Fighting the Sweatshop Regime: A Conversation with Alessandra Mezzadri
The sweatshop regime will only be dismantled by mobilizing around—and transforming—work-spaces, life-spaces, and workers’ health in a holistic sense.
Illustration: Jamhoor
The Indian textile and apparel industry is large, geographically dispersed across cities and towns, and powered by workers performing diverse functions to make garments for both domestic use and an enormous global market. While textile production and export has been an important feature of India’s colonial and postcolonial economy, the embedding of garments into global value chains as a central feature of the industry can be tracked clearly from the 1990s neoliberalisation era. In 2018, the textile and apparel industry provided direct employment to about 45 million people, a third of which were women. If the equally large number employed informally are taken into account, the feminised labour force comes into sharper focus, along with the depredations of informal, casualised work controlled by labour intermediaries.
On the 10th anniversary of the horrific Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, this interview is part of our special issue exploring working conditions in the garment and textile industry across South Asia.
Given that similar logics of neoliberal capitalism govern garment labour regimes across the global South — tough, unending labour in poor working conditions for meagre wages — here we explore the case of India to ask: How were the ripples of Rana Plaza felt in India’s garment sector? Did the tragedy affect India’s position in the global garments value chain? Did the horrors of Rana Plaza serve as an opportunity, whether momentary or sustained, for labour mobilisation around healthier working conditions? How have Indian manufacturers navigated the (nominally) greater scrutiny on the garments sector post-Rana Plaza?
In this interview, Mihika Chatterjee discusses the economic dynamics, labour organisation, and political contingencies in India’s garment ‘labour regimes’ with Dr. Alessandra Mezzadri, a leading critical scholar of labour and gender in India. Her book ‘The Sweatshop Regime’ is based on nearly two decades of research on the garment sector in India and mounts a formidable critique of the exploitative conditions under which workers toil to make a living. Alessandra is a Reader in Global Development and Political Economy at SOAS, University of London.
Mihika Chatterjee (MC): India has a rich history of textile manufacturing. The textile mills of Bombay and Surat in Western India as well as knitwear in South India have been central to capitalist development in agriculture and working-class politics in postcolonial India. Your work studies the garment sector today. Could we start by locating the garment sector within the larger textile industry?
Alessandra Mezzadri (AM): That is a very interesting if complex question. There are many linkages between textile and garments, but there are also key differences, especially viewed in a historical perspective. Textiles, as you said, have been central to the history of capitalist development in India, but garments are a much more recent endeavour. Textile mills in India are linked to colonial and postcolonial history. They expanded during the Raj, and the system of production which dominated in this period carried on in the initial periods after Independence. When you think back to the very famous Bombay mills or Gujarat mills, you will find highly capital-intensive endeavours; acquiring and running a mill required a lot of money. So, it was only the rich classes, such as the Sindhis and trading communities such as Parsis and Gujaratis, who were able to take over historic mills at independence.
The garment sector instead has a different history. In some places, we still find a connection to the Raj and colonial forms of production — for instance, the Ludhiana hosiery industry developed considerably between the two World Wars primarily to produce undergarments and woollens for the British Army. Yet, overall, the garment sector is a far more recent business; it required much less capital and started to take off well after independence in the 1960s. It followed its own historical pattern, which intersects with the history of tailoring and various Muslim crafts, like embroidery, originally organised in mahallas — that is, labour-intensive artisanal workshops — as in the case of Shahajahanabad, now old Delhi. Today, a significant segment of production, particularly for the domestic market, is still organised in this way, like in Maeshtala or Metiaburij, for instance, which are neighbourhoods in metropolitan Kolkata. These were the prototypes that the garment industry evolved out of. The garment industry was made of petty-capitalists and small businesses, many of whom worked with family labour.
Of course, there are also instances of intertwining within the history of textiles and garments, particularly in key areas like Mumbai. Here, the big labour strikes of 1982, which unfortunately eventually signalled the end of the textile mills, and of the Mumbai textile labour movement, had massive repercussions also for the rising garment sector. Anti-labour and anti-union sentiment became so widespread that the industry was pushed outside Mumbai, in places like Bhiwandi, where it reorganised as the small-scale powerloom sector. This splintering of production does resemble the overall pattern of outsourcing for garments and textiles in other parts of India.
