 entitled the sweatshop regime, laboring bodies, exploitation and garments made in India. Alessandra is a lecturer here in the SOAS Department of Development Studies and her work cuts across the fields of globalization and labor informalization, global value chains and labor, labor standards and CSR, gender and feminist theory and the political economy of India. Her research has been conducted with both the British Academy, ESRC DFID and she's published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, Oxford Development Studies and Competition and Change. She is presenting this new book to us this evening which draws on her long-standing and in-depth research on the garment sector in India. It's theoretically grounded in Marxist and feminist insights and it's not quite published yet so we can't sell copies to you this evening but you should find some leaflets around if you want to take one of those with you. We're also really really pleased to welcome Nila Kabir tonight to discuss the book with us. Nila as many of you will know is a professor of development and gender at the LSE and is one of the leading academics in in her field. Her highly distinguished career has seen her teach both here at SOAS and IDS Sussex and she's been actively involved in the policy arena. Her works include reverse realities, gender and social protection and organizing women workers in the informal economy. Before I hand over to Alessandra if any of you want to tweet the hashtag is SOAS Dev Studies and I just wanted to say a quick thank you to all the volunteers that across the department that have helped us tonight. It's really a pleasure to be here because this project actually started here so I think it's just as it should be that is the first venue where I presented and I see in the audience basically half of my acknowledgement in the book which is great to see and also a lot of people that have seen the many avatars of this research. Now this has been a very long journey and for me it lasted around 10 years so it went through very many different qualitative phases and although I was always concerned with the research in the sweatshop in India of course these phases also meant that I applied different methods during these 10 years. I was first concerned with mapping the work of major government producers in India and then I became instead more concerned with the interactions with global buyers then instead from there I got more concerned with the difference between factory and non-factory work and finally with the work of labor contractor. So in a sense the book reflects this process of building up layering and this long journey has a more basic scope in my view and a more complex one and at a very basic level of analysis is simply an account that wants to join the many concerned studies with the labor conditions in this industry that always managed to reconstitute itself as an industry incapable to provide good working conditions. They are just after the recent event from 2013 from Rana Plaza there have been a number of accounts concerned with the working condition in the sector ranging from the book by Jeremy Seabrook the song of the shirt to the quite famous I would say anti-capitalist book of fashion by Tansy Hoskins and of course Nyla herself among many contributions to the field has written this beautiful book on government in Bangladesh in 2000 which was one of the sources of inspiration for the project itself that I engage with on India the power to choose. Now this is at the very basic level so I don't mind to join a chorus of you know studies that are concerned with bad working conditions worldwide but also I would say the book has a much more ambitious design an aspiration which is then to theorize the sweatshop and to theorize it to make sense of its extraordinary resilience across time so we have spoken a lot about Rana Plaza in 2013 but as a matter of fact the first ever disaster in the history of the government industry is to be placed in New York City in 1911 where 147 workers women workers actually died following what was the first industrial disaster in the history of the industrial relation in the sector and and we have the very similar sort of circumstances after 100 years and during these 100 years we have seen a lot of measures have been put in place to try to address the working condition in the sector so this extraordinarily resilient in my view can only be explained by theorizing the sweatshop as a regime namely in a quite complex definition that I give in the book a regime a system of labor exploitation and oppression which comprises multiple spaces of work that crosses realms of both production and reproduction of the workforce and entails both processes of production and circulation and also a regime which has a very specific signature that lives on the labor in bodies even in the absence of industrial disasters because it always has very specific health depleting effects on the labor in bodies of the workers involved so in a nutshell this very complex definition can be summarized as the sweatshop in this book being theorized as a set of labor relations as opposed to a place or a space so not the small space as opposed to the large factory etc but the type of social relations which cross productive and reproductive domains now this definition allows me and of course the ethnographic journey that the book presents allows me to engage with three key debates one is the one on industrial modernity and particularly with ideas of stagism is the cheap labor model ultimately something which is temporary and it will go away the second debate is that of modern slavery which is if you want that's the opposing side of the coin much more gloomier are these the modern slave of the global economy and the third is the one on ethical consumerism that I've written a fair amount before so today I'll just focus for reason of time mainly on the first on the first two so before I actually give you a sense of the structure of the books and the way in which this regime is shaped I think I have to sort of give you a sense of the literatures that the book engages with and also some of the sources of inspiration for a book that is called the sweatshop regime I cannot but start dealing with the literature on labor regimes which of course was quite influential in the development of my ideas the work of Michael Gouravoy on factory regimes where he actually highlighted how for understanding labor we have to match studies of the abode of production i.e of relations in production with the understanding of capital labor relations more generally in India in this case and indeed at the global level there are a number of very interesting spins that actually started off from Gouravoy's work attempts to expand the concept of labor regimes to areas of social reproduction I'm talking about the work of Chris Smith and Pune in particular with reference to China and also instead references to patents of labor control which have interested other authors particularly in the realm of geography starting from the work of Jonas all the way to the recent work by Mark and also some of the work that has been recently done by Jonathan Pattenden on Rural India and of course we have been engaging with this literature in the context of a project on labor conditions and the work in poor led by Jens Lech was sitting in the second group on the right so the use of the word sweatshop as opposed to labor regime has a very specific rationale here and this that I wanted to focus the attention both on patents of production and reproduction and not simply focus on the the productivist stage but going also beyond a theorization that only looks at the daily social reproduction of the workforce what does it mean Pune and Smith actually look at what workers actually do in the industrial areas where they work while instead they wanted to have a wanted to have a longer to re in terms of the overall livelihoods of this workforce and also the term sweatshop of course allows me to also point the directly underlying the fact that we are looking at highly precarious and harsh working conditions they're systematically reproduced by the industry and in a sense the book tries to unveil all the very complex processes through which this production of working poverty is actually perpetuated and in a sense it wants to contribute to an analysis of how the so-called cheap labor