Leicester, Boohoo and the new sweatshop: reprising a feminist lens for the UK Garment Industry
Emily Kinder
January 22nd 2024
A selected bibliography to works referenced in the blog can be accessed at the bottom of the page.
The UK sweatshop
Leicester, an historic hub of the UK Garment Industry (UKGI), now faces a troubling phenomenon: the rise of the UK sweatshop. The conditions in these Leicester factories, which primarily supply fast-fashion giant Boohoo, are emblematic of broader systemic problems in the UKGI.
Traditional analysis of sweatshops focuses on economic factors, weighing their potential benefits as “engines for development” in developing nations against the drawbacks of the poor working conditions experienced by their predominantly female workforce. In response, feminist scholars have produced increasingly nuanced frameworks for gendered analysis, yet existing literature has largely remained focused on sweatshop manufacturing in developing nations.
The UK sweatshop has to be grasped as a product of global and domestic industry structures and the evolution of the UKGI. At present, there exists a lacuna in research on the relations between the work and the worker in this context, which prompts the application of these feminist scholars’ work to this emerging phenomenon. The rich history and ongoing development of feminist scholarship on sweatshop work deserves both recognition and reexamination, in light of these evolving forms of labour exploitation.
New sweatshops, old regulations
The resurgence of the sweatshop in the UKGI is striking, insofar as these workplaces have typically been associated exclusively with developing nations. These new factories, however, mirror traditional sweatshops in their poor working conditions, low wages, and long hours, and are further characterised by their small size, flexibility, and flouting of UK labour laws.
The contemporary UKGI is the product of a complex history. As garment production migrated overseas from the 1950s to 1990s – epitomised by Marks & Spencer’s international relocation in 1996 – the UKGI was widely considered part of the UK’s industrial past. However, 2007 saw the return of production to the UK, bringing with it a transformed industrial ecosystem. Today’s manufacturers compete with international rivals – who have lower labour costs and levels of regulations – by targeting the fast-fashion market through aggressive cost-cutting strategies and an emphasis on flexibility.
Leicester exemplifies this trend, specialising in a just-in-time production model that prioritises rapid response to market demands and minimises inventory. The city’s manufacturers leverage their physical proximity to UK retailers, as well as their small size and characteristic agility, minimising delivery times. This is attractive for fast-fashion retailers like Boohoo, who account for an estimated 75-80% of garment production in Leicester, and regularly adjust their product line based on market performance, with lead times which can be as short as a single week. The constant market pressure to maintain competitive pricing motivates intense labour conditions. This is facilitated by subcontracting methods, which also permit greater labour flexibility, and obscure production in factories which fail to meet audit requirements, because of the ‘arm’s-length’ relationship between the retailers and the producers.
Current regulatory frameworks, designed for an outdated system, remain fundamentally ill-equipped to monitor these fragmented, predominantly informal supply chains, and any suppliers and manufacturers who comply with regulation cannot compete. The consequence is systematic labour violations: widespread underpayment or non-payment, hour manipulation, minimal unionisation, and near-total absence of employment contracts.
Gendering our analysis
Although the workers in Leicester’s garment industry are predominantly women, existing research falls short of providing a sufficiently feminist lens. This needs to be addressed. Understanding the nature of mistreatment and the worker’s experience is key to implementing change. Feminist theory is well placed to provide a powerful analytical framework for investigating context-specific labour dynamics, and developing strategic interventions.
Initial feminist scholarship on sweatshops emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside the boom in offshore manufacturing, and served as a critical response to dominant economic narratives, explaining, in part, why these jobs were women-dominated. Feminist theorists argued that existing economic explanations – portraying women as the cheapest labour source due to their secondary status in the labour market – failed to address the deeper structural dynamics of gender in industrial employment, down to the social and cultural factors behind women’s preference for temporal flexibility.
Pioneering scholars like Diane Elson and Ruth Pearson began to shift this research focus, examining instead how women in sweatshops experience workplace environments through distinctly gendered perspectives. Early scholarship was divided: did this employment liberate women by undermining traditional gender roles (Linda Lim; Helen Safa), or reinforce women’s multiple subjugations (Kathryn Ward; Diane Elson & Ruth Pearson)? There was widespread agreement, however, on the need for continued gendered analysis.
