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Abstract
This article shows how the Eastern and Central European export footwear sector has experienced economic and social downgrading and immiserating growth over the last three decades. Based on interviews with 209 workers from 12 factories across six countries, it analyses how intense gender-based labor exploitation—entailing dangerous working conditions and poverty pay—underpins the sector’s expansion and extra-regional integration. It draws upon and contributes to the global poverty chain (GPC) approach by (1) showing how the concept is relevant beyond the global south, and (2) providing a gendered political economy perspective from which to conduct GPC analysis. It concludes by suggesting that GPC’s are quite common throughout the world economy, and that their existence requires a more critical approach to much global value chain analysis.
Acknowledgments
Some of the data presented in Section 5 has been previously published (See Clean Clothes Campaign: Citation2016). We thank the following for help conducting this research. Mirela Arqimandriti, David Hachfeld , Megi Llubani, Ante Juric–Marijanovic, Jelena Bajic, Maja Kremenovic, Miranda Ramova, Marija Todorovska, Grazyna Latos, Joanna Szabunko, Corina Ajder, Veronika Vlcková, and Christa Luginbühl. We also thank Diane Elson, Andreas Antoniades, and Beate Jahn, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of RIPE for comments and suggestions. Any errors are those of the authors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Big German discount retailers, most notably, Aldi, Lidl, and Otto, are also increasingly important players in the ECE footwear sector although workers we interviewed did not mention that they produced for these brands
2 In Albania, e.g. interviewed workers did not receive contracts or payslips.
3 At the time of writing this was still a draft WDR, which will be published in full towards the end of 2019.
5 The overall sweep of this section draws inspiration from Pickles and Smith (Citation2016, chapters 5 and 6).
6 Most noteworthy are CCC and LP shoes.
10 Interview, Bosnia-Hergzegovina, October, 2015.
11 Interview, Romania, November, 2015.
12 Interview, Poland, October, 2015.
14 Interviews, Romania, October–November, 2015.
15 Interview, Slovakia, December, 2015.
16 Interview, Macedonia, October, 2015.
18 Interview, Slovakia, November, 2015.
19 Interviews, Macedonia, December, 2015.
20 Interview, Romania, December, 2015.
21 Interview, Romania, December, 2015.
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Notes on contributors
Benjamin Selwyn
Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Development at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex. He is author of The Struggle for Development (2017), The Global Development Crisis (2014), Workers, State and Development in Brazil: Powers of Labor, Chains of Value (2012) and co-editor of Class Dynamics of Development (2017).
Bettina Musiolek
Bettina Musiolek PhD is coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign in Eastern, Central and South Eastern Europe and Turkey. She has co-authored many reports by the CCC addressing issues of globalisation, women's work, fashion and human rights, including most recently a country profile about export garment production in Romania (https://cleanclothes.org/news/2019/05/livingwage/europe/country-profiles/romania/view).
Artemisa Ijarja
Artemisa Ijarja has an MA in Global Political Economy from the Department of Social Science, University of Kassel. She is an appeal coordinator for the German branch of the Clean Clothes Campaign, with a focus upon the campaign for a living wage in East, Southern and South Eastern Europe.