Abstract
This study develops a solidaric theory of organizational recognition through learning from one of the world’s most disenfranchised group of workers: women working in Bangladesh’s jute mills. Drawing on Nancy Fraser and Richa Nagar’s theoretical concerns with justice-seeking as central to subaltern modes of recognition, this study explores the gendered potential and limitations of solidaric recognition as constituted through institutionalized patterns of interpretation and valuation. Through a qualitative, in-depth study of a state-owned jute mill in Bangladesh that spanned over 10 years, our analysis focuses on how solidaric modes of recognition are both enabled and constrained through place-based, corporeal and diasporic conditions and socio-religious and economic experiences. In paying close attention to the interplay between political-economic and localized conditions that inform organizational subjectivities, we show how solidaric recognition, as an ontologically generative site for worker subjectivity, is inseparable from the broader socioeconomic conditions of provisional work.
Introduction
Drawing on insights from the subaltern dynamics of situated solidarity and recognition, this study explores the gendered organizational subjectivities of one of the world’s poorest and most politically disenfranchised groups of workers: female jute mill workers in Bangladesh. Specifically, it examines how situated solidarity manifests in the context of socioeconomic life, generating conditions for recognition and the potential to challenge inequity. We develop this subaltern account of organizational subjectivities through a 10-year qualitative study of Rupali Jute Mills in Bangladesh based on interviews, focus groups, conversations, observations and documentary evidence.
Drawing on the accounts of iman – understood by our Bangladeshi participants as an ethico-religious way of being that pertains to social justice, fairness and security – we consider the variegated ways in which solidarity emerges in the encounters and experiences of gendered working lives in the Global South. We focus on how this solidarity is constituted in micro-processes of place, bodies and politics within the subaltern conditions of provisional work in the state-owned jute mills setting. This extends our understanding of solidaric organizational recognition in a context where gendered working lives are rendered both (i) materially provisional in ways that differ from contemporary accounts of precarity in the context of the Global North (Kalleberg, 2011; Moisander, Groß, & Eräranta, 2018; Soundararajan, Sharma, & Bapuji, 2024; Zanoni & Miszczyński, 2024); and (ii) ontologically provisional in terms of occlusion from formal, recognized social and cultural spheres due to the layering of geopolitical, historical, cultural and economic dynamics.
Our study complements the growing body of research on organizational subjectivities in professional work contexts in the Global North (e.g. Harding, Ford, & Lee, 2017; Harding, Tassabehji, & Lee, 2024; Kenny, Fotaki, & Vandekerckhove, 2020; Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2014), which views recognition as foundational to becoming viable and intelligible organizational subjects. We extend this concern by exploring how the specific contexts and conditions that render subjects vulnerable or marginal may foster the potential for solidarity and particular forms of organizational and institutional resistance (Courpasson, Dany, & Delbridge, 2017; Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017; Vijay, Monin, & Kulkarni, 2023). Taking seriously the idea that there are ‘institutional histories of subjection and subjectification that “position” me’ (Butler, 1994, p. 160), our theoretical lens takes into account particular economic, cultural and institutional logics as constituting forces. This is a response to more general critiques surrounding unilateral theoretical frameworks that have already been taken up within post-colonial management studies (Jack, Westwood, Srinivas, & Sardar, 2011; Mir, Calás, & Smircich, 1995; Mir & Mir, 2013) in terms of how the situated agency is enabled or constrained by the empirical and theoretical conditions we call upon in our research. For example, Spivak’s (2010) problematization of her own thesis suggests shifting the focus from whether the subaltern can speak to how, and under what conditions, they can be heard, requiring us to critically reflect on the geographical spaces from which we draw our theoretical tools (Nagar, 2000, p. 344). Despite this call, women, particularly poor women and poor women from the Global South, are rarely represented as fonts of theoretical insights in discussions of marginalization and resistance within management and organization studies. However, this does not mean that poor women do not struggle, resist and organize. Our paper demonstrates how they do so through modes of solidaric recognition that offer theoretical insights for the broader study of organizational subjectivities.
To contribute to the emerging trajectory of ontological inquiry in organizational subaltern studies, we engage in a theoretical dialogue between Nancy Fraser and Richa Nagar. Both scholars allow us to explore how the ontological lines of flight created in specific subaltern conditions and contexts provide the potential for recognition and justice-seeking modes of resistance as part of a project of solidarity. Such work is grounded in recognizing how situated vulnerability, shared within a group, provides a potential basis for mobilization, even when the group is by no means monolithic in terms of ethnicity, caste, or regional and cultural backgrounds. For Fraser, a claim of subjectivity through recognition of social status and identification is inseparable from justice-seeking demands related to redistribution. For Nagar, such demands must be understood within the context of radical vulnerability 1 and the embodied experience of the collective. In our study, we bring these ideas together to suggest that in the context of subaltern economic lives, ethico-religious dynamics, such as those around iman, both enable and constrain solidaric demands for equity, which are central to recognition. These demands, in turn, provide possibilities for the modes of organizational resistance that are central to subaltern subjectivities. Through the case of Bangladeshi jute mill workers, we empirically explore how such solidaric practices cleave out organizational modes of recognition and inform women’s working lives, their relations with the mills and their communities, and their accounts of relations with institutional bodies such as the state and the World Bank.
This study is guided by two questions. How do women’s situated subjectivities generate solidaric modes of recognition? And to what extent are such solidaric practices built upon the demands surrounding recognition and redistribution? In addressing these questions, our paper makes two contributions. First, by recognizing the variegated and situated dynamics of marginalization and resistance, we address calls for contextually rich accounts of subjectivity in organizations beyond the Global North, which have localized identity work processes. Second, we develop a dialogue between Nagar’s concept of radical vulnerability and Fraser’s framework of redistribution and recognition to understand how solidaric demands play out in the economic lives of historically and socially disenfranchised working women. We begin by considering the potential of extant debates to develop a historically and geopolitically situated, generative account of organizational subjectivities and subaltern resistance. We then turn to Fraser’s and Nagar’s accounts of subjectivity to explore the dynamics of vulnerability, solidarity and resistance as contextually situated in socioeconomic conditions and geopolitical contexts. After introducing our empirical study, we explore how lived experiences of place, body and politics provide sites for situated solidaric demands. Finally, we reflect on the implications of our findings for understanding the situated dynamics of subaltern organizational subjectivities in the Global South and for theorizing organizational recognition in ways that broadly consider socioeconomic conditions.
The Situated Dynamics of Organizational Recognition and Resistance
In examining the conditions of organizational recognition for employees and other stakeholders (e.g. Cutcher, Riach, & Tyler, 2022; Harding et al., 2017; Kenny, 2018; Kenny et al., 2020; Tyler & Cohen, 2010), contemporary discussions on identity and subjectivities emphasize how ‘recognition provides a mechanism through which we are able to relate to one another and enact our lives through work’ (Tyler & Vachhani, 2021, p. 249). Organizational scholars underscore that systems of recognition are built on normative frameworks that can marginalize certain groups, such as women, who may be ‘part’ of the workforce but not acknowledged as such. As Cutcher, Dale, and Tyler (2019, p. 272) note, women may have the ‘experience of being physically present, yet symbolically negated’. While studies of gendered subjectivities recognize our reliance on organizational processes, structures and resources (Tyler, 2019, p. 61), there has been less exploration of how these elements are organized across geo-historical settings. This is crucial, as Milroy, Cutcher, and Tyler (2019) argue that contextually sensitive considerations of subjectivity can both negate and open up productive trajectories that reveal new possibilities surrounding subject formation. Their nuanced account of the ethics of recognition in indigenous lives demonstrates how the contextual parameters of recognition are intertwined with multi-layered historical and cultural processes deeply embedded in power relations. These accounts show that subjectivities are not merely empirically situated in different settings, but that processes of recognition are also theoretically shaped by particular geo-historical contexts.
Simultaneously, the dynamics of marginalization in post-colonial studies of management and organizations have shown that identity, positionality and subjectivity are subject to hegemonic discursive strategies. These strategies often assimilate differences and homogenize, silence, reduce or suppress the dissenting voices of marginalized, exploited, oppressed or subjugated groups – the subalterns (Khan, Munir, & Willmott, 2007; Mir & Mir, 2013; Mir et al., 1995). Such accounts reflect broader cultural critiques, highlighting how the politics of representation involve ‘hegemonic representations of class interests or gender hierarchies . . . (that) have effectively kept women workers from gaining permanent employment’ (Fernandes, 1997, p. 161). Organizational marginalization and differences are further entrenched as part of the landscape of gendered capitalism, where economic, political and institutional interconnections depend on culturally gendered practices. This often occurs in contexts where women are already disenfranchised, and institutional or state-regulated dynamics contribute (deliberately or otherwise) to obscuring the ubiquity of gendered workplace exploitation. For instance, both Mohanty (2002) and Ong (2006) argue that international economic policies have been ineffective owing to their failure to fully grasp the contextual conditions through which women are recognized as workers. Part of the reason for this lies in how normative conceptions of justice and agency are absorbed into neoliberal discourses on women’s economic empowerment, as seen in the narratives of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Decent Work Agenda of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
The establishment of gendered and racialized regimes operating across multiple levels creates uneven geographies in which specific processes of organizational subjectivity may be rendered impossible (Ghosh, 2012). As studies of South Asia, particularly on the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi subcontinent (Agarwal, 1994; Bannerji, 2001; Mohanty, 2002, 2013), have shown, organizational structures are mediated by gendered, sexualized, caste-based and racialized hierarchies operating at various levels. The reliance on the symbiosis of the conditions of the market economy as well as traditional and cultural practices or norms is central to configuring women’s economic lives and the parameters for recognition (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). Sen’s historical account of female jute mill workers in late colonial India from 1880 to 1947 (S. Sen, 1999a, 1999b, 2008) remains exemplary in demonstrating how interlocking modes of capitalism and patriarchy work to create an exploitative social structure and gendered industrial workforce that reproduces the flow of low-cost labour in post-colonial states (S. Sen, 1999a, 2008). Oppression and lack of agency were not only historically experienced owing to historical and political legacies but also influenced everyday cultural practice. However, less is known about how the political-economic dynamics of marginalization and misrecognition persist today and profoundly affect organizational subjects.
S. Sen (2008) emphasizes that the interplay of historical and material contexts with the lived experience of marginalization both enables and constrains recognition and resistance processes. She suggests that concepts, such as izzat (which can be loosely translated as ‘honour’), enabled women to recognize themselves as part of collective labour politics and potentially foster ‘a paradigm of resistance’ (S. Sen, 1999b, p. 240). This work pre-dates recent organizational studies on resistance, which highlight the central role of identity and subjectivity in shaping organizational resistance (e.g. Courpasson et al., 2017; De Coster & Zanoni, 2019). Organizational accounts remind us that resistance is an inherent part of the ontological process of recognition, as it is an organizational practice in itself. As Harding et al. (2017, p. 1210) state, ‘resistors do not pre-exist but rather are constituted within and through practices of resistance’. Their invitation to ‘peer more closely into these micro-practices of resistance’ (Harding et al., 2017, p. 1226) calls for a focus on how resistant subjectivities manifest in various ways. Recent studies have shown that recognition regimes may be experienced through collective or communal lived experiences. For instance, Fotaki and Daskalaki (2021, p. 1280) explore how embodiment provides ‘a foundation for collective resistance and relational solidarity’ in their study of anti-mining activists in Greece. Similarly, Fernández, Martí, and Farchi’s (2017) ethnography of neighbourhood cooperative organizing in Argentina, along with Daskalaki and Kokkinidis’ (2017, p. 1318) study of solidarity initiatives in Greece, highlight ‘the potential impact of space-based solidarity practices in the production of resistance and alternative organising’. These studies emphasize that solidarity is not merely a practice but is ontologically integral to ‘associational life, cementing existing communities and configuring new ways of “being together”’ (Vijay et al., 2023, p. 1282).
At the same time, scholars have noted that ‘resistance constitutes and is constituted by complex relations of solidarity’ (Vijay et al., 2023, p. 1319). This suggests that recognition and resistance are not merely situated within but are created by the amalgamation of particular histories, bodies and contexts. Recognizing ‘the importance of multilevel analysis for better understanding how solidarity emerges and how it can be sustained’ (Fotaki, 2022, p. 313), we now turn to Fraser’s bivalent framework of recognition and Nagar’s ontology of solidaric vulnerabilities to conceptualize how micro-processes of solidaric recognition are interwoven with broader political-economic dynamics that structure subaltern organizational subjectivities.
Cultural Misrecognition, Maldistribution and the Possibilities of Subaltern Solidarities
In Fraser’s recognition thesis (Fraser, 1997a, p. 283; see also Fraser, 1995, 1997b, 2017), she suggests ‘relations of recognition’ of an institutionalized pattern of interpretation and valuation. In her critique of contemporary accounts of recognition, she shares frustration with subaltern scholars, such as Mohanty (2013) and Nagar (2000, 2017, 2021), that a concern with individual inequality has led to contemporary accounts of recognition displacing concerns and debates around the broader norms and processes of distribution and equity. These may include, for example, inattention to material resources, inheritance law and structural patterns that shape female subjectivities. At worst, it may reproduce a form of representational politics that can lead to an ‘agency-destructive’ thesis (Bhattacharyya, 1995, p. 61).
By way of a corrective, Fraser argues for moving beyond an a priori identity model that prioritizes individualized subjectivities toward an appreciation of the hybridity of recognition as produced through both ‘cultural recognition’ and redistribution. This suggests that the political-economic dynamics of maldistribution should be given serious theoretical consideration at an ontological level alongside attention to what she terms the ‘cultural misrecognition’ that has hitherto been prioritized. Introduced as a bivalent socio-theoretical project premised on justice, recognition is premised upon ‘participatory parity’: a normative measure of equity based on ‘social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers’ (Fraser & Honneth, 2003, p. 36). Participatory parity is constituted through both structuring principles (e.g. re/distribution) and cultural variational elements (e.g. the dynamics of cultural recognition). Not all struggles for redistribution can be read as struggles for recognition and vice versa, given that in practice, ‘each has peculiarities not shared by the other’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 78); however, they are intertwined in ambitions around recognition. In other words, participatory parity does not assume that recognition and redistribution have only an ‘external relation’ (Fraser & Honneth, 2003, p. 265) to each other, but that subjectivities are ontologically contingent on both ‘objective’ in/justice (around forms and patterns of material resources) and ‘intersubjective’ in/justice (concerns around cultural value). These conditions for subjectivity must both be attended to without prioritizing one over the other.
Fraser suggests that understanding recognition as constituted from cultural value and the dynamics of distribution is particularly poignant for subaltern subjectivities and those institutionally anchored in systems that perpetuate uneven power dynamics. Those who experience racial and gender injustices due to the hybridity of socioeconomic maldistribution and cultural misrecognition generate what Fraser (1995, p. 78) terms ‘bivalent collectivities’ which are borne of ‘injustices that are traceable to both political economy and culture simultaneously’. Yet just as injustice is experienced in multiple forms by different individuals, we suggest that bivalent collectivities also provide generative possibilities for solidaric modes of justice seeking. An example of this can be witnessed in Nagar’s (2000) accounts of street performance. Here, Nagar shows the development of female resistance groups and how their deployment of situated practices serves as both a performative act and an intervention to call into account structural injustices. As a manifestation of a ‘contestatory relationship’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 70), this agitates for recognition regimes through demands for equity, even if this does not lead to an immediate redress of an individual’s inequality. In this sense, recognition takes into account socioeconomic conditions through recognizing solidarity as ‘grounded in the historical, geographical, and political contingencies of a given struggle’ (Nagar et al., 2016, p. 513).
Nagar’s accounts suggest that particularly for those who are vulnerable (unrecognized or misrecognized at a social, cultural, economic and/or state level and subject to material deprivation), the manifestation of collective responsibility and recognition produce a basis for enacting solidaric modes of recognition. Rejecting an instrumentalist approach to empowerment (Nagar, 2000, p. 343), Nagar instead situates agency in the politics of alliance-making, whereby solidarity is generated through relationality, reflexivity and responsibility. Here ‘the possibilities of alliances are inseparable from a deep commitment to an ever-evolving critique that not only ontologically traverses individual bodies but traverses time, avoiding a conceptualisation of the de-historicized sovereign subject. Solidarity instead emerges through the possibilities of “walking together”’ (Nagar, 2017, p. 6), providing modalities for resistance as part of a collective endeavour. Such solidaric modes of recognition do not conflate or erase difference, but rather are led by ‘politics without guarantees: a collaborative process of weaving together critiques, stories, and dreams; or an entangled process of theorizing and worlding’ (Nagar et al., 2016, p. 513) without assuming where the process may lead, if anywhere.
Both Fraser’s and Nagar’s accounts underscore the importance of economic institutions, organizations and paid labour in enabling or constraining subaltern solidaric modes of recognition as constituted in historical, geopolitical, economic and cultural conditions. Therefore, to understand recognition as part of the working lives of the most disenfranchised workers, we must ‘engage the different fragments and layers that constituted the state in order to do justice to different epistemological moments in the making of a struggle’ (Nagar, 2021 p. 163). This means exploring the relations and antagonisms that manifest in the lived experience of cultural recognition and distribution as inseparable phenomena that are central to the constitution of subaltern organizational subjectivities and solidaric modes of recognition. To explore how the processes manifest in contemporary practice, we now turn to the experience of provisional women workers in Bangladeshi public jute mills.
Introduction to the Study
This research forms part of a larger study of the jute mill sector in Bangladesh, undertaken over the course of 10 years following an ethnographically informed, case-based approach. The analysis focuses on Rupali Jute Mills, established in 1954–1955, a state-owned jute mill located in Khalispur Industrial Town, Khulna, Bangladesh. The research began in 2010, when Author 1 spent 8 months at Rupali Mills, followed by another 4 months in 2011 conducting observations and interviews. These revealed the complex and paradoxical relationship between women being physically present but symbolically absent as workers in the mill. Subsequently, Author 1 repeated visits to the mills and mill communities over four extended periods of observational fieldwork between 2014 and 2019. In total, she carried out 49 in-depth biographical interviews, 35 focus group discussions, and a comprehensive documentary analysis of official documents, including government circulars and factory inspector reports from 1974 to 2016. Her research continues, with a recent visit in late 2023 to discuss this article with the community of respondents.
To explore how solidaric demands for recognition are enabled or constrained with a particular socioeconomic context, it is important to consider the political and historical terrain of jute mills in Bangladesh. This context is important, as it has rendered female workers vulnerable – or, to use a term specific to the field, provisional – through the means of production, the gendered organizing of work within the mills, and women’s relations with the state and the World Bank. We acknowledge similarities between this provisionality and contemporary accounts of precarity (e.g. Moisander et al., 2018; Zanoni & Miszczyński, 2024). However, as Soundararajan et al. (2024, p. 979) suggest in their study of labour contractors and caste in Tamil Nadu’s garment industry, ‘it is necessary to examine and understand the context-specific forms of precarity and the underlying mechanisms that perpetuate them’. In this light, we heed the warning of Alberti, Bessa, Hardy, Trappmann, and Umney (2018, p. 447) against using precarity as a catch-all beyond the specific geopolitical dynamics of the late capitalist context in which it has been deployed, given that ‘the overstretched nature of the concept has diluted its political effectiveness’. Subsequently, we use the term ‘provisional’ (asthayee) as a particular mode of vulnerability specific to the Bangladeshi context, as outlined below.
From their inception in 1855, employment in mills in Bengal (including both Bangladesh and West Bengal) was male-centric. However, by the 1880s, almost 30,000 women were employed in the mills. As S. Sen (1999a, 1999b) explains, recruitment and labour relations were managed through informal channels that worked alongside organizational policies, which categorized female workers as a ‘special kind’ of worker. For example, they could not be employed on night shifts and long hours owing to assumptions about their familial responsibilities, and they were perceived as both less compatible with machines and not capable of acquiring skills to operate them. However, women continued to be systematically employed under badli – a temporary worker status and system formally sanctioned as ‘provisional’ within policy (Alamgir & Cairns, 2015). This legacy endures, and women working in local mills in Khalishpur were given only a single opportunity in history to be collectively appointed to permanent positions after large-scale demonstrations in 1996.
Rupali Jute Mills, the focal point of this study, comprises a public mill and offers a fascinating case for considering the situated subaltern modes of organizational recognition. In part, this is because it has a unique politically inscribed history while still having a similar demographic make-up as other mills. Although Rupali Jute Mills has not formally recorded caste, race, religion or ethnicity, its workforce has consisted predominantly of Muslims, identified as Bengalee and Bihari Muslims, many of whom migrated from Bihar during the partition of 1947. Dalits and Nimno-Sanatanee (Hindus) were primarily cleaners and manual labourers, while Babus (clerks and supervisors) and officers were more likely to be Bengalee Muslims, alongside a representation of upper-caste Hindus. However, unlike privatized jute mills (e.g. Fernandes, 1997), Rupali Jute Mills was a site of active trade union activity and resistance to practices around the neoliberal economic efficiency models proposed by the World Bank’s Jute Sector Adjustment Credit Program (JSAC), initiated in 1993. However, the badli status of female workers precluded their formal participation in union activities or protests and made them more vulnerable during the enactment of the JSAC, which resulted in further casualization of their employment, retrenchment, and a continued lack of access to permanent positions.
Recognizing this landscape highlights how the socioeconomic conditions of workers at Rupali Jute Mills are historically and culturally constituted through provisionality and how women can remain provisional badli workers, even after several years of employment. Nevertheless, during our engagement with the community and discussions about the badli system, it became evident that women’s experiences as provisional workers,and in provisionality, were central to how they also fought through this vulnerability, particularly around the demands for recognition and equity. For instance, in 2007–2008, when the army-backed caretaker government moved to close down and privatize all public jute mills under the JSAC, all workers resisted this decision, including women, irrespective of their badli status. We also heard about experiences suggesting that Rupali Jute Mills was a historical site for various national collective movements, which were connected to women asserting themselves as more than contingent participants of the labour process in the mills.
To explore the potential relationship between the socioeconomic lives of these women, solidarity and the situated conditions of recognition, we focused specifically on field notes, documents, seven focus groups (average length of 120 minutes) and 13 in-depth interviews (average length of 90 minutes, excluding informal conversations) with 13 women who had known each other and engaged with the researcher for over 10 years. Table 1 presents the backgrounds of key respondents using pseudonyms.
Overview of Employment Status and Background of Women Workers and Focus Groups in Bangladeshi Jute Mills.
Our analysis is also indebted to numerous informal encounters over the years in the field, including conversations at chai (tea) stalls, discussions with the surrounding community, and in homes, such as having afternoon tea with them on the weekly Friday holiday, which became Author 1’s routine during the fieldwork. Acknowledging these interactions as part of the research story recognizes the labour and stakes involved for those contributing to fieldwork encounters and that what is to be known, collected or extracted through research carries costs and consequences far beyond ‘direct’ participants (Sangtin Writers’ Collective & Nagar, 2006). Yet it also highlights how the women at the heart of our research were themselves active in the creation and shape of the research, such as how and to whom they introduced Author 1 and where they invited her to accompany them. For example, when the general manager insisted that focus groups take place in the boardroom at the head office (adjacent to his own office), the women participating demanded ‘tea with milk’ (which cost 5 taka, as opposed to red tea, only 2 taka) and later met up with the Author 1 informally ‘in an open space’ of their choice to talk further about what they wished to share.
Overall, our questions during interviews and other interactions revolved around women workers’ involvement in and engagement with the mills and their experiences with the other forms of institutions that they felt shaped their economic lives. They discussed their past and current concerns, the changes they desired both within and through the mills, and their cultural and social experiences. Over time, it emerged that Author 1 came not to be primarily perceived as a middle-class, educated Bengalee woman living abroad for higher education. Instead, the women positioned her as a single woman working on workers’ rights. One woman remarked, ‘She is like us (. . .) a fighter’, while another commented, ‘(who knows whose daughter she is, (. . .) has been in the mills for months and wants to do something for us.’ Nevertheless, we acknowledge that our own position as researchers is ambivalent. For example, we recognize our responsibility in how we weave together their accounts and avoid reducing their lived experience to a battle only for economic entitlements against the backdrop of exploitation and discrimination. We also do not wish to present a sanitized or monolithic representation of organizational subjectivity in the Global South as solely concerning emancipatory economic agency, nor that this ambition cancelled out the plurality – and occasionally the tensions – between women from different communities and backgrounds.
All interviews and focus group discussions were initially transcribed into Bangla and later translated into English. Owing to their form and volume, the field notes were retained in Bangla. Through iterative readings of transcripts and drawing on fieldwork observations, which were woven into our analysis as analytical memos, we thematically identified some of the key forms of action or practices. We then used these to examine the subjective positions, events, emotions and processes surrounding these actions, noting whether they were enabling, restricting, or a mixture of both. Next, we compared these configurations to look for patterns of comparability or distinction around how different kinds of enabling or restricting encounters were emerging and the parameters through which they seemed to be informed. At this point of the analysis, we began to identify an interplay between instances of connectedness, agency and solidarity, as well as the cultural and situated experiences of millwork and economic life. In particular, the concepts of izzat and iman emerged repeatedly as a way of talking about, explaining, justifying and legitimizing action. 2 Participants’ situated experiences around izzat were often delineated within accounts of marginalizing or denigrating processes. However, the references to iman were more variegated and facilitated the accounts of generative conditions for collective expression or connections with other women, as well as politicized and reflexive modes of recognition that operated around the differential practices of resistance.
We then returned to the original accounts of the women, exploring how our conceptual ideas spoke to their life-course narratives, focusing on iman as a conceptual interlocutor between expressions of solidarity and an enactment of solidaric modes of recognition and demands for rendering visible inequity. This revealed a series of patterns and causal chains between the constitution of solidaric demands and generative possibilities for recognition surrounding, for example, calls for justice or resistant practices. As Bhadra (1994) explains in his account of subaltern movements in Bengal, iman indicates the distinctive structure of subaltern consciousness. 3 This consciousness evolves around everyday lived experiences of oppression, deprivation, subordination and servitude, often in accordance with caste position. In the context of women’s social and economic lives, iman emerged as vital in structuring and organizing beliefs and recognition of themselves and their relations, roles and work.
From here, we were able to analytically articulate how broader ideas surrounding the dynamics of marginalization and resistance around solidaric modes of recognition spoke to the socioeconomic lived experiences of our women. 4 In analysing their accounts, including our ongoing witnessing of the practices mentioned, the context of political, historical and organizational contingency was inseparable from these variegated dynamics of recognition in the making and unmaking of solidaric alliances. Accordingly, we discuss three sites of solidaric modes of recognition in terms of the place-based, corporeal and political diasporic conditions and experiences in and around economic lives.
Findings: Iman and Solidaric Demands of Women Mill Workers
Our analysis identified three distinct sites of solidaric demands that patterned through the conditions of situated marginalization and resistance in the lives of female jute mill workers. We present these by highlighting the variegated ways that show how solidaric modes of recognition emerged and manifested. The first is place-based solidarity, which demonstrates how the dialectics of izzat and iman play out through the cultural norms and material conditions of place, space and community in the generative conditions of situated solidarity. The second is embodied solidarity, which considers further how iman manifests in the corporeality of subaltern women in the context of work as a site for vocalizing and making public declarations of resistance. The third, political solidarity, explores how accounts and narratives around political episodes generate a sense of collective intertemporal ‘we’ of iman that enables possibilities to challenge the immanence of lived experience.
Place-based solidarity
As described earlier, the historically gendered development of jute mills meant that women workers were excluded from being regarded as chatkal shramik (formal workers) – an identity many aspired to. This exclusion meant that limited rights and entitlements could be side-lined and conspired with the enactment of izzat in the Bangladeshi context. For example, izzat was bound up with patriarchally inscribed ideas of feminine dignity and seclusion as desirable: features that were the anathema of mill work. Silence, segregation and individuation among women workers were also contextually and historically marked. Women discussed how izzat often legitimized and supported expulsion from other economic rights, such as women’s property claims and the right to be a permanent worker. Many participants suggested that they were bound into situations in which their izzat was compromised, such as their husbands leaving them and their children, which forced them to work anywhere for survival. One economic consequence connected to this was that most of the women workers we spoke to in the mills had migrated to Khalishpur in search of work; many stated that ‘there was nothing left there’ in their villages or hometowns. The main reason for women working in the mills was loss of male earnings due to being deserted or widowed, although others also discussed the inability of the land to support them: We had to leave because of hunger. We are all helpless women. Either our husbands have died, or they have left us. So, we have to work, as there is no other way to look after ourselves and our children (. . .). Another factor is river erosion. Nothing there drew on what we could live on (Kohinoor/Mahmuda/Parveen, focus group 3; different speakers indicated by a solidus).
The migration narratives of these women underscored a structurally entrenched vulnerability, often exacerbated by the denial of their property rights.
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In contrast, most of the permanent male workers we encountered visited their villages regularly and drew support from resources they had there, such as periodic subsistence of rice and dal. For example, Jahangeer, who was a permanent male worker, described how he and others visited home during holidays and harvest season to benefit from the land they owned: ‘We visit home on Eid and other holidays. Some of us have a few lands back home, so they also go during harvesting.’ By comparison, many women spoke of their disconnection from such resources and village communities. Viewing themselves as uprooted from their origins and deprived of property rights, coupled with the moral panic of the loss of izzat, meant that they did not think of visiting or returning to their village of community at home. Simultaneously, the necessity of working in the mill also prevented them from being accepted by the local communities in Khalishpur. Consequently, they created their own shomshar – smaller communities or ‘families’ of women in similar economic or social situations. The same women discussed how situated provisionality produced new parameters and forms of connectedness: We can’t go back from where we have come from. We are uprooted (chino-mul). We left our family many years ago. Now, our neighbours and colleagues are with whom we have been living, sharing our tensions and suffering. They are our family members, our relatives. The reality is that crisis and poverty cannot let you maintain your relations with your family members. However, in our social nexus, by the mercy of Allah (Mashallah), we are very proud that we have our earnings and live with dignity (izzat). (Nahar/Rahima/Palashi, focus group 1).
This is not a romanticized situation but a necessary set of collaborations that primarily emerged to offer some degree of safety or security in the townships and slums next to the mills. Here, iman was used in focus groups to describe not only as a sense of unity but also a connection through the conditions of marginalization. Ayisha explained: They (mill management) know that we are always united through iman. We have learned this because we have been through the same crisis. We must protect our izzat (dignity), which is our responsibility. Yes, the people outside the mills see us in dirty sarees every day on our way back home. If we put on a good saree on weekends to visit a shop or anywhere, they tease us. However, in our surroundings, we have respect and thus protect our izzat because we have learned that we must always be united.
Such an experience, provided a site for the generation of affective affinities surrounding grief and pain, which also involved participating in events that crossed the religious-spiritual and labour status distinctions of the women. For example, some women who were members of Sanatnee Hindu religious sects, such as Charubala (a Dalit), would join Kafila (pilgrims), led by Jorina, to visit a Mazar (Sufi shrine) in Chittagong. Similarly, Jorina would often join Charubala and Bhoben Mistri (a badli worker) at Bauls’ spiritual gatherings. 6 This was not about ignoring or conflating differences in terms of their own community or regional differences in religious practices. Rather, they emphasized an ability to be co-present and talk safely at these events in a way that provided a basis for challenging the justifications management gave for inequity. Some suggested that these alliances were more valuable than other normative reporting structures or supervisors whose own iman was questioned owing to their actions. For example, Charulbala exclaimed tongue-in-cheek that ‘Dr Joyteen Ray [the appointed doctor for the mill and a male upper-caste Hindu] has become more Muslman (Muslim) these days’ when he refused to support a case of a dismissed Dalit worker.
Through invoking izzat, patriarchal management often produced social compliance, legitimizing the way women workers and their labour were recognized and regulated via exclusion, suspension and segregation. This was reinforced by the broader economic, legal, cultural and political regimes that brought together the mill management, the Jute Mills’ Corporation (the corporate body designed to supervise state-owned jute mills), the World Bank and its patronized NGOs (e.g. Building Resource Across the Community [BRAC], which ran microcredit programmes) and the state. As a result, women’s marginalization was not only a workplace issue but also a community issue, as exemplified by their discussions of physical attacks or unfair treatment at work. The interlocking relationship between the lived experience of izzat and the impact of structural disadvantage merged together in women’s everyday conversation, particularly around instances involving episodes in which badli women had been mistreated at work. Using this as a conduit to disclose their own experiences led to a discussion of broader acts of injustice. An example was when women in a focus group began discussing how they had been individually shamed about their productivity: Mills incur losses by procuring inferior quality jute. It is the management – officers, Babus, and trade union leaders – they are corrupt. / What is their iman? The losses are not incurred by our hands. By our hands, we mean it is through our hands we give production – that is, our Karma and Dharma – our iman / We need someone like you (Author 1), who would come from the outside and go through the records to find out how management, including the CBA (assigned collective bargaining agents), is involved in corruption. We are not Balad [meaning ‘bulls’, which has the connotation of being dumb]. (Malti/Marjina/Kohinoor, focus groups 1, 2, and 3)
The conditions for recognizing the potential to unite as a counter to losing dignity and the lack of social recognition of their izzat emerged due to women often living together in ghettoized communities and slums. When a workplace issue occurred, such as a physical attack or unfair docking of pay, it was not only an organizational event but also a community episode. Connecting their workplace ‘fight’ with the collective voice in their created shomshar (community/family) further facilitated a collective cultural code of morality in their response. However, the corollary of this was that what women workers did socially was perceived by others as ‘paying their way’ independently, even when this had negative material consequences. For example, Halima shared that ‘We must pay the rent as soon as possible. Otherwise, the slum owners start swearing, so for our izzat and safety, we pay the rent when it is due, but we remain starved.’ While constantly a struggle for survival, this financial imperative in part also helped build a platform for collective claims of being legitimate economic citizens, as Selina suggested: Women come to work. This is a fact. They work and earn their living by their rights. However, it is painful that in order to get whatever we are entitled to, what is our right, or what can be considered our right, we have to fight for it.
For Selina and others, ‘fighting back’ was justified through a consciousness associated with iman. Here, notions of ‘management as lacking iman’ frequently emerged in our interactions. Many of the women introduced iman to publicly question the organization of the mill management, trade union leaders and other institutions with which they interacted. In one focus group, women discussed how iman countered a silencing through curating spaces for vocalizing from a situated moral position: We do not have the opportunity to speak/if we say something, they (Sardars – the line chief
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– and male workers) dapor dei start swearing. However, we often tell them that we do not smoke like them/we do not frequently leave our workplace, and we never avoid or ignore our work. (Laili/Malati/Momena, focus group 4)
‘Establishing territory’ from a provisional but collective position in this way also provided possibilities for cohesion, and women repeatedly discuss their closeness with other badli women, with Jorina saying, ‘We are always united – that make(s) our male colleagues envious.’ This was not only about claiming community or belonging, but also about a solidaristic practice that allowed questioning and refusal to emerge publicly, which they connected to iman. For example, both Aruna and Jorina, as badli female workers, discussed and raised questions about the capability of Sardars, Babus and officers to manage violent incidents during the night shift work through invoking iman: ‘What are their responsibility and accountability? They should be more careful when they supervise the C shift’ (which operates from 10 pm to 6 am).
Similar sentiments and questioning emerged during informal discussions within women where they used their situated provisionality as a standpoint from which to create jokes and make pointed comments. For example, women workers would laugh with each other about supervisors or permanent workers to highlight uneven relations, such as pointing out the Boro Babu’s (head clerk’s) stomach that contrasted with their own bodies: ‘Look at how big his tummy; it’s as if he is pregnant – all our money is in that tummy’ (field notes). Clearly, these cases played on their own status of ‘not mattering’ and provided the women with a means to articulate the injustices of how others benefited from their position, particularly when their own provisionality was written on their own and others’ body comportment, an aspect to which we will now turn.
Embodied solidarity
The women’s aforementioned diasporic circumstances were leveraged by management regimes in both formal and informal-yet-instituted practices that controlled where and how their bodies were conditionally accepted in the context of work. For example, an informal hiring process and temporary work conditions for women implicated their social status by giving them a low value as workers. This manifested in routes to employment as an ambivalent threshold. On the one hand, work could also enable iman, where working in the mill meant being able to secure dignity via some kind of wage to pay for rent and food. On the other hand, izzat was compromised through working in the mill. Moreover, this involved a hierarchical stream of extraction due to being employed under the badli system that required them to register their name to acquire a gate pass or identity card: Processing a gate pass requires five or six signatures, and everyone involved with the process attempts to extract as much as possible from us with each signature. To get a gate pass, what matters here is whether we have some nexus (relationship, but also other connections) with the people working here. (Aruna)
If employed under the badli system, women often had to pay a ‘toll’ of around US$1 a week to the Babus and Sardars for ‘providing them’ with the opportunity to work (weekly wages for women average US$15). In addition, for the women to be placed on the regular job lists for work, the Babus, union leaders and officers also asked for sexual favours. Such treatment was intertwined with broader parameters of cultural misogyny and a problematic sexualization where, despite women’s labour being still widely utilized, ‘The management was never interested in appointing women workers permanently because they pollute the environment . . . You know . . . the curves and movements of their body . . . are enough’ (head clerk of the Department of Labour, field notes).
At the same time, women’s situated embodiment also provided a site from which justice-driven actions could be enacted. A very practical way this emerged was through acknowledging and supporting each other’s bodily functions or health episodes. Ayisha explained how (. . .) the Sardar does not allow us to go to the toilet. Again, asking something from them means we need to think about our izzat as they misbehave. That day, I was sick. I asked several times, but the Line Sardar did not allow me, and then I spoiled my saree.
