Alessandra Mezzadri

Globalisation, informalisation and the state in the Indian garment industry

Globalisation has affected the industrial trajectories of developing countries, producing an increasing disarticulation between the management of production and regimes of labour control. While production regimes have been projected into the global arena, labour regimes have remained apparently anchored to regulatory mechanisms provided by local social structures, and gone through increasing processes of informalisation. Examining the case of the Indian garment sector, this paper argues that the informalisation of labour should not be conceived as necessarily taking place ‘in the shadow of the state’. In fact, in the case presented here, the state was a strong active agency behind the process of informalisation, which it supported through formal policies and through its progressive alignment with the interests of capital.

Backshoring, Local Sweatshop Regimes and CSR in India

Deploying an approach to chain analysis concerned with regional differentiation and backshoring, this article investigates the regional complexities of the garment commodity chain in India and its multiple local sweatshop regimes to illustrate the limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) norms. First, the article shows that Indias distinctively regional organization of production and product specialization, arising from different local historical legacies of production, reproduces labour outcomes that prevent the effectiveness of CSR. Second, it shows that the backshoring practices used by a powerful group of Pan-Indian buyer-exporters, who increasingly behave like global buyers, further reproduce the logic of the local sweatshop, hence reinforcing the limitations of corporate approaches to labour standards.

Class, gender and the sweatshop: on the nexus between labour commodification and exploitation

Abstract Drawing on approaches to class emphasising the multiplicity of labour relations at work under capitalism, and from feminist insights on oppression and social reproduction, this paper illustrates the interconnection between processes of class formation and patriarchal norms in globalised production circuits. The analysis emphasises the nexus between the commodification and exploitation of women’s labour, and how it structures gendered wage differentials, labour control and the high ‘disposability’ of women’s work. The analysis develops these arguments by exploring the case of the Indian garment industry and its gendered sweatshop regime. It illustrates how commodification and exploitation interplay in factory and home-based realms, and discusses how an approach on class premised on social reproduction changes the social perimeters of what we understand as labour ‘unfreedom’ and labour struggles.

The informalization of capital and interlocking in labour contracting networks

Analyses of labour contracting crucially inform studies of labour informalization and precarious work in industrial systems and production networks. Challenging conceptualizations emphasizing contractors’ intermediary role, and drawing from debates on petty commodity production and interlocking, this article analyzes labour contractors in the home-based embroidery sector in Bareilly, India. It shows that these are informal capitalists, rather than intermediaries. Workers’ precariousness is not due to intermediation, but to the way in which surplus extraction is secured interlocking labour and credit markets, and broader realms of social reproduction. Interventions targeting intermediation may not always ameliorate the lives of the working poor.