The Next-Node Approach: Systematically Researching and Organizing Labour Along the Global Garment Value Chain

Labour struggles take place along the entire garment value chain at various nodes in the world. Whether on the cotton plantations in Brazil, in the garment factories of Cambodia or on the second-hand markets in Accra: workers fight everyday struggles of re/production, documenting diverse forms and dimensions of labour agency. Investigating these labour realities and struggles in such complex global re/production networks (GRPNs) like the garment industry – explicitly from a labour (geography) perspective – is, however, a challenging task.

At this point, the next-node approach can serve as a methodological tool to systematically investigate labour struggles - and thus also life realities and strategies of workers - along the garment value chain from a dedicated labour perspective. The approach brings workers along the value chain together at the next node in the chain (for example, from factory workers to truck drivers to dock workers) in order to examine life realities and struggles together with the workers and in relation to each other.

A gathering of garment factory workers and truck drivers in Cambodia as part of a participatory research project shows challenges, but also great potentials of systematically bringing together different groups of workers – here from factories and logistics – to investigate together labour struggles along the value chain as well as options for (joint) actions.