Alessandra Mezzadri, The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hbk £75 (also published in India, available on Amazon c. £13-20).
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The massive expansion of the world market over the last thirty years has seen hundreds of millions drawn into it as workers, with the extension of global commodity chains and production networks, and the establishment of new sites of accumulation across the globe. This has been a process of proletarianization in a broad sense, as individuals, families and households have lost the ability to survive without access to wages. At the same time, it has not led to the creation of a simple two-class society in which an homogeneous class of free wage labourers - 'free' in the double sense of being able and obliged to offer themselves for work for a wage - face an equally homogeneous class of capitalists who extract profit (surplus value) from workers through continuous revolutions in the process of production that raise productivity and profits, and force their competitors to do likewise or go out of business. This is most obviously the case with the gendered division of labour, in which women, despite increased participation in the labour market, bear and raise children, and take primary responsibility for domestic tasks associated with the replenishment of labour power (the physical capacity to work) from day to day. It is reflected also in the fact that the majority of the world's workers are still to some extent in the 'informal' economy, variously minding livestock, cultivating small plots of land, working on their own account in precarious occupations that barely afford them a living, performing 'piece-work', often in their own homes, at the very end of chains of outsourcing distant from the most productive factories, or carrying out labour-intensive tasks in small workshops under the control of merchants or 'petty capitalists' of the kind common before and during the emergence of large-scale industrial production. So it is impossible to understand the world market, or the increasingly dominant politics of global competitiveness that shape it, without looking simultaneously at the 'spheres' of 'production' and 'reproduction' (which are everywhere part of a single complex, without fixed or clearly demarcated boundaries), and exploring the intricate manner in which capitalist enterprises are organized, embedded in specific material and social contexts, and connected in a variety of different ways to households, communities, and local and global markets. This is nowhere more the case than in India, which is home to the largest number of informal workers in the world, and second only to China in its contribution to the expansion of the world market over the last three decades.
These themes are addressed in this study of India's rapidly expanding garment industry, a key sector of its economy with a very long history, but also with significant new export-led growth since 1990. It is therefore essential reading. It provides a thorough, detailed and illuminating introduction to the garment industry itself, and in doing so it tells you a great deal about the working of the world market. It draws on an excellent broader literature on the political economy of India by Jairus Banaji, Jan Breman, Grace Carswell, and Barbara Harriss-White in particular (references below). It offers valuable critiques in relation to narratives of modernization, concepts of 'modern slavery', and especially practices of corporate social responsibility, 'codes of conduct' and ethical consumerism (166-9, 182-4, and Conclusion). And above all, by mapping the garment industry across India as a whole, it provides rich insights into the ways in which the politics of global competitiveness works in this very important case. Mezzadri develops the concept of the 'sweatshop regime', exploring in turn global commodity chains, the principal commodities produced, the difference between North Indian and South Indian production structures, the roles of regional capitalists, merchants, and brokers, and the consequences for the labouring body. Her great strength is that she presents production across the country as a whole as a single, complex, and differentiated totality, integrated in turn into the world market, and argues that the 'sweatshop regime' cannot be understood without grasping the way in which it is articulated across the realms of production and reproduction in ways that reflect the specific historical, material and social circumstances of local industrial trajectories. 'Despite being subject to the universal laws of capital,' she says, 'the sweatshop creates and reproduces a world of difference' (72).
Mezzadri defines the 'sweatshop regime' as 'a complex system of labour subjugation and social oppression establishing a strong interrelation between different clothing "things" and the people who make them across multiple (factory and non-factory) spaces of work; organized in a joint enterprise set-up and strongly managed by multiple global, regional and local masters; banking on a complex matrix of social differences and patterns of labour unfreedom spanning across both productive and reproductive realms; and implying greatly depleting effects on the labouring bodies of the workers involved’ (2). She attributes the difference within unity that it exhibits to the physical and social materiality of production - starting with the material properties of specific garments, and the 'spaces of work and people composing and inhabiting the sweatshop', then encompassing both the broader networks of oppression that 'cross realms of social reproduction that are not only confined to the daily survival of the workforce but that also include workers’ place of origin', and are 'mediators of processes of working-class formation as well as constitutive elements of processes of accumulation', and 'the interplays between processes of production and circulation of commodities as well as people' (3-4). Within this inclusive framework she addresses the passage of 'labouring bodies' through the sweatshop (here understood as the garment industry as a whole) and documents the depletion they suffer through the life cycle of entry, engagement in the labour process within it, and exit. The book builds systematically towards the excellent analysis, presented in Chapter Six, of 'The Body and the Sweatshop', and it demands to be read as a whole.
