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April 7, 2002
REVIEW: Difficult choices
THE power to choose by Laila Kabeer, a social economist, is an unusual study of global garment industry women workers at two geographical extremes, Dhaka and London. In Bangladesh, a country where strong norms of purdah have always confined women to the home and where female participation in public forms of employment has historically been low, the apparent ease with which women seem to have abandoned old norms in response to new opportunities is an enigma. By contrast in Britain, a country with a tradition of female factory workers going back over a hundred years, Bangladeshi women are largely found working from home, in apparent conformity with purdah norms.
The author attempts to bring together both sets of experiences first of all to find out the reason for the paradoxical market choices made by Bangladeshi women in the contexts of Bangladesh and Britain. Kabeer draws on testimonies by both groups concerning their experiences at work and the impact these have on their lives generally to explain such paradoxes. Then she has a more political objective as the narratives embody, implicitly and explicitly, models of the human actor, in the shape of third world women workers whose views are largely unsought and unheard in the forming of policies in international trade.
The international restructuring of the garment industry, which began in the early 1960s, was itself a part of a larger phenomenon subsumed under the general term of globalization. What was new about this new international division of labour was the growth of an export-oriented manufacturing sector in a number of countries in Asia and Latin America. In Bangladesh it took market forces, and the advent of an export-oriented garment manufacturing industry to achieve what a decade of government and non-government efforts had failed to do: to create a female force of sufficient visibility, and on such a scale, that they could no longer be overlooked.
The garment factories first opened in Bangladesh in the late 1970s as a result of the quota hopping strategies of East Asian capital. Several thousand women were drawn into jobs in the new factories. What came out in the research on the reasons why owners preferred women workers over men is moot. While most employers maintained that men were more productive, female docility compensated for male productivity. The need to meet deadlines imposed by their buyers, compulsory overtime, the locking of the factory gates to ensure that workers did not smuggle out duty-free fabrics intended for export all implied a compliant labour force.
Interestingly enough the concept of purdah occupies a central role in much of Kabeer’s analysis mainly because of the very real limits it is seen to place on women’s life choices. Purdah takes on an economic dimension, since it restricts women’s income generating opportunities to those that can be carried out within the home. Indeed in regions where the ideological link between the maintenance of female purity and female family honour requires the seclusion of women, their participation in paid activity outside the home has been low. The chapter titled “Renegotiating purdah” is by far the best in the book.
Tracing the history of the of textile manufacturing in Bengal the author focuses on the role played by protectionism. Arab merchants who came to trade in the port of Chittagong as early as the eighth century brought Islam to Bengal. In the sixteenth century, Europeans began to trade with Bengal, lured in particular by its legendary cotton textile industry. Dhaka muslin was in demand in the courts of the Mughal emperors and among the aristocracy of Europe as the finest textile in the world and the descriptions of its beauty abound in the historical literature.
With the decline of the Mughal rule in Bengal, the British East India Company consolidated its hold on Bengal with a military victory in 1757. As the British textile industry mechanized, Britain sought to eliminate competition from Bengal’s textiles through an elaborate network of restrictions and prohibitive duties. Thus by the end of the British rule Bengal had become a primary agrarian economy with jute as its main export.
The London component of the study begins with the very evocative title, “Across seven seas and thirteen rivers”. It traces the trajectory through which a large community of Bangladeshis came to be settled in the East End of London. Also examined is the historical development of the clothing industry in Britain in order to find out what it was about the industry’s demand which explained the large involvement of the Bangladeshi community within it.
Employment in the clothing factories or outdoor units which made up the London industry has been almost totally rejected by these women. The reason that they gave for their reluctance suggested that such employment crystallized various anxieties related to the boundaries of gender, culture and class. For some women the anxieties stemmed from the presence of men and women of other cultural groups on the factory floor, the breakdown of gender segregation and the possible threat to cultural identity.
But the point that Kabeer makes is that despite the importance of gains that some women undoubtedly make as a result of their home working earnings, there is little evidence of the strategic choices that factory women in Bangladesh have been able to exercise as a result of their newly established earning capacity.
Kabeer asserts that the garment industry has historically made its profits through exploiting the labour of excluded sections of society whether in the first world or the third. There is, however, a very real difference in the situation of the two groups.
The Bangladeshi women who worked in home-based piecework in London, like ethnic minority workers in the garment industry in New York and Los Angeles, obtained these jobs as members of socially excluded groups. These were jobs that had been rejected by the more privileged sections of the working class in these countries and the predominance of ethnic minority women in these jobs was symbolic of both the discarded status of these jobs and the excluded status of those who performed them.
The Bangladeshi women who worked in the factories of Bangladesh, by contrast, aspired to such employment because it moved them from their position at the margins of the labour market to a more central, better paid and more visible place in the economy. Their jobs can be seen as an expression of a new, if problematic, inclusion .
Laila Kabir’s research into the unique phenomenon of the third world women’s status in the first world and its comparison to those working in their own country is fascinating to say the least. The language is academic which could make it somewhat difficult for non-scholars to grasp. But my advice is to persevere. Once you go deep into the text you get used to the ‘heavy’ language and the paradoxes in the life of women workers begin to become clear. The idea of powerful losers and weak winners in the international trade sector is an evocative theme. For all those who wish to understand the impact of globalization on women workers and labour issues this book is highly recommended.
The power to choose: Bangladesh women workers and labour market decisions
By Laila Kabeer
Vistaar Publications, a division of Sage Publications,
M 32 Market, Greater Kailash 1, New Delhi-110 048
Email: marketing@indiasage.com
SBN 81-7829-075-8 464pp. Indian Rs575
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