Global Accumulation & Gendered Class Exploitation: Theory and Evidence from the Garment Industry During the Covid Pandemic

Abstract

The paper conducts a gendered class analysis of the impact of the Covid pandemic on the global garment industry to explain the coproduction of retailers’ profits in the core, as measured by higher retailer markups, and the biopolitical control over the minds and bodies of women working on production lines via exploitation and oppression (wage-theft, intensification, violence) in the Global South. The paper proposes the concept of an SRT-augmented rate of exploitation to distinguish between necessary and surplus labor performed at two sites, that of the factory as well as the household. The framework demonstrates how, in the aftermath of supply-chain shortages, gendered forms of absolute & relative surplus-value became critical to retailers’ markups at the cost of immiserating working-class women in peripheral capitalist economies. We posit the ‘housewife proletarian’ as negotiating two crises, a crisis of accumulation at the factory and a crisis of care-labor at home, and show how a dynamic interaction of these twin crises led to increased violence and oppression against women at both sites. We then draw upon a host of empirical sources from recent quantitative/qualitative surveys to explore how working women reported these experiences themselves. The paper concludes by arguing that zooming into these differences, as well as similarities, across peripheral economies can not only improve our understanding of how victims of gendered class exploitation subjectively experienced the transformed biopolitics of manufacturing in the aftermath of the pandemic, but can also enrich our general understanding of SRT as a theory of under-development by unearthing the structural relations of violence between monopsonic power and gendered class exploitation.