Mezzadri's focus, then, is mostly on the complex processes through which cheap labour is produced and reproduced in the 'highly informalized, chaotic settings' (6) beyond the large foreign-owned factories that are increasingly show-cased in isolation and promoted as models of corporate social responsibility. Some of the variety she describes arises from the nature of the product - so for example the richly embellished and embroidered ladies wear produced in and around New Delhi, some of it at the highest end of high fashion, lends itself to small workshop production, in which the most skilled work is done by casual or temporary male 'circular migrants', primarily from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who retain a connection to the land and return annually to work on it; women tend to work as thread cutters in centralized workshops, while a complex, hierarchical chain of sub-contracting and outsourcing reaches out into the periphery of the region, with men dominating adda work, and women paid less well for work constructed socially as 'less skilled'. At the bottom of the hierarchy, these are Muslim women working from home, as in Bareilly and its environs ('the very bottom of the "joint enterprise" called sweatshop', 142), combining this with domestic tasks, and earning as little as half the otherwise fairly uniform regional wage. Other regional centres in the North produce print-based garments (Jaipur), woollens (Ludhiana), and cheap nightware, underwear and kidswear (Kolkata) - all with predominantly male labour, and in the latter case in particular, in a merchant-dominated putting-out system featuring a myriad of tiny 'cottage' units. Conversely, women workers predominate in the factory-based system of the South, in Chennai, Bangalore and the 'T-shirt town' of Tirrupur, although they make up no more than 15 per cent of the garment industry workforce as a whole. These are the locations of mass production of basic items (taking jeans as an example, assembly consists primarily of sewing seams in sequence once the material is cut, and so lends itself to a simple division of labour on an assembly line of individual sewing machines in a single location); in Chennai, production was 'feminized' in the early 1980s, with pay reduced at the same time, after a series of strikes by the then predominant male workers. Feminization remains selective, while the practice of housing young migrant women in employer-run hostels or 'dormitories' as in China and Vietnam is increasingly prevalent, with contracts routinely terminated shortly before the five-year point at which social benefits kick in, and at the bottom end workers are effectively bonded labourers, kept on very low pay for three years, at which point (if they reach it) a lump sum is paid.
Against this background, Chapters Four and Five explore the local commodity chains and production networks run by 'regional lords' (local capitalists, merchants and large retailers) and connected by brokers (contractors, sub-contractors, and 'jobbers'), showing how the sweatshop is 'effectively created at multiple levels and scales by pressures simultaneously shaped by the behaviour and strategies of a complex and highly differentiated group of actors' (106), with industrial and commercial capital mutually embedded (110). Local suppliers themselves engage in 'backshoring' - setting up their own production chains in ways that go beyond sub-contracting to re-organize the production process and create new industrial spaces, with merchant capital playing a significant role. In Mumbai, in particular, virtually only low-value backstreet workshops to which merchants put work out remain, as the larger exporting producers have mostly relocated to Bangalore or other centres, keeping only their headquarters in the city. Mezzadri describes this process as the crafting of an 'All India commodity chain', in which local capitalists take on a role 'strikingly similar to that of global buyers'; and large local retail chains such as Westside and Trent adopt similar policies, in alliance with global firms (122). Meanwhile, over half a million predominantly male casualized and unregistered migrant workers in the city, with no access to social security, produce for the domestic market in a system managed by labour contractors (124). All in all, industrial and commercial capital cannot be considered as separate, nor is the relationship between them invariable: some merchants do become industrialists, opening factories in what might be regarded as the classic pattern of transition, but at the same time 'putting-out' systems are resilient and continue to be reproduced, especially in relation to domestic markets; other industrial capitalists exit from direct production and move back, as in the case of Mumbai, to a commercial role; and in another variation, mixed and 'hybrid' forms emerge, characterised by the 'co-existence and co-determination of mercantile and industrial strategies' (130).
