Broken Promises of Globalization The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry [Paperback]

This book offers a timely corrective, yet far from eulogising the textile sector as the motor of radical social and economic transformation.Broken Promises of Globalization: The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry contributes to the contemporary debate on the limits and possibilities of globalization to the global south. It examines how a Least Developed Country is dealing with both domestic and external pressures in its response to neo-liberalization.Broken Promises of Globalization: The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry analyzes the consequences of the latest wave of globalization within the context of the Bangladesh garment industry's integration into world markets and production chains. Shahidur Rahman has found that although globalization has created opportunities, the process of globalization has also triggered a deformed development leaving Bangladesh increasingly vulnerable to shifts and tensions within the world trading regime. Bangladeshs vulnerability, experienced as a constraining framework by all the major actors in dependent industrialization, is of particular importance to the progress both of workers and of Bangladeshs industrializing modernizers in the garment industry.This book intends to respond to three questions. First, has the garment industry been able to counteract the vulnerability that women garment workers had experienced in their villages? Second, is the formation of a welfare committee a substitute model for unions when it comes to protecting womens rights? Finally, how is a Least Developing Country dealing with both domestic and external pressures in its response to globalization? Rahman argues that in spite of the opportunities created by the growth of the garment industry, the key actors such as workers, entrepreneurs, unions, and even the government have become vulnerable in the process of the global integration of this industry. This is an ethnographic study that tells the story of the rise, growth, and demise of a Bangl³!