Insights Into Global Supply Chain
Maya John
UNMAKING THE GLOBAL SWEATSHOP: HEALTH AND SAFETY OF THE WORLD’S GARMENT WORKERS by Rebecca Prentice and Geert De Neve University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2018, 304 pp., 6,699
March 2018, volume 42, No 3

Unmaking the Global Sweatshop is a volume that brings together a rich collection of ethnographic studies which focus on the deplorable safety conditions at work and the poor status of health and well-being of workers employed within current garment production regimes. The overarching context of each of these studies is the interesting conjuncture of increasing corporate self-regulation and enforcement of newly formulated voluntary labour codes defined by the ‘first world’ for ‘third world’ garment sweatshops. In this regard, two such codes that are critically discussed by several of the contributors are the ‘Accord on Fire and Building Safety on Bangladesh’ and the ‘Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety’ of 2013. The collection represents a much needed and well timed intervention in the ensuing debate about the perils of the current form of globalization and the spread of highly NGO-ized trans-national activism. By mapping garment workers’ health on a quotidian level, as well as fleshing out the aftermath of large-scale factory disasters on workers’ well-being, the contributors successfully highlight that the poor condi-tions of garment workers is the systemic result of outsourcing and subcontracting that produce conditions for intense physical work for long hours, continuous compromising of workers’ safety in order to meet produc-tion deadlines, and competitive cost-cutting which depresses wages.

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