While Chapter Four examines strategies adopted by local capitalists, Chapter Five turns its attention to workers and the specific channels through which they are 'contracted in' to the highly decentralized and fragmented production system described, and work is contracted out. Mezzadri describes the informal corridors along which partly finished garments flow out to the periphery, and workers move to and from urban centres of production, profiling the labour contractors, 'jobbers' and brokers who manage the flow of commodities and 'labouring bodies' and thereby extend the spatial boundaries of the sweatshop (134). Most brokers are not just intermediaries who could easily be removed from the system: 'In factory realms, labour contracting functions as the key working mechanism through which the management of labour is decoupled from that of production. In these contexts, contracting involves the recruitment, supervision or organization of groups of workers inside the factory premises, in exchange for a commission on each of these workers. In non-factory realms, instead, labour contracting enables the subsumption of given economic activities into the orbit of a far wider production circuit. Here, contracting involves the full organization of some ancillary, labour-intensive economic activities, outside the factory realm' (136-7). In out-contracting, some brokers are petty capitalists who advance credit to subsistence producers, and through it 'labour discipline is not only interlocked across multiple [i.e. labour and credit] markets, but it is also anchored to both realms of production and reproduction' (141).
Mezzadri explores in detail the case of Bareilly, where many garments are finished by home-based workers. The industry here is new in its primary orientation towards the export market, and the much larger numbers employed than in the past, but it draws at the same time on established social structures and especially gender relations, and may even tend to reinforce them. Advances of wages or credit and materials are used to tie workers to big contractors, often working through local sub-contractors as intermediaries. But the most skilled male workers avoid advances where possible, as they prefer to retain mobility and autonomy, while the poorest female workers do not receive credit either because contractors 'hardly need to attach these workers via credit': 'Their remote geographical position and experience of patriarchy are already very potent devices at [sic] labour control. In this sense, these poor women home-workers are the least likely to be made ‘unfree’ via credit-based interlocking practices. However, this is only because they are already subject to patriarchal unfreedom, which reinforces their exploitation in labour markets' (154).
In fact, then, the organization of labour turns out not to be so chaotic after all. It exhibits a clear if complex hierarchical structure similar to that achieved in a more formally contractual manner in more advanced economies, in that the labour force is structured into a minority of core workers and a less secure or entirely casual majority, here consisting of a lower temporary or casualised layer, and a stratum of home-based family units and individual women workers. In both cases, this achieves both the minimization of wage costs, and sufficient flexibility to vary the level of production at short notice, a requirement that in India has become pressing as the boom that began in the 1980s first drew waves of new entrants into the industry and extended production networks out into the periphery, then gave way to instability and fluctuating demand from 2007-8:
'The network must be stable enough so that production could immediately start once orders arrive. However, the same network must also ensure the easy expulsion of workers during lean season, and when orders dry up. This dual need is satisfied through the deployment of combinations of different typologies of labour, subject to a fairly different employment strategy. On the one hand, skilled workers, who represent the core of contractors’ business, must be retained at all costs. In order to keep them busy throughout the year, during lean season many contractors engage in domestic production. Domestic markets are massively expanding in the
subcontinent; they pay higher rates than export, although they only guarantee limited volumes. Export-based contractors increasingly deploy these markets as a safety net to minimize the risks of engaging in global markets. On the other hand, non-core workers, instead, must be expendable, and easily retrenched' (155).
The labour contractor, then, 'performs, paradoxically, a very modern function': ' He disarticulates the management of production from that of labour; he participates in reproducing the segmentation of the production process and its polarization in core and ancillary activities, and he organizes parts of the production process in full. Most of all, he further develops commodity chains and production networks whose flexibility is inexorably centred on making labour cheap across an increasing variety of spaces of work and realms of production. Today, this contractor is hardly only a remnant of a traditional past, but rather also an agent of a neoliberal future, no less than the myriads of head-hunting agencies increasingly crowding our supposedly more "formalized" labour markets' (156).
