Introduction

When I arrived at Da Bindu just before lunchtime on a Sunday in July 2019, I was not expecting to find a television crew and a small group of Tamil women workers at the premises. Although it was the weekend, Chamila had suggested that I come along because they were returning from a long-distance trip and that I arrive late morning. I arrived there a bit later because a prior interview had taken longer than I had anticipated.

As I arrived late at Da Bindu, nearing lunchtime, I was hoping that the delay would not mean that I could not interview Chamila. I had contacted her because I was tracing the reactions of various groups to the employment reform bill, which I discussed in Chapter Five. Like all things in fieldwork, running late can fortuitously open up opportunities on the research radar that had not taken priority when setting out for the day. Following jagged little paths of research connections rather than linear and neat tracks is how I remember the month of July 2019.

As I walked into the premises of Da Bindu, four workers were seated in the garden area – and a television film crew was further into the porch area of the house-cum-office. As a native Sri Lankan (now British–Sri Lankan), I knew from the way that the workers were dressed, in colourful salwar kameez clothes and adorned with a pottu, that the chances were that they were Tamil workers. After smiling and greeting each other, I went into the office area, and asked for Chamila. When she came out, I apologized for my delay; she generously laughed it off, saying how they too had returned late and everything was behind schedule.

We then started our research interview, during which she explained why women workers from Northern Sri Lanka were present and outlined for me a new set of challenges faced because of management practices in the area.

According to her, ‘The factories that these young women work at apparently administer birth control pills to control their periods. This way, they do not take too many breaks when they are menstruating/having their periods.’ She then went on to outline both the compulsion involved in prescribing birth control pills to young women workers and the health risks because of the type of medication given.

Appendix

2008: Global and Local Significance

The year 2008: A benchmark globally and, as it turned out, for distinctly local reasons, for Sri Lanka too. Months after I received news of success with my grant application to enable me to explore how Sri Lankan apparels are at the vanguard of ethical code governance, the world went into a global economic meltdown. This put pressure on apparel producers worldwide, including those in Sri Lanka. Local issues also had an impact on Sri Lanka's apparel sector. The Rajapaksa government had started its steady onslaught to end a protracted ethnic conflict and, by May 2009, through a bloody and gory military war, three decades of violence in the country ostensibly ended. What might these shifts mean for the Sri Lankan apparel sector's trademark Garments without Guilt (GWG)? Anu's poem, which I collected during my fieldwork in 2009, is also a reminder to ask: What about labour?

Around 2006, Sri Lanka's Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF) members envisioned GWG as a labelling strategy by which garments produced in the country were to carry a brand label and tag. Although the labelling objective was eventually recognized as unrealistic, GWG offered an effective platform to promote the Sri Lankan apparel sector as a safe place for retailers wanting to conduct their business ethically. Under the aegis of the JAAF, the Sri Lankan apparel sector was branded, packaged and promoted as a niche and ethical producer, which also created added value (Gunawardana 2007; Kelegama 2009; Athukorala and Ekanayake 2018).

Introduction

When travelling out of Katunayake Airport, visitors to Sri Lanka meet a large billboard – greeting tourists, retailers, buyers and investors with ‘Welcome to the world's first ethical apparel sourcing destination’ (Image 4.1). The sign incorporates a logo with a shopping cart – located above the slogan ‘Made in Sri Lanka’ and topped by a halo, no doubt a subliminal message of sanctified sourcing. This bold, confident sign reflects the success of the Sri Lankan apparel sector in recent decades. The advent of free market policies led to the establishment of the first FTZ in the late 1970s and initially attracted FDI. Alongside these rudimentary beginnings was the birth of nascent local capital within the sector. The industry now claims to produce GWG and sees itself in the vanguard of the global value chain. For instance, Sri Lanka was one of the initial countries in the region and the world to go into partnership with Marks and Spencer's Plan A and set up eco-friendly production sites. It also envisages becoming a regional hub and has already set itself up as a centre of fashion design.

This sign raises an obvious question: How has the Sri Lankan apparel industry gone so successfully from strength to strength in the past four decades that its apparel association can make such claims without appearing hubristic or attracting condemnation? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question with an outline of Sri Lanka's apparel landscape and its evolution over the past 40 years. Taking 1977 as the beginning of the burgeoning of a local apparel sector, I provide the foundation from which to understand the post-2008 years. Drawing on and interweaving my fieldwork, I also examine the impact of the onset of a global recession and the ending of 30 years of ethnic war and violence. Alongside this, I briefly sketch the industry through a combination of management perspectives and secondary data. The chapter provides some historical context to enable an appreciation of how the Sri Lankan apparel industry has successfully navigated various challenges, a success that stands in stark contrast to the death of the industry in neighbouring Nepal (Shakya 2018).

