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Paper short abstract:

Based on a recent ILO report on The Social Life of Industrial Disputes, this presentation reflects on how workers articulate their own claims towards social justice from the shopfloor, through filing industrial grievances. The analysis maps grievances and reflects on labour regimes and conflict.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on a recent ILO project and report on The Social Life of Industrial Disputes (Mezzadri and Sehgal, 2023). The study traces the social biography of industrial conflicts and explores the links between regional labour regimes in the Indian garment industry and the evolution of industrial relations from a worker-centred lens. It analyses the features and outcome of industrial grievances filed by workers in three garment clusters, Gurugram (National Capital Region), Bengaluru (Karnataka) and Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu). By centring workers’ action, the study analyses how workers articulate their own claims towards social justice from the shopfloor, even in the absence of mobilisations. Through a labour-centred approach to industrial relations focusing on workers’ experiences, and by investigating workers’ industrial grievances either filed individually or through unions, the study reconstructs the ‘social life’ of industrial relations as drawn by labour. The evidence discussed here is based on the study of 25 industrial disputes in each location, totalling 75 disputes. The analysis shows that disputes can be formal, semiformal, and informal, individual, or collective; yet, different typologies intersect and are better understood as placed on a spectrum, where conciliation and litigation processes interplay. The trajectory disputes may follow depends on these intersections and interplays and shape a complex legal chain, made of many nodes involving different legal offices and entities. The study of workers’ disputes reveals great regional variation in labour abuse, also along gendered lines. Yet, it also shows commonalities, particularly with reference to illegal terminations and wage-theft.

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Paper short abstract:

A case study investigating the implications of the H&M Global Framework Agreement for the implementation of collective bargaining rights in the Indonesian garment industry.

Paper long abstract:

Many global union federations (GUFs) have concluded global framework agreements (GFAs) with multinational companies to compel compliance with core labour standards across their global operations (Papadakis (ed), 2011). The emphasis is on addressing national regulatory gaps in jurisdictions to which production is relocated (Fichter & McCallum, 2015; Hadwiger, 2018). In 2015, IndustriALL (the GUF for manufacturing sectors) signed a GFA with H&M covering its direct suppliers and subcontractors. National monitoring committees that include national union and H&M representatives were set up in six countries–Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar and Turkey–which are prioritised for participation in implementation programmes.

I am conducting a case study on the GFA's implementation in the Indonesian garment industry to investigate whether it has contributed to improving working conditions and industrial relations. The study draws on interviews conducted with, amongst others, garment workers, trade unions, and H&M suppliers. This paper focuses on my initial findings on the implementation of collective bargaining rights, which include:

• While collective bargaining rights are being implemented at H&M suppliers, this has minimal impact on working and wage conditions.

• Collective bargaining agreements mostly replicate national legislation. Wages are based either on district-based minimums for less than one-year service or wage scales determined unilaterally by factories.

• Recent labour law reforms have increased contractual flexibility and other precarities, thereby reducing union bargaining leverage. H&M suppliers have exploited the opportunities offered in terms of legislation and other social factors, notwithstanding their participation in GFA programmes to promote collective bargaining.

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Paper short abstract:

This is an empirically driven paper that explores the nature of access to remedy in the garment supply chain.

Paper long abstract:

This is an empirically driven paper that explores the nature of access to remedy in the garment supply chain. It documents violations of labour and human rights at workplace level in production units in the city of Bangalore, India. In addition to presenting new empirical data, it begins to interrogate and theorise the meaning of a ‘grievance’ as constituted by workers and trade unions on the ground, vis-à-vis other actors such as international brands, multi-stakeholder initiatives and the state.

Through data collection by grass roots activists, we constructed a data bank of workplace grievances as reported by workers over a period of two years. In worker concerns we glimpse a regime of exploitation that thrives in the context of poverty and intense inter-firm competition (see Mezzadri, 2017; also Selwyn, 2017; Anner, 2019).

