Geopolitical Fabrics: Industrial Zones, Migrant Labour and Jordan’s Transformation into a Garment Production Hub

Jordan features several special economic zones (SEZs) for export-oriented clothing production. New factory clusters are currently being developed and the garment sector features prominently in governmental economic development visions. Yet Jordan neither makes for a profitable clothing production location, nor does its garment industry benefit the national economy. High energy- and labour costs inflate production costs, and the garment factories clustered in the SEZs mostly belong to foreign investors who benefit from generous tax breaks, employ foreign labour, and repatriate their profits. To unpack this conundrum, this paper examines how Jordan’s SEZs emerged as geopolitical constructs, in the context of US peace diplomacy between Israel and Jordan. It explores how the extra-territorial production zones were established – and continue to be bolstered – by distinct spatial and legal regimes of exception that favour Jordan’s insertion into the global garment value chain. The paper’s key argument is that the ex-post creation of a dormitory migrant labour control regime in Jordan’s SEZs proved vital to guaranteeing the sector’s global competitiveness. This labour regime was enabled through the suspension of national labour law and regulations; as well as the transformation of the SEZs into quasi-carceral living and working environments. To legitimise this exploitative and racialised labour regime, US government agencies have funded the establishment of a Better Work program by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The program’s focus on international compliance standards and its co-optation of the garment sector’s unitary labour union has since helped to obfuscate the continued exclusion of garment workers from national labour law, be it the minimum wage or health insurance provisions. Taken together, this paper shows how geopolitical manoeuvring not only shapes geographies of global production and work, but also actively produces and perpetuates particular forms of labour exploitation.