model is all but the natural comparative advantage in developing societies which is instead and instead is mainstreamed as so very much particularly in economics models of trade liberalization so comparative advantage in cheap labor has to be constructed and in very complex ways through complex strategies and there's a huge number of actors that participate in this endeavor and while the construction of comparative advantages has been widely acknowledged in the literature with reference to goods and service you can remember Hajin Chan's work or Anwar Shahid's work on this very little has been done if not a bit by the feminist literature on this particular issue finally the reference to the word sweatshop allows me also to address the interplay that I think can occur between processes of production and circulation and this I think I'll have to explain more in that as we go along in the presentation of course if you look at studies of the government industry you cannot escape from what is called chain analysis study of global commodity chains have contributed a lot in terms of unveiling the workings of the industry however although I indeed learnt a lot from this literature I still think that when it comes to labor it's systematically unable to treat labor as anything but as a residual so you were able to switch in analysis to see what happens in terms of when a global process impacts upon labor but you are unable to make labor the center of the analysis which instead methodologically was a fundamental aspect for me behind this project so to start from labor as a prison for the study of globalization and development rather than looking at as a global economy impacted labor representational issues I think are very relevant indeed particularly as I feel labor has been massively marginalized from the study of development for such a long time as the commodity chain represent a device to study global capitalism also here the study of the sweatshop regime does something very similar so these are dispositives ultimately for scholars to talk about capitalism and indeed it's the case for me so the representation of the sweatshop regime that I proposed here wants to speak about a very specific vision of capitalism and a very specific vision of class so a vision of capitalism as a system that is based primarily on the extraction of labor surplus to multiple forms of exploitation so which is not defined necessarily by the presence or absence of free wage labor i.e. this means that the labor relations can manifest in many different ways and people can be exploited in many different ways and these ways are not transitional these ways are actually quite stably defined so in relation to class the type of understanding of class which is proposed here is indeed the one where class is seen as given by a multiplicity of labor relations that is formed across productive and reproductive realms so I do not find satisfying accounts that starts from production to define the working class and particularly the social profile of the workers involved in the sweatshop are fundamental to understand where in the employment ladder these workers are located a woman, a male migrant, a child they all have a very specific role and a specific task to perform in the context of the sweatshop regime so in a sense these are not residuals we cannot look at social traits and social identity as simply an add-on to class but these are fundamental constitutive elements of processes of class formation so the books which I found most inspiring for these theorizations first of all Gyrus Banagy theories history 2010 book and my early reading of Gyrus I owe to Alfredo who is also sitting in second row during a study group that will run a million years ago or so and the other by-influential book for me has been Henry Bernstein's classes of labor contribution and from the feminist literature I owe a lot or these books owe a lot of his inspiration to the work of Maria Mia's pageant and accumulation on the global scale and the more recent contribution by Silvia Federici the caliber and the witch so that the idea of social reproduction constitutive of processes of working class formation finally to give you a sense of you know the what's the empirical material when it comes from of course it's not a case India is hardly a case study here it was a fundamental inspiration the way in which I could engage with global capitalism as well as class for me an engagement with Indian political economy and I hope the book actually also contributes to it the understanding of Indian political economy in different ways first of all in terms of understanding the making of global India how it's just actually unraveling and how this is actually taking place on the shoulders of the working poor and how effectively the informal economy which has always characterized massively Indian capitalism is actually taking over and dictating the rhythms also in more formal realms of production so that you have an expansion of processes of labor informalization that touches upon both formal and informal realms touches in this case both factories as well as home-based realms also another set of contribution to which I hope the book does is an understanding of India that is based on regions and I think too little is discussed with reference to massive countries emerging economies like India but I would say like others in terms of the very different industrial trajectories that characterize this massive social formation and indeed understanding regionalism in India actually is fundamental to understand the various trajectories of capitalism you find and indeed the more the framework at the basis of this project was fairly mobile so that I started in Delhi continued in Ljubljana then Jaigarh then I went all the way east to Calcutta went back to Pongme and then down south to Chennai, Bangalore and Tirpur I will present to you very soon in a minute and then back to Delhi trying to make sense also of the very urban and rural areas that increasingly are incorporated into garment production well beyond urban places so you really see an entire country at work this is from the table of contents so the book what he tries to do is to convince you that not only we can theorize the sweatshop as a regime but this regime is composed by very specific factors which then correspond more or less to the majority of the chapters that are presented in the book and the first chapter of the introduction wants to convince you of the case of the relevance to shift the attention from the chain to the sweatshop i.e from capital to labor and then the following chapters each deal with one of the aspects of the sweatshop regime starting with the correspondence between physical and social materialities of production and I will get to what I mean by this in a moment then continuing to the presence of multiple patterns of unfreedom and difference in the industry not just in terms of gender and caste but also mobility geographical provenance etc and then he continues trying to unpack the sweatshop as a joint enterprise where the process of surplus extraction i.e the production of working poverty in the end not be ascribed only to a couple of bad guys but instead is very much shared in labor and there is a division of labor whereby different actors have a different role to play. Finally another factor deals with the representation of the sweatshop as a bodily regime a regime that leaves a sign on the bodies of the workers even when we do not have necessarily industrial disasters at play. Now starting with the first of starting with the first of our features what do I mean with the physical and social materiality well there is a very strong correspondence in India between patterns of product specialization i.e which garments we talk about if we all look at each other we're wearing different things so the word garment actually says something and nothing the very different seams very different processes very different product cycles well there is a correspondence between these physical features and the social processes of labor and production and labor they're connected to them so in a sense it's a bit like tell me what you do and I'll tell you who you are so you see this correspondence quite strikingly and in a sense it's what establishes this very connection between competition and exploitation that actually might talk about and I