Datta Samant, an Indian trade union leader and politician who led the textile mill worker strikes of 1982. Image: Telegraph India
So historically, I’d say that you have moments of reckoning and moments of reconnection between textile and garments, particularly when the textile industry starts declining as a capital-intensive sector in the 1980s. And, although there are some tight interrelations between the two, there are important reasons why textile and garments represent two different worlds inhabited by different capitalist classes as well as different labour relations and forms of exploitation, or what are known as ‘labour regimes’.
MC: Your 2017 study of the garments sector, The Sweatshop Regime, is based in 21st-century India, where the garment sector is well-integrated in global value chains. What are the features of garment production today?
AM: Well, the peculiarity of the garment industry is that it has a very complex labour regime. The landscape today is characterised by a great number of what economists refer to as urban industrial clusters. These are conglomerates of small and medium enterprises generally mushrooming in urban areas, yet often connected to micro-units and home-based units, which may stretch into peri-urban and rural areas. The Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) in India recognises eight key places for garment exports — Delhi, or better the NCR region (including Delhi city, Gurgaon, Noida, Greater Noida, and Faridabad), Jaipur, Ludhiana, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai and Tiruppur. Mumbai is also listed, although today it hosts more the managerial headquarters of garment companies than actual manufacturing units, also due to the stratospheric cost of urban land — the historical Mumbai mills land eventually sold at astronomical prices. While these are key hubs, there are a number of other clusters, like Bellary or Indore, for instance, that are also integrated into value chains, perhaps more connected to domestic production.
The size of the units varies across these big industrial clusters and smaller cities. Clusters are also somewhat specialised — Delhi specialises in ‘ladieswear’; Jaipur (an old printing site) focuses on garments that may include artisanal printing; Ludhiana mostly makes woollens; whilst the southern cities of Chennai and Bengaluru represent classic cut-and-stitch centres. Tiruppur, the T-shirt town of India, developed along a distinctive trajectory including traits of both northern and southern centres. The clusters participate in global garment commodity chains based on this regional specialisation and banking on the segmentation of garment markets. This is not to say that there may never be inter-cluster competition, but this is limited, and garment companies produce across clusters.
This landscape is the result of historical legacies of different textile/garment regions, but also more recent policies. During the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA), when garment producers were constrained by quotas on the international market, India allocated quotas based on two principles: First Come First Served, and Past Performance. These principles benefitted traders and operators with connections abroad, even those with limited manufacturing capacity. Only from the 2000s onwards, with the introduction of the New Textile Policy and a third principle of quota allocation, the New Investment Entitlements, did exporters with manufacturing capacity start obtaining quotas. It is then that Bengaluru emerged as a key centre. Another policy regenerating the fragmented industrial landscape was the Reservation Policy: garments as a sector was for a long time reserved for small and medium enterprises, due to high employment generation. All these policy interventions continue shaping the industry, and while we observe a certain degree of consolidation of production in the upper tier of the industry, the sector mostly remains fragmented. This has key implications for labour relations, which remain largely informalised, but differently in different sites.
MC: What you have described is quite a diverse geography of production arrangements across the North and South of India, one that is a result of a long history of state policies and capital-labour relations. Could you tell us more about those labouring in these clusters?
AM: Sure. In the North, where production is greatly fragmented, the labour force mostly comprises migrant labourers. Here you have an overrepresentation of male migrant workers from the Hindi-speaking states, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, but also increasingly from Odisha, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. This labour force represents a massive floating population, delivering well for the regional product cycle. This cycle is greatly fragmented, although today is less seasonal than it used to be, and benefits from migrant labour that will just stay on for a while in industrial areas and then leave. The industry overall is characterised by high degrees of labour circulation.
“In areas like Kapashera, a workers’ industrial hamlet in Delhi, living arrangements are set up for a very temporary labour force. You have lines of rooms that 5-8 people have to share. ”
In fact, you find three different types of circulations. One is the classic yearly circulation where workers go back home after say, 8 to 9 months. This used to coincide with the harvest and wedding season, but also it quite ‘magically’ overlapped with lean seasons for the industry.
The transient character of labour is also observable from their specific dormitory set-up: in 2013, Ravi Srivastava and I studied living conditions at the spaces of social reproduction, as an important complement to the analysis of labour conditions in factories. In areas like Kapashera, a workers’ industrial hamlet in Delhi, living arrangements are set up for a very temporary labour force. You have lines of rooms that 5-8 people have to share. This works precisely because the workers circulate back home. Notably, the circulation happens both because employers retrench workers, but also because labourers themselves refuse to continue living in these conditions permanently. I would add that this seasonality is declining to an extent, because after the end of the quota system, you have the possibility to produce more, and also produce for non-quota (and non-Western) countries.
