Social Justice in the Globalization of Production

Labor, Gender, and the Environment Nexus

Md Saidul Islam, Md Ismail Hossain

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137434012
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Md Saidul Islam and Md Ismail Hossain investigate how neoliberal globalization generates unique conditions, contradictions, and confrontations in labor, gender and environmental relations; and how a broader global social justice can mitigate the tensions and improve the conditions.

1

The Globalization of Production

With Tommy Kevin

The relation between human labor and the environment

From the beginning, it is part of the human condition to labor collectively and utilize the surroundings and its resources for survival and reproduction. Since the beginning, the dynamics among labor, gender and the environment characterizes the production and perpetuation of human social lives.

Prior to modern humans, there were documented cases of environmental degradation in pre-Homo sapiens societies. Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) experienced an unexpected population boom simply by throwing rocks to hunt and using fire to cook. They have been known to set fires to open dense vegetation for travel, to attract game animals and to drive animals for hunt (Richerson et al., 1991: 392). While the specifics of cooperation and competition varied among Homo sapiens populations, early hunter-gatherers lived in kinship bands and were known to cause ecological disaster through over-hunting and over-gathering. The first farmers over-farmed, leading to deforestation, soil erosion and species extinction. Flooding occurs frequently in the Yellow River region resulting in destroyed villages. In the Fertile Crescent (8500 BC), the Middle East region’s highly productive vegetation areas became deserts, and entire civilizations were wiped out (Diamond, 1997, 2005; Chew, 2001).

The human story contains certain recurring features in the cycle of expansion and social and environmental crisis regardless of the mode of production; that is, they live in social groupings and labor collectively to make use of the environment. Perhaps because it is often too effective in exploitation – be it of fellow human beings or of nature – excesses appear to be a trend in production based on the social collective. Solutions to the problems are typically either physical – by expanding into new frontiers when they have exhausted the natural resources of the previous area, conquering other groups of humans – and/or technological, with innovations in new tools leading to new methods of production. With environmental changes, hunter-gatherers gradually settled for horticulture. Sedentary collectives generate surpluses to produce innovations in culture and technology and through sociocultural evolutionary processes, gender dynamics shifted from rather egalitarian practices of hunting-gathering societies to the patriarchal arrangements of agrarian, and subsequently industrial, societies. Bands, tribes, chiefdoms, empires and nation-states either expand at the expense of others or experience downfall, amid differing forms. Such is the nexus among labor, gender and the environment. This nexus continues today – in the age of globalization – with more complex dynamics and varying outcomes.

From reflexive modernity to flexible accumulation

Production – how to make a living – drives both individuals and the social collective. A cornucopia of literature in the anthropological fields traces the sociocultural, economic, political and technological evolution of production from the earliest days to the present. For the sake of brevity, we shall focus on the most recent shift to the current dominant mode of production: the trajectory that shifted the characteristics of production from (industrial) development to (contemporary postindustrial) globalization (Islam, 2009).

Before the industrial order, the economy is a function of the society in question. Since the industrial revolution (1760–1840), which is based on the engines of production and consumption of goods and services, we see a peculiarity where society is made to serve the economy (Polanyi, 1944). Whereas in other types of society “economy, as a rule, submerged in ... social relationships” (Polanyi, 1968: 46), in the case of the industrial capitalist market economy “[i]nstead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic systems” (ibid., 57). The turmoil of current developments and social changes across much of the Third World stems from “Southern” societies being embedded in a global capitalist system in which their societies are made to serve the needs and interests of “Northern” economies, via an international division of labor. While the specific form has shifted somewhat with a change in political context, the essence of its unequal exchange mechanism remained. In the colonial era, mother states accumulated capital through extracting raw materials from the colonies on the cheap and returned the trade with higher-valued manufactured products, hence accumulating capital in the mother states at the expense of the colonies’ natural environment. Under the current global age, the newly industrializing nations (NICs) provide the site and labor for cheap production while the postindustrial nations control the design, services and investments inputs, hence accumulating financial and knowledge capital in the First World at the risk of environmental and workplace hazards in the Third.

