COVID-19 Exposes Faultlines in Sri Lanka’s Apparels Sector
The global pandemic and the national debt crisis collided to expose the claims of ethical garment production in Sri Lanka.
Illustration: Jamhoor
March 21st 2023: Sri Lanka’s establishment class is sighing with relief that the IMF’s Board has signed the Extended Financial Facility of SDR 3 billion bailout. The country’s debt stands at a staggering 53 billion USD, while the restructuring gives little joyful news. My statement on Sri Lanka’s debt crisis may appear to be a digression from reflecting on the apparels sector, ten years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. Not so, I argue.
2013 was annus horribilis for the global apparels sector, especially in South Asia, with reports of numerous factory fires and the horrific collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh being a wakeup call for retailers to take the life, health, and safety of workers seriously. However, the Sri Lankan apparels sector seemed somehow unscathed. Not blemished with industrial disasters or hyper-exploitative work conditions, the sector in fact had often perversely benefitted from mass labour struggles, rising wages or adversities in neighbouring countries.
However, the more proximal crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and IMF debt trap have exposed the underlying neglect faced by labourers in the garment sector and the economy more generally. These crises spotlighted the everyday grind of, and structural violence faced by, the working classes. It is these structural facets that I will focus on in this brief intervention, with a specific focus on the health of working bodies.
Writing as early as 1999 in the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Karp hailed the superlative conditions in Sri Lanka’s garments sector. A glorious account of favourable working conditions accorded to workers by visionary entrepreneurs, Karp’s article pointed to what was to become a widely-observed feature of the garments sector: workers on the Sri Lankan factory floor were better off than their counterparts across South Asia.
A number of us studying the sector closely for decades have located these working conditions in foundational factors, such as Sri Lanka’s relatively stronger labour legislation, the pivotal role played by collective labour struggles, and what used to be a sounder social welfare fabric. These political and social conditions have been key to appreciating attempts at taking the ethical trajectory, which has encompassed frontrunners, such companies like Slimeline Ltd. highlighted by Karp, and SME (small- and medium-size enterprises) production units alike.
However, despite these ethical credentials, Sri Lankan apparels found itself in the recurrent spotlight approximately six months after the outbreak of COVID-19. Which faultlines surfaced to suggest that the sector may have been basing its successes on a partial and faulty premise? How may the debt crisis have exacerbated them?
COVID-19 Cracks Clothing Companies
“Sri Lanka was so successful in this switch [to PPE production during the COVID-19 pandemic] that the ILO estimates that it came second only to China in PPE exports during January-June 2020.”
A near decade-long run of a relatively unsoiled record was upended towards the latter part of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic started out as a boon to the apparels sector: Sri Lankan apparels very quickly shifted towards the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) to meet growing global demands, underlining the vision and malleability of industrial capital. The country was so successful in this switch that the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that it came second only to China in PPE exports during January-June 2020. Moreover, and partly due to the country being a smaller supplier, coupled with a tripartite agreement that sought to protect job security during the pandemic, Sri Lankan apparels seem set to continue in the vanguard.
With the onset of COVID-19, Sri Lankan apparels took robust steps towards upholding safety standards and implementing relevant health protocols, including maintaining physical within factories. This was supported by factories’ self-promotional video clips circulating on social media and by independent news items, but also in conversations I had with workers as part of my research at the start of the pandemic. The gravity of the pandemic took centre-stage, and workers reported that safety protocols were being upheld.
Jeevani (pseudonym), a worker I have known since 2008, said: “At the start, the factory was totally thorough in how strictly distances were kept between workers, wearing masks, PPE, any worker with symptom had to stay back…slowly, however, this changed.”
The growing complacency Jeevani refers to over the course of the pandemic was observed in other factories too. In October 2020, a COVID-19 outbreak at a Brandix factory unleashed community transmission at a massive scale, signalling corporate culpability in the state-military-corporate corruption nexus. This was a turning point for both Sri Lanka’s apparel sector and the country, as COVID-19 spread from clusters to the community. It dragged down the sector and punctured the country’s overall commendable pandemic management.
The country's garment manufacturers reported a significant drop in orders from global retailers which further squeezed factories reeling from the pandemic. Image: EcoTextile News.
“Absolute surplus value extraction increasingly became the norm, heralding an ominous turn for a sector that had so far loudly marketed itself in terms of ethical sourcing.”
