Introduction: rethinking garment workers' health and safety / Geert De Neve and Rebecca Prentice -- Sweatshops and the search for solutions, yesterday and today / Jennifer Bair, Mark Anner, and Jeremy Blasi -- Voluntary versus binding forms of regulation in global production networks: exploring the "paradoxes of partnership" in the European anti-sweatshop movement / Florence Palpacuer -- Sourcing ethical fashion for collegiate apparel: "school house" lessons in business and ethics / Caitrin Lynch and Ingrid Hagen-Keith -- Capital over labor: health and safety in export processing zone garment production since 1947 / Patrick Neveling -- Discourses of compensation and the normalization of negligence: the experience of the Tazreen factory fire / Mahmudul H. Sumon, Nazneen Shifa, and Saydia Gulrukh -- Garment sweatship regimes, the laboring body, and the externalization of social responsibility over health and safety provisions / Alessandra Mezzadri -- Limited leave? Clinical provisioning and healthy bodies in Sri Lanka's apparel sector / Kanchana N. Ruwanpura -- Toward meaningful health and safety measures: stigma and the devaluation of garment work in Sri Lanka's global factories / Sandya Hewamanne -- Beyond building safety: an ethnographic account of health and well-being on the Bangladesh garment shop floor / Hasan Ashraf -- Afterword: politics after Rana Plaza / Dina M. Siddiqi.
Summary:
"The 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory in Savar, Bangladesh, killed over a thousand workers and injured hundreds more. This disaster exposed the brutal labor conditions of the global garment industry and revealed its failures as a competitive and self-regulating industry. Over the past thirty years, corporations have widely adopted labor codes on health and safety, yet too often in their working lives, garment workers across the globe encounter death, work-related injuries, and unhealthy factory environments. Disasters such as Rana Plaza notwithstanding, garment workers routinely work under conditions that not only escape public notice but also undermine workers' long-term physical health, mental well-being, and the very sustainability of their employment. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop gathers the work of leading anthropologists and ethnographers studying the global garment industry to examine the relationship between the politics of labor and initiatives to protect workers' health and safety. Contributors analyze both the labor processes required of garment workers as well as the global dynamics of outsourcing and subcontracting that produce such demands on workers' health. The accounts contained in Unmaking the Global Sweatshop trace the histories of labor standards for garment workers in the global South; explore recent partnerships between corporate, state, and civil society actors in pursuit of accountable corporate governance; analyze a breadth of initiatives that seek to improve workers' health standards, from ethical trade projects to human rights movements; and focus on the ways in which risk, health, and safety might be differently conceptualized and regulated. Unmaking the Global Sweatshop argues for an expansive understanding of garment workers' lived experiences that recognizes the politics of labor, human rights, the privatization and individualization of health-related responsibilities as well as the complexity of health and well-being."--Publisher description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.