Point Counterpoint

New Economist: Why feminists should support sweatshops

Professor Naila Kabeer from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, has visited garment workers in Bangladesh and written about their experience in a DFID-funded research paper Globalisation, labour standards and women’s rights: dilemmas of collective action in an interdependent world (PDF). There are, as expected, some negatives. But overall, these garments workers have benefited:

...problems notwithstanding, my own research in the Bangladesh context suggests that the majority of women workers rated their access to employment in the garment factories in positive terms because of its improvements on what life had been like before (Kabeer,2000). They valued the satisfaction of a ‘proper’ job and the opportunity to earn a regular wage compared to the casualised and poorly paid forms of employment that had previously been their only options.
Some of the women in my study had used their newly-found earning power to renegotiate their relations within marriage, others to leave abusive marriages. Women who had previously not been able to help out their ageing parents once they got married now insisted on their right to do so. Yet others used their earnings to postpone early marriage and to challenge the practice of dowry.

About Naila Kabeer: "Naila Kabeer is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, England. She works primarily on poverty, gender, and social policy issues. She is the author of Reversed Realities: gender hierarchies in development thought (Verso, 1994) and The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka."