Labour Control and Union Agency in Global Production Networks

For newly industrialising countries, the global garment industry is considered a vehicle for economic and social development, especially for increasing women’s participation in the labour market. At the same time, the garment industry has also been widely criticised for frequent labour rights violations, low wages and bad working conditions. Media and public discourses have focussed largely on private regulatory mechanisms and international labour standards as tools for promoting ‘decent work’ in the global garment industry. However, this chapter argues that lasting improvements for workers can only be achieved through the agency of strong local unions in garment producing countries. Against this background, this chapter introduces two central research questions that remain understudied in existing literature on labour in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and Global Production Networks (GPNs): (1) How do labour control regimes at specific nodes of the garment GPN shape and constrain the terrain for worker and union agency in garment producing countries? (2) Which relationships and interactions enable unionists and workers in garment producing countries to develop strategic capacities and power resources that allow them to shift the capital-labour power balance in favour of workers?

This chapter reviews literature on labour in GVCs and GPNs. It argues that within the interdisciplinary literature on labour issues in GVCs/GPNs, two parallel research strands have emerged that are characterised by very different conceptual approaches: (1) a ‘Decent Work’ approach underpinned by the institutionalist perspective of the ILO Decent Work Agenda and (2) a ‘Marxist Political Economy’ approach, which is based on the assumption that the exploitation of labour is an inherent structural feature of capitalist production systems. Situating this study within the second research strand, this chapter then reviews the contributions and shortcomings of existing literature on labour control and labour agency in GVCs/GPNs. In doing so, the chapter highlights the limitations of existing scalar approaches for studying labour control and labour agency in GVCs/GPNs, which have not paid enough attention to how dynamics of labour control and labour agency at different levels influence each other. Against this background, this chapter argues that to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ‘architectures of labour control’ underpinning specific GPNs as well as of workers’ and unions’ networked agency strategies, a relational analytical approach can be beneficial.

This chapter introduces central tenets of relational thinking in economic geography and then develops a relational approach for analysing labour control regimes and union agency in GPNs. It conceptualises place-specific labour control regimes at specific nodes of a GPN as emerging from the articulation of six horizontal (i.e. territorially embedded) and vertical (i.e. network embedded) processual relations: the labour process and workplace, wage, labour market, employment and industrial relations at the horizontal dimension, which in turn intersect with sourcing relations at the vertical, ‘network’ dimension of the GPN. Moreover, it develops a relational heuristic framework for analysing union agency in GPNs through the lens of three interrelated spaces of labour agency that unions construct through practices of building relations: (1) spaces of organising comprising internal union relations as well as unions organising practices; (2) spaces of collaboration constructed by unions through building relationships of collaboration with other labour and non-labour actors at various levels; and (3) spaces of contestation constructed by unions around specific labour struggles through building antagonistic relationships with employers, lead firms and state actors as well as through practices of drawing other allied actors into spaces of contestation to activate moral power resources.

This chapter introduces the research design and methodology of this study. It starts by setting out the key philosophical assumptions underpinning this study, characterised by a constructivist or reflexive research approach. Drawing on Burawoy’s extended case study method and Yin’s single embedded case study model, the chapter then develops an ‘extended single embedded case study’ design for studying the interrelations between place-specific dynamics of labour control and labour agency, and broader governance dynamics in the garment GPN. The chapter further illustrates how, for this study, the Bangalore export-garment cluster was constructed as a single case with three local garment unions representing embedded sub-units of analysis. Thereafter, the data collection process through participant observations and in-depth interviews is described. In this context, the chapter discusses challenges and strategies for interviewing managers and state actors as well as workers and unions in light of the power relations, which structure interactions between the researcher and the research subjects. The chapter concludes by outlining the data preparation, analysis and interpretation process.

This chapter introduces the Bangalore export-garment cluster as the main case of this study and situates it with the broader structural context of the garment GPN. To this end, the chapter first outlines the historical and geographical development of the garment GPN as well as the power relations structuring it. In this context, the chapter identifies three subsequent trends that have characterised the garment GPN since the early 2000s: (1) the geographical consolidation of garment retailers’ sourcing networks with a particularly strong growth of the industry in China and India during the 2000s; (2) thereafter, the emergence of new low-wage sourcing destinations in South and South-East Asia, and in Africa; and, most recently, (3) a selective shift towards ‘near sourcing’ by fast fashion retailers for higher value-added, time critical fashion garments. Thereafter, the chapter lays out the historical and geographical development of the export-garment industry in India and in Bangalore and gives an overview of the industrial relations in the cluster.

This chapter applies a practice-oriented, relational analytical approach to labour control regimes in GPNs to the empirical case of the Bangalore export-garment cluster. It illustrates how the labour control regime in the Bangalore export-garment cluster emerges from the intersection of six different sets of processual relations with the labour process: sourcing relations, wage relations, workplace relations, industrial relations, employment relations and labour market relations. For each set of relations, the chapter reveals the specific exploiting and disciplining practices performed by actors at various levels, which together constitute structural labour control relations. These practices include inter alia Bangalore garment managers’ production targeting, union-busting and wage theft practices, garment retailers’ predatory purchasing practices, and employers’ and state actors’ practices of constructing a complex multi-level training and migration regime to secure adequate labour supply. In the face of this complex mesh of labour control practices, the chapter highlights the various constraints and challenges for local garment unions to build and activate associational and institutional power resources.

This chapter analyses the networked agency strategies of three local garment unions in the Bangalore export-garment cluster. Drawing on the heuristic of three interrelated spaces of labour agency constructed by unions—spaces of organising, spaces of collaboration and spaces of contestation—the chapter highlights the various challenges for building sustained union bargaining power vis-à-vis employers. These challenges result on the one hand from the tight labour control regime and on the other hand from unions’ engagement with consumer organisations and donor NGOs from the Global North: When unions rely on financial support from NGOs instead of members’ contributions to fund their operations, and on moral power exercised by consumer organisations instead of associational power exercised by workers, unions risk constructing spaces of organising, collaboration and contestation that provide limited opportunities for workers and organisers to develop strategic capacities. Consequently, unions’ associational and organisational power remains limited. In contrast, when unions strategically use moral power resources from consumers to open up spaces for workplace organising and collective bargaining, this can enable unions to enhance their bargaining position vis-à-vis employers and thereby bring about sustained improvements for workers.

This chapter summarises central findings in light of the posed research questions and discusses the empirical and conceptual contributions of this book. In terms of empirical contributions, the book highlights the central role of local worker organisations in improving working conditions in the garment industry while simultaneously revealing the complex, networked labour control structures that constrain the terrain for labour agency in garment producing countries. Against this background, unions need to develop networked agency strategies that employ coalitional and moral power resources from international consumer and labour organisations to open up space for workplace organising and collective bargaining. Conceptually, the relational approach for studying labour control and labour agency in GPNs developed in this book contributes to reinvigorating a relational understanding of labour dynamics in GPNs as constituted through power-laden, networked relationships at the vertical and horizontal dimension of the GPN. Thereby the book addresses a gap in past scalar analyses, which have not sufficiently explored the specific links between network dynamics and territorial outcomes for labour at specific nodes of a GPN. The chapter concludes with final reflections on challenges and strategies for improving working conditions in the global garment industry and directions for further research.