While first modernity is used as the term for the breakdown of agricultural society in favor of industrial mode of production – and its implications to the changes in political, economic, social and cultural characteristics – in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens (1991) separately describe a second modernity, or “reflexive modernization”, as reassessing sociology as a science of the present by moving beyond the early 20th century conceptual framework and to provide a counterbalance to the postmodernist paradigm offering a reconstructive view alongside deconstruction (Beck et al., 2003) so as to reflect the transition from industrial to networked information society (Castells, 1996). Using this framework to analyze the global production system, Fordism of the late 1800s, where capital accumulates through breaking down production into simple steps along an assembly line so that large quantities of standardized, mass-produced items may be sold in the market, has been replaced by post-Fordist forms of production in the late 20th century. In this consumerist-geared mechanism, products are no longer homogenous, straightforward, or mass produced but contain a varying set of characteristics that are increasingly customized in the minute details so as to target differentiated sets of consumers through flexible specialization (Piore and Sabel, 1984) of producing, if necessary, small volumes of a wide and rapidly changing range of products.

In order to produce goods and services in ever-evolving and specialized conditions, neoliberal globalization is practiced through outsourcing, displacement, informalization and recolonization, where inputs beyond raw material (e.g., land, labor) are increasingly commoditized (Michael, 2008), the value of which is determined through the process of exchange rather than their use (Harvey, 1991), so that capital (i.e., financial, social, knowledge) is accumulated “flexibility”.

In the wake of this flexible accumulation under the conditions of neoliberal globalization (Munck, 2002; Smart, 2003; Harvey, 2005; Islam, 2013), the issue of labor has become both significant and challenging. While only a minority of working people today hold jobs that are well paid, where their fundamental rights are respected, and where they can enjoy to some extent social security in case of job loss, personal or family illness or other difficulties, the majority of them are faced with inhuman working conditions and are living in poverty (Dahan et al., 2011). “Good jobs are getting harder and harder to find and keep; while bad jobs seem to be getting worse even as they are more plentiful than ever” (Islam, 2008: 212). According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 39 percent of the world’s workforce is living in poverty (earning less than $2 a day) and 21 percent live in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 a day) in 2008 (ILO, 2010a). A majority of the workers are in the informal economy, which is mostly associated with low wages, unsteady job security and extreme conditions of labor exploitation. The gender wage gap is at the center as women are engaged in segregated sectors that are generally characterized by low pay, long hours and oftentimes informal working arrangements (Bulut and Lane, 2011; ILO, 2010b; McMichael, 2008; Islam, 2008; O’Brien, 2004). Despite these dire conditions, women need their jobs at global factories to survive. The precarious conditions and vulnerabilities of women ironically appear as an “advantage” for the capitalists’ continued accumulation, generating a paradox known as “comparative advantages of women’s disadvantages” (Arizpe and Aranda, 1981: 453). This juxtaposing situation of workers is not unique in a specific country, but rather a common feature of most developing countries that are connected to the global production system.

Globalization of production and the nexus

Supporters argue that globalization brings positive changes in the lives of women workers in various forms, such as expansion of employment opportunities leading to higher incomes (Barrientos et al., 2004; Razavi, 2001), subversion of century-old exploitative patriarchal relationships (Lim, 1997), an increase of self-awareness about rights and duties (Kabeer, 2004) and a shift in affirmative gender roles and value structures, as well as a reconfiguration of the public–private and production–reproduction dichotomies (Unni, 2002). Critics of neoliberal globalization, however, reject the claim of economic benefit to women resulting from economic globalization, stating instead that it is pushing women into even more vulnerable situations than they were in before (Elson and Pearson, 1981, 1997; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly, 1983; Acker, 2004; Standing, 2009). They argue that the entry of women into the paid workforce does not make any significant change in hierarchal gender relations, since a new sexual division of labor is created in factories. Working conditions in the factories are characterized by, for instance, extremely long hours, little training, absence of seniority payments, unhygienic work conditions, and little occupational and employment security. All of these in turn reduce the labor costs, leading to a profit haven for many multinational corporations (Jaggar, 2001; Acker, 2004; O’Brien, 2004). These critics therefore maintain that women workers are a vital resource for economic globalization and are subject to capitalist exploitation.