don't think it's a case that he started chapter one of volume one in capital with the chapter on commodities now I'm very much aware that when you talk about physical materiality you you can be accused immediately of commodity fetishism but my intention here is just only by studying commodity fetishism you can actually see how employers fetishize labor and how effectively commodity fetishism although we have to unveil it through our analysis has a very real effect in the world of labor so I'll introduce you to how global buyers and outsourcers see the country so I welcome you to well you can call it india mart or you can call it sort of india h9 version so if you talk to any buyer or global retailers they this is how they see the country is a massive garment mall with different garment collections available at different floors and this of course corresponds to different trajectories that historically the industry has gone through so you see the presence of niche garment production in the north in the areas of Delhi and the national capital region which is a little bit of an area around it that in Jaipur, Ludhiana and well partially Calcutta in Delhi you have embroidered ladies wear in Jaipur is where you will source your printed items in Ludhiana is where you go if you need woolens and in Calcutta is where you go to source kids wear workwear and nightwear all this niche production are characterized more or less by very complex and fragmented product cycles which means that you have smaller batches of orders generally speaking so H&M will source there your nice skirts which is embroidered with the nice design or the t-shirt or shirt you're wearing with funky printed drawing and instead in Ludhiana they'll source woolens and ribbons if you go down south you find a completely different word of seams and products and here you find your classic global product so you have basic production jeans, jackets, shirts everything that is slightly easier to do on an assembly line and also of course down south so you find larger factories on assembly line production so for engaging with the niche production you have to have shorter cycles when instead for larger batches or basic orders you will need the larger factory now this Mumbai is actually a center for the registration you have to imagine it as the till of indian art if you want right i mean they don't do much anymore but you have a massive number of indian retailers that they have nothing to envy to any max and Spencer they're just located there now this being the map of the products this is the map of the people and these are fundamentally different sets of labor that you find at work so again starting from the north one we've seen we have niche market and we have a more complex product cycles you find the very complex combinations of factory and of factory labor factory labor is characterized by male migrants mainly from the Hindi belt of Bihari and you have combinations of known factory labor in home-based establishment or home-based like establishment your armies of home workers you find here and for the biggest haps like daddy you find that these home workers actually are sought after all the way through the interline in the south completely different you actually enter a factory and voila you find 80 to 90 percent female workers on an assembly line much larger venues and of course it makes a lot of sense in terms of cost minimization to deploy gender as a principal axis of discrimination because you're able to pay these workers less so there is a very strong correspondence between the physical features of the commodity we see and the type of labor that we find at work which leads me to a second component of the sweatshop as regime which deals with patterns of difference and unfreedom now if you look at the literature on sweatshops what i find deeply dissatisfying is generally dealing with unfreedom focus primarily on what i would call the excesses or the extremes so instances of modern slavery partially because this is sensationalized in outlets such as The Guardian for instance and you have the generally there is a very liberal understanding of unfreedom that is connected to forced labor or bondage on the other hand in the maxis literature you have a much more interesting debate around dispossession about ownership of means of production but also this literature actually falls short to try to map all the possible ways in which unfreedom manifests in the industry so if we go back to our map for instance depending on which understanding of unfreedom we deploy we will have different sets of contribution to make vis-à-vis how these people actually live and work so if we adopt a sort of focus only on bondage that generally we will find instances up north related to primarily labor contracting in home-based realms where workers are tied by advances to contractors while in the south we find the rising instances which are linked to the rise of dormitories that host young female workers particularly in the areas of Tirupur and Bangalore so with a very restrictive view on unfreedom this is what you get if you instead talk about unfreedom in terms of dispossession becomes much more trickier and in terms of ownership of means of production you have the combination of free and unfree labor you see correspond more or less to the distinction between factory and unsactory work and again linked with patterns of debt however I would contend that if you look at wage levels you can find actually interesting trade-offs between different forms of unfreedom so for instance my work in Tel Perdesh with the home workers has revealed that as a matter of fact the workers which you will be able to define as neo-bonded i.e. those that receive advances are not the worst stuff in terms of taking wages the women are which will receive nothing from the contractors because they're already attached to the walls of the house in this sense patriarchal unfreedom or generally speaking social forms of unfreedom can actually establish trade-offs with the economic forms of unfreedom this is an important point that I'll go back to in the conclusions for dealing with the debate on modern slavery a fourth third still the third factor that I consider as constitutive of the sweatshop as a regime is that I need to understand the sweatshop as a joint enterprise and I think this is down to little and generally there is a tendency to try to focus the attention only on a few culprits so you have this catch the bad guy approach and the bad guy actually ships with the depending on which literatures you actually look at so they're just a part of the literature concerns with attacking globalization as imperialism that focuses a lot on the power of global buyers as if the entire enterprise of the sweatshop could be ever orchestrated from seeking from a global chair which is very unlikely and I would say that this is one of the dominant views is the demonization of global buyers and again you're wrong global buyers do all sorts of bad things but I would say that the sweatshop is so complex in its reproduction that also other actors have to be considered first of all suppliers of course and some of them are massive we get to these the difficulties in applying categorization based only on geographical location in a moment and also increasingly also a number of intermediaries which have come under the light in recent times more than anything labor contractors now all these actors participate in creating platforms for surplus extraction so they all have a role to play in the reproduction of working poverty it's more about understanding which is the division of labor and so how to act and against what to act in terms of policy options we have but we will never find the one magic formula only focusing on a set of actors that will actually it's going to be able to address the resilience of the sweatshop now there are two chapters in particular what I try to theorize the sweatshop as a joint enterprise there are chapter number four and five one dealing with the original lord and so the original player in a sense how to understand them and a second one that deals with brokers with labor contractors and what they do and I would say in both chapters what I try to address is the linkages that occur between different actors because after all capital is capital and also how an understanding of how the process of surplus extraction