by Shormila Akter
Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh examines the lives of female garments workers, shaped by “a state that colluded with capitalists to create a socioeconomic environment where millions of young rural women were mobilized into a precariat workforce to serve the interest of capitalism,” (p.30). Lamia Karim documents the human dimensions of the transition that Bangladeshi workers experienced in their search for a ‘good life’, respectability, material comfort, education, fun, sex and love. Karim eschews the narrating of these workers’ lives with just ‘cold-statistics’ which simply classify this female led workforce as the lowest-paid workers in the world and as impoverished victims. These workers navigate hazardous situations with precise accuracy and Karim takes her research beyond the walls of the factories. Through the stories of their non-work lives, the author intends to introduce the reader to the wants and desires of Bangladeshi women and seeks to reveal what life means for those working in this sector (p.12).
Motivated by captivating stories of workers’ encounters with capitalist modernity, Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, besides analysing “how global capital in search for its precariat workforce targets poor women to advance its neoliberal agenda of market penetration and labour flexibility” (p.3), shows how women navigate their workplaces in pursuit of improving the conditions of their families. Karim explores the intersections of work, gender and age, and their co-construction of cultural notions of love, marriage and romance among these female, younger and older, workers leading to different results. The writer intends “to capture the amorous desires of older factory women and their quest for an ‘embrace’, denied to them by global capital that exploited them as working machines” (p.31). The actors of global capital were often the men in these womens’ lives who used their bodies for sexual pleasure with the support of a state and society that viewed them as ‘fallen’ women to be financially exploited.
Using data from a survey of a hundred female garment workers of Bangladesh, the author, pursued an ethnographic narrative in the style of what George Marcus termed as ‘following the story’. In this qualitative study, which took place between 2014 to 2018, the author took a condensed version of historian Tamara Hareven’s life-cycle approach through interviewing and tracking sixteen women in their near or post-retirement phase. Karim, with her research interest being globalization, gender, modernity, and social movements, has contributed much to the regional ethnographic literature, perhaps due to Karim’s own familial roots being close to the people of Bangladesh. This style of fieldwork that Thomas Hylland called fieldwork ‘at home’ clarifies the disciplinary goals of anthropology, as it accounts for cultural variation in the world “thorough field studies have shown that modern societies are far more heterogeneous in terms of cultural and social organizations, than is generally assumed” (Eriksen, 2014, p.40). Furthermore, Karim employed a highly reflexive approach as an ethnographer, shown during one of her interviews, in which she faced refusal by a worker to answer her question. Karim accused herself of being confined within her middle-class subjectivity and thought about re-examining her positionality.
The monograph ends with the author’s follow up interviews in 2020 with sixteen garment workers who took part as interlocuters in her original study. The author confirms historian Willem Van Schendels finding on Bangladeshi garment workers that these women whose social roles used to be homemakers and caregivers, became migrants under the incentives of the global capitalist economy, forcing them to enter a highly gendered labour market (Van Schendel, 2009, p.237). The author argues that during this process, how brutal it might be, these workers sculpted perceptions of the existing society, of which they are also a part, as ongoing phenomena. The study investigates how the Bangladeshi state’s neoliberal policies shaped the perception of female workers about themselves, and societal expectations of their role within it. Whether it was their perceptions of desire, work and “love in the broadest sense” (p.31), Bangladeshi women earned recognition from the state as its citizens. Eric Hobsbawm identified the new consciousness of femaleness and its interest in the latter half of the twentieth century due to the increased participation of married women in the working class as significant, and something that required further critical investigation. This further validate Karim’s arguments around changing norms in the patriarchal society of Bangladesh (Hobsbawm, 1994, p.310-313). According to Hobsbawm, capitalist employers’ preference for female over male labour was primarily due to their being a less expensive labour reserve and in the process plunged female industrial workers, with no particular interest in bettering the social position of women and improving their rights, led to a “revolutionary and undeniable” (Hobsbawm, 1994, p.312) trend in labour practices.
The shift in the economy of Bangladesh from an agrarian to a major developing market (Ali and Rahman, 2016, p.165) within the space of a few decades prompted significant social changes. As a country where nine out of ten people previously resided in rural areas, the first nationwide famine in 1974 affected people’s livelihood significantly, forcing internal migration to the rapidly expanding urban areas in search of work (Van Schendel, 2009, p.133-237). On the other hand, starting with the first military government of the country in 1975, the government of Bangladesh in general, whether military or democratic, welcomed the International Monetary Fund–led economic liberalization and paved the way for a plunge in garments industries in the “Poverty stricken” Bangladesh, as Anu Muhammad described it. To explain the reason behind this ever-increasing globalization of production I find the labour-cost explanation by Appelbaum and Christerson (1997) worth mentioning where they quote The Gap’s Vice-president for Offshore Sourcing saying: ‘Why would I have my people in Sri Lanka if labour costs were not important?’(Cunningham,1993). In search of cheap labour and larger profit retail giants engaged with the Bangladeshi state and exercised great power and influence that meant that they could ignore ongoing labor rights issues (right to safety in the workplace, right to job security, right to union activities and many more) which led to frequent industrial accidents and caused death of hundreds of workers. Incidents like Rana Plaza, which housed five garment factories in an eight-storied house, collapse in April 2013 that killed 1134 and injured twice that number showed the extent of the brutality and greed of these ‘death traps’ (Muhammad, 2015).
