"Participation? My blood and flesh is being sucked dry": Market-based development and Sri Lanka's Free Trade Zone women workers

Journal of Third World Studies

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 51-74

  Hewamanne, Sandya ^a  

^a DRAKE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FREE TRADE AREA; GARMENT INDUSTRY; MARKET DEVELOPMENT; WOMENS EMPLOYMENT; WOMENS STATUS;

ASIA; EURASIA; SOUTH ASIA; SRI LANKA;

EID: 33745506236     PISSN: 87553449     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. I acknowledge the research funding provided by the Ford Foundation Area Studies Program, The Swiss National Foundation for Scientific Research, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Mellon Population Research Fellowship Program. The writing phase was partially funded by a Fulbright Fellowship. I also thank James Brow, Andrew Causey, Neil DeVotta, Calla Jacobson, Laura Lein, Harikanta Ogren, and Kamala Visweswaren for their valuable comments on a previous draft.
2. Ester Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970)
3. See Caroline Mosser, Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training (London: Routledge, 1993);
4. Rosi Braidotti, E. Charkiewicz, S. Hausler, and S.Wieringa, eds., Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development: Towards a Theoretical Synthesis (London: Zed Books, 1994);
5. Wendy Harcourt, ed., Power, Reproduction and Gender: Intergenerational Transfer of Knowledge (London: Zed Books, 1997).
6. Gustave Speth, UNDP Memorandum (New York: UNDP, 1994).
7. Robert Chambers and Gordon Conway, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century, IDS Discussion Paper#296 (University of Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, 1994).
8. The FTZ has a tall barbed wire fence around it and the factories are located close to each other within the enclosed area. The area surrounding the FTZ has a police station, a bus terminal, a line of shops, and numerous rooms that neighbors built to house the workers. When one refers to the FTZ area it typically encompasses this entire complex.
9. In this paper I limit my focus to analyzing the sustainability of economic empowerment and the difficulties the women encountered when seeking to maintain their new senses of self once they returned to their villages. This has at times forced me to pay less attention to the creative and pleasurable aspects of FTZ lives and everyday cultural politics both in the FTZ and their villages. I have, however, amply dealt with these issues elsewhere and have directed the reader to such writings whenever appropriate.
10. There are several useful studies that focus on women factory workers, their working and living conditions, and issues of empowerment in transnational or local factories in different countries, and these would include Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I And My People (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983);
11. Louise Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987);
12. Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
13. Caitrin Lynch, The Good Girls of Sri Lankan Modernity: Moral Orders of Nationalism, Gender and Globalization in Village Garment Factories (Ph.D.diss., University of Chicago, 2000);
14. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987);
15. Devon Pena, The Terror of the Machine: Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University ofTexas Press, 1997);
16. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003);
17. Diane Wolf, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992);
18. Kevin Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender and Class in a Caribbean Work Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
19. Speth, UNDP Memorandum;
20. Charles Perrings, "Sustainable Livelihoods and Environmentally Sound Technology," International Labour Review Vol. 133, no.3 (May-June 1994), pp. 302-326.
21. Harcourt, Power, Reproduction and Gender, p. 22.
22. Michael Woost, "Alternative Vocabularies of Development? 'Community' and 'Participation' in Development Discourse in Sri Lanka," in Discourses of Development: Anthropological Perspectives, R. Grillo and R.L. Stirrat (eds.). (Oxford: Berg, 1997), pp. 229-253.
23. Majid Rahnema, "Participation," in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, Wolfgang Sachs (eds.). (London: Zed Books, 1992), pp. 116-131.
24. Naresh Singh and Jonathan Gilman, "Making Livelihoods More Sustainable," International Social Science Journal Vol. 51, no. 162 (December 1999), p. 540.
25. Chambers and Conway, Sustainable Rural Livelihoods.
26. Jim Gilling, Stephen Jones, and Alex Duncan, "Sector Approaches, Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Poverty Reduction," Development Policy Review Vol. 19, no.3 (September 2001), p. 305.
27. Kumari Jayawardene and Swarna Jayaweera, A Profile on Sri Lanka: The Integration of Women in Development Planning: Sri Lanka (Colombo: Women's Education Centre, 1986), p. 9.