This, then, is how many of the clothes you see for sale are produced. And on the basis of a survey of 300 factory and 70 non-factory workers in and around New Delhi (the NCR, or National Capital Region), Mezzadri concludes by documenting the effects of the sweatshop regime on the bodies that labour in it and are consumed by it (see further Mezzadri and Srivastava, 2015). Capital here 'can consume workers' bodies without major concerns for profitability. After all, upon the depletion of some, others can be made available at the same cheap rates' (161). As Mezzadri points out, then, capital still takes no account of the health and length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so; and where it can, it 'externalizes' the cost of reproduction of the workforce, pushing it out onto households and families which accordingly become sites of depletion (169), whose ultimate source is the world market.
Over 90 per cent of the 370 workers surveyed were from rural areas; over 70 per cent still owned some land in their place of origin, and 43 per cent considered this a crucial part of their overall livelihood income (170). Circulation between the city and the countryside on an annual basis goes along with high levels of mobility within the NCR - 60 per cent had been in their current place of work for less than a year (171). Workers live in colonies close to the main industrial areas or rent rooms in nearby slums, and in all cases, 'five to eight labouring bodies generally share a tiny living space for the whole period in which they are hosted in the metropole and deployed in its sweatshop' (172). As regards non-factory based workers, 'once regularity of employment – guaranteed only in 11 per cent of cases – is taken into consideration, own-account, allegedly self-employed workers individually earn a very similar income than [sic] that of the migrant wageworkers labouring in micro-units. Only female home-workers ... systematically earn significantly less (less than half, and in some cases, less than one third) than other categories of non-factory labour at work at the periphery of the NCR industrial formation' (174). Only a quarter of all surveyed garment workers have access to emergency medical facilities or routine medical check-ups through their employers; only 40-50 per cent of those in factories have access to Employee State Insurance and the Provident Fund. Mobility and the lack of portability mean that over 80 per cent declare to have no entitlement either to injury compensation or retirement benefits: 'In non-factory settings, we had to explain what we meant with work-related benefits during interviews. None of the workers is covered under any scheme' (175). As regards average working hours, 'the majority of workers – 51 per cent of all workers in factories and 67 per cent in workshops – work for 10–12 hours per day. One-third of sweatshop workers employed in workshops even works 13–16 hours per day. In ‘peripheral’, non-factory spaces of work instead, labour intensity changes based on patterns of un(der)employment. Circular migrants always work more than 12 hours per day, while female home-workers at the bottom of the sweatshop regime work far less, as their time is claimed by reproductive activities' (176). Workers suffer from back pain, eye-strain and loss of eyesight, allergies and exhaustion; fainting on the shop floor is commonplace; and 'very few labour past the age of 30':
'Findings from our surveys indicate that 58 per cent of factory and workshop labourers were between 21 and 30 years of age, while
12 per cent were younger than 20. Only 21 per cent was above the age of 30, and a staggeringly low 5.9 per cent above the age of 40. Workers above the age of 50 were less than 2 per cent. Generally, in fact, this handful of older workers can mainly be found in supervisory positions. Also in non-factory, peripheral settings, the average age of the garment proletariat was quite young, with only 6 per cent of workers – generally own-account workers – older than 40. This means that the industrial experience remains only a temporary, transitory moment in the lives of garment workers' (177).
Labouring bodies, in short, are 'a sort of "human waste" the sweatshop regime disposes of incessantly' (178), and corporate approaches to labour standards and ethical trade initiatives sit perfectly comfortably in a tightly demarcated space within this system, and help to perpetuate it.
This is a fine book. The text is clearly written and virtually free of misprints (I found one on p. 141). But Mezzadri has been let down by the failure of copy-editing to pick up occasional errors in English, which can obscure meaning or even produce the opposite of the sense intended (as with 'all but' for 'anything but', e.g. pp. 161 and 168). Perhaps these and similar small things can be put right in a paperback edition, which would in any case be very welcome.