takes place in the sweatshop only based on production falls short to explain how you have this systematically production of working poverty and of course I don't have time to sort of go through all of that but hopefully I'll just give you some snippets so first on this over demonization of global buyers which I'm very sympathetic to in many respects but I think the risks to be an analysis that overrepresents the power of the global over the so-called local and also that places the local in a very awkward position because we have a sort of very orientalist view or there is a risk of an orientalist view of the poor supplier that is actually subordinated to the action of the global buyers and there are some people that are interviewed in India that are very little to only global actors for and actually they should be conceptualized as global actors themselves and instead this focus on the guys at the top is something that you see in sweatshop accounts very much you have that the bad guy changes in the 1990s where I started reading about the industry the evil monster was KT Lee Gifford they used to design clothes for Walmart now here she's been substituted in the imaginary of people with the Ortega was the owner of Zara but still you have this understanding that global buyers are solely responsible now this is a picture that's taken from the last tie-up that has been signed between Zara and Trent which is the clothing retail arm of Tata so that is Pablo Isla and Noel Tata they even wear the same tie and actually the dealer's billion pounds deal where Tata actually own 49% and Zara own 51% so this gives you a sense of how would you go and then separate who's global and who's the regional actor in this case is really complex and problematic India is developing very fastly its own brands and some of them actually some of us that travel to India are very attached to like Fab India and I have to break it to you that 8% of Fab India has just been sold two years ago to the Louis Vuitton group so that again how we sort of substitute what is global and local capital is becoming increasingly a headache so in a sense all these actors participate in the same way in the reproduction of working party and both in terms of their retail strategies as well as production strategies with these two sets of strategies often interplaying with each other so you have for instance a set of very powerful retailers in India they also own manufacturing production and will decentralize their orders on the basis of where to source different collection across the mall so they're being exactly like a buyer some of them have some manufacturing capacities some orders do not have and this combination between production circulation is kept very much now this is not even particularly historically new if you look at the whole history of the textile sector as beautifully represented by historians like Sven Becker in the empire of cotton but also the tankeroy or yellow and part as a ratty they will still refer to the history of the indian ocean trade as a history where a cosmopolitan community of global merchants coming from all over the world actually managed to draft the trade so it's not a surprise that in this new avatar we have something very similar actually taking place and this is valid for textile as for many other industries if you look at the beautiful account by gyrus banagy again on the opium trade and his linkages with the city of london during colonial times and actually on the opium trade you can simply read amid of course novels which are a beauty now on the this relations between production and circulation and the fact that to understand working poverty we have to go beyond the plastic marxist account the only focus on production i would say a lot has to tell also a study of the lower rank guys the labor contractors which in recent times have emerged particularly in the literature on labor standards as the even link in the chain if we only could cut this guy off then we'll have direct relations with laborers this is something that at policy levels is proposed by international organization by local NGOs etc it is that many of these guys are not necessarily intermediaries at all they actually participate very actively to processes of surface extraction in very crude terms by making surface extraction possible in the first place so when you have the lower ranks the linkages between factories and home base realms of work a first problem that you have is the subsistence of extremely poor artisans which are linked to the sweatshop in various ways now how would you guarantee their subsistence the guarantee the subsistence by the provision of advances and a lot has been written about advances in terms of the role in reproducing unfreedom and that is definitely a way to look at that but also advances are crucial to create the very possibility to extract surplus from laborers because otherwise quite simply these people would starve and you would not be able to actually accumulate so in a sense the advance also is a productive investment for the contractor which hands us to be seen as a petty capitalist and not necessarily as an intermediary so that again in policy terms only focusing designs in trying to cut the middlemen might not be the best option you have and we've done a lot of work in Barilli in trying to understand how the system of advances actually worked and again how it related to patterns around freedom who gets the advances and who doesn't which is a crucial question that again explains the relevance of social identity in shaping the different opportunities that different workers have in the sweatshop the final factor shaping the sweatshop as a regime that i want to talk about it's it's a health depleting components so the fact that the sweatshop is always bad news for the labor in bodies not just when you have a rama platza when over a thousand workers die but you always have a systematic process of depletion of health that manifests differently on the basis of the different realm of work of workers so of course we interviewed workers during the project that i carried out together with yens and others and of course workers in factories report different health issues than workers in the lower ranks of the shaming on base realms for instance in the factories very common that they report allergies or back pain we have waves of fainting in the uh in the larger industries that actually bring us back to our own account on factory workers in malicia and these waves of fainting also not necessarily only characteristics of india they were reported in with reference to cambodia in a beautiful article of the new york times by julia wallas that was titled quite provokingly workers of the world faint now the however in each and every segment of the sweatshop regime you do have that the health depleting effect that's so severe that eventually will have a very harmful impact on the body and you see that employers in the context of india never internalize the cost of social reproduction of the labor force so they're able across all the different venues of work not to engage their provisions how do they do that well they do that because in india the workforce is mainly circulatory and the process of labor circulation cannot be only understood as classically is done in relation to patterns of internal migration between urban areas and the village there's been done extraordinary work on indian literature on this and the work of ian breman is astonishingly vivid in like showing you and taking you through how the process of internal migration actually works but i would say that with reference to the sweatshop it's only part of the story when it comes to understanding how you have this ever pattern of circulation reproduced and our employer can simply you know wash their hands over the provision to the work to the workforce so there are three types of circulation which we found in the survey connected to the projects where there was there were interviews of over 320 workers in the more organized segments and interviews of 70 workers in the sectors in the national capital region and we had yearly circulation but also other two types of circulation one connected to the industrial area and one to the life cycle of the individual and i'm quickly working on we found 30 percent of workers circulating classically between the ncr and the village so going