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.