Organizer: Angie Ngoc Tran, California State University, Monterey Bay
Chair: Irene Norlund, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Denmark
Discussants: Frederic C. Deyo, State University of New York, Brockport; Irene
Norlund, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Denmark
This comparative panel focuses on two major inter-related issues in countries with a fairly recent export orientation: the role and development of the textile and garment industries, and the impacts of this development on the labor force as well as the possibilities for labor organization. It analyzes similarities and differences regarding these issues in the three Southeast Asian countries-Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines-which have taken over some parts of production from the East Asian NICs (such as South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore).
The panelists will discuss different historical contexts of these three countries. The Philippines started their textile and garment exports in the 1970s with a less coherent strategy of industrialization and internal political problems. Indonesia's industrialization started in the 1980s with both textile and garment products as being important for export. Vietnam has recently entered into the world market in the 1990s with garment export playing a significant role in the total export, and continued exporting to the former Socialist countries.
The expansion of textile and garment production results in a growing labor force. Due to the labor-intensive character of these industries, the tendency is to employ low-skilled and low-paid labor, often migrants and young women. One of the characteristics of the East Asian NICs' export-oriented industries is the development of a "hyper-proletatiat" which did not have a strong bargaining power vis-à-vis the employers. However, this system of exclusion of labor changed during the 1970s, and new modes of labor control were developed in which labor organizations and unions were regarded more positively by the state as a means to include labor through corporatist arrangements and paternalistic relations. The panelists will examine the extent to which these tendencies have emerged in the three Southeast Asian countries in the process of global restructuring.
Reorganizing the "Rag Trade" in Southeast Asia: Comparative
Perspectives on Capital and Labor in Apparel Production
David A. Smith, University of California, Irvine
The textile and garment industries are extremely interesting cases of global economic restructuring. This paper illustrates the factors promoting the shift of apparel production (and other light industries) away from core and semiperipheral regions in the world economy; illuminates some of the complexities and nuances of that process; and discusses the implications of this for the regional division of labor in East Asia. In the East Asian NICs (particularly South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), apparel manufacturing helped propel "economic miracles" during the 1970s and 1980s, but it now faces an uncertain future due to escalating wages and severe labor shortages. This forces NIC-based garment makers to seek "offshore" production sites. Southeast Asia, along with Central America and the Caribbean, became attractive targets for this type of apparel investment. In the 1980s, Indonesia, with its cheap and abundant labor and a state eager to welcome foreign investment, was a powerful magnet for garment capital from Korean and the other Asian NICs. Despite some recent wage pressure and labor unrest, this country (along with China) seems well-positioned to continue as a major global "sourcing" area. More recently, Vietnam, with a nominally Communist regime pushing a policy of "market liberalization" and gradually improving relations with its old enemy the United States, appears poised to become a big player in world apparel production. Garment manufacturers from the NICs and elsewhere have begun to set up factories in Indonesia and Vietnam to take advantage of these countries' large, industrious, and extremely cheap labor forces. Dealing with a rapidly changing global apparel production and marketing system presents special challenges to the states, local capital, and workers through this region.
Impacts of Global Restructuring on Manufacturing and Labor Relations in the
Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries
Angie Ngoc Tran, California State University, Monterey Bay
This paper explores the opportunities as well as challenges arising from greater integration into the world economy and responses of domestic actors to this process in the case of the Vietnamese Textile and Garment Industries (VTGI).
The first part of this paper outlines the evolution of the VTGI from the command economy to a more market-oriented system since the mid 1980s, and how these industries provide an impetus to economic development, just as they led the way for the East Asian NICs in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, this paper presents major structural issues of the VTGI such as production, exports, ownership, labor force (textile and garment workers in general, and women workers in particular), as well as the relationship between domestic integration and performance of domestic firms in the VTGI (or value-added).
The second part of this paper examines responses of the main domestic actors to global restructuring the state (via labor policies) and the labor unions. While the market-oriented economy creates more employment in both public and private sectors, it also engenders many challenges such as job fluctuation due to the nature of subcontracting, poor working and living conditions of workers (especially women workers from rural areas). Moreover, many new labor laws have been passed and implemented since the early 1990s such as the labor union law, the law concerning workers in firms with foreign investment, the law on labor contract, and the new labor code effective since the beginning of 1995 legalizing labor strikes among other protection for workers. This paper examines how these labor laws are implemented and their effects on welfare of workers in VTGI. It also examines the changing roles of labor unions, which are still the only trade union in Vietnam and under government control, and their response to global restructuring.
Women Workers in the Philippine Garments Industry
Jane Hutchison, Murdoch University
Garments are a leading export industry in the Philippines. The first part of this paper outlines the history and current structure of the industry, pointing particularly to the ongoing dependence on the United States market, the shift towards East Asian investment and the role of domestic capital, particularly in subcontracting. The second part focuses on the impact of export production on the organizing capacities of women workers in the industry. Against "new international division of labor" perspectives on women workers in "global factories," it will be argued that production for an overseas market has enhanced the structural conditions of union formation because quality demands have placed limits on the local subcontracting out of production.