back on a yearly basis but we found in astonishingly higher rate of people circulate within the industrial area workers 60 percent of workers reported to work in the same unit for less than a year which means that the factory is never the venue that actually can sort of deliver social provisions also because in india you have no portability of social contributions so basically the factory the employer is never forced to internalize the cost of the social reproduction of the workforce and all workers 80 percent of them reported that they basically access private clinics for anything that concerns their health even those in tier one factories so one of the other classic stories about sweatshops is larger unit will deliver beta we found that this was hardly the case because workers had a very high level of breaking service which meant that they exited the factories very early and wage levels across the sectors was extraordinarily similar so if you take social contributions aside which are paid by larger factories but then they go wasted because workers cannot actually access them and they will leave the factory before take-home wages were very similar set between 6700 and 6900 rupees so in the sense where a worker doesn't make much much difference who you work for if you know that you're going to circulate and anyway you're going to lose the social contributions that you possibly mature so this is also why there is this sort of every production of this very flexible geography is designed by capital but it's co-designed by labor those workers make very rational choices why should i care if who i work for is after all more or less the same and finally the third important aspect of circulation relates to the march out of the sweatshop that very few people particularly those concerned with or they have a benign vision of industrialization by stages and refer to which is how long these workers ultimately work for and we found that the majority of workers were finished work in the workshop in the sweatshop whichever the venue whichever the chambers of the sweatshop they work with they finish by 3075 which is really young but and to an extent you can talk about retrenchment so to an extent they're sent away but to another extent if you also consider the narratives of health they actually are exhausted and simply go back home eventually as sucked oranges as nicely put by young bream after 10 15 years of engagement in the sweatshop so there is this production of human waste which is also very quick inside the sweatshop and also has big implications for how we think about the cheap labor model in stages terms or not so on this I'll just spend a few minutes on conclusions and in the conclusion the books try to engage with the number of different things ranging from industrial modernity to modern slavery to ethical consumerism and of course of course struggles and I'll focus here only on the first two because of what I presented and the first debate that on industrial transition I think the study of the sweatshop regime actually puts to rest very benign account of industrialization as necessarily entailing a stages process of improvement because actually this is not what emerges from the field findings themselves so the idea that the cheap labor model is just a temporary evil and that you have to go through that for a period of time because eventually you have an improvement in working conditions is not something that I feel I can subscribe to after this year's spend in spending the sweatshop I haven't seen any evidence related to that particularly if you adopt a view of working poverty which is also time-based it's not just a matter of static comparisons but you also want to ask in the context of a livelihood of a worker if the engagement in the industry will make a huge difference or not would they live with a massive level of savings what do they do after which is one of the key questions in fact to us we're trying to map now with the some people especially for Bangalore like histories of what workers do after they leave the sweatshop so young and there seem to be a narrative whereby they go back engaging with the same type of informal work that released them originally to the sweatshop so there isn't this sort of linear sort of progressive transformation of livelihoods that from informality get all the way to this industrial future and I think this is a very important point to make particularly to counter what is a very resilient narrative that instead places the cheap labor model as one of the stages and you know you close your eyes go through that and eventually you have improvement happening this is not what you see on the ground if we can call the cheap this type of cheap labor model temporary it's only for workers it's very temporary for workers because they will exit in 10-15 years as a new batch actually arrives and is welcomed in because that would be partially exhausted partially there will be retrenched and a new batch will be then hired etc and also the idea of big is beautiful which is the fundamental in the study of stagism that you know you have an increase in factory sizes and this is overall beneficial is also something that I do not feel like I can substantiate by my findings because the level of overall wages is quite similar and I think there has been a major shift in the 1990s with a stage of more aggressive processes of flexibilization of the workforce so it could be the case up to the 1990s but now it's definitely not the case in terms of the modern slavery debate I would say that going back to our consideration on freedom I think the understanding of this worker still as the slaves of the global economy is really unhelpful both analytically as well as politically first I would just want to highlight how understandings of slavery and like that embrace this sort of viewpoint can be hijacked politically in all possible ways we've seen the the paternalistic language used to actually check migrants where they came from with reference to the so-called European migration crisis that Bridget Anderson has called violent humanitarianism and I think we have to be very wary of how the language of modern slavery can be hijacked but more than that I don't think it's helpful to only focus on excesses or understanding of unfreedom that lie outside what is the business as usual in the sector while instead the production on freedom is a systematic feature of the industry it comes in various shapes and forms according to the social profile of the workforce and their location on the employment ladder not to add what how workers see themselves and what they report when they ask about issues of freedom and unfreedom and unfortunately I don't have time to go into that here and of course both debates then resonate very much with debates similar debates that go on with reference to India which I still think is very fascinated in the last minute very fascinated by the the stages model too much and instead it's not clearly delivering if you look at the formalization rates not just for this industry but for others and as well for the in terms of instead the unfreedom debate although if you want India leads and there have been much more interesting study on India on unfreedom that you find internationally on modern slavery still I think the new ways in which you one can observe new forms of in-work unfreedom also perhaps begs the question of revisiting the the debate also with reference to the subcontinent so this is going to take some time first of all I have to apologize and be organized to apologize because I was given the book or actually I was requested to do this discussion really two days ago and I was given the book an ELECTRONICY really a day and a half ago and actually we hadn't realized from Alessandro's presentation this is not a lightweight book and it's not something she said what's a skimble to this you know well actually it's not a skimble readable book and I have great trouble trying to you know speed reads all these different chapters and all of that so I will not be able to do justice and I said to Alessandro I will not be able to give her the kind of well talked through commentary that she deserves so what I'll do instead is just pick out a couple of things that struck me as I was doing my very rapid reading I think the first thing that struck me of course is that as Alessandro said you know this is