A Literature Review on Gender and Manufacturing: with Special Reference to Employees in Global Garment Factories in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Understanding the positioning of women within the global garment industry with the use of relevant theoretical underpinnings is the purpose of this paper. It pays special attention to women and men working in the garment industry in Sri Lanka a country in the global south. Garment industry is one of the leading employers in the country and more than seventy percent of the workforce is women and majority of them work in the factory floor. Although women contribute to a greater extent for the economic development of the country, less attention is paid to their positioning within the industry. This papers aims at addressing this gap in literature with the use of seminal work of Elson and Pearson (1981) in which they explained the complex dependence of capitalist strategies on the patriarchal subordination of women as a gender, Salzinger’s (2003) study which argues that gendered subjectivities are created not just locally but on the shop floor, Carswell and De Neve’s (2013) work on how employees agency is rooted in every day decision making around employment affects the functioning of capitalists firms and ethical trading initiatives in the global garment industry (Hale and Shaw, 2001).