In addition to presenting data on grievances and workforce composition across multiple production units in Bangalore, the paper analyses the meaning of ‘grievance’ in practical application. Demands for remedy have to be captured within frameworks laid down by factory and state bureaucracies. In this way, even gross violations may be contained and sanitised before they are subjected to external scrutiny.

This paper anatomises the circumstances that lie behind the grievance as reported, exposing the constraints on worker voice, the modest nature of workers’ expectations and demands, and the hidden recesses of workplace regimes.

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Paper short abstract:

I examine workers’ structural and associational power in the Mauritian garment industry and how they shape social up- and downgrading. I find that gains are differentiated, whereby local workers (with active state support) have leveraged more power than migrant workers - mainly Bangladeshi men.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to understand workers’ structural and associational power in the trajectory of the Mauritian garment industry. Building on insights from Barrientos’s (2019) work on Global (re)Production Network analysis and Marslev et al. (2022), I explore the ways in which the state has interacted with capital and labour, and how they in turn have shaped parallel and contradictory processes of social up- and downgrading. Finally, I ask whether the (counter)strategies adopted by workers have in fact improved their working conditions.

Specifically, I narrow down on the migrant issue in Mauritius since industrialists have found new ways of accessing cheap labour with active support from the state. This takes the form of disposable migrant workers, mainly Bangladeshi men, who make up over half of the workforce on Mauritian factory floors. In parallel, industrialists claim they cannot find Mauritian workers for the low-end jobs when essentially the working conditions, including mandatory overtime in combination with lived experiences of sudden factory closures, appear to make up some of the overlooked reasons related to social reproduction needs.

Preliminary findings based on fieldwork, together with analyses of household survey data, suggests that a social hierarchy has been created to keep the labour-intensive garment industry in a country that has otherwise structurally transformed its economy. While worker power has succeeded in shaping the industry’s operations, gains appear to be fragile and differentiated by type of worker, largely based on gender and migrant status.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the making of the current labour regime within UK fast fashion and focuses in particular on forms and spaces of worker voice. It highlights recent bottom-up initiatives and points to the role of social reproduction in progressive labour strategies.

Paper long abstract:

The UK fast fashion industry has been characterised by economic and social downgrading over the last decades, underscored by monopsonistic capital structures as well as the super-exploitation of an informalised labour force. This paper examines the making of this labour regime and focuses, in particular, on forms and spaces of worker voice. It contrasts the decline and evolution of formal organised channels with more recent bottom-up initiatives, highlighting the role of social reproduction in progressive labour strategies.

While employment conditions in the industry have gained constant media and, increasingly, political focus, grievances rarely made it beyond the informal structures of the industry. Austerity and monopsonistic supply chains are key factors in this situation which can be evidenced through data from the UK’s dispersed labour market enforcement agencies, on the one hand, of social auditing data, on the other. This contrasts sharply with a further source of data which stem from labour and community organisations which have developed over the last years. What is distinctive about the latter initiatives is that they, both, perceive work and employment issues from a wider, reproductive labour, perspective. Strategies based on the latter perspective have resulted in considerable successes and contain important elements of worker-driven supply chain governance. It will be argued that such strategies should take a central role in frameworks of mandatory human rights due diligence.

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Paper short abstract:

Located in the Bangladeshi garment workers’ movements and local labour activist networks, this paper seeks to explore these spaces as integral to sustaining movements and shaping the course of methodological concerns related to the question of social reproduction.

Paper long abstract:

Being a well-researched ‘subject’ community for transnational rights organisations, garment workers and union leaders in Bangladesh are aware of and prepared to respond to the standard questions about their work and struggles whenever an international researcher visits the industrial belts in the suburbs of Dhaka. The template is set – for them as well for the researcher; they know what an international researcher wants. In this paper, I seek to explore the modalities of how feminist research can centre the concerns of labour and gender on “life-making” processes that unfold in the field. This not only requires one to record the field in its “thick descriptions” and the peculiarities of gendered care-work, but also to be mindful of that immersion and be cautious of the narratives of loss, labour and sympathy that the transnational activist spaces weave. In doing so, I undertake a mixed methods approach and propose to extend the SRT framework to understand the process of the reproduction of labour power from the sites of work, communities and organisational spaces, marking a shift from the conjugal/domestic spaces. I would also like to explore the interesting relationship between an international researcher and the workers, in a field as dynamic as the garment industry in Dhaka, where meaning making becomes a two-way process – between the main actors in the field and an outsider extending (fruitless) solidarity.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on images and experiences from an exhibition in 2023, this photo-essay will remind us why and how Rana Plaza happened; remember those who suffered and witness how they live now; and raise questions about the legacies of Rana Plaza: who wants to remember, how, and why?

Paper long abstract:

In 2023, an exhibition of photographs by the photo-journalist Ismail Ferdous marked the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster, the worst in the garments industry’s disaster-studded history. The exhibition was immersive, an effort to render unforgettable the horrors of the collapse of the factory complex and the workers who suffered and died. Survivors and families of victims of the disaster visited; some found it painful to remember, even though they lived with the disaster all the time. Several said they valued the exhibition because public authorities had forgotten and neglected them in the years since. As multinational corporations, domestic manufacturers, and the Bangladeshi government work hard to erase and ignore Rana Plaza, this visual essay prompts us to remember why it happened and to whom, and why disasters of this nature continue to happen in the industry. It will raise questions about the legacies of Rana Plaza, in particular the infrastructural and legal responses it has engendered without empowering workers to protect themselves collectively. It will ask questions about the role of memorials in accountability, and about the prospects for artistic and cultural interventions when politics and policy have so singularly failed to advance workers’ rights and power.

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Paper short abstract:

Why do workers protest under some conditions and not others? A 2019 dispute at the Donglian Fashions garment factory in Bangladesh demonstrates why workers in a ‘socially compliant’ and unionized factory resort to ‘spectacular’ protest against the slow violence of shopfloor sexual harassment.

Paper long abstract:

When 17 garment workers declared their intention to ‘fast unto death’ (amoron onoshon) over the sexual assault of a fellow worker at the Donglian Fashions factory in Bangladesh in 2019, the protest spoke not only to a specific injustice in their workplace, but also challenged the normalisation of sexual harassment as a supervisory practice across the industry. The survivor and her allies found no easy resolution to their grievances, and their employer retaliated against them. The Donglian story highlights two important aspects of violence and harassment in Bangladesh’s global garment industry: first, the pervasiveness of sexual harassment among many coercive supervisory practices, and second, the institutional failures to address workplace abuse. In this paper, we draw upon ethnographic research with industry insiders, including participants in the Donglian Fashions dispute, to explore why workers protest under some conditions and not others. At the time, Donglian Fashions was perceived internationally as a ‘socially compliant’ factory, signatory to multiple labour standards agreements. Donglian is also a unionized factory, with a collective bargaining agreement between workers and their employer. We demonstrate how unionization efforts may set the stage for ‘spectacular’ protests when expectations of social justice are built up and unmet. These findings suggest that in the face of systemic institutional failures of prevention and redress, preexisting worker solidarity lends critical hope and moral force to their cause.

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Paper short abstract:

Women workers' discontent manifests in multiple ways, disparate, but a powerful potential tool of resistance. Fragmented, multiplying and patriarchy-marked trade unions highlight the limits of scaling up women's resistance, and the complex space where gender and class formation intersect.

Paper long abstract:

Work, Agency and Collective Action of Bangalore's Garment Workers.

Low wages and multiple vulnerabilities of workers mark the global value chain in the Ready-Made Garments industry (RMG), overshadowing gradual advances that have occurred in the establishment of certain rights-based institutional mechanisms in the sector. Drawing on recent research on the Bangalore RMG industry, this paper looks at three related questions: how do women workers perceive their work? What are the modalities of expression of worker resistance on an everyday basis as well as through organised action? Third, the paper would foreground these questions in the broader political-institutional framework of the sector’s trade union movement: two formal divisions have occurred, in 2012 when a split in the Garments and Textile Workers Union (GATWU) paved the way for the formation of the Garments Labor Union (GLU), and in 2023 when the GLU split, leading to the Independent Karnataka Garment Workers Union. Additionally, the Karnataka Garment Workers’ Union (KOOGU) has existed independently since 2009.