Once COVID-19 started to spread within and through communities, apparel industrialists came to face the harsh reality that no level of adherence to health and safety standards was going to prevent the spread of the virus. There were rising tensions between the observance of health and safety standards and meeting orders with an ever-smaller cohort of workers due to illness. These tensions were getting frequently picked up by international labour rights groups from Human Rights Watch to Asia Floor Wage. The risk of forced labour for people behind the masks, also reared its head owing to the need to make do with smaller worker cohorts as they were constantly being taken ill. Absolute surplus value extraction increasingly became the norm, heralding an ominous turn for a sector that had so far loudly marketed itself in terms of ethical sourcing.
There was, however, another dimension to workers’ health and safety that the Sri Lankan apparels sector was soon to discover: that of the living wage. The consistent absence of living wages in the garments industry, not just in Sri Lanka but across South Asia, was to especially haunt it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The living wage — calculated at Sri Lankan Rupees (SLR) 94,000.00 (£235.00) by Asia Floor Wage Alliance — has always been the Achilles heel of the industry. In the best case, a productive worker with various incentives may garner a wage packet of SLR 60,000.00 (£150.00), with a more likely average of SLR 30,000.00 (£80.00).The paucity of living wages across the board has severely impacted workers’ health and safety on the shop floor and beyond. Workers face rampant food insecurity and live perilous lives, which were soon exposed by the spread and severity of the virus in worker communities.
“The consistent absence of living wages in the garments industry, not just in Sri Lanka but across South Asia, was to especially haunt it during the COVID-19 pandemic. ”
Poor wages compel workers to seek cheaper housing. Boarding homes which house workers are often congested and poor in quality, whether located within free trade zones or outside of them. Lack of regulation of housing stock is one dimension to a persistent problem of overcrowded living. The other is that lack of a living wage forces workers into cheap lodging, which is often shared by multiple workers and is of dismal quality. A recent social media campaign by Asia Floor Wage revealed the squalid conditions of these lodgings.
Reminiscent of deplorable working-class neighbourhoods in industrial-era Britain, this line-housing has been hastily set up with inexpensive and cheap materials. Windows and ventilation are lacking; sanitary facilities are shared with other co-workers and running water is not assured. The spread of disease — especially one as contagious as COVID-19 — was only inevitable. The severity of health risks then became evident during the pandemic, begging broader questions on dense living, poorly regulated housing stock, and more generally, a hyperproclivity towards megapolises in Sri Lanka’s post-war urban imaginary.
Lodgings, Living and (Working) Life
For workers not earning a living wage, communal living is a necessity and the norm for the simple reason that wage packets do not cover inflated rentals for single rooms. Shared living in cramped rooms enhances virus circulation. If one worker is afflicted with COVID-19, the chances of their co-tenant getting infected are high, since workers do not have the luxury of physically distancing within their homes.
Management was hence to discover that labouring lives are never neatly demarcated between the production floor (where they may applaud themselves on superlative health and safety standards) and their social reproductive spheres, i.e. the squalid homes and boarding lodges the workers are forced to live in. It underscores what feminist scholars have consistently highlighted: the need to appreciate “linkages between lives as waged workers in a formal workspace with the…nature of work-life outside” (Dutta 2016). These connections matter not just because they help appreciate labour agency and action, as feminist scholars recurrently raise, but also because they provide grounded understandings of the constraints within which labour agency is experienced and asserted.
The assault on the credibility of health and safety standards in Sri Lankan apparels became so acute on the back of COVID-19 that the ILO Better Work initiative rolled out a flagship program on health and safety protocols for SMEs in late 2022. Despite the ILO being a tripartite organization, and in the face of its claims of involving unions in the program, in practice this often fails to be the case (which is in itself worthy of further exploration). More critically, however, the ILO too continues to limit itself to technocratic tool kits, as if wholly oblivious to the absence of living wages, hyper-inflation, and a debt crisis in the country, as well as the possible relationship of these issues with the depletion of working bodies.
Poor health and safety standards in the Sri Lankan apparels industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that the ILO Better Work initiative rolled out a flagship program on health and safety protocols for SMEs in late 2022. Image: Cornell University.