The second kind of circulation that takes place is what I would call industrial circulation. The fact is, even if workers stay on in the industrial area (rather than going home), they are not likely to remain in the same unit, but rather circulate within the industrial area amongst different units. Employers may move workers from unit to unit to avoid paying benefits, and workers may also move based on better wages and conditions. Finally, there is a third type of circulation, too often overlooked, out of the industrial sector overall, as workers leave when they are still relatively young given how taxing the job is.
In the South there are other forms of precarious working conditions, based on the feminisation of factory labour, combined with the use of migrant workers both from nearby districts and increasingly from more distant inter-state locations (again, Odisha and Jharkand in particular). Recent evidence suggests the entry of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes among the long-distance women workers. In a nutshell, labour across the textile and garments sector is extremely precarious, hypermobile, always in flux, and therefore at the mercy of small and large shifts in economic production, both locally and transnationally.
MC: Your formulation of labour arrangements and control in the garments sector as a ‘sweatshop regime’ has helped scholars and activists better understand labour-capital relations, and particularly why poor health and safety risks to labour tend to persist in industrial garment settings. Can you describe what is a sweatshop regime, and how it helps us understand the state of workers’ health?
AM: By ‘sweatshop regime’, I mean a complex system of production and work, connecting workers’ productive and life-spaces, and co-shaped by global brands, exporters, vendors, and contractors in ways that perpetuate the regeneration of working poverty in the sector. In fact, the regeneration of working poverty in the sector takes regionally specific forms through the complex geography of production I mentioned earlier. In a sense, you could understand the subcontinent as a sort of massive department store, where different kinds of garments are available on each floor, and on each floor a different set of labourers are at work, in poor conditions that continue to exist for slightly different reasons.
Now, this differentiation also involves different health risks, which hence can also be understood as the product of different labour regimes. In the North, for example, in areas that produce ladieswear like Delhi, Jaipur and to an extent Ludhiana, one typically finds forms of sweatshop labour involving a migrant population working 12-16 hour shifts. Overtime is built into the system not just because employers demand it, but also because migrants want to maximise their take-home wages before they circulate back home leaving behind their squalid industrial accommodations.
The work is physically depleting; and one of the health issues workers complain about the most is exhaustion. The circulation they undertake is partly because they need a break from work to recover. When we spoke to former workers regarding the reasons they left the industry, exhaustion was one of the main reasons mentioned. The other was working under contractors who can be abusive and greatly exploitative, to the extent of committing violence. Of course, they also mentioned poor living conditions and low wages, but bodily depletion came up again and again. In particular, those workers focusing on embroidery, in micro units connected to the industrial clusters, say they stop working at the age of 30 because they develop eyesight problems.
“The work is physically depleting; and one of the health issues workers complain about the most is exhaustion. The circulation they undertake is partly because they need a break from work to recover. ”
In the South, you have a different setup. This is where the New Investment Entitlement policy of the government pushed for greater manufacturing units with large mechanised production capacities. You find cut-and-stitch centres producing basic garments with a relatively more stable production cycle that, as I mentioned, is feminised, with women working coming both from nearby areas and northeastern states. Assembly lines dominate here, with a completely different labour regime. Workers report allergies from intense exposure to dust and fabric particles, and Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs), due to the denial of toilet breaks, an issue which is intimately linked to the gendered forms of abuse and control on the assembly line.
Textile workers at the Estee garment factory in Tirupur, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Image: Reuters
The important point is that health outcomes are very different across the sweatshop regime based on the type of product cycle workers are inserted into, as well as their gender, ethnicity and positioning on the employment ladder along the global supply chain. Generally speaking, this is an industry with a very long history of poor health. TB was known as the ‘tailor’s disease’ not so long ago, in the United States. Occupational Health and Safety regulations place emphasis on the infrastructural elements of factories, such as fire exits, windows for air circulation, etc, with very limited results, which we know from the history of industrial disasters like Rana Plaza. These regulations do not even begin to address the low-intensity epidemics depleting workers’ health on an everyday basis.
MC: Based on our conversation so far, in a context where labour is so geographically fragmented, hypermobile due to frequent migration, and transiently employed over seasonal cycles, how then do workers organise?