not a case study this is a study of a number of different countries all stitched together I call India and therefore she's able to through a study of this one country actually cut across a number of different variations of this sweatshirt regime and his labor regimes and she depicted that very nicely in the graph and I think this point about the relevance the materiality in the product and its implications for the way that the labor processes are organized and so it is a very important one and a very interesting one because again it's the story that is normally spread out amongst many and many different countries we're seeing it in one country but there are a couple of comments to make about that one is you know she talks about the actual product you know so I mean kids wear and night wear and sportswear but one of the earlier findings about the materiality of product of garments that I have always carried with me through my research is this idea of how difficult it is to mechanize certain parts of the process that the limpness of the texture of garments makes it very very difficult to mechanize which is why it has remained very labor intensive and this labor intensity I think is at the heart and the need to to cut down on labor costs is I think that the heart of certain characteristics of the garment industry globally that you see in many different forms in many different countries. One example of it for me was when we did work in Vietnam and we looked at the garment industries there and there were three or four sectors that we looked at one was the state-owned factories for export because the state used to make garments and now it makes garments for export. The other is the foreign venture you know foreign capital-owned garments then there were the smaller locally owned garments and then there was informed work of various other kinds. What was very striking is of course as you would expect that the state-owned garments had the highest labor standards people have in contracts everything that you would expect a socialist state to provide its workers even if they're in a garment factory. The foreign owned factories were a little bit better and the locally owned ones were not so good but the one thing that all the factory sectors have in common was ours of work that is something that even the socialist state still the socialist state in Vietnam trying to export garments to the rest of the world and complete Indian national market has not been able to deal with and it is the long and you cannot do shifts for various reasons so it is these long hours of work. Similarly we had a comparison of export processing zone factories in Bangladesh with locally owned factories with others and again the export factories have better conditions etc but when you divided the hours of work of people in the garment sector when you divided what they earned by the hours of work were actually returns to labor were not particularly different in these highly met you know industry. So one of the things I think that has always been at the heart in the garment sector that almost makes it distinctive is this very labor intensive price elastic you know thing that makes it quite hard to do anything about that and you see that in the Indian context. I think what Alessandra brings up very nicely is this the the variations of the special regime in the different parts of India and the idea of human labor has been used as one more piece of raw material that is used up in the process and there was one figure which didn't come from India that struck me and that is someone writing about China the Berlin River Delta and China the comment was in this area 40,000 fingers are lost every year in the garment sector and that is a very kind of it it just tells you something like graphics about it tells you something very graphic about one of the points of this describing and that is the indifference to the costs of human reproduction that people do not take any very little responsibility for their workings and that and you know to some extent I think it is about a kind of informality that permeates the relationships at all levels so while you may have these huge global buyers who are you know very much apart from the economy their relationships to the people who supply them is one of informality taking very little responsibility the relationships of the people who buy from them or supply them to their own workers is also one of informality so all along the chain we have this reluctance to assume any responsibility for whoever comes to work without the chain so one the global buyers are not the only bad guys so too the employers are not the only bad guys but they too do what the buyers do which is to devolverise and devolve costs so that just seems to be something that is very characteristic of the industry across the world what are two things that are distinctive about the economy can you hear me one of the things that are very distinctive about India again captured in some of her figures and this was very interesting for me is that in 2001 the indian garment sector earned over five and a half billion dollars on the basis of 10,500 factories the Sri rangan garment sector earned same year three billion dollars on the basis of 300 factories and I think that is telling you something about the indian story of the missing middle that you have these great big industry the factories you know large and then you have this huge network of what I gathered from your comments outside almost policy created informality policy created small sectors that you know in the name of protecting local industry you encourage these tiny workshops and so on so I think that is something very distinctive about the indian industry the other interesting thing is I think when we talk about the materiality of the product and how it plays out this may or may not be coincidence but there is a very distinct north south divide in the the gender conversation of the labor force so in the north of india where in any case female labor force rates are extremely low we have a quite a masculine labor force and in the south of india where you have much higher women higher percentage of women working you do have a far higher percentage of women in there and I wondered if that had anything at all to do with the way that local friendship systems release women for work or not I've only got a minute or two points I think one is I was very very pleased with the way that Alessandro dealt with these debates around modernization versus slavery and in particular a point that to describe the garment workers as slaves modernized slaves treats them as being in a state of exceptionalism but actually what they are in is in a specific kind of precarious work which is characterizes you know the labor force right across india and many other parts of the world clearly because these workers are working for such high-profile factories and such high-profile lanes there is something about the publicity that surrounds them that is quite distinctive to them and my final point in fact you kind of picked up on it you talk about these workers you know the work that yes they burn out they do burn out you cannot work those kinds of hours and retain any you know kind of ability to continue but i would like to see those life histories and what happens to those workers because the phrase you use is you know they kind of dumped on the waist waisting plate it's not necessarily the Bangladesh story you know they work for a very and they know they're going to be exploited and they work very hard but they do save and they do they go back to the informal economy but they go back to self-employment and they set up enterprises small-scale enterprises and to some extent as long as there is a dearth of all the sector decent jobs those self-employed ventures is probably preferable to some of the kind wage labor that is available to them so i would be very very interested in hearing how it goes for for the workers who march out if you like the industry nothing you didn't have much time to watch because otherwise i would have been able to get to those points because all the points are very relevant and i would agree with you that in terms of the correspondence between the physical and the social indeed there is a privatization of the body as yet another raw material so that of course you know teach on labor is not commodity this is the new