These export-oriented garments industries preferred female laborers over male ones, who used to work in the local garment manufacturing sector, because of their lower hiring costs and perceived subservience. According to BGMEA website, four million women worked in the garment industry of Bangladesh in 2012–14. As Willem Van Schendel puts it these women who shifted from being homemakers and caregivers now entered a highly gendered new labour market. (Van Schendel, 2009). Lamia Karim investigates the diverse effects of this displacement of men by women on society and gender relations and found heightened anxieties among men because of the loss of their economic power, which she described as intense gender-based class envy, led to higher rate of domestic violence against women in their lives. These female workers were a good example of what Guy Standing calls precariat labour, as a population whose lives are shaped by the oppressive advances of the neoliberalism through its incentivization of profit at the cost of increased violence in the private lives of women as well. As Simone De Beauvoir pointed out, “women who enjoyed a certain economic autonomy and took part in production were the oppressed class, and as workers they were even more enslaved than male workers” (Beauvoir, 2014, p.84). The author identified the situation for these women as being cheated simultaneously by patriarchy and global capital.
Some of these female workers start their job as early as 14 and since they tend to retire at an early age, it is unlikely to find workers older than 35 years old. Karim notes that 35 is the age where female workers are ‘aged out’ or deemed to be less productive as workers by the factory authorities. After their retirement from the garment sector, tracking down former workers became increasingly difficult as organizations like Labour rights NGOs, the organization of factory owners in Bangladesh known as the BGMEA, the Bangladesh Institute for Labour Studies (BILS), the International Labour Organization (ILO) have become reluctant to pursue those who have exited the labour market. Anu Muhammad added, ‘speedy privatization of public goods and common property also led to a situation where even the Bangladeshi state has taken a back seat regarding responsibilities like expenditures for public welfare (education, healthcare, safe drinking water and energy capabilities, etc.) and continued to treat those as liabilities (Muhammad, 2015). According to David Harvey, the capitalist economy always faced trouble when it came to the cost of the internalization of social reproduction or cost of childcare, elder care, healthcare, social security, education etc. (Harvey,2011, p.265).
The qualitative study revealed that most of these women, 13 out of 16 interlocutors, had no kinds of security in their post work lives and some of them returned to their ancestral home without any kind of job prospects. Endeavouring to reveal the necropolitics of gender, the epilogue takes the reader to the story of Nilufa, who hid her identity to escape from her abusive husband, started to work in the garments sectors early in her life with the hope of a better life but in the end faced a violent and brutal death. Even after her death, the burial of Nilufa’s corpse was denied in her ancestral village by her own community, meaning Nilufa was unable to find dignity even in death.
However, in her anthropological endeavour the author argued that even after this adverse socioeconomic condition these “female garments workers are challenging deeply held social attitudes” (Karim, 2022, p.8). One interesting finding of this study was that although these workers were not even able to feed themselves and their families prior to these factory jobs, more than eighty five percent of the women put freedom of mobility as the most positive outcome of their factory work. These women were walking fast in the streets, speaking aloud wherever is necessary, writing poetry to communicate in the crudest form while questioning expectations of a patriarchal society from women to be invisible and unheard of. With jobs demanding long daily work hours and family members relying on their jobs, they are confident and have to stride quickly and purposefully (Karim, 2022, p.87). Evidently, the city (Dhaka) is experiencing significant changes in women’s attitudes and the comportment in public space. A poem by one of the factory workers, Yesmin, brings the reader into the world of these workers.
When the day breaks
My eyes take in a vision
Of a tide of garment workers on the street
………………..
Have you seen so many women’s faces together?
Have you heard the thunderous sound of a thousand women walking?
(Karim, 2022, p.53).
Lamia Karim attempts to predict the political future of the garment workers of Bangladesh. With trade unions in the country being manipulated by political parties and little autonomy, the left-identified trade unions have failed to recognize these workers’ urge for middle-class respectability and economic comfort. Their concern with the narrow gap between them and the ultra-poor peasants from the rural areas has meant a reticence to acknowledge their working-class identity. Karim draws the conclusion that it would be a mistake to consider the lives of garment workers only through the outstanding desires and continuous exploitation they face. During many of her conversations with these workers she felt that their lives also contained “residue of hope”, a term coined by Bangladeshi anthropologist Nurul Momen Bhuiyan. As Bertell Ollman said, ‘the next step up the ladder to class consciousness is that workers must have an inkling, however vague, that their situation can be qualitatively improved’ (Ollman,1972, p.13).
References
Appelbaum Richard P. M and Brad Christerson, 1997, Cheap Labor Strategies and Export-Oriented Industrialization: Some Lessons from the Los Angeles/East Asia Apparel Connection, 213.
Beauvoir Simone De, 2014, The Second Sex, 2014, Simone De Beauvoir, Vintage digital, 84.
Cunningham,J.P. ,1993, Personal interview with the Vice President for Offshore Sourcing,The Gap Far East, HongKong, 12July.
Eriksen Thomas Hylland, 2015, Small Places, Large Issues: An introduction to social and cultural anthropology. Fourth edition, Pluto PRESS, 40.
Harvey David, 2011, The Enigma of Capital and Crises of Capitalism, Profile Books, First South Asian Edition, 265.
Hobsbawm Eric, 1994, Age of Extremes The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 , 310-313)
Karim Lamia, 2022, Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh. LAMIA KARIM, University of Minnesota Press, 3-31, 53-87.
Khondoker Habibul Haque, 2023, Reviewed book: Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh, Journal of Asian and African Studies https://journals-sagepub-com.sussex.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1177/00219096231167936
Muhammad Anu, 2015, Bangladesh- A model of Neoliberalism: The Case of Microfinance and NGOs, CADTM, https://www.cadtm.org/Bangladesh-A-Model-of-Neoliberalism
Ollman Bertell,1972, Toward Class Consciousness Next Time: Marx and the Working Class, Politics and Society, vol 3, Issue 1, 13.
Riaz Ali, Rahman Mohammad Sajjadur, 2016, Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Bangladesh, Routledge, 165.
Culture and Capitalism 