In Harvey (2005), developing nations are unable to transform into First World economies through internalized neoliberal mechanisms because exploitation is rampant. It examines how a neoliberalized, global, political economy benefits few at the expense of many, which has resulted in the recreation of class distinction through “accumulation by dispossession”. That is, how some groups of people (namely, the upper and middle classes of the First World and the elites of the Third) accumulate wealth, power and material possessions at the expense of disempowering and povertizing others (namely, the global masses) through the global economic order. Klein (2000) argues that manufacturing and industrial jobs have been offshored from developed countries (i.e., United States and Western Europe) to developing countries, particularly to export processing zones (EPZs). She highlighted that because normal labor laws and environmental regulations do not apply to sweatshops located within these EPZs, semi- and unskilled workers face exploitation through long working hours, dangerous work conditions, inhumane treatment and low wages, sometimes barely above subsistence levels. Under the new system, the companies no longer own the means of production nor manage the manufacturing process. The actual manufacturing of the physical goods is contracted out to factory and plant owners who are able to keep costs down by employing methods as described previously. Portions of the work can be further subcontracted with even greater cost savings albeit to higher degrees of worker exploitation at each level. With the manufacturing of the goods no longer under the purview of the corporations, they now focus heavily on branding and marketing, using the surplus monies generated by the cost savings of offshoring and contracting. Klein rationalized that the corporations are able to get away with these misdeeds due to two main reasons. First, the developing countries are trapped in a negative feedback loop where, in order to compete with other developing economies for foreign investment dollars, the countries had to offer cutthroat deals such as relaxing regulations and control. In addition, the corporation deals with only the contractor, and only prices are on the agenda. Micromanagement and law abatement are the concerns and legal liability of the contractor.

These polarizing trajectories in the existing literature, however, often obscure the extent to which labor practices at global manufacturing are just and fair, leaving little or no room for considering and enhancing labor justice. This book attempts to explore the relationship between labor and the environment in the context of globalization. Compounded by the feminization of marginalized Third World labor and the associated social problems that arose with said globalization, these three topics (labor, gender and the environment) and their dynamics in relation to production form the “nexus” through which we examine the global economic and social order of our times. Drawing on the social justice framework propounded by, among others, Amartya Sen (2009), we will unpack this critical nexus. In other words, we will investigate how neoliberal flexible accumulation generates unique conditions, contradictions and confrontations in labor, gender and environmental relations; and whether and how a broader global social justice can mitigate the tensions and improve the conditions.

Methodology

This book is based on a robust analysis of secondary sources found in various social science disciplines and a content analysis of “grey” literature (see Cadman, 2011: 21). This analysis has been substantiated by a number of primary researches conducted on the garment industry in Bangladesh, labor migrants in Malaysia and foreign domestic workers in Singapore. In addition, the authors, over the past decade, engaged and participated in discussions with various stakeholders related to the issue of labor from the global South to the North. Grounded largely in the discipline of sociology, social work, philosophy, history and economics, the book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the critical nexus of labor, gender and the environment in the globalization of production.