References
Banaji, Jairus. 2010. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
Bremen, Jan. 2002. The Labouring Poor in India: Patterns of Exploitation, Subordination, and Exclusion. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Carswell, Grace. 2013. ‘Dalits and Local Labour Markets in Rural India: Experiences from the Tiruppur Textile Region in Tamil Nadu.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 325–38.
Harris-White, Barbara. 2003. India Working - Essays on Society and Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mezzadri, Alessandra and Ravi Srivastava, eds. 2015. Labour Regimes in the Indian Garment Sector: Capital-Labour Relations, Social Reproduction and Labour Standards in the National Capital Region (NCR), Final ESRC Report for the Project ‘Labour Conditions and the Working Poor in China and India', London: SOAS, at https://www.soas.ac.uk/cdpr/publications/reports/file106927.pdf
These themes are addressed in this study of India's rapidly expanding garment industry, a key sector of its economy with a very long history, but also with significant new export-led growth since 1990. It is therefore essential reading. It provides a thorough, detailed and illuminating introduction to the garment industry itself, and in doing so it tells you a great deal about the working of the world market. It draws on an excellent broader literature on the political economy of India by Jairus Banaji, Jan Breman, Grace Carswell, and Barbara Harriss-White in particular (references below). It offers valuable critiques in relation to narratives of modernization, concepts of 'modern slavery', and especially practices of corporate social responsibility, 'codes of conduct' and ethical consumerism (166-9, 182-4, and Conclusion). And above all, by mapping the garment industry across India as a whole, it provides rich insights into the ways in which the politics of global competitiveness works in this very important case. Mezzadri develops the concept of the 'sweatshop regime', exploring in turn global commodity chains, the principal commodities produced, the difference between North Indian and South Indian production structures, the roles of regional capitalists, merchants, and brokers, and the consequences for the labouring body. Her great strength is that she presents production across the country as a whole as a single, complex, and differentiated totality, integrated in turn into the world market, and argues that the 'sweatshop regime' cannot be understood without grasping the way in which it is articulated across the realms of production and reproduction in ways that reflect the specific historical, material and social circumstances of local industrial trajectories. 'Despite being subject to the universal laws of capital,' she says, 'the sweatshop creates and reproduces a world of difference' (72).
Mezzadri defines the 'sweatshop regime' as 'a complex system of labour subjugation and social oppression establishing a strong interrelation between different clothing "things" and the people who make them across multiple (factory and non-factory) spaces of work; organized in a joint enterprise set-up and strongly managed by multiple global, regional and local masters; banking on a complex matrix of social differences and patterns of labour unfreedom spanning across both productive and reproductive realms; and implying greatly depleting effects on the labouring bodies of the workers involved’ (2). She attributes the difference within unity that it exhibits to the physical and social materiality of production - starting with the material properties of specific garments, and the 'spaces of work and people composing and inhabiting the sweatshop', then encompassing both the broader networks of oppression that 'cross realms of social reproduction that are not only confined to the daily survival of the workforce but that also include workers’ place of origin', and are 'mediators of processes of working-class formation as well as constitutive elements of processes of accumulation', and 'the interplays between processes of production and circulation of commodities as well as people' (3-4). Within this inclusive framework she addresses the passage of 'labouring bodies' through the sweatshop (here understood as the garment industry as a whole) and documents the depletion they suffer through the life cycle of entry, engagement in the labour process within it, and exit. The book builds systematically towards the excellent analysis, presented in Chapter Six, of 'The Body and the Sweatshop', and it demands to be read as a whole.
