Activating Communities, Mobilizing Women: Affective Organizing in Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment Industry

Abstract

This dissertation explores the development of class consciousness among women workers, the process of their activation, and their contributions to contemporary labour organizing in Bangladesh. Focused on the country’s ready-made garment (RMG) industry – a notoriously anti-union sector where women comprise approximately eighty per cent of the work force, and which generates USD $46 billion per year in export earnings – this dissertation demonstrates that contrary to the popular portrayal of garment workers as victims to forces outside or beyond their control, women workers in the Bangladeshi RMG industry have been at the forefront of efforts to transform their workplaces, and the communities that have formed around them, through affective organizing.

I begin with a discussion of methodology and introduce the analytical framework used to conduct my study. In this section, I bridge recent work on social reproduction and affect to explain how women organize themselves. Next, I contextualize this framework in reference to the industry and worker in question. This section documents the shift of global garment production to Bangladesh, how it altered the demographic composition of the Bangladeshi working class by bringing women into the world of formal waged labour and, finally, the specificities of the women employed in the RMG sector. I then introduce the institutions at the forefront of mobilizing these women. Discussed here are the formal/informal spaces and strategies activists use to mobilize women workers, and how the networks formed in this mobilization support an emergent infrastructure of dissent which sustains women’s activism in the sector. Critically, this section discusses how these efforts have upended the formal compartmentalization of workers’ public and private lives to not only to advance workplace rights but, equally, longer-term efforts to broaden the social lives of women workers. While traditional workers’ institutions in Bangladesh have been slow to identify, address, and incorporate strategies relevant to the growing proportion of working-class women in Bangladesh, labour activists have developed unique patterns of affective organizing amongst women workers that have proven to be essential to the development of their growing class consciousness.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with workers and organizers, and participant observation at activist training sessions in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this dissertation contributes to theoretical debates on women’s activism in anti-union industries of the Global South today.