Garment producer nations as ethical sourcing destinations. 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). In Garments without Guilt?, Kanchana Ruwanpura provides a substantive overview of the history and the development of the country's garment industry, including the contribution of not only capital but also labour to its development. Ruwanpura argues that the country has become a renowned ethical sourcing hub for garments, in comparison with its South Asian neighbours, and suggests that the country is seen as having a niche position amongst global retailers. In fact, its claims of producing ‘garments’ without ‘guilt’, she suggests, are related to the absence of highly exploitative work conditions within the industry. Instead, the country's garment industry has gained an international reputation amongst buyers as one governed by ethicality, eco-friendly production, and unblemished work conditions. There are several strengths of Ruwanpura's book. I find it highly interesting that the Joint Apparel Association Forum of Sri Lanka, the apex body for Sri Lanka's apparel industry, envisioned Garments without Guilt? as a labelling strategy through which garments produced in the country were to carry a label and a tag. In this way, Ruwanpura argues that—although the labelling objective was eventually recognized as unrealistic—JAAF made it possible to brand, package and promote Sri Lanka as an ethical niche producer. In this way, Ruwanpura's work ties in with broader debates in global value chain and labour research about so-called supplier perspectives on corporate social responsibility (Fontana & Egels-Zandén, 2019; Bae et al., 2021). However, whereas many other authors mainly speak about individual suppliers when they discuss supplier conceptions of ethicality and responsibility (Lund-Thomsen, 2022), Ruwanpura explains how this was achieved in the case of Sri Lanka through a collective supplier approach to articulating ethical production. Articulating this argument is important at a time when other garment producing countries such as Pakistan, through the recently established Pakistan Textile Council and Bangladesh through the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), are pursuing similar strategies of branding their countries’ garment industries as sustainable sourcing hubs. This points to a future research agenda on ethicality in the garment/textile industries of not only South Asia but also the global South more broadly where the achievements, challenges, and future prospects of collective, national-level supplier approaches to ethicality are investigated in greater depth. The second strength of Ruwanpura's book lies in its underlining of the role that labour organizing has played in Sri Lanka in terms of making the positioning of the country as an ethical producer possible. Ruwanpura highlights the role played by labour organizing historically in terms of pushing both employers and various Sri Lankan governments to provide (relatively) decent work conditions and enact legislation that provides labour with high levels of social protection. Hence, it is not only the direct interaction between employers and employees but also the role of the institutional context in Sri Lanka which can be seen as facilitating the move towards social and environmental upgrading within the industry. Third, I wish to highlight the importance of Ruwanpura's understanding of the economic, cultural, and social context of Sri Lanka's garment industry. Not only does she cite a wide range of previous studies on the evolution of the country's garment industry, and the role of labour within it, but she also manages to tie this in-depth understanding of Sri Lanka's institutional context together with broader insights into the global value chain literature. Whereas the global value chain literature has often highlighted the necessity of understanding interfirm dynamics—i.e., the governance relationship between buyers and suppliers in a top-down fashion, Ruwanpura's book takes a bottom-up view of ethicality through her analysis of the role of local suppliers, labour, and the national government in articulating and developing the country's position as an ethical sourcing hub. Hence, providing such an in-depth account based on many years of detailed fieldwork and an investigation of a particular production locality are rare these days. Typically, highly ranked international journals will tend to highlight the importance of articles making theoretical contributions to a given subject area (for instance, ethical sourcing and production). However, Garments without Guilt? underlines the importance of continuous, longitudinal, and in-depth studies of one sourcing locality. The book celebrates the importance—in my view—of making empirical contributions to knowledge. And it is a gift to those of us, who as researchers, believe that understanding the empirical nature of ethical production and particular production contexts has a value in their own right. Having highlighted some of the strengths of the book, there are also a number of areas in which I think Ruwanpura's argument could have been further elaborated. The first is with regards to the concept of ‘ethicality’. Business ethics is typically understood as a subject field that deals with investigating the moral choices and decision-making processes of business managers and enterprises—often in their interaction with a wider set of stakeholders. Hence, business ethics deals with questions of right and wrong and the determination of which values, norms, and ideas are/should be upheld as morally justified and sanctified. I would have liked Ruwanpura to reflect more deeply on questions such as ‘whose ethics’? According to which criteria do we judge a production locality to be ‘ethical’? According to which criteria—i.e., norms, values and beliefs—can we assert that one production location is more ‘ethical’ than another? If the role of institutional contexts is so important to the functioning of ‘ethical production’, does this not mean that each producer location can then—in principle—determine which is ethically right or wrong for its own enterprises to do in their own right? For instance, whether child labour or homework is (not) permissible in the garment industry—not only in Sri Lanka but also more widely in Asia? This leads to my second concern. I am not empirically convinced that Sri Lanka can be described as a production hub that is more ethical than other production locations in Asia. This would require a kind of detailed comparative analysis of Sri Lanka vis-à-vis other production locations which is not a subject that is taken up in the book. First, it would have required that Ruwanpura set up a fairly strict definition of and criteria regarding what characterizes an ethical sourcing hub. Second, in-depth fieldwork would have to be undertaken in other producer countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan in order to establish which of these producer locations came closer to exhibiting the ethical criteria that characterize an ethical sourcing hub. For instance, such criteria could have included share of world garment production, gross wages, hourly wages, and work hours for different job categories of garment workers across the different South Asian nations. Other measures could have included the number of garment jobs created in the last decade vis-à-vis population size and/or size of the local garment industry. In the environmental realm, a comparative assessment of South Asian garment producer countries as ethical sourcing hubs would also have been interesting. For instance, such an assessment could focus on the relative number of ‘green factories’—or LEED-certified factories—that are present in countries such as Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Particularly, in Bangladesh, the number of LEED-certified factories has increased drastically in recent years. Moreover, a comparison between the different producer countries could have been made in terms of industry compliance with specific sustainability standards. For instance, organizations such as the Fairwear Foundation or the Business Social Compliance Initiative maintain detailed databases that make it—at least in theory—possible to compare relative ‘compliance performance’ across garment producer countries if researchers can negotiate access to these databases. With these caveats, I will certainly make reference to Ruwanpura's book in the years to come as an important and authoritative work on the development of Sri Lanka as an ethical garment producer and its path towards combining both economic and social upgrading in a national-level garment industry. I would like to thank Nura Aziz, at the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography for her kind editorial assistance during the process of writing this review and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura for many years of productive and helpful discussions about garment production, CSR and workers’ conditions in South Asia.

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