Working conditions in the global garment industry have been a subject of intense debate and criticism in scholarly circles as well as in the mainstream media. Some have argued that garment production provides much-needed employment opportunities while others have posited that these jobs result in social downgrading. Yet, much still remains unknown about power dynamics, institutions, and actors at the base of global garment supply chains. Interestingly, these local-level networks of social relationships and actors are manifested in distinctive ways across socially contentious and spatially bound geographical settings referred to as local labor control regimes. These interlinkages are further complicated by a diverse workforce in which social control by employers and workers’ influence over the local labor control regime become functions of workers’ socioeconomic contexts (i.e., positionality). Nonetheless, most analyses of labor control regimes are rather limited in scope in primarily accounting for the role of firm/employer practices in shaping local labor control regimes, while relatively overlooking that of labor agency. Moreover, the garment workforce has often been perceived as either feminized or migrant at a time, resulting in intersectional analyses of mutually interacting social identities – such as gender and internal migration status – enjoying scant scholarly attention at best. Focusing on internal migrant workers in an export-oriented garment industrial setting in southern India, this dissertation makes important contributions while pushing the frontiers of industrial relations scholarship, particularly within the context of global supply chains, in several ways. First, it adopts an intersectional approach towards labor-capital contention and highlights how worker subordination is reproduced in this relationship as it relates to workers’ intersectional social identities, specifically internal migration status and gender. Put differently, it shows that employers leverage different social identities of workers in ways that reproduce workforce segmentation at the globalized garment workplace thereby hindering labor contestation. Second, it demonstrates how internal migrant women exercise agency – including non-collective and non-confrontational – and influence the local labor control regime. Third, it presents one of the first studies to document internal migrant worker organizing extensively. In doing so, it addresses a range of migrant vulnerabilities and builds on existing work, which has highlighted union efforts for organizing locally based workers and international migrants but not internal migrants as such. Fourth, it underscores a relatively underresearched process of grassroots union organizing of internal migrants in an emerging context and complements the evolving scholarship in this domain. Fifth, it brings to light the challenges emanating from within unions that workers with gendered and migrant identities may face toward effective union participation. These impediments exacerbate preexisting low prospects for effective mobilization and undermine labor representation at the garment workplace. From a practical standpoint, this dissertation also highlights unique power relationships between workers – particularly internal migrant workers – and organizations such as employers and unions at the local level in global supply chains. It uncovers critical implications for policy formulation pertaining to labor rights targeted at highly vulnerable workers; unpacks strategies for organizing a hitherto underacknowledged worker category of internal migrants; and brings forth equity issues within the labor movement so important for active union participation and mobilization. In summary, this work is an essential consolidated complement to the existing yet rather partial grassroots analyses of labor-capital power relationships in globalized industrial contexts.
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