Introduction

I return to the poem by Anu with which I started this book. I use the lines with which she ends her poem to reconsider the Sri Lankan apparel sector and its successes. Anu reminds us that factories run on the courage of labouring workers, emphasizing another dimension to labour agency: courage. The end of her composition, however, takes us from the factory to a different level, that of the nation; she praises the workers’ contribution to the land. In her subtle way, she promotes the value creation that toiling labourers bring to two different levels, accentuating how their courage helps both the firm and the country earn hard currency. Unstated is the point that this appreciation of sweating workers does not take material form; in other words, they are not adequately remunerated and yet they are recognized. How did labourers come to be in this place? The two ends of my research trajectory may make some sense of this.

I started my research at the onset of a global recession; ironically, my writing of this concluding chapter coincides with the CoVID-19 global pandemic. Although at the time of writing it is early days in the pandemic (March–April 2020), the prognosis for the world economy is dire, with ripples in livelihoods in places far away from the current epicentres of the plague (Europe and the USA). I draw attention to the effects on theglobal garment industry, where reports of leading retailers cancelling orders from countries, such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, abound (Hossain 2020; Kelly 2020a, 2020b; Hoskins 2020, 2021). These accounts alert us to the large-scale cutbacks and the struggles of local activists to ensure some degree of protection and severance for redundant workers. With retail therapy adrift, many major brands have walked away from their contractual obligations. This has meant the closure of local factories or employers’ inability or unwillingness to pay workers, potentially creating the prospect of mass unemployment. While labourers seek justice, retailers blame the markets and local manufacturers highlight their exposure to the vagaries of global markets.

Introduction

This line from Anu's poem to me captures the essence of labour geography. It was a poem pinned against one of the walls in the canteen of a production site where I was doing fieldwork. The creative wall, as it was called, was vividly colour-washed in orange and was a strip that everyone encountered upon entering the canteen. It was an initiative introduced by a recently recruited HR manager, where workers were invited to post their artwork, poems, verses, short stories and such. One day, the poem caught my eye. I learnt that these creative works were rotated on a monthly basis to make way for others. Later, I approached the worker who penned these verses and inquired if I might have them to use for my research. I let her know that, if I were ever to use her poem in my writings, she would be acknowledged. She was bemused by my request: She was ambivalent about her work's poetic value and so wondered if I was in earnest. I had to assure her that I did find the poem powerful and effective. This is how I came to obtain a copy of the poem, while I encouraged her to retain the original.

I had not used this poem before in my writings. Yet, as I returned to my field diaries and collections, I was reminded that it remained a poignant and powerful effort to capture the essence of labour geographies; without the worker, firms would not exist. Even as her entire poem entitled Lovingly, To You, tenderly captures the challenges and hardships of working in the apparel sector, she also reminds her co-workers that without them or us, the factories simply would not exist. They, the workers, make an important contribution to the nation's wealth. Her poem then is a tender call for recognizing their agency.

Through the entirety of the poem, Anu invokes the importance of workers to the country and the firm. Her verses are a stimulating way of combining two important theoretical strands – feminist interventions and labour geographies literature – which are pertinent for thinking about labour geographies within the context of the Sri Lankan apparel sector.

Introduction

Commentators often portray the Sri Lankan apparel industry as visionary, giving industrialists credit for pursuing an ethical and niche-market production strategy. In Chapter Five, I attempted to puncture this storyline to reveal its partiality – since the rendering ignores how labourers have held the state culpable for violating their rights. Early collective struggles led to general legislative frameworks that continue to offer workers some recourse, and resistance by apparel sector workers in particular helped shape work conditions within that sector from the late 1980s (Kearney 1971; Jayawardena 1972; Women's Centre 2006; Biyanwila 2011; Saxena 2014). When a senior officer at the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) regional office shared the above sentiments, she was capturing another dimension to Sri Lankan apparel's successful ethical trajectory: that of the voice and place of labour, enabled by social and human development factors, as well as by labour legislation.

By the time ethical trade practices were promoted via global governance initiatives, the apparel sector in Sri Lanka was poised for success due to reasons beyond that of management vision. From the 1980s, workers had compelled the Sri Lankan state to respond to their concerns regarding working conditions and rights, often endangering their lives in doing so. The global move to implement voluntary codes of conduct barely caused a squeak, because Sri Lanka was already ahead of the game (Ruwanpura and Wrigley 2011). In a country and sector that had achieved this lead, and where workers had greater voice, what were work conditions like within production sites?

I now turn to an examination of ethical codes at production sites. I return to my located ethnography and long-term field research to tease out the nuances in the media narratives that often describe Sri Lankan factories in terms of extremes – either as idyllic spaces or as exploitative ones.

Introduction

Towards the latter part of 2008, when I travelled to Sri Lanka to start this research, I did not envisage that I would be continuing this work for almost a decade. My initial approach was to a large degree dictated by the methods I had outlined for an Economic and Social Research Council–funded research project. Hence, like many others before me, I too followed the well-trodden track of carrying out interviews and located ethnography in a way that fell well within the project timeline. However, for a variety of factors recounted later, I also returned to do further research on the topic, maintaining connections with a number of workers, labour rights activists and managers. In this chapter, I try to capture the unbounded nature of field research and provide a sense of the processual nature of my research over the past decade.

