Can workers of the world unite?: a multi-sited ethnography of transnational labor organizing across the apparel commodity network

This dissertation analyzes transnational labor activism and activist discourses developed in relation to the deadliest garment industrial disaster in the human history - the 2013 collapse of Rana plaza, a factory building housing five garment factories in Savar, Bangladesh. The project takes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, involving two-year-long physical and digital ethnographic observation and interviews with Bangladeshi women garment workers, labor rights activists, researchers, and policy makers in Bangladesh and the United States. In this research, I ask what it means for grassroots labor organizers in the Global South, who are often restricted by national borders and neoliberal socio-economic-political forces, to engage in transnational solidarity building. I specifically examine why some grassroots organizing initiatives in the Global South can engage in solidarity building with transnational allies while others do not gain such access. Drawing on the case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh - a transnational govenrance structure that aspired to ensure safety and security for Bangladeshi garment workers after the Rana Plaza collapse, I argue that the post-Rana Plaza transnational collaboration between workers and labor organizers in the Global North and the South reproduces a neoliberal attention economy where gendered and racialized Southern workers receive attention from their Northern allies only if they speak the preferred language, subscribe for a preferred politics, and mobilize donor funds in a preferred way. My ethnographic fieldwork documents how attention from the Northern allies often comes at the cost of losing attention from Southern workers and activists. Therefore, the neoliberal attention economy offers the impossible choice between engaging in transnational collaboration while losing material impact on the ground and focusing on grounded struggles while losing transnational allies.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Nafisa Tanjee