An anthropological study of female workers in the global apparel industry in Bangladesh uncovers a zero-sum game. Aged out by 40 with worn-out bodies and younger workers ready to take their place, women often have little or no savings to sustain them.
by Lamia Karim, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
My book manuscript After Work is an anthropological study of the incursion of capitalist modernity in Bangladesh through the global apparel industry, and the forms of life that the industry has generated for its female work force. In Bangladesh, the garment industry labor force is primarily female and young. Workers enter around the average age of fifteen years and are aged out by thirty-five to forty years when they are no longer considered productive by factory management. After Work seeks to bring out the human dimensions of these workers’ lives. These women are workers, but they are also mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. In each of these areas, their lives are profoundly complex, meaningful, and instructive in understanding the formation of a global female workforce. My study seeks to illuminate the challenges and circumstances of the aged-out workers’ lives in Bangladesh, and contribute toward a public anthropology of working-class factory women in the global supply chain.
The global garment industry in Bangladesh has grown on a steady supply of young rural workers. The workforce is four million plus, of which 80 percent is female. By her late thirties, a worker is deemed less productive by factory management, and a younger worker replaces her. Once these workers exit out of factories due to ageism, no data is kept on their life circumstances by labor organizations. These workers disappear either into the urban informal economy or they return to their villages due to lack of work. They have given the best years of their lives to help grow a global apparel industry that benefits consumers and retail giants in the West, and the state and a newly emergent capitalist class in Bangladesh. Yet, they never received the benefit of a living wage, healthcare, or an adequate pension. Monthly wages were held flat between 1994 to 2006 at $11 dollars, rising only to $22 in 2006, $30 in 2010, $67 in 2013, and finally to $90 in 2019. These are bodies in bare existence with weakened eyesight, chronic upper-respiratory problems, gastrointestinal and kidney ailments, all compounded by low wages, poor diet, and precarious work conditions.
Background
The garment industry in Bangladesh is only four decades old, beginning with a Korean-Bangladeshi venture in 1978. Today, it is second to China in apparel production, having overtaken both Vietnam and Sri Lanka. Major retail brands like Walmart, Zara, and H&M among others have their presence in Bangladesh, and transnational capital from China, South Korea, and India have flooded into the industry. The industry was a beneficiary of the Multi-Fiber Agreement (1974-1994) and the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (1995-2004) that gave preferential access to goods manufactured in the least developed countries like Bangladesh. The garment industry is the largest source of foreign revenue for the government at $30 billion (2018 figures), and it remains a vital industry as the country climbs to a middle-income status country by 2025. Following the 2008 financial crisis, Western manufacturers and retailers began to search for the lowest prices in the garment sector. This trend, dubbed as the race to the bottom, brought many retailers to Bangladesh where wages were held at $22 in 2008. Global retailers sought low wages, fast production turnaround, and a compliant labor force, all made possible in Bangladesh with severe restrictions in trade union activities. Factory fires were frequent at these factories that violated building and labor codes with unsafe work conditions––no fire escapes, water sprinklers, and often with padlocked doors that kept workers locked inside the factory during the workday.
Immediately following the Rana Plaza industrial accident in 2013 that killed over 1,100 workers and injured another 2,500 workers, global outcry forced EU nations, global retailers, trade union leaders, facfinally pass stricter factory oversight and upgrades through two measures known as the Accord and Alliance. But the industry continues to be plagued by factory-level accidents and violations of workers’ rights. Questions over low wages continue to be an ongoing issue between workers and factory management with two large-scale workers strikes in 2016 and again in 2018. Although some gains were made by workers, increased technological surveillance through CCTVs have resulted in striking workers being identified and fired from their jobs. It is under these precarious work conditions that young women work every day for $90 a month in 2019, still the world’s lowest apparel production wages.
