Exhaust and switch: labour and the garment industry in global production networks

This chapter emphasizes how composite production circuits in global apparel production networks (GPNs) are based on various forms of labour and multiple forms of exploitation. The articulation of garment manufacturing into GPNs, driven by lead firms’ predatory purchasing practices, often results in deteriorating work and employment conditions. Wages below workers’ reproductive needs point to super-exploitation rather than a rising tide of living standards following world-market integration. At the workplace level, market discontinuities are translated into relations of dependence, debt, and neo-bondage while workers’ mental and physical limits are often exhausted by their 30s. Strikingly, these characteristics apply to offshored, backshored as well as reshored parts of the apparel industry, from South Asia and the Caribbean to Italy, the UK, and the US. It remains questionable to what extent the, largely hybrid, ‘markets of standards and regulation’ will moderate the power imbalances within GPNs as well as the workplace.