Conceptualizing Labor Regimes in Global Production Networks: Uneven Outcomes across the Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan Apparel Industries

abstract

This article seeks to develop the concept of labor regimes as a tool for understanding the uneven labor outcomes of global production networks (GPNs). Existing work on labor regimes tends to give primacy to the control of labor, thereby analyzing labor regimes largely from a governance perspective. The agency of labor, however, is deeply embedded in the workings of labor regimes in GPNs, and remains somewhat undertheorized therein. In this article, we seek to build on recent work that has revivified the concept of labor regimes in the context of global production to develop an approach that brings the governance and agency of labor under one analytical domain. For this purpose, we develop a multiscalar conceptual framework with relations amongst and between labor, capital, the state, and international civil society organizations delimited as the key dynamics shaping labor regimes. By employing comparative case study methods and qualitative inquiry, the article deploys this framework to examine and compare the labor regimes of the Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan apparel industries, which exhibit seemingly very different labor outcomes in the context of enrollment in similar GPNs. Based on the findings, the article explains how and why labor regimes are shaped as a result of the variable intersections of governance and agency, which in turn are deeply embedded in, and constitutive of, both global production dynamics and territorially specific characteristics.

Key words:

• global production net-works
• labor regimes
• labor
• Sri Lanka
• Bangladesh
• apparel industry
• labor governance
• labor agency

Acknowledgments

This article is based on the PhD thesis of Shyamain Wickramasingha, carried out under the Research Scholarship of the National University of Singapore with the full endorsement of the Institutional Review Board (Approval Number: NUS-IRB Ref No: S-18-252E). An initial version was presented at the Labor Regimes workshop at the Queen Mary University of London in January 2019, organized with the support of the GPN Center, National University of Singapore and Queen Mary University of London’s Centre on Labor and Global Production. We thank the participants of the workshop for their helpful feedback. We are most grateful to our respondents in both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka for their valuable time, and thank Mahpara Kaizer and Iffat Jahan Antara for providing translation assistance in Bangladesh. We are indebted to Woon Chih Yuan of the National University of Singapore for reading earlier versions of this article and providing helpful comments along the way. We thank Jane Pollard and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Any errors remain our own. This work was supported by a National University of Singapore Research Scholarship and the Graduate Research Support Scheme.