It is crucial then, that continued dissection of the ethical credentials of Sri Lankan apparels by labour campaigners is not merely limited to wage theft by global retailers. Asia Floor Wage, Labour Behind the Labels, Clean Clothes Campaign, and others must also spotlight how multi-lateral organizations themselves fall short of grappling with the scale of the problem by confining themselves to toolkits that attempt to address symptoms but not the source of worker immiseration: the threats to worker survival and the depletion of working bodies struggling under pitiable wages, a historic pandemic and a monstrous debt crisis that brough the country to the brink of economic collapse.
“It is crucial then, that continued dissection of the ethical credentials of Sri Lankan apparels by labour campaigners is not merely limited to wage theft by global retailers. ”
The unravelling initiated by the pandemic, which started with COVID community transmission linked to a large apparels producer in the country, reverberated in the industry as the debt crisis worsened. The gains of 2022 in terms of export revenue (as seen in data provided by Joint Apparel Association Forum, JAAF) began to falter for SMEs by April, as the debt crisis started to hit. Since the apparel industry is embedded in an ecosystem where the larger factories are reliant on SMEs, as Mallika Shakya (2018) underlines, any effects on SMEs also impact the industry as a whole. Although, larger producers – MAS, Hirdramani Group and Brandix (especially) – continue to be the powerhouses of this growth, SME producers continue to have a harder time, as reported internationally and locally.
Falling wages due to hyperinflation, hovering around 50% in the country, coupled with a 40% reduction in orders means that the working day is shortened, the possibility of overtime reduced, and productivity targets lowered, as the Sunday Times in Sri Lanka reported in January 2023. The global crunch makes it difficult for workers to sustain their income levels – with hyperinflation and a national debt crisis, the compounding effects on the health and well-being of workers go well beyond the factory floor. Consequently, soup kitchens for factory workers are an increasing norm. Put differently, no amount of ‘superlative’ shop floor conditions will sustain the health of workers when living wages are absent, while the situation becomes acute in crisis conditions, whether a pandemic or a debt crisis.
A soup kitchen in Colombo, July 2022. Food inflation and shortages of cooking gas and petrol have had compounding effects on the health and well-being of workers, beyond the factory floor. Image: Al Jazeera
The demand for living wages is of course the tip of the iceberg. Sri Lankan labour activists continue to demand better working conditions in more radical, egalitarian, and redistributive forms, which are not the focus of this essay on the afterlives of Rana Plaza (and other big crises) on working conditions on the garment factory floor. I and others have written in more detail on unionization efforts in garment factory sites, and in some cases, workers’ ambivalent attitudes towards unions. AWFA has continued their concerns around issues of union repression in Sri Lanka in the context of ongoing crises.
“Both in the everyday (pandemic and debt crisis in Sri Lanka) and the extraordinary moments (Rana Plaza in Bangladesh), the structural violence endured by labouring bodies is real.”
As resonant today as it was in 2018, when Rebecca Prentice, Geert de Neve, and Alessandra Mezzadri and I remarked, with no crystal ball in hand, that to understand health, safety, and well-being of workers, we also need to account for the spatial and temporal dimensions of workers’ lives. Limiting initiatives around shop floor safety to technocratic tools and protocols is restrictive and pitiable, as the ILO Better Work programme in Sri Lanka is doing. The intricate connections between the shopfloor (productive) and workers’ dwellings (social reproductive sphere) call for the recognition of labouring as “a bodily engagement, expressed through idioms of capability, strength and skill, on the one hand, and depletion, stress, ill health and injury on the other”.
Both in the everyday (pandemic and debt crisis in Sri Lanka) and the extraordinary moments (Rana Plaza in Bangladesh), the structural violence endured by labouring bodies is real. Without living wages, any claims of ‘ethical’ production or consumption fall short, as the pandemic and debt crisis in Sri Lanka continuously exposes. Any claims of the sector’s earnestness around promoting decent jobs and upholding decent work stand on spurious ground – and will continue to do so. In a post-default setting in Sri Lanka, without redistributive justice at its core, if the clarion calls and social conditions of the current juncture are neglected, then the apparel sector, too, is implicated in an elite bargain that is driving the country towards an existential crisis.
Kanchana N Ruwanpura is Professor of Development Geography, Human Geography Unit, University of Gothenburg, SWEDEN and Fellow, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, SCOTLAND. She is the author of Garments without Guilt? Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels published by Cambridge University Press; and can be found on Twitter at @knr21_cam