Polycrisis and labour agency in global production networks: evidence from Bangladesh’s apparel industry

Abstract

This article explains how temporally uneven polycrisis reshapes labour agency within apparel production networks. Developing a spatial–temporal analytical framework, it shows how interactions, amplification, and acceleration across crises reconfigure workers’ opportunity structures through legitimacy, profitability, and social reproduction pressures. This qualitative case study of Bangladesh’s apparel industry examines how the Rana Plaza accident, COVID-19, and the climate crisis interacted to produce cumulative effects that enabled openings and constrained mobilization, shifting labour agency across associational, coalitional, and micro-practices over time. The study advances labour regime analysis by demonstrating the temporal contingency and spatial situatedness of labour agency during polycrisis.