Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand

Conclusion. Looking Back, Moving Forward

Conclusion Looking Back, Moving Forward On Tuesday, December 17, 2002, F2 shut down its operations without advance warning to any of its workers. Women coming to work as usual that morning found the factory gates locked. Workers were given no reason why the factory closed. Later that day, workers discovered that the owner had already moved all the production equipment and machinery to another facility and was continuing to produce garments at its subcontract factory. The F2 employer alleged that the Bangkok Bank had filed a claim against the factory and that a court warrant had been issued demanding repossession of all factory assets, including land and property. The remaining 150 workers at F2, left without pay or compensation, immediately began to file grievances with the Labour Ministry and protested outside the Prime Minister’s office. F2 women often expressed their bewilderment that their employer would rather pursue grievances in court, shut down operations, and relocate elsewhere than try to comply with workers’ demands and provide the minimum basic needs―which, according to the women, would harness a more compliant and productive workforce. The situation of factories shutting down at short notice is commonplace and a testament to the extraordinary power of capital over labor: workers are truly disposable commodities and are rendered irrelevant to systems of production in today’s globalized economy. Eliminating production lines, firing workers without compensation, shutting down and relocating production to cheaper sites―all have become increasingly common practices in garment factories around the world. Just as goods are disposable in 168 Textures of Struggle a consumer culture, so too are people at the end of the global supply chain. Childhood is disposable. Health is disposable. Even the environment that people must live in is disposable. In the face of globalization, all nationstates seek to regulate less (in the name of growth and modernization) when they should be regulating more and more effectively in partnership with businesses, labor unions, and communities. And regulation should apply not only to factories but also to the local environmental impacts of sweatshop production.1 Pressure groups such as the Clean Clothes Campaign and Campaign for Labor Rights constantly alert us to the worst examples (such as the use of children in sweatshops) but the problem is much more widespread than this. Nonetheless, respect for labor standards is growing, and in some countries the International Labour Organization is actively involved in monitoring factory conditions and ensuring that corporate codes of conduct are applied. Furthermore, to get these procedures in place it takes enormous acts of political will, often accompanied by intense campaigning activities on the part of the groups affected and nongovernmental organizations . With many governments, including that of Thailand, seeking to attract investment and generate trade growth as a priority, however, many factories have been relocated to free-trade zones, export-processing zones, or special economic zones. Thailand is just one example of where even minimal labor standards often do not apply to workers in labor-intensive factories. It is not coincidental that many of the people laboring under these conditions are stateless migrants without formal legal status or access to all the entitlements of citizenship. In short, deregulated zones enable or facilitate the exploitation of the most vulnerable people and those least able to mobilize on their own behalf. As I write this conclusion, I am tapping away on the keyboard of a new HP Pavilion laptop. I don’t know how many sweatshops and how many workers were involved in making the parts for the machine in front of me, so part of the problem is lack of information. We don’t often know where our goods come from or under what conditions these modern-day “treasures ” are made, but we hope that brand-name corporations that have signed up to codes of responsible conduct really do try to live up to them. But even if they try, many textile factories around the world do not meet the codes of conduct of international brands, meaning that workers will continue to be subject to exploitive and harmful conditions at work. Meanwhile , workers who do mobilize against exploitation are often dismissed and replaced. So what is being done? Looking Back, Moving Forward 169 The story of the Gina Form Bra (GFB) workers is one excellent and recent example of a successful struggle waged by workers at a local factory against their employers, a struggle...