A Manufactu(RED) Ethics: Labor, HIV, and the Body in Lesotho's “Sweat‐free” Garment Industry

Abstract

Employing mostly women and producing for major U.S. labels, Lesotho's primarily foreign-owned garment industry undertook efforts to become "sweat-free" in 2006; simultaneously, it also began producing for the Product(RED) campaign. This article explores the parameters and ethical challenges of an industry-wide, public-private partnership providing HIV prevention and treatment services in this industry. Here, HIV services are intimately bound up in emerging patterns of humanitarian consumption and the production of an ethical industry. Within this ethical production zone, all is not what it seems: Labor violations persist, workers confront occupational hazards, and an elaborate theatrics of ethical practice plays out on the factory floor during routine inspections. This article explores the place and purpose of HIV treatment in the context of such humanitarian fetishism, highlighting the uses to which worker bodies are put and the conceptions of bodily well-being that prevail in these new "moral" economies.

Employers’ responses to the HIV epidemic in sub‐Saharan Africa: Revisiting the evidence

“…An alternative approach would be for policy‐makers to compel firms to support HIV workers through the implementation and enforcement of industry regulations designed to provide an appropriate level of support alongside enhanced and enforceable employment rights for HIV positive workers across all sectors. Further, the extent to which the workplace should even be considered as an appropriate site for HIV‐related interventions is questionable, especially as HIV programmes can come to dominate interventions aimed at employees and detract attention from other worker concerns, such as low wages and poor working conditions (Kenworthy, ). While it is not suggested that firms be given free range to abdicate their responsibilities to workers and local communities, nor that workplace programmes cannot in some settings enhance access to treatment for HIV positive workers, there is a need for a rethink of how best to support HIV positive workers, and the mechanisms through which to do this, which should include strengthening public healthcare systems in sub‐Saharan Africa.…”

“…This has, perhaps, influenced the lines of enquiry, and may explain why these case studies do not seem to address the possibility that these firms have used other less supportive strategies in their response, and also the dearth of studies (beyond the anecdotal evidence noted above) that seek to understand the full array of strategies. However, any future research will depend on the co‐operation of the firms under investigation, be it to provide sensitive data or facilitate access to workers, and the ability of researchers to resist attempts by management to influence the research process (Kenworthy, ).…”

Female Garment Workers’ in Bangladesh: Violence, Gender and HIV/AIDS

“…It is far easier for factories to keep aloof the FGWs from the social circumstances that add to the obviously high HIV prevalence among this population than it is for them to refute the workplace exposures that escalate stoppage among FGWs. In Lesotho, abortions are illegal and FGWs find that, despite their incomes, they either cannot give support another child or can't afford the loss of salaries due to enforcement of compulsory, but mainly unpaid, maternity leave (Kenworthy, 2014).…”

Drone philanthropy?

“…They note the 'productive work that distance, dissociation, and detachment perform for CSR, as corporate virtue operates through estrangement as much as intimacy ' (Dolan and Rajak 2011, 6). This proximate distance has been a norm in transnational corporate ethicizing for some time now (see also Kenworthy 2014), but it has become embedded in Watsi's funding model in new ways. Watsi has borrowed from corporate 'modalities of ethical governance' and placed them online, in the hands of consumer-donors.…”