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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.