Gender, the Global Garment Industry and
the Movement for Women Workers’ Rights

Clean Clothes Campaign, Dec 2005

Introduction

Why Gender Is Important

Nina Ascoly

When the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) came onto the scene in Europe in the early 1990s, one of the things motivating those mainly female activists was a desire to make people aware of the fact that almost universally it was women who were making our clothes under bad conditions, and that there were reasons for thatit was no coincidence that women were stitching our garments or gluing our sneakers together, whether it was in the Philippines, Indonesia, India or China. Clean Clothes Campaigners wanted the public to know that exploited labour in these industries often had a female face, and if something was going to be done about their situation that fact couldn’t be ignored. The CCC emerged at a time when more light was being shed not only on economic globalisation and industrial restructuring, but also the gendered division of labour in that context and the processes of the feminisation, informalisation, and flexibilisation of labourall connected in the reality of global garment production. The campaign and those involved in it should be considered in this context: one infused with frustration at women’s invisibility as workers and agents of change but also inspired by feminist critiques of the status quoat home, in the workplace, and in the labour movement and recognition that women are actually powerful.

As the network broadened the news kept pouring inwomen workers in the garment and sports shoe industries were organising to push for change. They weren’t always successful, but in any case there was a great deal of activity that sometimes resulted in progress, despite the great odds. As clearinghouse for this information, the CCC embraced the role of informing the public and industry of the roles they could and should play to support the often difficult and dangerous organising efforts of these women.

Still today, more than a decade later, the challenge remains to communicate the importance of understanding the role that gender plays in shaping conditions in these industries, and how solutions to any problems need to take this on. For the CCC this means not only considering gender when formulating and posing demands to industry to recognise and address what’s going on, but also in other facets of our workin building awareness among different segments of society here in Europe and also in support given to partner organisations in countries where garments and sport shoes are produced.

While the CCC strives to ensure that the rights of all workers in the garment and sports shoe industries are respected, the fact that the majority of these workers are women means that ultimately the work of the CCC is largely about the empowerment of women. Some will see this as a much more radical proposal than simply calling for respect for workers’ rights. However, without being clear about the gendered nature of the processes that underpin the current garment and sports shoe industries, how can labour rights advocates understand which strategies are the best way forward? If solutions are proposed that don’t really take on board the reality that women work and live within, how sustainable are they likely to be?

What is gender? Considering gender means going beyond the biological differences between men and women, and thinking about the roles that are attributed to them. It shouldn’t be a controversial undertakingsurely most people would agree that men and women’s lives are different. Their lives are different because their roles are socially or culturally constructed in different ways. While the biological reality of being a man or woman is the same anywhere you go, gender roles are determined by the specific social and cultural context that you are in. Because men and women are “located” differently within our societies, everything from policies to practices affect them differently. Overlooking gender means being practically blind to the complete reality of a person’s situation.

Gender influences labour practices in countless waysideas about the jobs women can do, how they should do them, their wages, their relationship to employers and the law.

This publication was conceived in order to help people get past the jargon that sometimes obscures gender issues and provide a clear understanding of the key role gender plays in shaping the issues labour rights activists in the garment industry are tackling.

Some participants in the CCC network believe that the campaign’s commitment to gender justice for women workers is implicit in all that the CCC does; others believe that this aim and the ways to address the gendered processes that facilitate rights violations in the garment and sports shoe industries aren’t so obvious, and could be more explicitly highlighted.

Indeed, when the CCC convened an international gathering of its broader network in 2001 in Barcelona (85 participants from 35 countries), one of the conclusions participants reached was that gender issues needed to receive more attention within the network. The NGO and union representatives at this meeting believed that it was essential to take gender issues into consideration as each new activity or campaign was developed, and that while the focus on the workplace was important, the links to the community and the household also had to be better understood, since these spheres are also part of the reality of garment and sports shoe workers, and are also the location of rights violations. (1) Participants noted that the obligations of companies should be reconsidered in this light at all levels.

This publication is a direct output of that meeting in Barcelona. As we began to talk more explicitly about gender, some campaigners admitted they weren’t clear what it meant: what is gender after all and how does it relate to our work? Where does it fit in with the demands we make of companies and public authorities to ensure that workers’ rights are respected? For sure people were generally well aware that the majority of workers in the garment and sports shoe industries are women, but they did not always thoroughly understand the implications of such a fact.

Everything from the level of payment and how quickly a worker is paid, to the terms of your jobsuch as lack of a contract, no medical or maternity leave, no right to organise, or no pension, down to the way a supervisor speaks to or touches a worker is informed in part by gender-based notions of what is acceptable. If you consider what this means in relation to the stress created by job insecurity and by verbal and physical harassment, the malnutrition created by low pay, the exhaustion that results from forced overtime, and the inability to do anything about unsafe working practices and environments, then the roll-out effect on a woman’s health and that of her children is immediately evident.

In most cases, women are the main producers in the so-called “care” economy meaning they are “producing” the bulk of the care for their families or their households and even in their communities. That in itself already means they have lives different from those who don’t take on those (usually unpaid) jobs, for example in terms of the time spent on those tasks, in terms of their health, etc. And this is before even considering the impact of the conditions of their work in the “cash” economy where they make clothes and sports shoes for the entire world.

As highlighted in the article by Diane Reyes, the costs to women of working in the industry reach far beyond the workplace. In telling the story of one garment worker, Reyes makes clear how bad labour practices can for example poison relationships, dash plans for getting an education and moving up out of poverty, and separate families. What do these costs meanfor women, their communities and society as a whole?

