Interwoven threads: building a labour countermovement in Bangalore's export-oriented garment industry

This paper approaches globalisation as a contradictory and dialectical phenomenon, one in which the tools of exploitation are being subverted into instruments of labour resistance. Through a study of the Garment and Textile Workers' Union (GATWU) the paper observes how feminised workplaces are bringing to the fore issues of gender oppression, flexible conditions are expanding union organisational capacity and the universality of capital has led to transnational links between workers. While the global neo-liberal regime weakens traditional paths to unionisation, it has concurrently facilitated alternative strategies of worker organisation and resistance. GATWU members both battle immediate economic issues while transforming worker organisation from an atomised factory workstation, to assembly line, to outside the factory gates, and finally into social movement and transnational spaces. The research takes note of how GATWU's organising strategy both compliments and conflicts with struggles of gender and class, the local and global