Others described how once other Badli women realized what had happened, there was a sense of camaraderie where . . . we united, and all circled around her (the woman needing the toilet/ There is only one toilet in the mills) (for 144 badli women workers and 35 permanent female workers). We must first secure what we could do and whatever we are entitled to. (Resma/Halima, focus group 3)
Solidarity as a response to bodily vulnerability also emerged in the experience of intergenerational relations. Jorina discussed how ‘my pride iman’ was replenished in looking after and protecting newly joined young badli women workers. She explained how speaking out on their behalf is not only an ‘act of my iman’ but a broader act of justice-seeking behaviour too: I was 15 years old when I started working here. On the first day, I almost peed on my salwar as I was intimidated by my line Sardar. Now, I swear at them (Sardars and male colleagues) if I find anything wrong, such as swearing or asking for sexual favours from younger badli women. (Jorina)
Framing this not only as a ‘duty’ but as something that reaffirmed her own sense of justice carried weight in this context. Compared to private mills, where women said that ‘there is no one to protect you or to guard all those anomalies/ Sardars, Babus, and the Officers – they do whatever they feel like’ (Nargis/Runa, focus group 6), public mills did afford different possibilities. Women workers in Rupali Jute Mills witnessed and engaged in collective practices to protect their own and other women workers’ bodies through trying to call ‘harassing bodies’ to account. This sense of solidarity was further bolstered by recognizing their value in production, as women often reminded each other of their essential role in securing economic outputs. As one group suggested, ‘We know that we are secure/ as long as we give good production (amader izzat amra rakhi)’ (Nahar/Parul, focus group 1). Ayisha added that: We protect our dignity and respect. Now, the question is, what does their (Sardars and Babus) iman say? Just tell us how and in what ways we are not capable. The quality of our work is far better! We tell them, ‘Go and ask the production managers to supervise our work’.
Another avenue that provided possibilities for collective recognition was being physically present around other forms of solidaric action from which they were personally excluded. Trade unions were a strong presence in the public jute mill setting, although membership was only available to permanent workers. However, from watching and learning from their activities, Jorina and others established a collective, subsequently calling for their status as ‘vulnerable’ to be recognized by the union, even if they were still not eligible to join. Being visible was important, and Jorina became the leader of the women’s group of badli workers committee; according to Jorina, ‘an “informal committee” (. . .). We have formed this committee to raise our issues. If an incident arises, we take the issue to the union by going there together.’
While the efficacy of this process was partial, many women referred to the public presence of the group as a fight for their rights that needed to be collective in lieu of the individual conditions that men were able to assume through their employment status: ‘We have to survive/ and we can survive only through struggles and fighting. To us, survival implies fighting and fighting for our rights/ our dignity, for our izzat with iman’ (Maria/Lata/Prova, focus group 5).
However, this reflexive capacity to assert themselves through being physically present alongside other women through formal–informal organizing could come at the cost of rendering their bodies more vulnerable. Women’s experiences highlighted how a provisional economic existence had left scars through the way harmful working conditions, harassment and violence were inscribed on their bodies and the bodies of others around them. During our fieldwork, we repeatedly heard that the number of female workers under the badli system has been increasing as they undertake low-cost work, which was corrupted by the logic that they are only capable of doing low-cost work that often led to insults and daily derogatory remarks: Even a young boy who joined last year threatens me like, ‘You people receive wages without doing anything’. He would show me ‘unfit’ for the job by complaining to Sardars. Only by the grace of Allah do I still have the physical capacity to work, and I continue my work (sobbing). (Sufia)
Women were also frustrated, humiliated, suppressed and bullied by their male counterparts. As Begum stated: ‘If we want to say something, they begin dapor dei (start swearing). They never call us by our name; they use Magi or Khanki (slut).’ Selina also recounted the cumulative physical, social and psychological toll of leading and organizing movements to become permanent workers from 1988 to 1996: I had been in jail in a false case of a murder attempt. Only I know my suffering . . . Staff and colleagues used to tease me: ‘You will be made permanent workers through the cane’ (i.e. they will force a piece of wood into her vagina).
Women also felt that their experiences of embodied vulnerability were ignored at a meso level. Aruna discussed a lack of will from bodies such as NGOs, including BRAC, which could provide justice-seeking support, as they had strong local coverage (project officers visited the slum every week to collect weekly instalments under its micro-credit programme): The risk of being a girl starts in the family; she is forced to be married, even to a man like my husband – who roams around, gets married, and never takes responsibility – and in the workplace, they are victims of violence. So, the police, army, and BRAC all should work together for justice.
The physical scarring of economic provisionality was intertwined with women’s perceived ‘failed’ circumstances of being subject to talak (an oral form of divorce), and mota marriage (temporary marriage), which are allowed under the Islamic code.
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This was read not only through their bodies in terms of dress and food, but also through a failure to uphold a recognized maternal corporeality: We cannot buy good sarees. Our regular meals consisted of rice and dal. Every week, my daughters ask, ‘Maa, can we have meat this week during lunch on Friday?’ It has been a year since the last Qurbani Eid (Eid-ul-Adha – when cows and goats are sacrificed), we had meat. I often wonder; I would never have come here if I had not been a mother. (Begum)
This subsequently shaped our women’s economic subjectivities in profound bodily experiences of hunger, shame and fear of homelessness. Yet iman was also contextualized through seeking to secure their daughters’ future: something that ‘all’ mothers, no matter what their ethnicities or religion, discussed as central to an embodied maternal consciousness. However, seeking honour for their daughters required them to be in debt and often to compromise their own sense of self. For example, Sufia, who came to Khalishpur from Bihar in 1957 when she was 7 years old, found that as a mother of three married daughters, the lion’s share of her weekly wages goes to moneylenders due to their dowries: Every Thursday [Friday is the weekly holiday, so Thursday is the day workers receive their weekly wages], I find moneylenders waiting for me at home. (. . .) Is this a life? I often wonder whether I am simply a shadow with a structure that could move around! (. . .) I have forgotten how to live a life with izzat [or dignity] – or whether I had a life.
Elsewhere, Ayisha spoke of her fears that securing a marriage for her daughter would require a higher dowry, as her dark complexion was in danger of consigning her to low-wage work. In turn, this economic demand tied Ayisha to continuing to accept low-paid work. By contrast, Selina and those around her discussed how her daughter undertook tailoring at home, maintaining the normative regimes of her izzat by spatially situating her body away from public view. This was the result of Selina securing a successful marriage, which was central to her dignity and translated into feeling the right to be recognized. Such narratives of maternal subjectivity and iman were produced in the context of other economic sources. For example, women often called out the inconsistency in the development discourse endorsed by the NGOs, suggesting they were complicit in maintaining the current gendered economic status quo. Some were frustrated by the NGOs’ misplaced energies around women’s entrepreneurial capability rather than security in other forms of labour. Aruna, for example, pointed out that if the aim of NGOs was to empower women, they should support a structural change that would allow them to be recognized as permanent workers in mills. Other women discussed how the NGOs consistently ignored the fact that the microcredit funding initiatives were basically being used for dowries.
