Geert De Neve

Fordism, flexible specialization and CSR: How Indian garment workers critique neoliberal labour regimes

Global production and trade networks have significant transformative effects on production regimes across the Global South, and tend to produce particular work regimes and workplaces at the sites of production. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) interventions similarly seek to reshape production processes in their search to improve labour conditions and protect workers’ rights. However, workers’ voices and their preferences for particular work regimes and employment conditions are rarely considered in such debates. Drawing on data from the Tiruppur garment cluster in South India, the article presents ethnographic evidence on what workers themselves make of the work regimes and ethical codes of labour practice produced under neoliberal governance. It explores how garment workers engage with different labour regimes and why some workers actively seek to avoid employment in companies where Fordist regimes prevail and CSR policies are implemented. Such avoidance and exit strategies amount to a critique of particular neoliberal labour regimes that seek to control labour and curtail its freedom and dignity at work.Global production and trade networks have significant transformative effects on production regimes across the Global South, and tend to produce particular work regimes and workplaces at the sites of production. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) interventions similarly seek to reshape production processes in their search to improve labour conditions and protect workers’ rights. However, workers’ voices and their preferences for particular work regimes and employment conditions are rarely considered in such debates. Drawing on data from the Tiruppur garment cluster in South India, the article presents ethnographic evidence on what workers themselves make of the work regimes and ethical codes of labour practice produced under neoliberal governance. It explores how garment workers engage with different labour regimes and why some workers actively seek to avoid employment in companies where Fordist regimes prevail and CSR policies are implemented. Such avoidance and exit strategies amount to a critique of ...

From field to factory: tracing transformations in bonded labour in the Tiruppur region, Tamil Nadu

Abstract Taking a historical perspective, this paper explores the phasing out of ‘bonded’ labour in agriculture and its reappearance in the village-based power-loom industry in the Tiruppur region of Tamil Nadu, India. Focusing on a village outside Tiruppur, we trace the gradual transformation and ultimate disappearance of forms of labour bondage in agriculture. In this region bondedness in agriculture changed in a number of significant ways, before giving way by about the 1970s to primarily casual and contract-based labour arrangements. Around the same time, small-scale power-loom workshops, which are highly labour intensive and increasingly dependent on migrant labour, began to mushroom in the village, leading to the reintroduction of bonded labour, but this time in the context of rural industrial employment. We explore how debt bondage was introduced and how it affects the working lives of both migrants and non-migrants. The paper examines the differences and similarities between past agricultural and current industrial labour bondage, and how it is experienced and talked about by both employers and workers.

Introduction: revealing the hidden hands of global market exchange

The first theme is the “problem” of personal relations in the economy. Under neo-liberalism the Market is treated as universal, a trans-historical and trans-cultural entity; it is naturalised and reified, rather than thought of as a set of social relations; it is treated as a given rather than the result of a historical process with complex social actors. This view of the Market dovetails with a particular understanding of the individual, as driven primarily by a (universal and naturalised) desire to maximise material well-being and seek out value for money, while an “invisible hand,” rather than known personal needs, provides the mechanism to relate supply to demand.

Global garment chains, local labour activism: New challenges to trade union and NGO activism in the Tiruppur garment cluster, South India

Almost on a daily basis newspapers and magazines tell us of the exploitative circumstances under which workers produce garments for the global market. While local trade unions, international NGOs, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) officers claim to act in the interests of garment workers, the latter continue to lack voice and representation in their everyday struggles for better and fairer employment. Focusing on a South Indian garment cluster, the article explores the reasons why key labour rights, such as the freedom of association, keep being violated, and why local trade union and international NGO activists fail to prevent such violations. Through the lens of a major labour dispute, we consider the decline of a once successful trade union and the challenges of emerging local–international activist collaborations. The article concludes that for union, NGO, and corporate interventions to be successful in the context of a liberalising state, the political economy of labour has to be taken into account, and labour struggles have to be understood within their political and historical context.