“Workers have filed specific grievances against employers, especially against illegal termination or against the withholding of pay. They have relied on a variety of local unions to take up these legal struggles.”
AM: Organising in this context is really a complex endeavour. If you look at those working in the National Capital Region (NCR) around New Delhi, you don't see much in terms of massive collective organising. You do find key moments of disruption of industrial relations, where workers rebel against the sweatshop regime. Wildcat strikes erupt in some factories in response to a particular event or issue, like if someone got injured or the contractor didn't pay some workers. But so far, we have not witnessed sustained collective uprising of the type that exists in the NCR region’s other sectors, for example the automotive industry. In the South, however, we have seen sustained mobilisations, particularly in Bengaluru, generally led by local unions GATWU and GLU, usually focusing on pay or social contributions.
A GATWU protest at the office of the Department of Labour in Bengaluru, seeking a revision of minimum wages, September 2019. Image: The News Minute
I have, together with many others including the labour activist Rakhi Sehgal, been involved with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) over the last three years on a project that maps the social life of industrial disputes in Gurgaon, Bengaluru, and Tirupur. We have tried to understand why there is an absence of collective demands or grievances and collective organizing in the sector, and we are mapping the journey of industrial disputes across labour courts.
Once one focuses on disputes, forms of resistance do emerge. The evidence we collected suggests that workers file complaints and formal grievances either individually or more often through local unions. These have escalated during COVID-19, when lockouts and wage theft have escalated, as also reported in national media. Workers have filed specific grievances against employers, especially against illegal termination or against the withholding of pay. They have relied on a variety of local unions to take up these legal struggles. Once again, only a small number of these disputes have resolved successfully in the North, while we have seen more successful outcomes in the South.
MC: It is encouraging that labour unions are enabling and mediating litigations on behalf of workers. That said, it is also the case that union membership among informalised labour is low, even non-existent in some areas. Instead of the more established unions, newer grassroots unions have emerged in the garments sector, such as the Garment Workers’ Union in Bengaluru, which started out as an NGO, and Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU) also in Bengaluru. What role do you see for unions and NGOs?
AM: The issue that needs to be discussed when it comes to organising is where the organising should be directed, and which spaces bear more possibilities to generate new forms of action. Today, in my view, places of life may offer more possibilities for organising than places of work alone. This is because workers may move in and out of factories and workshops, whilst their urban place of residence may be relatively more stable. We can learn a lot from the Chinese experience, for instance, where a lot of successful workers’ protests started in workers’ dormitories. Now in India we don't have dormitories, certainly not in the North, and not of the kind that we find in China. However, industrial hamlets—like Kapashera for instance—host hundreds of workers and represent key sites where unions and activists can approach them. This is where unions should focus their work.
Another potentially effective strategy is focusing on workers’ political education and initiating ‘pre-union’ work in the villages where workers come from, so that when they move, they may find information about their rights, points of contact, and channels to address grievances, etc at their urban destination. Finally, unions need to talk to one another to build connections across their membership, as opposed to competing with each other locally. One could also explore the viability of setting up Workers’ Centres, which even the ILO has dedicated some thinking into recently.
Some of these things have indeed already happened. In Bengaluru, GATWU has been trying to establish connections with the villages where long-distance women migrant workers come from and get workers to join the union immediately after reaching Bengaluru. GLU, originally linked to Cividep India, which has focused considerably on pre-union work in the area, continues to educate workers about their entitlements and minimal work standards. Both unions actively seek access to local dormitories where women migrant workers may end up, although recent findings led by Supriya Roy Chowdhury for Cividep and GLU, suggest that women now prefer to live outside the asphyxiating walls of the dormitories where social control is very strict. Either way, it is clear that life-making spaces are becoming increasingly central to organizing new strategies to support workers.
MC: So what you are saying is that to organise workers, we have to look at the realm of social reproduction – both the villages of stable residence and temporary lodgings around industrial clusters. If that is the case, what are the demands that can be advanced through this type of organisation? Are these demands then directed at the state rather than the employer, given that they are linked more to the social reproduction sphere?
AM: Well, not necessarily. First, the focus on reproductive spaces is simply a strategy to ensure that you can find the workers in the first place. Since the industrial hamlet does not change but the worker’s place of work, the factory, is transient and often changes, it is easier to organise workers in their life-spaces. Then, demands may be addressed to the state, to the employer, or both, depending on specific grievances.