Political solidarity
Our third theme focuses on how invoking iman enabled the development of political consciousness and the capacity for situated solidarity among women mill workers. Central to this was enacting a sense of the ‘we’ across time, where previous acts of resistance served as a foundation for mobilizing political awareness in the present. For example, many women spoke about the first legal complaint against the mills’ management under the clause of violation of ILO fundamental labour laws at the Joint Directorate of Labour and the associated massive demonstration: We initiated the process in 1988, and in 1996, we were appointed as permanent workers. Being appointed permanent workers was our right, and we were entitled to be appointed by labour law, so we appealed to the Joint Directorate of Labour (JDL)/ We set up a fund. We collected the money drawing on our wages, and later, when we did not have work (management stopped giving work to women workers at that time), we contributed from our savings/ We sold off whatever we had. We understood we needed to remain united to counter the management’s injustices. (Banu/Rahela/Mariam, focus groups 1, 2, and 4)
The collective retelling of their experiences involved a powerful sense of seeking justice as women: We have a life; we have the right to have a life with Izzat. Then why do the systems not allow us to work? What is the cause, and what lies behind it? What is the mystery? Where was their iman? (Begum)
Central to these accounts is a reflexive capacity to leverage their ambivalent relations with those who were complicit in reproducing their provisional status. For example, in encounters with trade unions through their formal-informal women’s committees, women often found themselves in a paradoxical position: requiring acknowledgement of their organizing due to their vulnerability and being viewed as unable to organize and ineligible for union membership because of this same vulnerability. Women used the first premise of vulnerability to gain visibility as a collective while challenging the second premise, demonstrating their capacity to organize. They argued that it is not a gendered trait but a capacity rooted inherently in their situated iman. Selina, who led the movement to be appointed as permanent workers, articulated this belief powerfully: I knew—as long as my iman is strong and I am on the right track in my faith and justice, I believe my Allah is up there, and my Mother Earth is beneath my feet. I told the management, “I challenge you: I will be back here and work as a permanent worker” [in the mills]
Women who had become permanent, and therefore became union members, viewed their membership as holding possibilities for claiming justice for those beyond themselves who were still badli. However, they also experienced conditional recognition within the union, especially when attempting to hold corrupt union leaders and management to account. This often required identifying opportunities when public statements of critique by women would be more harmful and must be recognized, such as during election seasons. As one permanent worker in a focus group wryly noted, ‘we are important to trade union leaders during the CBA election. Then, we are darling (Shona Shona). When it is over, then we are mother fuckers’ (Kohinoor/Palashi/Karuna/Latifa, focus group 1).
These moments of possible recognition were often fleeting, necessitating effective and rapid collaborative efforts by women. During these times, they engaged in creative thinking about how to claim space for their voices. In practice, this often involved playing with a physical presence or absence so that their labour was rendered visible in striking ways. For instance, Charubala, a Dalit Jamadar (cleaner), mobilized her fellow Jamadars to surround the entire Labour Office with garbage for a week in protest against management’s actions regarding layoffs and casualization. This story was often recounted with humour, emphasizing Charubala’s understanding of her fellow workers that all having a sense of justice can lead to success and that, even in the most ‘dirty’ or unhygienic circumstances, vulnerable workers can unite. In contrast, the ability to not show up as a political assertion was also leveraged during the finalization of the JSAC. 9 Women recalled that ‘We were all being forced to submit the VRS (Voluntary Retirement Schemes) application in 2007–2008 during the caretaker government amal (regime)’ (field notes). During this time, the women deliberately chose not to go to work, also ensuring that they were not seen on Khalishpur Road. Begum discussed how the women agreed that if they could not be ‘seen’, they could not be forced to sign anything. Such resistance was not referred to as militant; instead, it leveraged the normative parameters of izzat-related seclusion to avoid being forced into passive submission and signing a VRS.
At the same time, political pathways could result in antagonisms between seeking dignity and justice simultaneously. These often emerged when collective demands clashed with individual claims for material security or intersecting cultural dynamics. For instance, Charubala highlighted disagreements about whether to ‘organize meetings in our community centre’ or a place closer to suburban Santanee and Dalit communities, where caution was required because ‘we have to be careful. Walls have ears.’ In another case, Anwara, a woman whose relatively powerful husband had died, was offered a temporary Aya (carer) role in the mills’ hospital and successfully lodged an individual complaint in labour court for permanency (which took 6 months). This occurred alongside a group of female workers who collectively lodged a case with the Joint Directorate of Labour, which took 8 years. Anwara did not sign the collective complaint out of fear that it would harm her individual standing, which was tied into respect as her husband’s widow. However, management often used Anwara’s case to exaggerate the likelihood of women becoming permanent workers, depoliticizing the broader economic systems of marginalization. The Boro Babu (head clerk) of the Labour Office shared this with Author 1 on more than one occasion, saying, ‘You know, Anwara was the first permanent woman worker of the mills’, referring to her as ‘our Bhabi’ (a term of respect for a sister-in-law of the elder brother). Yet, such comments were cynically interpreted by women given the backdrop of downsizing strategies, such as the JSAC, 10 and international strategies in which ‘Ad-hoc appointment is a form of appointment that the Bishhoy Bank (The World Bank) suggested to the mills for appointing workers’ (Selina).
Historically instituted patterns of marginalization meant that iman, as a ground for mobilizing justice, was not solely about individual consciousness but also a multigenerational endeavour. Learning about local political strategies necessitates passing down tactics that form part of their broader identity as female mill workers. For example, Selina, who led the permanency movement from 1988 to 1996, shared: I had a guru at Star Jute Mills; she showed me all the ways and guided me, and then I trained Jorina. So when I am no longer there, Jorina will guide all women workers. I took Jorina to every location.
Jorina shared that the experience of being present and vocal with Selina countered feelings of shame and hiding associated with their work that had been imposed by others. This space provided an alternative narrative shaped by a marginalized social and economic status, even if it did not guarantee fully redressing inequities during their own lifetimes.
Discussion
Building on work that recognizes the gendered parameters of misrecognition (e.g. Milroy et al., 2019; Riach et al., 2014) and accounts of in situ solidarity-making (Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017; Vijay et al., 2023), our analysis suggests that in the context of Bangladeshi public jute mills, women’s solidaric modes of recognition are inextricably linked with social and economic systems aided through production relations that have been gendered for almost 150 years. Furthermore, this study demonstrates how situated solidarity, as a corollary of vulnerability, can be experienced and expressed in working lives, holding potential for practices of resistance and justice-seeking demands. In other words, when bivalent collectivities are constituted through ‘both socioeconomic maldistribution and cultural misrecognition in forms where neither of these injustices is an indirect effect of the others, but where both are primary and co-original’ (Fraser, 1995, p. 77), they possess a generative capacity to create and reaffirm alliances. Such practices challenge and probe what is allowable in the socioeconomic normative parameters and structures that regulate voice, visibility and resource allocation. In this sense, workplace recognition is constituted through lines of critical solidarity and an ‘embodied immersion in the politics of casteism, communalism, patriarchy, uneven development, and poverty’ (Nagar, 2017, p. 4).
Our study explains how working women’s expressions of iman afford spaces for solidaric modes of recognition in the face of significant economic and social marginalization. As Bhadra (1994) suggests, paying serious attention to subaltern imagination demands acknowledging the particularity of specific and contextually grounded elementary structures. By focusing not only on organizational subjectivities but also on broader socioeconomic dynamics central to participants’ lives as mill workers, iman was formative in the mode of consciousness around women’s relations and beliefs, as well as their beliefs in themselves and others. In turn, this afforded the potential for solidaric modes of recognition. Yet the women workers’ experiences are not simply an account of iman, nor are they a straightforward critique of how attention to exclusively organizational subjectivities may inadvertently draw lines of enclosure around the recognition regimes of workers. Rather, they provide the potential to understand how solidaric modes of recognition can be premised upon different ontological formations of subjectivity that have hitherto been overlooked in Global North accounts of world-making.
