Recognising the women who power the world's wardrobes

Dr Fahreen Alamgir, A/Prof Glen Croy and Prof Amrik Sohal, 2026

Purpose

Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment (RMG) sector has become the world's second-largest garment exporter, yet women garment workers continue to experience unsafe conditions, low wages and limited recognition. These vulnerabilities persist despite the extensive architecture of multi-stakeholder labour governance established after the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, revealing the limits of existing governance arrangements in addressing exclusion, participation and justice within global production networks. Civil society actors operating across global, national and local spaces – including trade unionists, journalists, NGOs, academics and compliance professionals – mobilise to challenge structures of exclusion and demand recognition and responsibility. Situating themselves within these struggles, Alamgir, Croy, Sohal, De Vass and Rahman's seven-year study advances understanding of relational recognition and situated responsibility by examining how recognition is contested, granted, denied and performed among actors in the apparel industry.

Practice

Informed by Nancy Fraser and Richa Nagar's work, the study demonstrates the entanglement of civil society actors with workers' lived realities and struggles for recognition, revealing how responsibility is invoked, negotiated and enacted among diverse actors. By uncovering women garment workers' persistent experiences of misrecognition and non-recognition, the case illustrates how failures of recognition are embedded in material vulnerabilities, including violence, unsafe workplaces and economic insecurity. Over seven years (2019–2025), the research combined ethnographic immersion with 36 in-depth interviews, more than 200 pages of field notes from conferences and workshops, and extensive secondary materials, including NGO reports, ILO documents, BGMEA-Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association data and advocacy publications spanning three decades of industry transformation. Reflexive understandings emerged through questioning the researchers' own positionality, status and locations – treating research as praxis rather than detached observation.

Output

The study offers a theoretically rich account of how civil society actors construct solidarity, how recognition becomes institutionalised through private labour governance, and how weakened representation within global production networks constrains workers' claims. It reveals that struggles for recognition are inseparable from representation and redistribution, and are grounded in experiences of exploitation, wage disputes, disasters and union co-optation.

Outcome

The study shows that women workers' struggles for recognition, material justice and representation remain ongoing. While safety mechanisms have improved, inequalities in wages, nutrition and employment security reveal the limits of recognition without redistribution. For civil society actors, legitimacy remains contested and hard-won, forged through solidarity, negotiation and resistance rather than institutional endorsement.

Impact

Beyond Bangladesh, the study contributes to management and organisation debates by arguing that recognition and responsibility must be understood relationally and transnationally. It challenges corporate social responsibility and state-led development narratives by highlighting how responsibility is negotiated within unequal global production networks, and calls for researchers to engage as accountable co-participants in struggles for workers' dignity.