28. Although Sri Lanka later established two more FTZs, one in Biyagama in 1986 and the other in Koggala in 1990, I concentrated only on Katunayake for this study.
29. Dabindu Collective, A Review of Free Trade Zones in Sri Lanka (Boralesgamuwa: CRC Press, 1997), p. 17.
30. Kumudhini Rosa, "Women Workers' Strategies of Organizing and Resistance in the Sri Lankan Free Trade Zone (FTZ)," South Asia Bulletin Vol. 10, no.1 (1990), p. 26.
31. Janice Fine and Matthew Howard, "Women in the Free Trade Zones of Sri Lanka," Dollars and Sense Vol. 202 (November-December 1995), p. 26.
32. Sandya Hewamanne, Migration as Resistance to Paternalistic Control: Recovering the Lost Voice (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1997);
33. Sandya Hewamanne, "Resistance, Contradictions and 'Agency' among Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids," Asian Women Vol. 11 (Winter 2000), pp. 109-136.
34. Sandya Hewarnanne and James Brow, "'If They Allow Us We Will Fight': Strains of Consciousness among Women Workers in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone." Anthropology of Work Review Vol. XIX, no.3 (Spring 1999), pp. 8-13;
35. Sandya Hewamanne, Stitching Identities: Work, Play and Politics among Sri Lanka's Free Trade Zone Garment Factory Workers (Ph.D.diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002).
36. Quoted in Vinishchaya Karanu Mana (Boralesgamuwa: CRC Press, 1999), p. 12.
37. Most workers start their garment factory careers as helpers. Their responsibilities usually included bringing material from other sections and helping the machine operators in any way they were required to. All new recruits were given some training as to how to operate a machine, and it was therefore not hard to replace machine operators with helpers.
38. In 2000 the JOC of the factory in which I conducted research organized a one day strike, which ended in failure. That same year there was an effort to bring factory JOCs together into one umbrella organization, but the workers' skepticism regarding this remained strong even in 2003.
39. Woost, "Alternative Vocabularies of Development?," p. 239.
40. Sandya Hewamanne, Stitching Identities;
41. Sandya Hewamanne, "Uneasy Alliances: Sri Lankan Factory Workers' Writings on Political Change" in SAGAR Vol. 8 (Fall 2002), pp. 1-7.
42. This is a saying among Sri Lankan elders on women's diet, although it is rarely in use today.
43. Sandya Hewamanne, Stitching Identities.
44. This was a center run by a trade union organization using American funding. The center maintained a library and organized classes in cookery, sewing, and handcrafts in the hope of getting workers together for labor union activity.
45. Sandya Hewamanne, "Performing Disrespectability: New Tastes, Cultural Practices and Identity Performances by Sri Lanka's Free Trade Zone Garment Factory Workers," Cultural Dynamics Vol.15, no.1 (March 2003), pp. 71-101.
46. Workers wrote poems and novels in notebooks. They sometimes published their poems in the Dabindu newspaper and occasionally in other magazines. Novels, however, were only circulated among friends and were more often than not based on their romantic experiences in Katunayake.
47. Hewamanne and Brow. "'If They Allow Us We Will Fight"';
48. Hewamanne, Stitching Identities.
49. This metaphor is used in Buddhist scriptures to explain how the results of what we do in this life (karma) follow us into the next birth. Bull, or Gona in Sinhalese, is also used as a derogatory term for prostitutes. As some people identify FTZ workers as prostitutes, this saying seemed strangely fitting in the context of prevailing social attitudes about FTZ workers.
50. Juki is the brand name of a Japanese sewing machine favored by FTZ factories. Young men derogatorily refered to the workers as "juki girls" or "juki pieces," showing how women can be objectified in association with their work and work tools.
51. Caitrin Lynch, "The "Good Girls" of Sri Lankan Modernity: Moral Orders of Nationalism and Capitalism," Identities: Global Studies in culture and Power Vol. 6, no.1 (January-March 1999), pp. 55-89.
52. These village factories were established under the 200 village garment factory program initiated to address youth unemployment in rural areas. However, in the discourses surrounding the program the factories were recast as moral heavens that saved village women from going to the immoral FTZ. The "good girls" were measured based on terms of adherence to sexual norms as opposed to terms of productivity.
53. Caroline Wildeman, "The Missing Link: The Role of Civil Society in the Development Process," Development: Journal of the Society for Internatinal Development Vol. 43, no.2 (June 2000), pp. 36-39.
54. Ibid., p. 38.
55. Singh and Gilman, "Making Livelihoods More Sustainable," p. 540.
56. Asoka Bandarage, "Population and Development: Towards a Social Justice Agenda," Development: Journal of the society for International Development Vol. 37, no 3 (September 1994), pp. 12-13.
57. Jayawardene and Jayaweera, A Profile on Sri Lanka, p. 5.