Study on the readymade garments in Bangladesh

A great deal of primary data, qualitative in nature, were collected through a robust study on the readymade garments (RMG) industry in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, during the period of October 2011 to June 2012. The Bangladesh RMG industry has been taken as an empirical site for this study for several pressing reasons. First, it’s a pressing example of global manufacturing that illuminates the global chain of production, feminization of labor and low standards of labor rights and benefits (Paul-Majumder and Begum, 2006; Rahman et al., 2008; Standing, 1999). Two recent RMG industrial disasters in Dhaka (a fire breakout killing over a hundred and a factory collapse killing over a thousand) highlight the precarious working conditions and significance of this study. Second, the RMG industry is the largest export-oriented industry (EOI) in Bangladesh generating about US$2 billion (about 80 percent) foreign exchange annually and the second largest in the world, in terms of RMG exports, after China. The growth of this industry over the years has therefore been exponential. While there were only 0.12 million workers employed in 384 factories during the year 1983–84 in Bangladesh, it has reached to 4 million in 5400 factories in the year of 2011–12 (BGMEA, 2013). Finally, the Bangladesh RMG industry is increasingly becoming a promising place – albeit with various challenges – for many multinational corporations after the rising labor costs in China and elsewhere (Wassener, 2011). In terms of operational flexibility and reduction of labor costs – two major considerations for neoliberal flexible accumulation – Dhaka remains an ideal place for multinational corporations (MNCs). Leading MNCs such as Walmart, Nike, Reebok, Levi Strauss, Disney, Li & Fung, Sears, Hallmark, GAP, Hasbro and TakaraTomy, Haines & Martinez, and Tesco import garment items from Bangladesh, linking the nation with the global commodity networks.

While Dhaka is the main hub of RMG manufacturing, its plants are congregated in different places around the city, and the labor rights situation varies from factory to factory (Hossain, 2011). Therefore, for empirical investigation, we purposively selected eight manufacturing enterprises, considering the size and location of the firms. For a credible representation, both large and small, export processing zones (EPZs) and non-EPZ areas were covered while drawing our sample. A methodological triangulation – an in-depth qualitative interview substantiated by ethnography, focus group discussions and a document search – was employed in this study to represent diverse stakeholders and to capture broad pictures. We conducted in-depth interviews with 71 respondents that include 32 factory workers, 16 employer/management staffs, 6 representatives from 6 workers’ unions (one from each union), 3 representatives from the government agencies (Ministry of Labor, Directorate of the Inspection of Factory and Establishment, and Bangladesh Export Promotion Zone Authority (BEPZA)), 2 representatives from Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), 2 NGO staff members working on the labor issues, 6 representatives from brand companies and 3 labor experts. The women workers, selected through snowball sampling for interviews, were between 18 and 45 years old and had experience working in the RMG industry for at least two years, demonstrating that they are “key informants” for interview.

For acquiring appropriate information, we used different interview schedules for each type of participant (e.g., workers, employers, union leaders). The interviews contained many semi-structured, open-ended questions dealing with various critical issues; for instance, whether and why the employers prefer to have women workers instead of men, what the current situation of worker rights and labor benefits is, to what extent they follow the international standards, types of problems and challenges women workers face at the workplace, in case of injustice whether and how workers voice out, and what roles different actors (i.e., state, employers’ association and unions) are playing and with what outcomes.

Respondents in each stratum were identified as “key individuals” for this study and therefore spoke with relative authority on the subject matters. Second, although a significant primary data was generated through in-depth qualitative interviews providing a substantial basis for this book, some ethnographic techniques in the forms of direct observation and conversation with local people added a significant value to this study. The researchers stayed six months in the research areas and spent a large amount of time engaging in informal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Globalization of Production
• 2  Labor, Gender and the Environment: Analytic Framework
• 3  Globalization, Gender and Labor Rights: Trends and Trajectories
• 4  Women in Employment: Local Dynamics, Global Pressures
• 5  Third World Industrialization: Women Workers between Exploitation and Survival
• 6  Globalizing Food and a Tale of Two Revolutions: Labor, Gender and the Environment
• 7  Migrant Labor: Conditions, Contradictions and Confrontations
• 8  Profit over Life: Industrial Disasters and Implications for Labor and Gender
• 9  The Global Treadmill of Production and the Environment
• 10  Conclusion: Social Justice in the Globalization of Production
• Notes
• References
• Index