Negotiation With Gender Norms and Relations at the Workplace: A Study on Women Garment Workers in Bangladesh

Introduction

Since 1970s global capital turned to developing countries in search of lower production cost by moving their manufacturing processes to these countries, which led to a new form of international division of labour. This progression accelerated during 1980s to 1990s assisted by regional trade agreements and by the formation of special economic zones for the manufacture of exports (Caleca, 2014; Collins, 2002). The relocation process and consequent shift in global division of labour remarkably happened in the world apparel, textile and garment production. Such development of transnational production arrangements was a profoundly gendered process, as the vast majority of new workers in the relocating industries were women (Collins, 2002). The global restructuring of the garment industry in recent decades is driven by the search for such labour which, for a variety of reasons that have been summarized as the ‘comparative advantage of women’s disadvantage’ in the labour market, has been mainly female (Elson and Pearson, 1981).

The fast growth of female workers into the labour force is termed in sociological discourse as the ‘feminization of labour’ (Standing, 1999). The feminization of labour force is a twofold process of increased participation in labour force by women as well as an increase in women’s entering in part-time, temporary, informal unregulated job with mostly poorly paid and unsecure employment arrangements (Crinis & Caraway, 2008; Standing, 1999), which is called ‘flexible labour’ (Hossain, Mathbor, & Semenza, 2013). Factories with flexible workforce recruits more workers when there is pressure for high production and reduce workforce when there is less volume of production. Because of limited job scopes combined with poverty, women often choose to work in global manufacturing industries even on a temporary basis. Socially constructed gender discourses of labelling women as ‘backward’ and their work as ‘un-skilled work’ and ‘naturalized work’, are frequently used by the employers to justify the exploitation of women’s labour with low payment (Caraway, 2005; Collins, 2002; Marchand & Runyan, 2000; Razavi, 2002).

Such feminization of labour, is a common trend happening worldwide in the apparel and garment industries. It is observed that the more developed the modern industry is, the more the labour of men gets superseded by that of women (Marx & Engels, 1888). In the 19th century cotton, textile, and clothing industries were overwhelmingly staffed by women workers (Rosen, 2002; Ross, 1997). In its modern form, the feminization of labour has turned into a major issue when the emerging Asian, Latin American and African textiles and apparel firms started recruiting huge numbers of young rural women. From the very beginning, textiles and garment industries were interested in recruiting women for their presumed ‘docility’, economic and social ‘backwardness’, ‘nimbleness’, and ‘submissiveness’ to owners--the patriarchal construction of women-- which is very useful to exploit them in terms of labour rights (Elson, 1983; Green, 1997). However, the ‘feminization of labour’ can be pronounced as a prospect for female labour participation and chance for empowerment (Richer, 2012). For women of many developing countries, feminized labour force in apparel industries creates the greater opportunities for rural poor women to be engaged in paid works which were previously restricted for them. In many cases, women’s engagement in factory work have carried some social transformation regarding women’s seclusion to public domain (Dannecker, 2002; Kabeer, 1991).