Mezzadri's focus, then, is mostly on the complex processes through which cheap labour is produced and reproduced in the 'highly informalized, chaotic settings' (6) beyond the large foreign-owned factories that are increasingly show-cased in isolation and promoted as models of corporate social responsibility. Some of the variety she describes arises from the nature of the product - so for example the richly embellished and embroidered ladies wear produced in and around New Delhi, some of it at the highest end of high fashion, lends itself to small workshop production, in which the most skilled work is done by casual or temporary male 'circular migrants', primarily from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who retain a connection to the land and return annually to work on it; women tend to work as thread cutters in centralized workshops, while a complex, hierarchical chain of sub-contracting and outsourcing reaches out into the periphery of the region, with men dominating adda work, and women paid less well for work constructed socially as 'less skilled'. At the bottom of the hierarchy, these are Muslim women working from home, as in Bareilly and its environs ('the very bottom of the "joint enterprise" called sweatshop', 142), combining this with domestic tasks, and earning as little as half the otherwise fairly uniform regional wage. Other regional centres in the North produce print-based garments (Jaipur), woollens (Ludhiana), and cheap nightware, underwear and kidswear (Kolkata) - all with predominantly male labour, and in the latter case in particular, in a merchant-dominated putting-out system featuring a myriad of tiny 'cottage' units. Conversely, women workers predominate in the factory-based system of the South, in Chennai, Bangalore and the 'T-shirt town' of Tirrupur, although they make up no more than 15 per cent of the garment industry workforce as a whole. These are the locations of mass production of basic items (taking jeans as an example, assembly consists primarily of sewing seams in sequence once the material is cut, and so lends itself to a simple division of labour on an assembly line of individual sewing machines in a single location); in Chennai, production was 'feminized' in the early 1980s, with pay reduced at the same time, after a series of strikes by the then predominant male workers. Feminization remains selective, while the practice of housing young migrant women in employer-run hostels or 'dormitories' as in China and Vietnam is increasingly prevalent, with contracts routinely terminated shortly before the five-year point at which social benefits kick in, and at the bottom end workers are effectively bonded labourers, kept on very low pay for three years, at which point (if they reach it) a lump sum is paid.
Against this background, Chapters Four and Five explore the local commodity chains and production networks run by 'regional lords' (local capitalists, merchants and large retailers) and connected by brokers (contractors, sub-contractors, and 'jobbers'), showing how the sweatshop is 'effectively created at multiple levels and scales by pressures simultaneously shaped by the behaviour and strategies of a complex and highly differentiated group of actors' (106), with industrial and commercial capital mutually embedded (110). Local suppliers themselves engage in 'backshoring' - setting up their own production chains in ways that go beyond sub-contracting to re-organize the production process and create new industrial spaces, with merchant capital playing a significant role. In Mumbai, in particular, virtually only low-value backstreet workshops to which merchants put work out remain, as the larger exporting producers have mostly relocated to Bangalore or other centres, keeping only their headquarters in the city. Mezzadri describes this process as the crafting of an 'All India commodity chain', in which local capitalists take on a role 'strikingly similar to that of global buyers'; and large local retail chains such as Westside and Trent adopt similar policies, in alliance with global firms (122). Meanwhile, over half a million predominantly male casualized and unregistered migrant workers in the city, with no access to social security, produce for the domestic market in a system managed by labour contractors (124). All in all, industrial and commercial capital cannot be considered as separate, nor is the relationship between them invariable: some merchants do become industrialists, opening factories in what might be regarded as the classic pattern of transition, but at the same time 'putting-out' systems are resilient and continue to be reproduced, especially in relation to domestic markets; other industrial capitalists exit from direct production and move back, as in the case of Mumbai, to a commercial role; and in another variation, mixed and 'hybrid' forms emerge, characterised by the 'co-existence and co-determination of mercantile and industrial strategies' (130).
