Worker agency & mobilization

How and why do workers consent, assist or resist?

In apparel global supply chains, supplier firms frequently depend on balancing low wages and rigorous control over workers with the need to motivate and retain workers. These compromises can be unbalanced and made increasingly volatile through GVC-related pressures to meet demanding production schedules and survive intense price competition. Whether and how a supplier firm can become and remain profitable depends in large parts on the extent to which workers can be persuaded to exert high levels of effort and comply with factory production systems. Workers in turn seek to obtain higher wages, share in productivity improvements, and increase control over their own work and working conditions. Worker agency takes many forms, from cooperation to resistance and can be based in individual action or mediated by trade unions and other collective organizations.

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Our research examines the conditions under which workers identify with the profit-seeking aims of the firm and conform to the rules and expectations laid out by company managers and, conversely, when workers instead choose to engage in various forms of resistance. We ask how workers can mobilise and demand better conditions, but also what constitutes and determines the limits of such mobilisations.

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We use different methods to generate information about workers' actions as well as their own explanations for their actions and perceptions about their work, ranging from large-scale surveys of workers in Ethiopia and Kenya to labor ethnography in a particular factory.