I also aim to discuss the various methods that I deployed, especially as the fieldwork was not conducted during a singular research trip but, in the end, was a prolonged process carried out over several visits and years. This extended timeline was not one that I had anticipated at the start of my three-year project but one that ensued nonetheless. Partly, my motivation for continuing to have an association with a select number of workers had some connection with my feminist and solidarity politics and an upbringing infused with Buddhist empathy. Recurrent visits also involved using and deploying multiple methods at various stages, as the extended field research necessitated an evolving research design schema. In this chapter, therefore, I will detail the progress of my research methods over time. An extended field-research schedule meant that I was able to gather and reflect upon unanticipated changes and different embodied tempos, methods and processes.

Multiple Belongings: Doing Fieldwork Back ‘Home’

The year 2008 was the starting point of my fieldwork and, like the experiences of countless others, my initial time in Sri Lanka had its ups and downs. The cyclical process of doing research back ‘home’ was undoubtedly linked to my shifting subject position as an insider (Sri Lankan born and bred) and outsider (residing and working in the United Kingdom).

Introduction

Sri Lankan labourers in the apparel sector are amongst the most educated workers in the global industry. Sri Lanka's human development achievements, however, came through decades of state intervention in the social welfare of its people, especially through investment in public education and health. The highly educated nature of Sri Lankan workers has played an important role in the apparel sector, cultivating an image in which ‘quality, reliability, and punctuality’, as management repeatedly informed me, are givens. As I noted in Chapter Four, it is an image that, according to suppliers, imbues buyers with the confidence to source from Sri Lanka.

The workforce that Sri Lankan apparel firms make proud proclamations about in their websites is then the product of previous state actions in response to labour agitation during the late colonial and pre-1977 periods (Jayawardena 1971, 1972; Kearney 1971). However, the critical role collective labour struggles played and how the state had to respond to them rarely get the attention or acknowledgement they deserve. They need to be taken account of in order to acknowledge how labour too shapes the state and industrial development (see also Chang 2003; Featherstone and Griffin 2016; Silver 2019; Palpacuer 2020). Chang (2003, 2014) makes this and other related points about the pivotal role of the state in industrial development in several places. He stresses its importance not just for East Asia, but also for most Western nations – including the USA, where protecting infant industries was key in the industrial development trajectory. While it may be that this level of mediation to secure a good quality of life for Sri Lankan citizens was a pre-1977 preoccupation, Sri Lankan apparel firms did not do it alone in the post-neoliberal landscape either. As I outline here, labour struggles were crucial for how the ethical sourcing strategy was secured for the apparel sector. In this chapter, I hone in on three such pivotal moments for post-liberalized Sri Lanka, with a particular emphasis on the post-recessionary phase (circa 2008 onwards).

In the sections to follow, I start by revisiting accounts by labour scholars and historians to allow me to place collective labour struggles in the chronicle of the country's political economy.

On a crisp, beautiful autumnal morning in 2007, I attended my first away-day in British academia. Quite a few of us in Southampton's School of Geography, had made the transition from North America to a British university. We were Cool Britannia then, and we all felt novelty, excitement and dread in equal measure. Little did I know the collective energy I enjoyed on that first day would generate a humbling journey that has culminated in the pages of this book.

That morning, I was treated to a presentation by one of my senior colleagues, Neil Wrigley, about his work with Alex Hughes and Martin Buttle, on multi-stakeholder initiatives and ethical trading. As I sat listening, a nagging question began rattling around my brain. During the question and answer, I first voiced it: ‘What about the workers? What do they think of these ethical trading initiatives? Where is their voice?’ I don't recall any discussion, but later, during lunch, Neil and another senior colleague, Peter Sunley, followed up and gave encouragement to this newly formed idea: ‘That was an important perspective you flagged; there is something there, you should explore it.’ Soon I secured an ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) grant (061-25-0181), which allowed me to launch this project, where I explore these questions in the context of the Sri Lankan apparel sector.

My question had its roots in work I had done before coming into academia. My time at the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, introduced me to senior colleagues who valued ILO's tripartite spirit: Manuela (Tomei), Auret (van Heerden), Naoko (Otobe), David (Kucera), Clare (Harasty) and Azita (Berar-Awad). The many projects I did there instilled in me the need to pay attention to workers’ voices and their quest for justice.

Primed to ask questions, I arrived in Sri Lanka where the generous, committed, feisty garment workers taught me what I needed to know to tell this story and answer the questions I posed on that away-day many years ago. And those workers, in turn, taught me the value of listening.

I brought these tenets to my research and analysis on the apparel sector of Sri Lanka.