The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India

by Alessandra Mezzadri

Overview

This book explores the processes producing and reproducing the garment sweatshop in India. Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, the book theorises the garment sweatshop in India as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, composed of factory and non-factory settings, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis shows the tight correspondence between the physical and social materiality of garment production in India; illustrates the great social differentiation and complex patterns of labour unfreedom at work in the industry; and depicts the sweatshop as a composite 'joint enterprise' against the labouring body, which is inexorably depleted and consumed by garment work, even in the absence of major industrial disasters. By placing labour at the centre of the analysis of processes of development and globalisation, the book critically engages with key debates on industrial modernity, modern slavery, and ethical consumerism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107116962
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/14/2016
Series:	Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

Alessandra Mezzadri teaches in the department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests focus on globalisation and processes of labour informalisation; materialist approaches to global commodity chain analysis and global industrial systems, labour standards and CSR; gender and feminist theory; and the political economy of India. She has investigated in depth the Indian garment industry over a span of ten years, and illustrated the different ways in which distinct regional sweatshops are formed and reproduced across the Subcontinent.

Table of Contents

List of tables, figures and pictures; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. The chain and the sweatshop; 2. The commodity and the sweatshop; 3. Difference and the sweatshop; 4. The regional lord and the sweatshop; 5. The broker and the sweatshop; 6. The body and the sweatshop; 7. Conclusions; References; Index.