In fact, organising this way does not mean that demands have to be reproductive in nature. You may still be organising people around their working conditions; it is just more effective to reach them in industrial hamlets, dormitories, and so on. Indeed, some workers’ mobilizations may focus on a specific reproductive demand. However, for migrant workers, it is generally hard to distinguish neatly between the two; what is reproductive is productive and vice versa. Reproductive demands—like housing, for instance, or water and sanitation—may be central to working conditions overall.
A concrete example of the interplay between productive and reproductive demands is the mobilisation of women garment workers in Bengaluru against changes in state legislation around the Provident Fund (PF). It was a protest that specifically targeted the state and state legislation, but on the specific use by workers of social contributions in the context of extremely low wages. The proposed changes to the PF would make it more difficult for workers to access it before retirement. Because workers earn very little, they use this fund as a sort of deposit to access whenever they need money. The fact that legislation now prevented their access until a certain number of years of work was not acceptable. So, in this case, you can say that the demand was reproductive in nature, in a sense, because it targeted social contributions. It was not a classic labour demand like wages, and it was directed at the state; however, it was entirely embedded in the labour conditions the workers experience—those of extremely low wages—which meant that they needed the PF to tap into at any point.
Additionally, many wildcat strikes—which may not be reported in the media—also focus on living conditions in industrial hamlets, such as the lack of functioning toilets, water, and proper sanitation in workers’ residential colonies. Now, how are we to understand these demands? Are we to argue that they are only reproductive because they concern workers’ living spaces? I do not think that is the case, because the conditions in which workers live emerge from the labour regimes they are a part of. Thus, such reproductive struggles should also be understood as labour struggles targeting working conditions and life as a whole.
So what I am saying, really, is that focusing on the reproductive sphere for novel forms of organising does not mean focusing only on non-work issues or targeting the state as opposed to employers. It simply means reorienting mobilising efforts towards spaces and issues which matter most for workers and that may provide activism with new answers and directions.
MC: The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the RSS-affiliated labour union, has mobilised labour from different castes and sectors quite successfully. They were vocal in pointing out the plight of labourers at the start of the lockdowns and through the draconian measures implemented by employers when factories re-opened. They have also been raising their voice against their political party, the BJP, in Gujarat and UP in relation to the new Labour Codes. Does the Hindu Right hem in the politics of informal labour in the garment sector through the BMS? How have more progressive labour fronts confronted this?
AM: Well, the new Labour Codes are bad news for labour, as stressed by all unions. The Codes largely codify the legitimacy of various forms of labour abuse. For instance, removing the cap on the proportion of contract labour in workplaces will make this form of work the norm, rather than the exception. For the garment sector, this will have a greatly negative impact, nullifying years of campaigning against the precarisation of employment. New limits on the right to strike are also a worrying development.
Many forms of formerly lawful collective action are now framed as disruptive, leading to factory lockdowns. As collective action, especially through unions, is central to workers’ successful litigation over industrial grievances, the new Codes will likely have an anti-worker impact. These developments will further curtail the ability of workers to act collectively. At the same time, multiplication of contract-based forms of labour will make it less likely for workers to collectively organise. The direction of travel does not really look good for garment workers – or any other category of labour, for that matter.
A Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) rally, 2022. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the RSS-affiliated labour union, has mobilised labour from different castes and sectors quite successfully. Image: Economic Times
Now, the BMS could only remark upon the anti-labour nature of Codes, as all other unions. Yet, I am not quite sure their protests can be seen as a break with the BJP. Consider, for instance, the fact that the G20 Summit being hosted by India has excluded the international Trade Union Congress that represents all the different independent unions, and instead BMS is the only one that is accepted as the representative of workers. So they may have countered the BJP in the one instance, but overall, they benefit tremendously from their affiliation. The ability of various unions to carve space in informal labour politics is likely to vary tremendously across India, so it is hard to assess overall trends beyond these general considerations.
MC: Did the Rana Plaza disaster have ripples in the textile and garments sector in India?
AM: I clearly remember where I was when the Rana Plaza tragedy happened. I had just finished interviewing the GAP South Asia CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) representative, who in our interview defined Bangladesh as the ‘jeans capital of the world’. He explained how the value chain dealt with South Asia as a whole: a producer like GAP would de-centralize production by allocating mass-production to Bangladesh, while in India it would allocate specific collections of clothing that needed more handicraft work. Labour issues across Bangladesh and India differed substantially due to these different types of production dominating regionally.
