THRREADS: Transforming Responsive and Relational Autonomy in the Garment Sector of the United Kingdom and Bangladesh

The garment industry comprises nearly 60 million workers around the world, many employed in vulnerable, marginalised, low paid and impoverished forms of work. This project is set in two locations where the garment industry is a significant economic sector - Dhaka in Bangladesh and Leicester in the UK. Despite their many differences, they share recent histories of tragedy and scandal that have drawn attention to exploitative working conditions, raised questions about the effectiveness of legislation, and underscored the importance of global economic cooperation for growth and justice. Our project is propelled through a unique partnership between academia and practice. It is needed because a significant gap remains in understanding why the garment sector lags behind with measures on rights-focused legislation, policies and practices. We put forward a bold international research agenda to meet the urgent need for ways to improve practices in the sector.

Building upon a growing body of research and political interest in exploitative work regimes, the project draws on the feminist-inflected idea of autonomy as relational (meaning that it is socially embedded and shaped by communal traditions and norms). In the workplace, this implies that worker autonomy must be understood within wider transformations in the global economy and constrained by factors including gender, migrant status, and racial relations. Through the lens of relational autonomy, we examine the impact of both social relationships and socio-historical circumstances that affect capacities, for example, as worker, mother, woman (girl) shaped by the interface of household and work roles, gendered norms, and absent voices. The project takes a worker-centred focus to measure changes to work practices, deploying a locally contextualised and mixed methods approach that is simultaneously comparative across the two countries. It will do this through four complementary work strands:

1 A rapid desk-based review to update existing evidence, and a baseline survey of workplaces in the two sites to fill gaps in knowledge about current workplace practices and knowledge of legislation.
2 'Community Conversations' and awareness-raising workshops to improve the qualitative, experiential evidence base, and to mobilise voices of change.
3 An 'Autonomy Lab' for co-creating an index of workplace practices, drawing together results of work strands 1 & 2 to feed into intervention at the factory level.
4 An intensive programme of dissemination and engagement to translate learning from the project into action, including a Leicester Accord.

Co-creation is one hallmark of our project, informed by our recent international work advancing co-creation with citizens across Europe who lack power and voice. We have shaped the project design along with partners in close day-to-day contact with people who are the 'experts by experience' most affected by working conditions in the garment industry. Work stands 2 and 3 are inherently co-creative in ways that are theoretically oriented as well as culturally and contextually sensitive.

Tangible, re-usable project outputs include a new, empirically grounded Anti-Slavery Index and an Action Plan. Our active dissemination and engagement will ensure their take up as learning and policy resources for local manufacturers, international buyers and government policymakers, explicitly linked to the garment industries of Bangladesh and the UK. The project will build new alignments for incremental changes in the South to share learning with similar work sectors in the North in the post-pandemic world, with an ambition for a Leicester Accord.
This is a timely project. Covid-19 renders precarity and insecurity as pressing challenges and adds urgency to investigate if current progress addressing exploitative labour regimes in the garment sector can be strengthened to work toward a global accord that prevents exploitative work practices.