In a context where only 10% of the workforce is unionised, the existence of multiple unions, as well as splits, represent unexpectedly high levels of internal frictions within the trade union movement. Has the quick fragmentation of fledgling efforts at collective organisation impacted grassroots efforts of workers’ self-organisation? What roles have the national level NTUI (umbrella union of informal workers), as well as affiliate CSOs played in these contexts of organisational disunity? In what ways do these dynamics speak to the intersection of gender and class formation?

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Paper short abstract:

This article seeks to reflect and analyze the precarious working conditions to which workers in the Portuguese garment industry are subject, what actions and means they use to grievance more dignified and fair conditions and the outcomes of such demands.

Paper long abstract:

Although countries in the global South are known due to political, economic, environmental, and legal factors to be more susceptible to labor exploitation and violation of the rights of workers in the garment industry (Nathan, Bhattacharjee, Rahul,et al., 2022). Also in global North, more preciously in Portugal, the precarious conditions that workers in this industry are subject have been noted (Pereira, 2023).

From unpaid wages, being prevented from going to the bathroom, threats, and dismissals for being on maternity leave or being part of the union, verbal humiliation, among others. These are the conditions of women who work in the “paradise” of sustainable production (Pereira, 2023; Mandeiro, 2023). To obtain fairer and more dignified working conditions, these women turn to their union leaders inside the factories and outside of them to the Authority for Working Conditions (ACT) (Guerreiro, 2023).

This article is based on interviews carried out with unionized workers in the Portuguese garment industry and seeks to reflect and analyze the precarious working conditions they are subject, what actions and means they use to demand more dignified and fair conditions and the outcomes of such demands.

It is concluded that, despite the constant grievances made to ACT and to the union, significant changes rarely occur. Such grievances end up contributing to intensifying the pressure and humiliation to which they are subjected to leave the unions, and often lead to them being fired, thus further accentuating their vulnerability.

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Paper short abstract:

We examine social and economic upgrading in Ethiopia's apparel GPNs by studying the rise and fall of a prominent Turkish investment between 2010 and 2019. These two forms of upgrading proved highly intertwined, and the interaction of various actors' agency crucial to the outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

Ethiopia’s quest for export-led industrialization through manufacturing is seen by many as a test case for the larger potential of African countries to benefit from global value chains. In recent years this quest has run into difficulties, prompting critics to question the social and economic advantages of this strategy. This article takes a novel approach to this question by examining the rise and fall of one prominent international investment that failed, namely the Turkish textile/apparel firm Ayka Addis. It does so through the lens of agency in global production networks (GPNs), arguing that a multi-stranded understanding of the constraints and opportunities faced by different actors can shed light on possibilities for economic and social upgrading. Drawing on interviews, as well as on multiple primary and secondary written sources, it finds a variety of complex and overlapping levels of agency between and within the workforce, government, main buyer, and firm management. An initial alignment in goals increased the agency of many of these actors, putting the GPN on the path to social upgrading. But economic upgrading proved more difficult to achieve, especially when key actors’ ambitions began to diverge in later years. The responsibility to create sustainable value chains is diffuse, and no one party can be blamed entirely for Ayka’s failure. Nor can GPN actors “parcel up” the work required: just as economic actors such as firms must increasingly work to ensure worker wellbeing and social upgrading, actors concerned with social progress must also concern themselves with economic sustainability.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with readymade garment workers in Bangladesh, this paper presents an analytical framework with which to better understand a critical aspect of labour organizing that is often missed, particularly in the context of women’s activism: the development of affective communities.