classical stores of course that is a fiction but is a fiction that has very real effect in the word of labor ultimately and there is a sentence a phrase by cindia federation which i think brings the point home quite powerfully and it is that the human body and not the machine which is the it's the human body that is the first ever machine invented by capitalism so you know the reasons the way in which is introduced to production the way in which you can commodify the social traits of the individual for different scopes so i i definitely think that that is yet another very good way to put it in respect to roma finanza well in terms of the garment industry be necessarily a labor intensive industry i would say yes to an extent of course there are depending on which markets you engage with because there's a massive diversity in terms of final markets you will have certain tasks which is very difficult to make nice like embroidery also where the premium is on the artisanal look okay you go to h&m and you want an indian looking shirt you don't want a industrial looking shirts so i think that is the artisanal premium stays and becomes part and parcel of the value addition of the productive cells so of course those are not meant to be mechanized because part of the value addition actually rests on the inability for them to be mechanized but i think if you look at the labor component of the overall cost of production this is what is said has changed massively over time particularly with the upsurge of what we call the fast fashion model so the fact that today we can decide if we want a pair of jeans or buying an ice cream has to do with process of devaluation of labor so that the more or less we found that the employer spent between five and eight percent of total cost on the labor force on the labor intensive industry which is a contradiction in terms so in a sense these are shut up profit levels and i think we should not be satisfied with simply you know sort of pointing at the fact that okay this is a labor intensive industries because there is a paradox with the labor intensive industry where labor is not the major component of the production cost so you this is what in economics you would expect even following i would say that the mainstream story and in terms of the india creating informality definitely i i would say that i agree with part of the argument because if you look at the indian states role in the sector has actually pushed towards a reproduction of small and medium enterprises particularly again because these enterprises could ask you the responsibility with the labor force so for instance if you have an establishment which is less than 10 out of 20 workers you don't have to register and if you have an establishment which is less than a hundred you have certain responsibilities and not others if it's below a thousand you don't have to ask for government permission to shut down so of course even in the north where we have in terms of overall capacity some major suppliers which command 10 000 machines you want to do them how many machines you have 10 000 but then if you try to find out how many units they have maybe they have 50 they prefer to keep it separate exactly because they're responding to government incentives although something has changed since 2000 with the new textile policy which has ended what it was called reservation to the sector now the problem is that the government at the moment is revamping instead the push towards the informality at the very least is managing the capital the informalization of capital from that of labor so basically is allowing factories to enlarge and at the same time is allowing these factories to employ contract labor so there is an amendment to the contract labor act there has been a discussion there is a revisiting on who's a child when it comes to child labor so there are all like labor sort of reforms which are underway under this government and don't look good news for workers either in sweatshops or indeed in many other industries I would say and finally on gender yes indeed of course it's not the case that you have also that division of labor between north and south corresponds to women workforce participation rates but in a sense for instance also in Bangalore you have main workers originally so what is it that drives an industry towards finding in a specific sector laborers the ideal workforce I don't think park dependence is sufficient to explain because if you look at the story of the type of commodities and how they spread across India is also a story of final markets so in a sense women workers were already available in the south perhaps to be deployed as workers but at the same time the south set up it's sort of an architecture of production where women could guarantee the skilling and the minimization of costs of production so in a sense it's just a story that where you you have the historical trajectory of the gender relations and and the incorporation of women workers in manufacturing activities that matches with which type of market then employers sought to actually make the most out of you know this raw material that they had in the south and finally what did they do when they exit for now we just collected very iconographic material they're like life histories of initially 20 workers living in the Bangalore government industry and it seems that the significant story that is recurrent but also interviewing the unions and the labor organization present is they start doing domestic work so in a sense it's not a story of petty entrepreneurship is really back to normal and I think the difference with the Bangladesh story here it's twofold on the one hand what happens in the 90s but I think there is an acceleration of the cheap labor model because before you could trace older workers even in India you have stories of women that tell you I worked in the industry 25 years that's not the case anymore so I think it has to do with the increasing patterns of commodity diversification so patterns of consumption so that has intensified work and so workers exit earlier so there is one and second I do think that the markets where Bangladesh and India engage with are very different so that you know India is not a competitor for Bangladesh necessarily so you have the same buyers that bought outsourced from India and Bangladesh because they know that they actually do very few things there and the type of production that you find in India it lends itself more to extreme things so I have to breathe some time thank you very much for your presentation I have a very small question on the status narrative and the rule of labor actually bring about these stages shift from very bad work condition to better work the condition of the up and the better wage and because historically I mean at least in other companies society what has not been capitalized sometimes at some point they just say you're going to give you a better wage or max is talking about the way union has the rule of human about the shift from absolute value to structure and in relation to this I would like to ask if in relation to this in India the co-assistant of small-scale production units and big scale plant manufacturing is a strategy that kept their place to undermine fragmented labor force because of the big big I mean empirically right now big workers in big factory are not it's not related with the higher wage and better working conditions but it's potentially good because in bigger factories it's easier for them to cut these historical aspects easier for them to organize and for working units you see and in relation to these again big factories is the is is capital playing the the gender not just because lower wage related with gender but also because is the gender also related with the this militants trade union things is any gender specificity about that okay um is it me yes thank you um yeah I got two full questions first of all you know obviously these problems are exposed now internationally so proof if the pudding we're debating this year but what is the exposure on the indian media newspapers tv if any and um what is the quality of the debate if it is allowed because you are saying that the rules legislation by the government is particularly neoliberal by understand so you know if you have only 20 workers you don't have to register if you have only 50 workers I don't know you only certain