T-shirts and tumblers Caste, dependency and work under neoliberalisation in south India

This article explores the variegated nature of processes of neoliberalisation and their diverse impacts on relations of caste and dependency in rural India. Focusing on the rural hinterland of Tiruppur, a major industrial cluster in Tamil Nadu, south India, the article examines the ways in which neoliberal regimes insert themselves in the region and combine, coexist or clash with existing institutional regimes of power. It documents the highly differentiated and unpredictable effects neoliberalisation has on the lives of villagers who have become directly or indirectly engulfed by its processes, paying particular attention to the uneven impacts on local landscapes of capitalist production and on rural relations of caste and dependency. The article examines rural transformations through the contrasting experiences of Dalits in two villages that became connected to the Tiruppur industry. While in one village, Dalits gained access to the urban industry, in the other, they remained disconnected from urban garment jobs due to persistent relations of debt bondage and unfree labour. It is argued that processes of industrial neoliberalisation do not lead to linear transformations in caste relations and social inequalities. Rather, the relevance and meaning of caste are transformed in uneven, and often even contrasting ways, depending on how particular localities are integrated into wider institutional regimes of power and rule. Processes of neoliberalisation unleash powerful encounters between old structures of power and new regimes of rule, and generate new configurations that defy prediction and expectation.

NREGA and the Return of Identity Politics in Western Tamil Nadu, India

In her piece, Pamela Price raises a number of fascinating questions about the possibility of a major shift in electoral politics in India which deserves further analytical attention and empirical observation. The thesis that electoral politics is being reshaped by development agendas and performance targets rather than being driven by a politics of identity and patron-clientelism is thought-provoking.

Towards an Ethnography of the Workplace: Hierarchy, Authority and Sociability On the South Indian Textile Shop-Floor

Introduction: The Politics of Production Recent scholarship on labour in South and Southeast Asia has begun to recognise the centrality of the workplace and shop-floor organisation to an understanding of relations of class, gender, equality and authority. Work regimes, divisions of labour and production processes are continuously being imposed, negotiated and contested on the shop-floor and within the walls of the factory.’ But most anthropological and historical studies of industrialisation and class formation in India have been deeply entrenched in a teleological or essentialist framework, thus largely neglecting the actual shape of work processes and nature of struggles on the shop-floor. From a teleological perspective, industrial development in South Asia has for long been

We are all sondukarar (relatives)!: kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, south India.

This article is concerned with the role of kinship and kin morality in contexts of work in South Asia. It focuses on the highly ambivalent nature of kin morality when mobilised outside the household and the family. Ethnographic evidence from a small-scale industry in Tamilnadu, South India, shows how employers frequently invoke the morality of kinship and caste in an attempt to secure a reliable and compliant labour force and to avoid overt class confrontation. However, employers efforts to promote kinshipreal or fictiveand its morality in the workplace appear inadequate in the face of high labour turnover and frequently collapsing employer-worker relationships in small-scale industries. While employers repeated use of kin ideology succeeds in silencing the workers on the shop floor, it is much less effective in securing a stable labour force in the long run. The argument put forward here points to the limits of kin morality and questions its effectiveness in informal contexts of labour employment. The discussion sheds new light on the role of caste and kinship in recruiting, retaining and disciplining labour in Indias informal economy.

Entrapped entrepreneurship: labour contractors in the South Indian garment industry

As neoliberal restructuring leads to the rise of labour market intermediaries globally, labour contractors are being vilified as unscrupulous recruiters and as wicked figures who exploit and harass. Based on long-term ethnographic research among workers and contractors in the Tamil Nadu garment industry, this article argues for a more careful and grounded analysis of labour contractors’ role and position under neoliberalization. Evidence is presented of contractors’ precarious position at the tail end of global production networks and three conclusions are drawn. First, contractors reveal themselves to be a remarkably unrecognized source of entrepreneurship, flexibility, and skills acquisition, which facilitates manufacturers’ participation in global markets. Second, despite their resourcefulness and resilience, contractors find themselves trapped between management and the workforce, and in an overall situation of vulnerability as a result of the informal nature of their activities and the vagaries of the neoliberal market. For many of them this results in a highly fluid and unstable class experience, in which they struggle to materialize aspirations for upward mobility. Finally, neoliberal conditions tend to undermine rather than enhance contractors’ entrepreneurial success and to weaken rather than intensify their power with regard to both capital and labour.

The economies of love: love marriage, kin support and aspiration in a south Indian garment city

The paper considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, south India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the paper explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape post-marital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of post-marital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur’s labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardise the much needed kin support that youngsters need to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship and success in a post-liberalisation environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement and kin support to success in India’s post-reform economy.