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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.