While Chapter Four examines strategies adopted by local capitalists, Chapter Five turns its attention to workers and the specific channels through which they are 'contracted in' to the highly decentralized and fragmented production system described, and work is contracted out. Mezzadri describes the informal corridors along which partly finished garments flow out to the periphery, and workers move to and from urban centres of production, profiling the labour contractors, 'jobbers' and brokers who manage the flow of commodities and 'labouring bodies' and thereby extend the spatial boundaries of the sweatshop (134). Most brokers are not just intermediaries who could easily be removed from the system: 'In factory realms, labour contracting functions as the key working mechanism through which the management of labour is decoupled from that of production. In these contexts, contracting involves the recruitment, supervision or organization of groups of workers inside the factory premises, in exchange for a commission on each of these workers. In non-factory realms, instead, labour contracting enables the subsumption of given economic activities into the orbit of a far wider production circuit. Here, contracting involves the full organization of some ancillary, labour-intensive economic activities, outside the factory realm' (136-7). In out-contracting, some brokers are petty capitalists who advance credit to subsistence producers, and through it 'labour discipline is not only interlocked across multiple [i.e. labour and credit] markets, but it is also anchored to both realms of production and reproduction' (141).
Mezzadri explores in detail the case of Bareilly, where many garments are finished by home-based workers. The industry here is new in its primary orientation towards the export market, and the much larger numbers employed than in the past, but it draws at the same time on established social structures and especially gender relations, and may even tend to reinforce them. Advances of wages or credit and materials are used to tie workers to big contractors, often working through local sub-contractors as intermediaries. But the most skilled male workers avoid advances where possible, as they prefer to retain mobility and autonomy, while the poorest female workers do not receive credit either because contractors 'hardly need to attach these workers via credit': 'Their remote geographical position and experience of patriarchy are already very potent devices at [sic] labour control. In this sense, these poor women home-workers are the least likely to be made ‘unfree’ via credit-based interlocking practices. However, this is only because they are already subject to patriarchal unfreedom, which reinforces their exploitation in labour markets' (154).
In fact, then, the organization of labour turns out not to be so chaotic after all. It exhibits a clear if complex hierarchical structure similar to that achieved in a more formally contractual manner in more advanced economies, in that the labour force is structured into a minority of core workers and a less secure or entirely casual majority, here consisting of a lower temporary or casualised layer, and a stratum of home-based family units and individual women workers. In both cases, this achieves both the minimization of wage costs, and sufficient flexibility to vary the level of production at short notice, a requirement that in India has become pressing as the boom that began in the 1980s first drew waves of new entrants into the industry and extended production networks out into the periphery, then gave way to instability and fluctuating demand from 2007-8:
'The network must be stable enough so that production could immediately start once orders arrive. However, the same network must also ensure the easy expulsion of workers during lean season, and when orders dry up. This dual need is satisfied through the deployment of combinations of different typologies of labour, subject to a fairly different employment strategy. On the one hand, skilled workers, who represent the core of contractors’ business, must be retained at all costs. In order to keep them busy throughout the year, during lean season many contractors engage in domestic production. Domestic markets are massively expanding in the
subcontinent; they pay higher rates than export, although they only guarantee limited volumes. Export-based contractors increasingly deploy these markets as a safety net to minimize the risks of engaging in global markets. On the other hand, non-core workers, instead, must be expendable, and easily retrenched' (155).
The labour contractor, then, 'performs, paradoxically, a very modern function': ' He disarticulates the management of production from that of labour; he participates in reproducing the segmentation of the production process and its polarization in core and ancillary activities, and he organizes parts of the production process in full. Most of all, he further develops commodity chains and production networks whose flexibility is inexorably centred on making labour cheap across an increasing variety of spaces of work and realms of production. Today, this contractor is hardly only a remnant of a traditional past, but rather also an agent of a neoliberal future, no less than the myriads of head-hunting agencies increasingly crowding our supposedly more "formalized" labour markets' (156).
This, then, is how many of the clothes you see for sale are produced. And on the basis of a survey of 300 factory and 70 non-factory workers in and around New Delhi (the NCR, or National Capital Region), Mezzadri concludes by documenting the effects of the sweatshop regime on the bodies that labour in it and are consumed by it (see further Mezzadri and Srivastava, 2015). Capital here 'can consume workers' bodies without major concerns for profitability. After all, upon the depletion of some, others can be made available at the same cheap rates' (161). As Mezzadri points out, then, capital still takes no account of the health and length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so; and where it can, it 'externalizes' the cost of reproduction of the workforce, pushing it out onto households and families which accordingly become sites of depletion (169), whose ultimate source is the world market.
