‘Classes of Labour’ at the Margins of Global Commodity Chains in India and China

Abstract

This article deploys the concept of 'classes of labour' to map and compare non-factory labour relations in the garment chain across Delhi and Shanghai metropolitan areas. It contributes to commodity studies by unpacking the great complexity of mechanisms of 'adverse incorporation' of informal work in global commodity chains and production circuits. Field findings reveal the great social differentiation at work in informalized settings in the two countries, and suggest that while the margins of garment work are characterized by high levels of vulnerability, they may also open up new possibilities for workers to resist or re-appropriate some degree of control over their labour and reproductive time. While these possibilities depend on regional trajectories, informal labour arrangements do not only result from capital's quest for flexibility. Workers actively participate in shaping their own labour geography, even when exposed to high employment insecurity. The conclusions more broadly discuss the merits of comparative analysis to study labour in global production circuits.

A gendered labour geography perspective on the Cambodian garment workers’ general strike of 2013/2014

“…Better working conditions in formal registered factories and higher monthly minimum wages for formal labour are the key points of this discourse as reflected in the trade unions' wage campaignsboth the 160 USD-campaign and the 177 USD-campaign that followed. To be clear, better working conditions and wages are definitely crucial for labour and are in this case study also a binding element of 'the classes of labour' (Mezzadri & Lulu, 2018) in Cambodia. However, wagesor the material struggles of labourare deeply linked with struggles of social reproduction that are embedded in a far more complex system of (re)producing labour (power).…”

“…This means that on the one hand women are specifically situated in the production systemwith an unlimited contract, with a short or long term contract, with no contract at all, within registered factories or illegal ones etc. (Mezzadri & Lulu, 2018, pp. 1037-1038.…”

Essential for what? A global social reproduction view on the re-organisation of work during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Mies (1986) does recognise that, differently from white women, women of colour in the former colonies could not afford to be housewives because their engagement in wage and paid work contributed to the family's survival and global capital's extraction of value. In addition, in the Global South, the separation between sites of production and reproduction is much more blurred and often various types of wage work are outsourced to homebased workers and other locations outside the factory (Mies 1982;Mezzadri and Fan 2018). These patterns hold true for many workers in the contemporary Global South, which we will illustrate below using the example of Mozambique.…”

Conceptualising Socio-Economic Formations of Labour and Workers’ Power in Global Production Networks

“…On the third tier most workers work on subcontracts, often in small workshops or at home. Home-based production is a component of the production system that is almost as important as the Type 2 workers (Mezzadri and Fan, 2018). The severe competition in the global apparel industry constrains the number of factories on the one hand, and thus generates the need for supplementary home-based production units, including household workshops or individual homeworkers.…”

“…Scholars have recently begun to remedy this by investigating global capitalism together with transnational production and labour. This is evident in development studies, labour process theories, labour regime studies and studies of labour geography (see Alford et al, 2017;Anner et al, 2013;Mezzadri, 2016;Mezzadri and Fan, 2018;Newsome et al, 2015;Selwyn, 2011Selwyn, , 2013Thompson et al, 2015). As contributions from perspectives in the sociology of work have been less evident, this study was developed to apply such perspectives to the study of GPNs and labour.…”