Scales of Power: Garment Workers and Transnational Campaigns in Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland

This paper explores worker agency in garment factories in Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland. The interest is to identify various sources of power mobilised by workers and the scale at which such power is exercised in order to respond to the extremely low wages paid by garment manufacturers, as well as a lack of state regulation of wages and working conditions. In the case of Lesotho, major campaigns around labour codes of conduct were used, but often stood in at the symbolic level for real factory-based organising – i.e. the global at the expense of the local. In the case of South Africa, a country that is seen as one with progressive labour laws, trade unions focus their efforts on institutional representation in national bargaining forums and “buy South African” campaigns at the expense of local level organising or transnational campaigns. In Swaziland, trade unions experimented with labour codes of conduct, but retreat into local organising after a negative experience with a supplier to the retailer Wal-Mart. The comparison highlights how different sources of workers’ power related to scales of organising and suggest possible ways in which these could be mobilised more successfully in future. At the theoretical level, the paper engages the literature on labour geography (Andrew Herod and others), as well as sociological work on sources of worker’s power (Eric Olin Wright, Beverly Silver, Jennifer Chun, and my own work with Rob Lambert, Edward Webster and others).