Writing labour into ethical apparel production. A review of Kanchana N. Ruwanpura's Garments without Guilt?

Abstract

Garments without Guilt? Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2022, pp. xxvi +198. ISBN 978-1-108-83201-4 (hbk). What improves working conditions in the global garment industry? Are private regulations hopelessly ineffective, or can they play a role in raising labour standards? How can national governments, employers, workers, and trade unions advance global labour justice? For the millions of workers—often young women in the Global South—who stitch garments for global apparel brands, the norm has long been low wages, excessive hours, and bodily depletion. These conditions are periodically brought to global public attention after spectacular failures of health and safety, such as the factory collapses and fires that became commonplace in Bangladesh in the 2000s, or in light of more recent concerns about Covid-19 (Wickramasingha and De Neve, 2022; Saxena, 2019). Kanchana Ruwanpura's Garments without Guilt?: Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels takes readers inside Sri Lanka's flourishing apparel sector, with a refreshing take on how labour standards can be improved. Not simply another critique of corporate-centric labour governance, Ruwanpura undertakes the much more difficult—and ultimately satisfying—task of explaining how private forms of regulation can make a difference, when labour and the state play fundamental roles. Sri Lanka has positioned itself in the global marketplace of outsourcing destinations as an ‘ethical’ producer, offering high-quality, reliable production. Though sourcing costs can be higher in Sri Lanka than in several of its garment-producing neighbours, global brands are enticed by an educated, healthy labour force that is mostly free from the scandals of child labour and hyper exploitation. Ruwanpura shows how Sri Lanka's reputation for high-quality and ‘ethical’ production is no accident but instead the product of an active industrial policy. After the 2005 phaseout of the international quota system known as the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), Sri Lankan industrialists pursued the ‘high road’ of specialist value-added production, rather than a ‘low road’ of fast fashion and cheapened labour more readily associated with Bangladesh (Ashraf & Prentice, 2019). Sri Lanka's government played a key role in this strategy, supporting the industry with tax incentives and infrastructure investment. Labour, too, is a central actor in struggling for improved conditions. The book is based on a decade of repeated ethnographic field trips beginning in 2008. Ruwanpura conducted several months of participant observation in two large export factories outside Colombo—factories that adhere to the ethical production requirements of corporate buyers like Marks and Spencer, Levi's, and Lilly Pulitzer. Ruwanpura also toured factories around the country, and interviewed senior managers, labour activists, women's rights activists, and many dozens of garment workers. Careful attention is given to newer factories in the North and East that were developed as part of post-war reconstruction. Overall, the book provides a rich and compelling portrait of globalization from the ground up, showing that the governance of ethical standards is a contested process across time and space. Ruwanpura devotes much of the book to demonstrating how labour is central to the success of the apparel sector. She argues that the unique history of labour struggles in Sri Lanka set the stage for the government's later support of labour rights—even under the intense competition of post-MFA neoliberal globalization—and the ability of workers to advocate for themselves. Although Sri Lankan workers are still not paid a living wage, their working conditions are better than many peers in the region, which according to Ruwanpura can be attributed to ‘neglected’ histories of labour struggle (p. 71). Workers do make their own history, and Sri Lankan workers today live in a present undeniably shaped by labour's past struggles (p. 24). Garments without Guilt? fills an important gap in the literature on global labour standards, a gap that is rarely even acknowledged. Of the thousands of reports, research papers, and books that critique voluntary ethical codes, most pay little or no attention to the state and its social welfare capacity. The governments of garment-producing countries are usually taken to be weak, compromised, or both, concerned only with the industry's expansion and profitability. Ironically, this body of scholarship reproduces a neoliberal bias, by focusing attention on the power and influence of multinational corporations while omitting the state and labour (exceptions include Kumar, 2019; Mezzadri, 2012; Selwyn, 2013). Perceiving the state to be self-serving, it is distrusted; perceiving labour to be weak, it is discounted. Ruwanpura's analysis of Sri Lanka's garment industry stands as a powerful counter-example that deserves to be widely read and debated. Garments without Guilt? makes three unique and substantive contributions. First, it contributes to emerging scholarship that reconceptualizes workers’ political agency by highlighting the need to think historically about how the past shapes the present (Lazar, 2023). In this respect, the book makes ample contribution to labour geography's long tradition of documenting and theorizing worker agency (Herod, 2001; Padmanabhan, 2012; Rogaly, 2009). Second, the book extends feminist analyses of the global garment industry into labour governance. Women garment workers’ life trajectories are shaped not simply by labour's relationship to (local and global) capital, but also by the dialectical relationship between Sri Lankan citizens and the state. Access to universal, free education and healthcare prove pivotal to whether women workers can advocate for their collective interests. Third, with its keen eye on how voluntary ethical codes are implemented, this book contributes to theories of regulatory uneven development by showing the selective nature of their application (Brenner et al., 2010; Prentice, 2021; Werner, 2015). The research on post-war factories illustrates this most sharply, but the survey of factories elsewhere in the country demonstrates the same: that voluntary ethical codes prioritize some rights over others. The great service of Garments without Guilt? is writing labour into the story of ethical production and corporate codes of conduct. Too often, labour has been represented as passive, inert, and victimized. Ruwanpura shows how upgrading standards depends upon the agency and voice of labour. At the same time, state intervention to safeguard social welfare and legal rights is indispensable to workers’ ability to enact political agency, just as access to education shapes workers’ imagination of what is possible. Garments without Guilt? disputes corporate-centric analyses of upgrading in global supply chains with its well-formulated insistence that for global labour justice, labour and the state profoundly matter.

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