thereby improve their conditions. Drawing on theoretical concepts from labour geography, relational economic geography, and Global Production Network (GPN) analysis, the book highlights, on the one hand, how the complex labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster poses manifold challenges and constraints for workers’ and unions’ collective agency. On the other hand, the book illustrates the various networked agency strategies that local garment unions in Bangalore have developed over the years to overcome by these constraints by tapping into coalitional power resources from worker, consumer and labour rights organisations in the Global North. The findings presented in this book shed new light on the ‘labour control architectures’ underpinning GPNs by highlighting how place-specific labour control regimes emerge from manifold intertwined processual relations at the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the GPN through which labour control is exercised. Secondly, this book reveals the complex and mixed effects that South-North alliances constructed by garment workers and their allies in consumer countries can have on local unions’ capacities for building bargaining power – from opening up spaces for collective bargaining to effectively undermining unions’ capacities for building associational and organisational power. This book is therefore highly relevant for economic geographers and other scholars interested in dynamics of labour and development in GPN as well as for unionists and labour rights activists committed to improving working conditions in the global garment industry. This is an open access book.