Production beyond the Horizon of Consumption: Spatial Fixes and Anti-sweatshop Struggles in the Global Athletic Footwear Industry

Abstract

Transnational outsourcing makes it possible for Western companies to access the enormous labour reserves in countries such as China, India or Bangladesh without entering into formal (contractual) relations with these workers. It provides global buyers with an opportunity to disassociate themselves from (labour-intensive) production activities, and thereby from struggles over wages, environment, conditions of work and reproduction. In this context, workers are increasingly treated as a subcontracted component rather than a fixture as part of employer organisations. Drawing upon concepts derived from human and labour geography, this paper takes one labour-intensive sector—athletic footwear—as a case study of how the transnationalisation of production has resulted in a sweatshop model, while simultaneously transforming the athletic footwear industry into a site of social struggle. This paper looks at how global buyers have used relocation as a spatial fix for crises of profitability and labour control, but also pays attention to countervailing tendencies such as the emergence of a global anti-sweatshop movement, and the influence of codes of conduct on working conditions, which adds an extra-local dimension to labour relations.

Notes

*An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Changing Cultures of Competitiveness” ESRC Research Seminar Series, 2007–2009, 17 April 2009, at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University. The author thanks Khalid Nadvi, Kees van der Pijl, Liz Parker and Marcus Taylor for helpful comments.

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103. Brown and O'Rourke, op. cit., p. 251.

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