Garments without Guilt?

Garments without Guilt?
Author: Kanchana N. Ruwanpura
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009032313

Sri Lanka's apparel sector holds an enviable place in the imaginary of its competitors for having a niche position amongst global retailers, given its claims of producing 'garments without guilt'. Exploitative labour conditions are not part of the industry's portfolio – ethicality, eco-friendly production and unblemished conditions of work are. Sri Lanka's transition away from a protracted ethnic war has meant that the industry portrays itself as investing in the former war zone to create jobs without reflection on how its vaunted mantle, the deployment of ethical codes effectively, themselves may be under duress. This book uses an analytical framing informed by labour and feminist perspectives to explore how labour struggles in the post-1977 period in Sri Lanka provided important resistance to capitalist processes and continue to shape the industry both within and outside of the shop floor. It studies contextual moments in the country's recent history to rupture the dominant narrative and record the centrality of labour in the success of the country's apparel industry.

Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries

Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries
Author: Sanchita Banerjee Saxena
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2014-06-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1604978783

The general perception of the garment and textile industry in the global South is fueled only by images of dismal labor conditions and unsuitable factories, descriptions of labor clashes with police, and analyses of low wages and exploitative multinational corporations. This book presents an insightful perspective on the garment and textiles industries in Asia by highlighting that an industry fraught with competing concerns can, in fact, collaborate and work together when it is in the interest of both the state and interest groups to do so. This comparative study recognizes the role of both the state and interest groups in the policy making process and argues that they are interlinked and require one another for sustainable reforms. Employing original, in-depth research in three different countries, the study skillfully delves down deep beyond the macro statistics and commonly held images to cast light on some of the significant policy and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in this industry. It demonstrates that even though the struggle continues, it is important to recognize the improvements thus far and to work towards positive change. This book also takes a much larger historical view of the sector, arguing that manipulation of the trading regime has created and continues to create both incentives and disincentives for the various stakeholders involved in this industry. This book is is essential for students and researchers in policy studies, labor studies, South and Southeast Asian studies, international trade, and political science, as well as those engaged in program design and evaluation of projects focused on labor rights. This study is also critical for non-governmental organizations with a thematic focus on the garments and textiles industry, labor rights, human rights, and international trade policy, as well as for private sector organizations focused on improving labor conditions around the world. More information at http://www.cambriapress.com/books/9781604978780.cfm

Workers' Rights and Labor Compliance in Global Supply Chains

Workers' Rights and Labor Compliance in Global Supply Chains
Author: Jennifer Bair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013-11-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 113501289X

This book provides insight into the potential for the market to protect and improve labour standards and working conditions in global apparel supply chains. It examines the possibilities and limitations of market approaches to securing social compliance in global manufacturing industries. It does so by tracing the historic origins of social labelling both in trade union and consumer constituencies, considering industry and consumer perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of social labelling, comparing efforts to develop and implement labelling initiatives in various countries, and locating social labelling within contemporary debates and controversies about the implications of globalization for workers worldwide. Scholars and students of globalisation, development, corporate social responsibility, human geography, labour and industrial relations, business ethics, consumer behaviour and fashion will find its contents of relevance. CSR practitioners in the clothing and other industries will also find this useful in developing policy with respect to supply chain assurance.

The Sri Lanka Reader

The Sri Lanka Reader
Author: John Holt
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 791
Release: 2011-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822349825

Fifty-four images and more than ninety classic and contemporary texts introduce Sri Lankas recorded history of more than two and a half millennia.

The Report: Sri Lanka

The Report: Sri Lanka
Author: Oxford Business Group
Publisher: Oxford Business Group
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre:
ISBN: 1910068594

While the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2015 instigated a wait-and-see approach within Sri Lanka’s private sector, the outcome is expected to be positive in the longer term, bringing improved stability and a more encouraging environment for foreign investment. Under what has been described as a more liberal, open and business-oriented government, Sri Lanka is entering a period in which it stands to grow rapidly. In 2016 the country should begin to see the benefits of the recent reform agenda, as the new leadership introduces policies that will help bring about strong and sustainable growth.

Sustainable Fashion

Sustainable Fashion
Author: Janet Hethorn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2015-07-30
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1628925310

As issues surrounding sustainability in the fashion industry continue to evolve, the conversation in this collection of essays from leading fashion scholars, thinkers and practitioners has been updated with current concepts and industry practices. This revised edition examines the challenges that designers, product developers, and consumers confront as they create, wear, and recycle clothing and fashion. The introductions to each section have been completely revamped to provide readers with a foundation for the concepts and principles of sustainability covered in detail in the chapter essays. Contributors include experts such as Lucy Dunne writing about how technology is helping create a sustainable fashionable future and Timo Rissanen on his innovative methods for creating fashion with zero fabric waste. New to this edition: - New sidebars focusing on an expansion of Real World Applications -Best Practices sections feature new examples of contemporary industry practices - Discussion questions at the end of each chapter - New chapter on social justice and corporate social responsibility (CSR) emphasizes the conditions of garment workers and human sustainability

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop
Author: Rebecca Prentice
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-07-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812294319

Anthropologists and ethnographers examine the global garment industry's impact on workers' well-being 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. Contributors: Mark Anner, Hasan Ashraf, Jennifer Bair, Jeremy Blasi, Geert De Neve, Saydia Gulrukh, Ingrid Hagen-Keith, Sandya Hewamanne, Caitrin Lynch, Alessandra Mezzadri, Patrick Neveling, Florence Palpacuer, Rebecca Prentice, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, Nazneen Shifa, Dina M. Siddiqi, Mahmudul H. Sumon.

Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia

Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia
Author: Leela Fernandes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000471284

This new edition of the Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia. The Handbook covers the central contributions that have defi ned this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focusing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This revised edition has been thoroughly updated and includes new chapters, thus adding new areas of scholarship. The Handbook is organized thematically into five major parts: • Historical formations and theoretical framings • Law, citizenship and the nation • Representations of culture, place, identity • Labor and the economy • Inequality, activism and the state The Handbook illustrates the ways in which scholarship on gender has contributed to a rethink of theoretical concepts and empirical understandings of contemporary South Asia. Finally, it focuses on new areas of inquiry that have been opened up through a focus on gender and the intersections between gender and categories, such as caste, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. This timely study is essential reading for scholars who research and teach on South Asia as well as for scholars in related interdisciplinary fields that focus on women and gender from comparative and transnational perspectives.

Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka

Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka
Author: Sandya Hewamanne
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812297334

Sandya Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone analyzed how female factory workers in Sri Lanka's free trade zones challenged conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy. In Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka Hewamanne now follows many of these same women to explore the ways in which they negotiate their social and economic lives once back in their home villages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fifteen years, the book explores how the former free-trade-zone workers manipulate varied forms of capital—social, cultural, and monetary— to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating gradual changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms. Free trade zones introduce Sri Lankan women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, Hewamanne contends. Her book illustrates how varied manifestations of neoliberal attitudes within local contexts result in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur as well as a good woman. By focusing on how former workers decenter neoliberal market relations while using their entrepreneurial and civic activities to reimagine social life in ways more satisfying to them and their loved ones—what the author calls a politics of contentment—the book sheds light on new political possibilities in contexts where both reproduction of neoliberal economic relations and implementation of alternatives co-exist.