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Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS)

Capital, Labour and Crisis: implications for the clothing industry in the Asia Pacific - 6 & 7th January

Workshop outcome

The interdisciplinary workshop sponsored by the ARC Asia Pacific Futures Research Network (APFRN) and CAPSTRANS was attended by international presenters and discussants including well-known economists, geographer and labour academics, Rajah Rasiah (Dean of Economics, University of Malaya), Sally Weller (VUT), Anita Chan (UTS), Piyasuda Pingsapa (University of the West Indies, Trinidad), Leo van Grunsven (Utrecht University, Netherlands), Melanie Beresford (Macquarie University) Angie Ngoc Tran (University of Southern California, Monterey Bay) and Helena Spyrou (Clothing Trade Union). Presenters UoW presenters were Tim Scrase (Director of CAPSTRANS) Ruchira Ganguly Scrase, Kate Hannan, Di Kelly and PhD student Rowan Cahill, with a written paper submitted by Dr Anne Vo.

The workshop began with an examination of recent developments in Global Commodity Chain theory. Through a series of individual country studies, presenters brought together the picture of the differential impacts of the Global Financial Crisis on the clothing industry in Asia. One series of panels focussed on overviews of the industry, raising issues such as smuggling and re-labelling of garments and their relation to the various tariff schemes, as well as to the new ASEAN-China free trade agreements. These papers also looked at the place of the garment industry in schemes of development. Other sessions concentrated on labour, labour conditions and the roles of unions, NGOs and codes of conduct. The attention to labour, which is a key part of the ARC-funded project, included studies on the roles of migration and mobility in labour.

The workshop captured the connections between clothing consumption patterns and production in a post MFA period and at a time of global economic crisis. The workshop managed to answer some of the questions regarding labour, global labour migration and corporate social responsibility in garment commodity chains. However, there is still a lot more to learn about social development and social upgrading in global production. Can Global Value Chain (GVC) and Global Production Network (GPN) approach still make a useful contribution?  

After two days of intensive presentation and discussions, conference participants found that while we can use the GVC/GPN model to understand the macro governance structures (among firms) and nodes which allow the researchers to see layers of relationships between different actors, we need to go beyond this model. In particular, we emphasized the need to incorporate labour, the state/government, and the media into this multi-level, transnational analysis. We also recognized the significance of historical legacy, a time dimension which would enrich this multi-disciplinary analysis. In addition to these important factors which broaden the GVC/GPN model, we identified some areas for comparative analysis which would strengthen the edited volume, one of the two book manuscripts as products of this project.