base a certain amount of n i and so on and so forth and also I'm not clear again if any because I understand in India there is a strong leftist tradition particularly in some cities like Kolkata and if there is a strong role of the unions in this or if the unions are marginalized because of this neoliberal agenda thank you I just have a question in terms of in terms of how women see themselves because of the work that we've been doing and actually we've been trying to have conversations with government workers in Bangladesh for example and we were saying well do you see yourself in a different kind of job and what else would you do if there were other decent job opportunities within the country and they were like yeah but that doesn't exist I mean we are destined to be government workers I'd be quite interested to hear how women see themselves thank you so starting from the coexistence between small and medium I think actually it's both I think there is an element of strategizing around keeping a small unit size in relation to organization but I don't think that it exhausts all the stories because I generally believe that in certain areas the product cycle is what drives I mean in the world the one who I shaped last week is competition that drives how you would decide in terms of you know the what is the the best size composition of your overall concern so for instance you have a supplier that engages in the production of highly embellished products and then average embellished products you will have a constellation of factories where the biggest are dedicated to buyers where he has a slightly bigger batch of production and less severely fragmented product cycle and he keeps and said the small small guys either in subcontracting terms or he has a couple of other units where instead he only focuses on on this sort of more niche type of production then of course he has the effect of fragmenting the labor force so I think it's a mix of both so let's say that if they have they always try not to reach sort of a very large capacity but at the same time these are also decisions that are influenced by markets by final markets as a matter of fact so it's not just labor driven then of course the two things might sit well together and I would say that in relation to these shifts from sort of absolute surplus extraction to relative as well as you know this debate between formal and real subsumption of labor actually in the sweatshirt you find both quite comfortably comfortably sitting and there is no evidence that anything is in transit so these are not transitory forms the overall concept of transition is redundant with reference to this type of chain capitalism and I think after a hundred years we can say that actually and I was very glad to see the giant's banaches making this point at the higher theoretical level with reference to capitalism that you don't see the erasure of processes of formal subsumption because they are useful in many industries and definitely in these industries you don't see it because you have such variety in terms of markets and product cycle so I just see the home workers and the factory workers leaving very happily or not happily ever after for quite a while it's only a question of which interventions can be addressed to either or both that we have to ask but it's not like the small concerns will just disappear we don't have evidence that suggests at least with reference to India in terms of gender well of course at the beginning the substitution of male with the female workers in the south partially responded to understandings fetishized understandings about the gender and militancy but as a matter of fact if you look at the last five years some of the most interesting strikes that we find in the industry which are very sporadic and never linked much to the union I must say have been actually carried out by women garment workers because their salary was so extraordinarily low vis-à-vis the male counterparts up to up to five years ago that they are the ones that actually staged the campaigns and recently in Bangalore I think six to seven months ago they've been part of another struggle when the government proposed to change the regulation on provident funds so I mean you know the fact that women are docile and nimble fingers this is all part of the mythology of capitalism but employers should not trust too much that might mythology either because sometimes it doesn't right away now in terms of what happens in India well there is no consumer movement as such in India but there is a rise in ethically aware consumption I would say that it's not very big at the moment but you do have a general push towards issues of ethical trade at the very least at corporate level in the last three four years you have the rise of the CSR bill for instance so that is this bill that decides the corporations have to contribute the percentage in corporate social responsibility activities and for the government industry you have an attempt very smart attempt by the ministry of textile to develop their own code of conduct so of course this doesn't respond to consumer pressures this responds to the fact that who owns compliance owns the business so the compliance is becoming really expensive for Indian suppliers one of the ways where they can appropriate at least control more rather than being exposed to checks from buyers is to develop their own compliance norms which they are doing there is a code which has been launched last year which is called Disha and it wants to be the first ever code of conduct in South Asia that is actually pushed by country but unfortunately the CSR model itself internationally has failed I would say miserably after two decades we're allowed to say that and so it's not particularly good news that you find producing countries that are internalizing that same model that we are fighting internationally because it's not delivering so I would say that other types of policies are more interesting to monitor the accords on fire and building safety although it has limitations but there are others that are more interesting to watch I would say unions in India are not necessarily particularly strong in the sector nor in the key sectors where the bulk of informal employment is unfortunately so I would say that from outside you have this idea of India's union led but you know in practice if you look at all the major strikes in the last years the unions often have been only marginally involved then struggling to claim some of the glory coming from the struggles of course the unions are better than others but those are increasingly I feel those that are not politically aligned so for instance one of one union that does very interesting work and the only one that tries to do work with the factory workers is NTUY which is the Neutral Union Initiatives but the others don't have much debt and on informal workers there is a massive engagement at least in the north by SEVA the self-employed women association with mixed results depending on where they're operating the last question was on how women see themselves what I have more data on this on histories with reference to the home base sector we did a fair amount of work with home workers between the Delhi region and Barili and what I find astounding is the differences in gender terms of how people self-represents so that you know for workers have no doubts that they are labor they are must do while women still see themselves as partial workers as curry guards as you know sort of mainly artisans and there is very little imagination of life outside that what there is what's really interesting is when you ask questions about opportunities as it's very similar to when you ask question about education they answer with reference to their children so they answer with the aspiration they have with reference to their offsprings even if as a matter of fact a significant percentage of their children will not in fact be able to do anything else so that there is at least you know two or three children that will have to be socialized to the craft to the work embroidery in particular and only few are able to then move elsewhere so we haven't seen that level of social mobility that for instance in older studies older studies that you you instead of seeing for instance naila studies of Bangladesh very different but they do voice it mainly with reference to offsprings