Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh: An Ethnography of Neoliberalism (Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference)
By Mohammad Tareq Hasan
Contents:
Part I 1
1 Contextualizing Ready-Made Garment Work in Bangladesh 3
Part II 49
2 The Roots of Local Capitalism: Outlining and Understanding Global Connections 51
3 Tensions and Negotiations in Neoliberalism: Emergence of Garment Kormi as the Model Citizens 85
Part III 111
4 Becoming Garment Kormi: Life in the Garment Factory 113
5 Kinship in the Factory: Garment Kormi Living a Life Away from Home 149
6 Negotiating the Public and the Private: Garment Kormi Becoming Joggo 189
7 Dare to Dream: Remaking Everyday Realities 223
Part IV 249
8 Paradoxes of Factory Compliance: Auditing, CSR, and ‘New’ Dispossession 251
Part V 275
9 The Multiple Realities of Neoliberalism and Garment Kormi 277
10 Epilogue: During the Pandemic 301
Index 315
Preface:
This monograph ethnographically explores an expanding neoliberal context in Bangladesh. At the frontier of neoliberal capitalism, the country has experienced rapid growth of the ready-made garment (RMG) sector during the last 30 years. Undoubtedly, the massive expansion of industrial work opportunities has transformed work and labor patterns across the country and led to the shift in the labor regime from subsistence to wages. But this monograph portrays the scene where corporate international trade agreements, a new neoliberal state regime, and a growing textile market have contributed to the becoming of a new class of Muslim female workers—who labor in Bangladesh’s apparel export factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The garment kormi—often abstracted by the homogenizing category of the ‘garment worker’—remain lost in the statistics of development and empowerment or contrarily exploitation. Thereby, focusing on the everyday lives of garment kormi, that is, workers’ stories than on the collective of garment workers as a category, this monograph at one front highlights the neoliberal structures of difference and inequality, and on the other reflects on the potential of egalitarianism and change in terms novel ways of comprising and expressing life-worlds. It shows that the values in life and the structures that govern life, such as contemporary Bangladesh’s neoliberal order, kinship relationality, and religiosity, are co-constitutive, multi-layered, and always on the move, never fixed.
Dhaka, Bangladesh Mohammad Tareq Hasan
CHAPTER 1
Contextualizing Ready-Made Garment Work in Bangladesh
Bangladesh has gone from being one of the poorest countries in South Asia to an aspiring ‘tiger’ economy. (This statement is from an article published by the World Economic Forum. The article states that Bangladesh has gone from being one of the poorest countries in South Asia to an aspiring ‘tiger’ economy owing to social changes, starting with the empowerment of women and the success of its garment manufacturing industry [see Basu, 2018].)
—Kaushik Basu, [former] Chief Economist, the World Bank
The GarmentKormi: Who, Why, and How?
In this monograph, I present the ethnographic findings of 15 months of fieldwork in a garment factory and among the garment kormi, that is, workers, of Dhaka, Bangladesh—examining growing capitalism, neoliberalism, and consequent transformations. This is an ethnography of those who labor in the export-oriented ready-made garment (RMG) factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Here, I use the Bangla word kormi rather than sromik to denote worker. The use of the phrase Garment Kormi refers to the professional identity of a garment worker. Another reason for choosing the word kormi—workers use it to refer to themselves. The word kormi also distinguishes garment workers from informal sector workers, commonly referred to as sromik. Finally, the use of kormi parts with the ways policy documents, industrialists, or even the labor unionists (e.g., National Garment Workers Federation) use sromik to refer…