1 Labouring for global markets: Conceptualising labour agency in Global Production Networks1

This article starts with the recognition that labour has received less than its fair share of empirical and analytical attention in scholarship on Global Production Networks (GPNs). Such scholarship often ends with a paragraph on labour, concluding that it is the tail end of the production network that needs further research. Little is known, however, about how jobs for export markets fit into workers wider livelihoods strategies, or how workers react to new employment opportunities available to them. Based on empirical research carried out in the Tiruppur garment cluster in Tamil Nadu, South India, the article takes labourers, their livelihoods and their social reproduction as its starting point. It first reviews relevant labour geographies and GPN literature, and suggests that labour agency has been almost solely researched and conceptualised in terms of collective forms of organised worker resistance. The article then draws on case material from South India to examine how people enter garment work, the multiple and everyday forms of agency that they engage in, and the effects that their agency has on themselves and the industry. We follow a ‘horizontal ’ approach that accounts for gender, age, caste and regional connections in the making and constraining of agency, Such an approach reveals how labour agency is not merely fashioned by vertically linked production networks but as much by social relations and livelihood strategies that are themselves embedded in a wider regional economy and cultural environment. The article argues that labour’s multiple and everyday forms of agency not only help to shape locally specific developments of global capitalism but also produce significant transformative effects on workers ’ wider livelihoods, social relations and reproductive capacities