Occupational health and safety in the global garment industry.

Abstract

This chapter presents a historical-realist analysis of (the lack of) occupational health and safety in the global textile and garment industry through revisiting key academic publications on historical developments in the sector since the early Nineteenth Century. In doing so, it uncovers that this sector has a long history of deliberately opting for the ‘sick role’, as corporations and regulators persistently ignore threats to workers’ occupational health and safety, while seeking to evade critical scrutiny of working conditions. Through shifting the analysis of health and safety from the scale of individual workers and factories to the scale of the industrial sector and the dynamics of capitalism more broadly, the chapter reveals four spatio-temporal features undergirding the accumulation of capital in global textile and garment manufacturing. These include (i) lack of investment in technological innovation, (ii) undervalued and unsafe labor, (iii) intransparent subcontracting networks, and (iv) racialized exploitation.