Introduction

As Sollund (2020: 520) points out, ‘[w] omen, children and nature are typically positioned in contrast to man and masculinity, which creates the dualistic hierarchy so central to the organization of patriarchal thought and culture’ – and, importantly, also central to the organisation of work and labour. In this chapter we examine how the profit motivation of private corporations and the insatiable demand of Western consumerism for cheap goods result in the oppression of marginalised women in the Global South and a variety of effects leading to environmental damage. Our starting point is that textile production is a globally ‘outsourced’ industry based on manufacturing in the Global South to supply markets of the Global North, creating an industry that is structured in such a way that the local labour laws of hosting countries are either routinely ignored or do not apply to the subcontracted factories operating in special economic/manufacturing zone territories. This situation represents the inextricable linking of structural and slow violence (Galtung, 1969; Nixon, 2011; Davies, 2019) characteristic of the processes of production in the ‘fast fashion’ industry and the incubation of varied forms of disaster that lead to suffering, death and injury. In particular and applying the concepts of poorcide (Udayakumar, 1995) and victimisation, we discuss their impacts on two groups of women factory workers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The chapter first presents a review of relevant literature, then describes the situation of garment, textile and assembly line workers in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who work within contexts of unregulated labour conditions and where the effects of resultant disasters and the adverse consequences of environmental damage are disproportionately borne by poor women. In particular, we highlight the negligence and denial that can lead to what Turner (1976) called the ‘incubation of disasters’, in this case the examples of the collapse of the eight-storey Rana Plaza garment factory in April 2013 in Bangladesh and its aftermath, and the three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting global factory workers in Sri Lanka in 2020/21. Linking these cases to the everyday environmental degradation caused by the fashion industry at the lowest rung of global value chains, we demonstrate how women, and the environment, are victims of the structural violence of global production.