Work, Women, and Change
Bangladesh is fed by the two mighty rivers of the Gangetic Delta, the Brahmaputra and Ganges. As the snow caps in the Himalayas melt due to global warming, annual flooding and river erosion have led to landlessness, forcing rural families to send their unmarried young daughters to the city in search of employment, the only available work for these women outside of domestic household help. These women come from poor farming families that depend on subsistence farming. It is important to note that they do not come from the traditional artisanal families of weavers, potters, and so on. In those families, women and men work together on production, and family income is based on collective work done by all its members—father, mother, and children. Sending women to work as migrant labor in factories is a foundational change for a Muslim society where a woman’s role is in the home, taking care of her husband, children and in-laws. This loosening of social expectations around women's work has had a major effect on the lives of working-class women in Bangladesh, especially in the areas of their private lives.
My research showed many changes in their lives, but what struck me most was this—a majority of the women said that despite sexual harassment and verbal abuse by line managers, they were safer in the factory, compared with the high incidence of domestic violence they endured at home. The more I talked to the women, the more they slowly began to reveal their stories of sadness, loss, and desire. From these investigations, four key areas of inter-generational change between the older generation and younger generation of female workers emerged, which I highlight below.
1) Education
Almost all of the older women workers were illiterate or had functional literacy. Functional literacy refers to a person’s ability to sign their names, to read and write at a very basic level. The government of Bangladesh has made education free for all children up to grade eight. But due to poverty, most of these women had between a third to fifth grade education after which they were forced to enter the labor force. At factories, they entered precarious work conditions—they often lacked proper employment documents, allowing management to fire them on a pretext. Workers often signed paperwork without realizing that they were signing papers that claimed that they were voluntarily leaving their jobs. Their vulnerabilities were increased by the absence of trade union representatives at factories.
These older women realized that lack of education had diminished their economic opportunities, and they wanted to educate their children so that the next generation would not have to do factory work. Most of them invested in their children’s education over other expenses. Upward mobility through education was the cherished goal of these working-class mothers. In many instances, their sons and daughters went on to study beyond the tenth grade. For some, their adult children earned work as technicians, primary school teachers, retail sales clerks, and other more secure positions. The women I interviewed mostly believed that the payoffs from education were more secure than in starting a business, the entrepreneurial model. Their desire for the status and security of middle-class occupations came through when they talked about going to “office” to work. They never used karkhana, the Bengali word for factory. When it was pointed out to them that they actually worked in assembly lines in a factory, they laughed shyly but again reverted back to their chosen word “office” to describe their desire for upward mobility.
2) Consumerism
When we compare the older workers to the new generation of workers, we find that the older workers eschewed consumerism; the younger generation not so. Older generation saved their money in order to invest in education, hence a better life, for their children. They ate very simple meals, and seldom bought clothes or trinkets for themselves. Many slept on the hard floor on a thin mattress over a costly thicker mattress or bed. While most workers, whether young or old, sent money to their parents, I found that the younger generation of workers also kept aside some money for their personal purchases. In contrast to the older workers, these younger workers had between an eighth to twelfth grade education, making education less of a goal. Many of these younger workers felt that they were upwardly mobile middle-class subjects who would eventually move into line management jobs.
These young workers also grew up in an era of rampant consumerism, television advertisements selling commodities, sparkling new malls in the city, restaurants, shops, and so on that all beckon the consumer. The younger workers have more disposable income compared to a generation ago. On Friday evenings, one can see young workers in the shopping areas around their slums purchasing clothes, vanity bags, trinkets, cosmetics, and clothes for their children. They eat snacks at local food carts and walk the streets for a few hours before heading home. The older workers mentioned that in the early days of factory work, such vibrant shopping areas had not grown up in their neighborhoods.
The incursion of capitalist modernity is also reshaping social attitudes among younger women, along with their living arrangements. Unmarried women often live in makeshift dormitories, and while living conditions are crowded and unsanitary, these novel living arrangements have given them space to cultivate themselves as slightly more autonomous subjects. A small but significant change is in the rise in unmarried women and men living together, indicating a major shift in Bangladeshi women’s sexuality. These arrangements occur because many landlords are unwilling to rent to single women. Working-class women and men then partner together to find housing as a “married couple.” These are precarious arrangements because often the man already has a wife in the village. These changes have diverse and tragic outcomes in these women’s lives that my book documents.