Paper long abstract:

Workers’ institutions such as trade unions and workers’ centres are crucial for organizing workers. However, in much of the Global South, the ability of these institutions to reach out to women workers is limited. Taking as a case study the garment workers in Bangladesh, this paper explores the ways in workers and activists attempt to overcome the historic ban on trade unions in the country's largest export-earning industry by organizing beyond the production floor in spaces of social reproduction. In doing so, this paper bridges theories of social reproduction (Vogel, 1983; Bhattacharya, 2017) with a materialist reading of affect (Hennessy, 2013; Chun, 2016) to offer an analytical framework with which to better understand a critical aspect of labour organizing in Bangladesh that is often missed, particularly in the context of women’s activism: the development of affective communities. I argue that at once hidden and overlooked, these communities – and therefore, relationships – that women cultivate span from workplaces to spaces of social reproduction are crucial for developing the capacities for activism and strengthening workers’ institutions themselves.

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Paper short abstract:

This chapter hopes to uncover how workers in the Sri Lankan sector tried to make sense of multiple crises that unfolded in Sri Lanka – a pandemic, followed by a debt crisis. While the pandemic was unpredictable, public protests underpinned by a debt crisis were decades in the making.

Paper long abstract:

Liminal Life: Pandemic, Protests, and Worker Voices in Sri Lanka

Abstract: This chapter hopes to uncover how workers in the Sri Lankan sector tried to make sense of multiple crises that unfolded in Sri Lanka – a pandemic, followed by a debt crisis. While the pandemic was unpredictable, public protests underpinned by a debt crisis were decades in the making. Nonetheless, how workers experienced these unfolding crises as well as moments of hope (protests) are frequently left outside of the frame of analysis with blithe preoccupations with an undifferentiated category of youth as the face of protests. In a country where class, ethnicity, and gender (at the least) are prominent registers that inflect and shape social life, it is also important to take our gaze to workers – the backbone of Sri Lanka’s economy that continues to toil through unprecedented upheavals in the country. Using worker testimonies and interviews, this chapter hopes to bring out how worker lives were upended and how they negotiated a liminal and uncertain phase through this period.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores an initiative in Bangladesh which is funded by Textile Reuse and International Development (TRAID). The initiative seeks to address social reproduction challenges by providing childcare to children of women garment workers.

Paper long abstract:

Reproductive labour plays a vital role in the functioning of the economy by sustaining and reproducing workers, but capitalism only recognizes labour for the market as the sole form of legitimate work (Bhattacharya, 2017). Feminists have advocated for Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) as SRT considers the labour dispensed to produce commodities and people as the systematic totality of capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2017) and highlights reproductive labour’s role in capitalism. Previous research finds that garment factories in Bangladesh require long hours from workers (Kabeer and Mahmud, 2004) and employers in the Bangladesh garment industry seek capitalist ‘time discipline’ which conflicts with the reproductive roles and responsibilities of women garment workers (Siddiqi & Ashraf, 2017). Research also finds that women garment workers' responsibility in social reproduction influences the nature of their paid work, terms of employment and forms of workplace control in Bangladesh (Anwary, 2017). Building on prior research this paper will utilize SRT and ethnographic research to examine a childcare initiative funded by TRAID. TRAID is a UK charity that works with Nagorik Uddyog (an NGO in Bangladesh) to run childcare centres in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The paper will examine whether and how TRAID’s childcare initiative allows women garment workers to navigate waged and reproductive labour efficiently as they engage with capitalism and will also identify whether the initiative enables women workers and their families to resist exploitative conditions that capitalism imposes on them.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how a Workers Centre initially set up as an entertainment space became transformed into a crucial site for grievance articulation and collective organising of predominantly South Asian migrant workers in Jordan's export-oriented garment industry.

