Juki Girls, Good Girls by Lynch Caitrin

Author:Lynch, Caitrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Village as Panopticon

This brief description of the village environment around Shirtex and Serendib illustrates where the factory women came from each morning and fills in some of the social, economic, and political linkages between the factories and the surrounding villages. References to caste and JVP violence show some of the ways in which problems, conflicts, and social relations from the village entered the workplace. There is another level on which village locatedness was supremely important to women workers: it offered them moral protection. Managers, investors, and workers alike invoked an idealistic image of villages as traditional, pure, and community-oriented by comparison with cities. By citing a few examples out of many, I explore the pervasive assumption that there were important differences between village garment workers and their urban counterparts. In effect, the village was a moral panopticon that disciplined village women. Managers and investors, workers and other villagers all assumed that to be a village-based garment worker was ipso facto to be a Good girl who, concomitantly, exhibited the discipline required for factory production.

Managers and owners ascribed a number of features to rural garment workers that marked them apart from their urban counterparts. Since village workers came from their homes to work they were said to be happier than urban workers, most of whom had migrated from villages to live in expensive and shabby boarding houses. One owner explained that rural women, unlike urban women, “shed industrial tension when they leave the factory.” Others said that village women were more obedient, shy, respectful, or disciplined or better-mannered than urban women because they were “under parental control.” Owners and managers contended that urban women abused their freedom and were spoiled and stubborn because they were away from their parents. They further noted that the cities were rife with the kind of people who would lead village girls astray, as evidenced by the reports of the illicit sexual activities of village women in Colombo. Outside-of-work behavior reflected back on work behavior: A woman who behaved improperly outside of work was undisciplined, and it was the same lack of discipline that would be manifest in her work as well. All these differences suggested that the rural work-force would not only be more docile but more productive.

Three years after establishing a 200 GFP factory, one investor told me he was quite pleased with its success. The reasons he gave me were quite common among investors and managers I spoke with, and they all had to do with differences between the workforce in Colombo and in villages. This investor explained that there had been “initial problems” with training the new employees, people who “are not used to the industrial type of life.” But after the training was done, the main benefit of the program was that this was a “fairly captive workforce.” He continued,

They have no other place to go to work, right? So, whereas here [in Colombo] there is a lot of competition among employers. So that was a plus point. Another thing was, the workers were not that corrupted by city life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.