Greening the Value Chain: Workers' Conditions, Agency, and Struggle in the Green Transition of the Moroccan Garment Industry

The ‘green transition’ within the global garment and textile industry is an increasingly salient issue within both academic and policy debates. These discussions tend to focus upon the technical qualities of these transitions, and their impact for predominantly corporate based actors within these industries. What is occluded within these discussions is thus the experiences and perspectives of workers on these transitions. The impacts of these transformations for their pay and working conditions is thus absent from much of these discussions, alongside any conceptualisation of the agency of workers as active participants in the processes of shaping how these transitions unfold. This paper will thus seek to move towards the rectification of these issues, by centralising workers within a study of the green transition within the Moroccan garment industry. It is based upon a four month period of fieldwork researching these themes, exploring the concrete changes this transition is bringing about, its impact upon different stakeholders, and the role that different actors are playing in shaping its ongoing development. It thus seeks to recentralise workers not only as recipients of these broader changes to the industry, but crucially also as active agents who play a key role in the struggles and contestations that determine how processeses such as these play out. Moreover, it also explores the role of labour movements at the forefront of climate crisis-based disruptions, and the intersections between their interests as inhabitants of areas ecologically threatened by the climate crisis, and workers within industries that are contributing to this ecological destruction. It thus links to the broader themes of a just transition, labour movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and the ‘green squeeze’ in developing economies.