Perceptions of gender play a role in propelling women in and out of different jobs throughout the industry’s supply networks and have an impact on the form their jobs take.

Included among the articles that follow is one on migrant women workers, an important segment of the workforce in the garment industry. Women travel within their countries and also across borders and find work to support themselves and their families in the garment and sports shoe industries. Trade agreements and foreign investments create jobs in some places and eliminate jobs in others, and for women who need to earn a living this means being on the move to get work where they can. Treaties like the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) have meant more factories in sub-Saharan African countries, while the phase out of garment quotas for North American and European markets that were set by the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA) also means shifting sourcing strategies by global companies. The industry is always in flux, and this has an impact on the women (and men) who populate it.

As outsiders in new communities, migrant women find themselves facing specific challenges, all of which are compounded by separation from family and lack of a support network. As migrants without legal residency status often the only jobs open to them are in illegal or unregistered workplaces. Unrecognised as “workers”, they lack legal protection and face difficulties if they demand fair and decent working conditions. These women are still generally “invisible”not “real” workers, in not “real” workplaces, yet these are the very workers, migrant and non-migrant, that organisers must reach out to. Devising strategies to connect to these women, understand their needs, and support their attempts to gain respect as workers with legal rights should be a top priority for trade union and NGO activists. If this growing part of the garment industrythe so-called informal economy (discussed in greater depth on page 57)remains unreached by efforts to improve labour practices, it means failing to address one of the main problems women workers face: the informalisation of their jobs. The CCC is increasingly receiving reports of formal jobs in factories being made “informal”, in some cases of entire workforces being laid off, only to have the same jobs they previously had as permanent employees offered back to them as contract work.

Gender plays a role not only in the problems faced by workers, but also in the attempts by various stakeholders to address injustice and improve labour practices. If initiatives that aim to support workers’ demands in actuality are not accessible to those workers, what credibility or value do they have as being communicators of those womens’ needs? The onus is on all who make claims to varying degrees about supporting workers’ rights to educate themselves as to the specific needs of women workers and to ensure that women workers’ voices are heard, respected and taken into account during any decision- making and institution-building initiatives intended to improve their situation.

This applies equally to companies with their own codes of conduct and compliance departments, to multi-stakeholder initiatives which monitor and verify compliance with labour standards, to governments with labour inspectorates and courts charged with upholding justice under the law, to unions as workers’ representatives and NGOs as watchdogs and advocates. It even applies to the CCC itself. If a public awareness-raising campaign conveys priorities that are not in sync with those of women workers’, or if social auditors fail to carry out and report on interviews where workers can speak frankly, or if multi-stakeholder initiatives complaint mechanisms are generally unknown or inaccessible to workers with grievances, or if a union’s leadership is disconnected from workers, how can these initiatives succeed in furthering their purported goals?

Many of the successes that have been achieved have meant rethinking conventional approaches to these challenges. The women action researchers, consumer activists, union organisers, and others highlighted here have taken risks and championed different approaches that have contributed to the movement that in all its shapes and forms has brought us to where we are now in the struggle for justice for garment workers. These women demystify what it takes to be gender aware. They demonstrate that gender awareness is not a confusing proposition at all. Put simply, keeping women workers’ needs central to what guides their work is what keeps them on the path of supporting worker empowerment.

This publication is part of a broader drive within the CCC to provide a gender analysis of labour rights issues, and specifically to document and re-state gendered concerns that relate to workers’ rights in the garment and sports shoe industries. Also it is part of CCC efforts to document examples of initiatives that do address these concerns, and to present ideas on how these concerns should be explicitly integrated in the work of the CCC. We envision this publication as a resource for building awareness among those directly involved in the Clean Clothes Campaigns and among CCC supporters, and more extensively among other NGOs and trade unions. It could possibly be a resource for those in the industry and the multi-stakeholder initiatives that seek to address labour practices in the sector. Clearly, a lot of learning still needs to be done on many levels, and we believe this publication can be a tool to clearly communicate what the issues are and possible ways for addressing them. We’re not aiming for this publication to directly reach women workers themselves (if it does, that’s a bonus), but instead to enable their voices to be heard, and their demands and grievances to be known and understood by those who, men and women, are in a position to influence their working conditions.

Putting together this publication has been an opportunity to draw upon the expertise within the CCC network on gender issues. In 2004, an international steering committee was formed to provide guidance on the content of this publication and to recommend possible writers; the editors are immensely grateful for the feedback received from these six women who between them have extensive experience working with women workers’ organisations as academics, researchers, activists, trade unionists and campaigners. Many of the activists featured and the authors of articles actively participate in CCC activities. Coming from different countries around the globe, they bring with them a variety of perspectives on the role of gender in the lives of women workers in the garment and sports shoe industries. In the following pages, the authors raise numerous challenges that are important for all stakeholders to address. After reading these articles we hope there will be no confusion about why gender should be a key concern for all labour rights advocates.

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1- Women’s rights are also violated outside the workplace. That cannot be ignored as it shapes the reality of who a woman worker is, both in and outside the workplace. Discrimination in terms of double workload (productive and reproductive), discrimination in the community and in the home, discrimination before the law (in the shape of regulations regarding property ownership, inheritance, etc.), these are all factors in creating the context in which a woman lives and works. She doesn’t shed these aspects of her reality when she enters her workplace.