3) Lack of safety nets
Majority of the older women did not have safety nets in old age. They did not have any savings because their abysmally low wages did not let them save. Many of them were tricked out of their pension plans by factory management. Most of these women were either looking for work in the city or they returned to their village if they had some land. Dependence on their adult children for support in old age was precarious at best. Perhaps the most difficult generational change between the older workers and their adult children is the question of autonomy over one’s income and familial duties. The younger generation made choices for themselves, such as their marriage partners, often against their mothers’ wishes. When these sons and daughters started their own families, their loyalties shifted from mother to spouse and to their children. This is not to suggest that they did not take care of their aging mothers, but they now had to negotiate with their spouses and children’s demands in a nuclear family setting. Life had come full circle for these older workers who were again on their own, struggling to make ends meet.
4) Changes in marriage
Marriage, one of the foundational structures of family life, was undergoing severe stress due to the dislocation of women from their rural households and wage employment. Most of the older women interviewed said that they were married, but in 70 percent of cases, they were separated or had been abandoned by their husbands. Due to the social status given to married women in Bangladeshi society, these older women were not forthcoming about their marital status. Although some of their husbands had taken a second wife and had been absent for more than eight to twelve years, the women still retained the idea of being “a married woman.” Within their socio-economic class, men tend to abandon their wives rather than divorce them, to avoid paying for maintenance to their wives and children. In order to understand marriage and divorce patterns among women, I spoke with two labor rights advocates with long-term experience on these issues. Interestingly, they offered divergent opinions regarding marriage practices adopted by migrant female workers in Dhaka city.
Shahnaz, a labor rights advocate, told me that among the younger generation of female workers marriages increasingly occur through the office of the Qazi, the government officer in charge of registering marriages and divorces. The Qazi’s office registers the marriage and gives the woman a receipt with a number that is her proof of the legality of the marital contract between both parties. Shahnaz said that if women do not get a proper divorce, later they face humiliation, and also sexual and monetary demands from their ex-husbands, who threaten them with exposure and scandal should they refuse to comply. Therefore, a divorce certificate guarantees these women control over their bodies, their financial resources, and the custody of their children. She then added that during the peak of micro-credit in the 1990s and early 2000s, NGOs, especially BRAC, taught rural women how to properly register marriages and divorces in order to better empower them over their marital rights. Thus, there was a spread of general knowledge about the registration of marriages in rural society.
However, another labor rights advocate had a different story. She mentioned that in her area, the local Qazi has opened his own shop in the market to offer false documents for marriage and divorce in exchange for a small sum of money. According to her, this particular Qazi had realized that marriages and divorces are on the upswing among these working-class women. When a marriage is legally registered, it is difficult for a man to simply walk away from his marriage without any financial responsibilities; he has to fulfill the terms of the marriage contract and pay for the maintenance for his wife and children should the woman take him to family court. From the Qazi’s perspective, issuing false marriage documents at a low price makes it easy for the couple—who are either madly in love, facing a sudden pregnancy, in need of housing, or some other social or economic necessity—to get married quickly. When they want to get divorced, and this occurs frequently, it is very easy for the Qazi to issue the divorce because the marriage was never registered with the state in the first place.
Despite these shifts, the Bangladeshi woman and family structure still remain closely linked to kinship and rural origins. Perhaps the most radical change is that rural families now increasingly accept their daughters getting divorced. A divorced woman has more control over her earnings, and from her family’s perspective it is easier for them to make demands on her income since she has no husband who can also make claims on her money. Women as wage labor are trapped in multiple levels of social pressure. What we are beginning to see is a gradual transformation of existing family relations.
After Work brings to life the complexities that inform these women’s lives—their dreams, their hopes, and their desires for a better life for their children. Yet their humanity is diminished daily, not only by the exploitation of the global apparel industry, but also by well-meaning researchers who continuously reduce their lives to statistics to offer us a generalized understanding of women’s labor. Without recognizing the innate humanity of these female workers, the world fails to see them as full human subjects with the potential to create meaningful lives. They are like the flowers of Chernobyl in the shadows of capital in Bangladesh.
—Lamia Karim, associate professor, Department of Anthropology, is the author of Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Her current project, After Work, has received supportive funding from multiple entities, including CSWS, Oregon Humanities Center, Office of the Vice President of Research and Innovation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.