Mobilities at Work: Stories of Migration and Labour from the Industrial Belts of Dhaka

Feminist ethnographers have been looking at the relationship between the migration of women and men and the impact on not just family and community but also their contribution to upward social mobility and the economic restructuring of the receiving and sending regions. Women were conceptualised as dependent migrants until feminist scholarship came of age and underlined that migrants are of all genders, religious groups, communities, castes and classes. In this article, we examine migrant women from rural Bangladesh who join garment factories located in the industrial areas around Dhaka. The predicament of Bangladeshi garment workers is very much like women across the third world in global industries that trivialise and extract women’s labour for the production of profit. The rising demand for semi-skilled, supposedly docile and well-mannered workers for assembling garments has been economically beneficial to the rural women as well as the factory owners. Coming from poor, farming families, women begin to work in the garment factories as there are few other livelihood options. This migration has primarily been independent (without men) for the women who migrated to the city with the assistance of distant kin. They work for more than twelve hours a day to sustain themselves and their families, as many are sole earners and heads of their households, earn less than they need to lead a dignified life and have limited opportunities for upward mobility. The misogynist perception that sewing and tailoring, which requires precision and patience, and a primarily feminine trait has led to economic and cultural denigration of women workers and men workers who are employed in the stitching sections. At the same time, as a mainstay of the economy, management and the workers has consistently relied on the logic of national development and decent wage and rights respectively. This article seeks to excavate the meanings of gendered subjectivities and its accompanying forms of mobilities that garment workers undertake and sustain.