Paper long abstract:

A Free Trade Agreement between Jordan and the United States – granted as a geopolitical present for signing peace with Israel – has prompted transnational Asian suppliers to relocate parts of their garment manufacturing process to Jordanian industrial zones. Across Jordan, 70.000 workers today produce apparel for the US market and 75% of these workers are foreign. The largest constituency of migrant workers are young women recruited from Bangladesh and the second largest group consists of male workers from India. This paper argues that the articulation of labour grievances on Jordanian shop floors is almost impossible. The migrant workers’ extreme legal precarity under the kefala system; the lack of freedom of association and the non-representation of migrant workers in the only government-authorised labour union; as well as the highly restrictive laws of assembly; mean that most mobilisation attempts in factories result in the deportation of workers or generalised recruitment stops. To examine alternative possibilities for the articulation of grievances and claim-making beyond the factory, this paper thus turns to an examination of the Workers Centre in the Al-Hassan industrial zone. Co-established by the ILO and a private garment manufacturer in 2014, the Centre has been transformed from an entertainment space into a central site of labour advocacy and organising over the past decade. Four women – from India, Madgascar, Bangladesh and Jordan – played a central role in subverting the Centre’s original purpose, turning it into a safe space for the articulation of labour grievances and for collective organising.

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Paper short abstract:

Indonesia's urban and rural industrial characteristics shape garment shop floor politics. High production targets, "molor" work system, and silencing workers occur in both regions, resulting in declining livelihood and workers' organisation, and blurring production and social reproduction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how Indonesia's garment shop floor politics affects the livelihood/social reproduction of women workers and workers' organising in urban and rural settings. The research was conducted for four months in two bonded industrial areas located in Jakarta (an urban area) and Semarang Regency (a rural area), Indonesia, employing qualitative methods. The researcher interviewed 58 workers (six of them are male) who currently or previously worked in the garment sector, using life history interviews. Additionally, the researcher observed their daily lives. In-depth interviews were also conducted with company representatives, government officials, and bonded zone authorities (in Jakarta). It is essential to acknowledge the distinct industrial characteristics of these two bonded areas, as these differences also shape the dynamics of shop floor politics and their resultant impacts, particularly concerning livelihood/social reproduction. In this context, three critical aspects of shop floor politics were identified in both regions. First, the imposition of high production targets has resulted in a decline in the physical and mental well-being of women workers, significantly affecting their daily lives. Second, the surplus value extraction occurs more intensively with a "molor" work system, which has been normalised through the perpetuation of capitalist work values, including individualising work-related issues, resulting in the blurring of production and social reproduction. Third, the nature of work demanding focus and advanced skills is often used as a pretext for silencing workers, which has far-reaching consequences for workers organising within this sector.

Keywords: shop floor politics, garment industry, urban and rural, social reproduction, Indonesia.

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Paper short abstract:

In the process of economic upgrading and downgrading workers deal with two levels of power structure – the monopsony and monopoly. The puzzle that emerges is whether garment workers are able to navigate them or develop resilience to sustain their livelihood in the global production system.

Paper long abstract:

Our attempt in this article is to examine the ways in which workers co-opt resilience. The article argues resilience stems from examining the politics of upgrading and downgrading in a production unit. The proponents of economic upgrading explain the opportunities it provides the developing countries to scale. However, the spill-over effect is adhering to monopsony power structure. Units possessing superior economic upgrading status have low risks and attain monopoly status, thus, empowering them to transfer the risk to subcontracted units. Therefore, the assumption of a positive impact on workers is very hypothetical. By downgrading, units, create space to increase profitability, allow them to escape voluntary governance and discontinue Free on Board (FoB) pricing mechanism imposed by global North companies. Apparently, this might look like a feasible solution; nonetheless, how far workers benefit by downgrading is still not clear. Downgrading strategy in the literature received less attention when compared to upgrading. One of the puzzles that emerged is the challenge to negate monopsony and monopoly power structure and bring positive change. This perspective is understood by doing a comparative analysis of large, medium and small garment units in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, selecting 90 workers. This paper intends to understand how ranking the risk of garment units, lead time analysis, buyer’s penalty, FoB pricing strategy, and regulation and governance differs across the upgrading and downgrading units. The purpose of this article is to look at whether such changes in production structure resulted workers to challenge resilience or forced to co-opt resilience.