As we learned from those who shared their stories and lives with us, socioeconomic lived experiences were more than merely organizational or derived from an a priori individual desire for recognition; they were constituted within and through broader systems of inequity that were central to recognition regimes. Following Fraser (2005, p. 82), we saw how these aspects manifest through the mutual imbrication of recognition and distribution as key features of subaltern subjectivities. The working lives of mill women were a product of the dynamics of the economy, post-colonial legacies, culture and multiple forms of state and policy regimes (legal, political and global) that were served up to create indeterminacy and naturalized historically and economically in ways that supported a wilful gendered misrecognition. However, they were also central in how justice-seeking – displayed here in the context of iman as an ethico-religious impetus or capacity – set the conditions for redistributive and recognition-based demands in mill life and provided the potential for solidaric demands to articulate and resist. Their demonstrative enactment of iman as a shared point of consciousness emerged and was consolidated by contemplating or voicing inextricable moral questions about justice, fairness and equity. Practically, certain practices and actions arose, often evolving through trust, affinity, feelings and responsibility between women (and ambivalent relationships with others, e.g. mill management), which carried the potential to leverage situated solidarity despite intersectional differences around religion or other axes of difference. Thus, solidaric recognition created ‘spaces of withdrawal and regroupment’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 68), as seen in ways that rendered their labour and socioeconomic conditions visible, from leaving out rubbish, to disappearing so as not to sign ‘voluntary’ redundancy papers.
As Fraser (1990, p. 68) suggests, it is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions of recognition and redistribution that their emancipatory potential resides. Demands for both recognition and equity permeate into women and how they come to know of their own existence as situated within the contingent webbing of organizations, sectors and state institutions. This is not merely about inclusion as a basic human need in which ‘we rely on inclusion as a sign that we have been recognized’ (Tyler & Vachhani, 2021, p. 249). Rather, it is a contingent and often partial call nonetheless suggesting that equity and justice are central to solidaric subjectivities. Like Nagar’s (2000, p. 358) account, our participants ‘do not advocate’ for a complete overthrow of patriarchal systems. Instead, their solidaric modes of recognition strive to ‘create a heightened awareness of the gendered injustices in their world and demand from their audience’: a demand to acknowledge and tether injustice to their lived experience. Of poignancy were instances where solidaric demands enabled women to ‘expose ways in which the labelling of some issues and interests as “private” limits the range of problems, and/or approaches to problems’ (Fraser, 1990, p. 77). For example, in instances where socioeconomic experiences are often assumed to be private concerns (e.g. dowries, women’s health episodes and sexual harassment), alliances facilitated the formation of solidaric demands for recognition that rendered inequity visible.
Recognizing the power of solidaric modes of recognition has broader implications for redistributive justice. As accounts of global poverty highlight, it is vital to understand how the experience of production and labour relations produces inequity in multifaceted and intersectional ways (United Nations, 2018). This is not merely a matter for recognition scholars to consider among themselves; it also calls into account how development interventions (e.g. NGO microcredit programmes) and the emancipatory promises embedded in normative discursive regimes of equality shape the conditions of recognition. As our study suggests, subaltern recognition is informed through particular gendered relations between the state, the global order of capital and civil society organizations, whereby female workers’ status has been either set up within narrow occupational subject positions or mystified as the ‘other’.
As such, solidarity as an expression of socioeconomic subjectivities is significant not only because of women’s relative lack of individual power but also because it serves as an important corrective to these narratives. Women showed us how solidarity could counter cultural, structural and systematic conditions that not only deny subjectivity but also imply that there is no possibility for recourse. In this sense, solidaric modes of recognition are central to recognizing the injustice of provisional conditions. In doing so, they foster an ontologically generative location where ‘radical vulnerability reduces the pain and disappointments because it is a way of being in an entangled and productive relationality where you are no longer carrying your burdens as an isolated self or an autonomous subject’ (Nagar et al., 2016, p. 514). Women’s solidarity and actions highlight how ‘the resistant emerges within and through material/discursive enactments of resistance’ (Harding et al., 2017, p. 1224), but also that it occurs through contextually situated interlocutors, such as iman, which facilitate solidaric modes of expression. Accounts of the manifestation of their solidarity, such as speaking up or speaking out, demonstrate that the interlocking functions of capitalism and patriarchy (S. Sen, 1999a) delineate conditions for recognition but do not determine them. Despite the potential consequences for economic and material survival, this is a stark feature of precarious work that we must remain mindful of in contemporary accounts of organizational subjectivity.
Of course, taking this position also requires us as researchers to continually challenge how we represent the multiple complexities of female workers’ lives and the solidaric modes of recognition as a theoretically rich resource for broader theorizing. In doing so, we recognize our own ethical-political engagement in this ambition. We ponder what kind of responsibility we have been assigned (Nagar, 2017) and what slippages in accountability we might have made despite our best intentions. In the pursuit of recognizing the theoretical ‘value’ of the study, we were acutely aware of the dangers in racialized maldistributions, for example, through norms of publishing that could potentially ‘whitewash’ our account to extrapolate value from the lives of women for the benefit of our own careers. Our act of publishing this paper may even render us culpable of appropriating solidaric modes of recognition and absorbing them into a sanitized project ‘restricted to deliberation about the common good’, that Fraser (1990) criticizes (p. 62). Grappling with such challenges, researching recognition is necessarily a political act – what Nagar (2017, p. 20) calls retelling hunger, ‘where our minds, bodies, hearts, and tongues can always be open to diverse ways of knowing and co-creating in a world’. Our own responsibility lies in theorizing in a way that highlights how the transformative politics of recognition must be considered as a matter of both solidaric vulnerability and survivability in women’s work lives. Moreover, any insistence on ‘walking together’ (Nagar, 2017, p. 6) must be undertaken while considering uneven geographical contexts compared to those who shared their experiences and through the narrow regimes of recognition set out in the parameters of an academic article.
Conclusion
We propose the foundations for a situated and solidaric mode of socioeconomic recognition that seriously considers redistributive demands for equity as deserving serious theoretical consideration. Further organizational theorizing would be invaluable in understanding how the differential modes of organizational recognition are connected to distribution across bodies, relations and histories. This may open up new vistas for organizational theorizing but could also entail the potential for troubling implications for other stakeholders. For example, the image of poor working women generating solidaric demands for recognition as a local agitator is less appealing than the image of individualized, enterprising female subjects which NGOs often draw on to inform their democratizing projects around the economy and culture. Indeed, by equating survivability with notions of efficiency and equality, the development agenda may complicate and challenge solidaric recognition in the communities they proposed to support.
However, the accounts of women in this study also hold the potential to expand the parameters of recognition within management and organizational studies. Given the scope and size of our discipline, along with the increasing popularity of a recognition-based lens for exploring workplace subjectivities, there is a need for more accounts to ‘address fundamental questions of systemic power and inequities’ (Mohanty, 2013, p. 968) that consider different theoretical modalities around relationality and solidarity. Our analyses demonstrate that political and socioeconomic relations are important at a theoretical, rather than simply empirical, level. They also highlight the need to extrapolate the demand for recognition from the exclusive concern on in/equality. The accounts and experiences of the women in our study emphasize that recognition, as an ontological process, is inseparable from broader demands for redistribution that render solidarity possible. The ontologically penetrative conditions of historical legacies, job insecurity and state-level complicity in the chronic instability of mill women’s working conditions constitute solidarity as an ontological condition rather than relegating these elements to a mere backdrop for theoretical consideration.
Such recognition emanates from paying serious attention to both the practical and situated dynamics of consciousness and radical vulnerability in situ. Solidaric modes of recognition invariably involve processes that are constituted in the gendered and racialized global division of labour and distribution. Nevertheless, this does not preclude female workers from antagonizing or pulling at the regimes of power and being makers of their own politics and lives, even when economies of work rely on their continued status to be one of provisionality.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their unending gratitude to all the women workers of the Rupali Jute Mills and the respondents who have been – and continue to be – so generous with their time and insights over the course of the ongoing research which formed the basis of this article. We also thank the journal’s senior editor Marianna Fotaki and the three anonymous reviewers for their patient and significant guidance in revising this article, as well as Sneha Chrispal for her insightful comments.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