“In India, the disaster did not have many reverberations then—in fact, the first reaction by employers in India to the event was one of sheer joy because they assumed that all the orders were going to be diverted to India.”
He noted how infrastructural issues were an issue in Bangladesh, which engaged in high volumes. This was also due to the industrial architecture dominant in Bangladesh. Here, production took place in buildings with one industrial unit on top of the other. This vertical arrangement of factories used to be present in Mumbai as well—where units were called galas—but it is not dominant in India. It is particularly risky, as infrastructural weaknesses can be further amplified when units develop one over the other. One could say that Rana Plaza was the outcome of this uniquely dangerous industrial landscape.
In India, the disaster did not have many reverberations then—in fact, the first reaction by employers in India to the event was one of sheer joy because they assumed that all the orders were going to be diverted to India. Eventually, given work intensity and poor health and safety standards, India also experienced industrial tragedies, if smaller in nature. One of these took place just before the pandemic in Delhi, where 43 workers lost their lives in a fire. The sweatshop regime continues to kill.
MC: The wishful diversion of production to India did not materialise precisely because of the division of labour across Bangladesh and India you described earlier: that India’s garment sector is heavily based on SMEs and specialisation in products, whereas Bangladesh is home to high-volume production. So were Indian producers in garment value chains left off the hook in terms of accountability across the sector after Rana Plaza? What about safety agreements like Accord and Alliance that were being introduced to monitor working conditions in Bangladesh? Did these accountability mechanisms shine a light on conditions and practices in India as well?
AM: Indian exporters were entirely left off the hook because the Accord targeted the Bangladeshi garment industry specifically. At no point was the Rana Plaza disaster used to change legislation more extensively. However, there are changes under way, and there is an effort to scale up the Accord. In 2021, we saw the formation of the International Accord. Recently, in June 2023, delegates of the International Accord Secretariat have visited Pakistan. These developments can be promising.
A number of workers-led efforts have also developed in recent years, starting from events in India. One project worth mentioning concerns the Dindigul Agreement, triggered by the murder of 20-year-old Jeyasre Kathiravel, a Dalit woman who worked for H&M in Tamil Nadu and was raped and murdered by her supervisor. The ‘Justice for Jeyasre’ campaign helped build a movement that connected a number of other campaigns fighting sexual harassment in factories. This project falls into a new category of international policy efforts called enforceable brand agreements, which may signal a shift from voluntary forms of CSR.
Yet, in a place like India, we also must scale up the debate from ‘health and occupational safety’ to ‘workers’ health’ in general. If we target only infrastructures, we risk limiting ourselves to Tier 1 large factories, and merely focusing on architectural problems. Instead, we also need to focus on the complex socio-economic processes of outsourcing, contracting, and labour informalisation which characterise the industry in India. Arguably, also in Bangladesh a mere focus on infrastructure has left out many other problems, and the Stern report has criticised the Accord exactly due to this limited reach.
“...in a place like India, we also must scale up the debate from ‘health and occupational safety’ to ‘workers’ health’ in general. ”
Crucially, a more holistic focus on workers’ health may require addressing both health and non-health indicators. For instance, it may imply focusing on living wages or designing health provisions that reach all informal workers, the majority of whom must approach private health clinics in the case of sickness. It may also include providing workers with health cards and opening properly funded health facilities in areas where women work in home-based units for garment factories. Ultimately, opposing the type of ruthless accumulation that characterises the sector may well be the best ‘health policy framework’ for garment workers.
Poor health outcomes are indicators of harsh exploitation—that is, they are the expression of depleting labour regimes. Bridget O’Laughlin has illustrated how epidemics in southern Africa were crucially connected to the deployment of migratory black labour in a variety of sectors, and based on severely exploitative conditions. In India, risk and health depletion compose the low-intensity epidemics workers are exposed to daily, due to their incorporation into the sweatshop regime. Hence, the best cure against garment workers’ many diseases cannot but be a politics of liberation aimed at smashing the Sweatshop Regime once and for all.
Mihika Chatterjee is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. Her current research is focused on the politics of land dispossession and rural transitions in Western India. More broadly, she is interested in the political economy of late-industrialisation, labour struggles, and rural inequalities.