Feminised Workforce in Transnational Production: Bangladesh Ready-made Garment Industry

Abstract

This article examines the lived experiences of workers and the organisational practices of a ready-made garment factory. It illuminates the centrality of social reproduction and the unpaid work of poor women of Bangladesh producing commodities that are channelled to core societies. This article demonstrates that women’s responsibility in social reproduction conditions the nature of their paid work, the terms of their employment and the forms of workplace control. Women workers face extremely rigid gender divisions of labour in the sphere of care work within the household and in workplace. Women workers’ unpaid housework reproduces the material bases of global capitalism by intensifying the labour demands on factory workers and the production process. Commodity chains (CC) threaten the productive and reproductive labour of poor women in periphery nations through the implementation of strategies by capitalists in core nations and by local capitalists connected to the CC. This article demonstrates the importance of incorporating class, gender, productive and reproductive labour, as well as households into world-systems analysis.