Over 90 per cent of the 370 workers surveyed were from rural areas; over 70 per cent still owned some land in their place of origin, and 43 per cent considered this a crucial part of their overall livelihood income (170). Circulation between the city and the countryside on an annual basis goes along with high levels of mobility within the NCR - 60 per cent had been in their current place of work for less than a year (171). Workers live in colonies close to the main industrial areas or rent rooms in nearby slums, and in all cases, 'five to eight labouring bodies generally share a tiny living space for the whole period in which they are hosted in the metropole and deployed in its sweatshop' (172). As regards non-factory based workers, 'once regularity of employment – guaranteed only in 11 per cent of cases – is taken into consideration, own-account, allegedly self-employed workers individually earn a very similar income than [sic] that of the migrant wageworkers labouring in micro-units. Only female home-workers ... systematically earn significantly less (less than half, and in some cases, less than one third) than other categories of non-factory labour at work at the periphery of the NCR industrial formation' (174). Only a quarter of all surveyed garment workers have access to emergency medical facilities or routine medical check-ups through their employers; only 40-50 per cent of those in factories have access to Employee State Insurance and the Provident Fund. Mobility and the lack of portability mean that over 80 per cent declare to have no entitlement either to injury compensation or retirement benefits: 'In non-factory settings, we had to explain what we meant with work-related benefits during interviews. None of the workers is covered under any scheme' (175). As regards average working hours, 'the majority of workers – 51 per cent of all workers in factories and 67 per cent in workshops – work for 10–12 hours per day. One-third of sweatshop workers employed in workshops even works 13–16 hours per day. In ‘peripheral’, non-factory spaces of work instead, labour intensity changes based on patterns of un(der)employment. Circular migrants always work more than 12 hours per day, while female home-workers at the bottom of the sweatshop regime work far less, as their time is claimed by reproductive activities' (176). Workers suffer from back pain, eye-strain and loss of eyesight, allergies and exhaustion; fainting on the shop floor is commonplace; and 'very few labour past the age of 30':
'Findings from our surveys indicate that 58 per cent of factory and workshop labourers were between 21 and 30 years of age, while
12 per cent were younger than 20. Only 21 per cent was above the age of 30, and a staggeringly low 5.9 per cent above the age of 40. Workers above the age of 50 were less than 2 per cent. Generally, in fact, this handful of older workers can mainly be found in supervisory positions. Also in non-factory, peripheral settings, the average age of the garment proletariat was quite young, with only 6 per cent of workers – generally own-account workers – older than 40. This means that the industrial experience remains only a temporary, transitory moment in the lives of garment workers' (177).
Labouring bodies, in short, are 'a sort of "human waste" the sweatshop regime disposes of incessantly' (178), and corporate approaches to labour standards and ethical trade initiatives sit perfectly comfortably in a tightly demarcated space within this system, and help to perpetuate it.
This is a fine book. The text is clearly written and virtually free of misprints (I found one on p. 141). But Mezzadri has been let down by the failure of copy-editing to pick up occasional errors in English, which can obscure meaning or even produce the opposite of the sense intended (as with 'all but' for 'anything but', e.g. pp. 161 and 168). Perhaps these and similar small things can be put right in a paperback edition, which would in any case be very welcome.
References
Banaji, Jairus. 2010. Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
Bremen, Jan. 2002. The Labouring Poor in India: Patterns of Exploitation, Subordination, and Exclusion. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Carswell, Grace. 2013. ‘Dalits and Local Labour Markets in Rural India: Experiences from the Tiruppur Textile Region in Tamil Nadu.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 2, 325–38.
Harris-White, Barbara. 2003. India Working - Essays on Society and Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mezzadri, Alessandra and Ravi Srivastava, eds. 2015. Labour Regimes in the Indian Garment Sector: Capital-Labour Relations, Social Reproduction and Labour Standards in the National Capital Region (NCR), Final ESRC Report for the Project ‘Labour Conditions and the Working Poor in China and India', London: SOAS, at https://www.soas.ac.uk/cdpr/publications/reports/file106927.pdf