The Power to Choose

Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka

Naila Kabeer

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781859842065
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789607833
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Business
• Index: Business

In this path-breaking study, social economist Naila Kabeer examines the lives of Bangladeshi garment workers in Bangladesh and Britain to shed light on the question of what constitutes "fair" competition in international trade. She argues that if the unhealthy coalition of multinationals and labor movements is truly seeking to improve the working conditions for women and children in the "Third World," as well as those of western workers, their efforts should be directed away from an attempt to impose labor standards and towards a support for the organization of labor rights. Any attempt to devise acceptable labor standards at an international level which takes no account of the forces of inclusion and exclusion with local labor movements is, she further argues, likely to represent the interests of the powerful at the expense of those of the weak.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. Labour standards, double standards? Selective solidarity in international trade
• 2. ‘Rational fools’ or ‘cultural dopes’? Stories of structure and agency in the social sciences
• 3. The changing face of shonar Bangla: background to the Dhaka study
• 4. Renegotiating purdah: women workers and labour market decision making in Dhaka
• 5. Individualised entitlements: factory wages and intra-household power relations
• 6. Across seven seas and thirteen rivers: background to the London study
• 7. Reconstituting structure: homeworkers and labour market decision making in London
• 8. Mediated entitlements: home-based piecework and intra-household power relations
• 9. Exclusion and economics in the labour market: explaining the paradox
• 10. The power to choose and ‘the evidence of things not seen’: revisiting structure and agency
• 11. Weak winners, powerful losers: the politics of protectionism in international trade
• Appendix 1: Methodological note
• Appendix 2: Statistical background to the Dhaka study
• Appendix 3: Statistical background to the London study
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index