Do Bangladeshi Factory Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood in the Post-Sweatshop Era

Bibliographic Data

ID3945808
AuthorsDina M Siddiqi (0000-0001-7451-2218, Bangladesh and the United States where she is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University., corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume91
Issue1
Pages154-174
Publication date2009-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.2008.55
OpenAlexW2063847349
LanguageEN
Citations received43
References cited21

This article revisits the figure of the 'third world sweatshop worker', long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the 'culture of global moralism' that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the 'sweatshop economy' have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between 'global' and 'local' feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above - calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance - can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to 'save' women workers

Sweatshop · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Labor Movements and Unions

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