Collective voice without collective bargaining: Women workers negotiating labour rights in Sri Lanka's apparel industry

Abstract

This dissertation responds to the question of how women workers use their voice to negotiate their labour rights in Sri Lanka's apparel industry. The conventional tools of labour law, such as unionising and collective bargaining, have been considered key mechanisms for worker rights negotiations, but appear increasingly weakened in Sri Lanka's apparel industry today. These conventional mechanisms pre-suppose institutional support for their effective implementation and often have to filter through political, social and industrial orders which, sometimes, make them ineffective at the ground level. This was most felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such erosions of worker rights leave women workers particularly vulnerable in the labour-intensive apparel industry, where they are both a majority of the workforce and arguably seen as docile contributors to the manufacturing process.

Adopting a socio-legal approach, this research is executed as a qualitative study examining three multi-level case studies from Sri Lanka's apparel industry in the pandemic and post-pandemic times. I develop the case studies through semi-structured interviews with women workers, worker representative organisations and a range of non-state and state actors at local, national, regional and international levels. Significantly, interviews allow women workers to speak directly about their experiences, consistent with feminist methods.

The dissertation argues that women workers in Sri Lanka's apparel industry action non-conventional forms of worker voice in negotiating their worker rights. I use networked regulation and governance as the primary analytical lens, in tandem with perspectives from Transnational Feminist Movements. Using these frames, I examine the circumstances in which worker networks, activated by grassroots-level women's labour organisations, can strengthen workers' bargaining power, empower workers to exert influence as 'regulators' (i.e. as contributors to net regulatory processes and outcomes) and act as a check on employer accountability in ensuring worker rights across the apparel supply chain. I find potential and significant constraining forces that affect the exercise of agency and self-empowerment. The dissertation demonstrates dynamic regulatory webs - worker networks that transcend conventional labour law framings of worker voice - and how workers legitimise such interventions in actioning 'collective voice' where collective bargaining is absent or weak. I conceptualise Sri Lanka's apparel industry as a semi-autonomous social and governance field. The industry has its own multiple sources and vectors of rule-making power, primarily exercised by employers and state regulators within the industry spaces, but also influenced by the rules and norms outside the conventional governance field that are often relied on by workers and their representatives to legitimise labour claims. In the face of political, social, industrial and gendered challenges, women workers push back and influence regulatory decision-making through these transnational networks and advocacy.

The dissertation makes an original contribution to the study of worker voice in apparel supply chains and advances scholarly understanding of networked regulation, by suggesting a framework to understand regulation by workers through non-conventional voice mechanisms. It also sheds light on women's labour activism in the industry and how they use different legal and normative frameworks to gain the maximum leverage to influence regulatory decision-making in complex apparel supply chains.