SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FROM WORKERS IN PRODUCTION COUNTRIES
On 24 April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Savar, Bangladesh, collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers. Several major global apparel brands and retailers were linked to factories operating in the building. Rana Plaza became a powerful symbol of the human consequences of global production, but it was not an isolated event. Poor working conditions, weak labour protections, poverty, and unequal power relations continue to shape the everyday realities of workers across many production countries.
Since 2013, I have been conducting field-based research on labour issues, with a particular focus on how workers, managers, grassroots organisations, and other local actors experience and respond to the social challenges embedded in global value chains. While doing this, I have been interested in better understanding what responsibility looks like from the perspective of those working at the production end of the supply chain whose formal power is limited.
Over the years, I have been conducted hundreds of in-depth, face-to-face interviews and spent extensive periods in the field, speaking with different individuals and organisations. This work has been primarily focused on the garment industries of BANGLADESH, SRI LANKA, PAKISTAN – while also extending to other sectors and contexts, including agricultural supply chains in THAILAND. These projects have allowed me to explore social responsibility as something that is not simply designed and implemented from corporate headquarters, but also negotiated, contested, and reshaped by actors on the ground.
A recurring theme emerging from this research is the relationship between top-down responsibility initiatives and bottom-up processes of social change. I have been examining how formal corporate social responsibility programmes, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and transnational forms of governance interact with the everyday practices and struggles of workers and local organisations. These interactions are often complex: external initiatives may create opportunities for change, but they often overlook local realities and constrain the agency of those they are intended to support.
My recent research in Myanmar develops these questions further in a context shaped by military rule, armed conflict, economic precarity, organisational control, and severe restrictions on worker voice. At the micro level, I examine how labour activism within the context of the garment industry unfolds inside factories and how activists create forms of political agency through everyday practices. At the macro level, I study the responsibilities of multinational companies operating in or sourcing from authoritarian and conflict-affected contexts. This includes the difficult question of responsible exit: what responsibilities companies retain when they decide or are pressured to disengage, how such decisions affect workers and local communities, and whether withdrawal can itself be responsible.
Across these ongoing projects, my broader aim is to contribute to a more grounded understanding of social responsibility that begins not only with what organisations claim or intend to do, but with how responsibility is experienced, negotiated, and sometimes created from below by the people most directly affected by global production.
Source: Young girls leaving their homes to join the movement against the military junta - The Guardian (2025)
