Hasan Ashraf

This article explores the relationship between labor unions and labor precarity in Bangladesh’s garment industry. After a string of high-profile factory disasters—including the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building—Bangladeshi labor unions have played a central role in new global initiatives to improve factory safety. These initiatives have provided an opportunity for unions to influence the governance of labor standards in a context of low levels of factory unionization. We argue that such global initiatives have deepened an existing divide between the conciliatory stance of mainstream, politically connected Bangladeshi unions and workers’ more radical responses to precarity. Militant protests have advanced workers’ interests historically, but are increasingly delegitimized and subject to violent crackdowns.
This article contributes to our understanding of the fraught relationship between precarious workers and traditional labor unions by showing that when unions devote themselves to the technocratic improvement of labor standards without confronting the structural conditions of precarity itself, workers can be made more vulnerable—a situation that becomes heightened in
a context of fast industrial expansion.

The effects of Covid-19 dramatized yet again the fragilities and asymmetries built into global supply chains and the marginal structural location of Bangladesh-the world's second largest clothing manufacturer-within the apparel supply chain. It was a reminder that the distribution of risk is highly asymmetric and falls disproportionately on gendered, classed, and raced laboring bodies at the bottom of the chain, usually located in the Global South. Against this backdrop, this article asks why and how pandemic discourses of stigmatization and othering largely congealed around the bodies of garment factory workers in Bangladesh. At the heart of the paper is the question of how ostensibly essential labour is made expendable through governmental techniques and discursive practices that draw on gendered and classed tropes with strong colonial precedents. We argue that Bangladeshi garment workers' shadow inclusion into or evacuation from this elastic and troubling category hinges on a complex assemblage of market rationalities, global supply-chain contingencies and national governmental determinations.

Misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change continue to surface in both academia and policy. This requires a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change.

We are happy to announce the new project of our working group "Workplaces: Pasts and Presents." After our blog series "Factory Reloaded," and our podcast series "Workplace Matters," we are now moving into the realm of digital humanities to explore the historical and contemporary dynamics of capitalism at the point of production. This project brings together international scholars in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Turkey, South Africa, and Bangladesh to investigate, in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way, the past and present of the workplace. We are especially concerned to move across the divides between the global North and South, between different disciplines, and between different methods and orientations. The project draws on a range of methodologies and on tools in the digital humanities and social sciences to archive, curate, and disseminate our results and findings to audiences of students, scholars, activists, and the general public. We welcome communication, especially offers to share research, collaborate, and exchange ideas.