Globally local
A shared concern has emerged with the evolution of feminist scholarship on sweatshops: the limitations of macroeconomic analyses of sweatshop work, when analysing gendered phenomena. The work of Nikolaus Hammer, a leader in the field, exemplifies this problem.
Across a number of publications Hammer and co-authors provide sophisticated analysis of the state of play in Leicester. They map the emergence of the current UKGI onto changes in the global supply chain, linking global forces to local management styles in factories. However, gender rarely features in their account, which remains primarily macro-level and unidirectional in its analysis of global-local dynamics.
Feminist scholars consider this kind of analysis to be at risk of rendering gender ‘invisible, superstructural or secondary’, insofar as it considers global phenomena exclusively in ‘world politics’ terms. Crucially, this is insufficient for understanding the lived realities of globalisation, particularly from a gendered perspective. Concerns about the insufficiency of such macrostructural accounts have therefore led to an increased focus on the local, studying small scale actors – like the individual, the household and the community – and examining how they interact with global forces. In the words of Carol Freeman, this analysis brings home the ‘lived realities of… mammoth forces’.
… capitalist production is not solely organised through monetary exchange; while the cash nexus may seem gender-neutral, the men and women in the labour market are not atomised genderless individuals. Rather, they and their interactions are embedded in gendered social structure, conditioning labour market relations accordingly.
However, we need to be careful not to eschew global analysis entirely. In the 1980s Elson and Pearson stressed the importance of gendered analysis of economic forces, particularly in the context of women’s factory work. The sum of economic relationships of production and exchange (the ‘cash nexus’) might be gender ‘neutral’ in the sense that monetary exchange itself is not gender ascriptive. However, capitalist production is not solely organised through monetary exchange; while the cash nexus may seem gender-neutral, the men and women in the labour market are not atomised genderless individuals. Rather, they and their interactions are embedded in gendered social structure, conditioning labour market relations accordingly. Production is organised, for example, through hierarchical managerial structures which reinforce traditional patriarchal power. Understanding the actions taken in factories to preserve and utilise traditional forms of patriarchal power can be seen as a way of understanding ‘particular conjunctions of forces shaping women’s lives’.
Similarly, Jennifer Bair has noted that focusing on only context-specific constructions of gendered labour precludes analysis of broader patterns. Global analysis is needed to explain the gendered dimension of transnational production. Without it, we cannot understand the reality of feminised labour in global manufacturing as a concept with causal force.
Thus, an integrated approach is crucial: local analysis provides context-specific insights, while global analysis reveals overarching patterns of feminised labour in transnational manufacturing. Local and global analysis are interdependent.
A multidirectional manifesto
Advocating for a multi-dimensional feminist analysis of Leicester’s new sweatshops requires a vision of what that might entail. Here, I suggest three critical dimensions of such analysis from which this might begin.
Localising the global: Scholars must examine local manifestations of global policies, engaging with the complex interplay between the global and the local.
The power of this approach is demonstrated in Annie Phizacklea’s book ‘Unpacking the Fashion Industry’ on the late 20th century UKGI. She argues that a crucial influence on the UKGI was Commonwealth migrants who, in response to limited economic opportunities, established small garment manufacturing businesses, often employing female family members with pre-existing sewing skills. In this context, the local influenced the global and vice-versa. Limited local opportunities for migrants and cultural factors permitting the use of free labour from female family members interacted with global immigration policies, and the changing global garment industry. The interplay between these forces shaped the working experience of women in these sweatshops, isolated from other job opportunities and beholden to family and community expectations.
The beginnings of such analysis is evident in Hammer’s work. He analyses the way that the global rise of fast-fashion and the nature of the UKGI interact to produce the low wages and insecure working conditions in Leicester. Unlike Phizacklea’s work, however, this does not treat the gendered factors mediating the lived experience of global policies at a local level.
Gendering globalisation: Challenging ‘genderless’ economic analyses requires recognizing how gender fundamentally shapes industrial practices.
Monder Ram’s research on the 1990s West Midlands Garment Industry exposes how cultural and gendered contexts influence management practices. He highlights the gendered relationships between management and the predominantly South Asian women working in the factory. Like Phizacklea, he observes the use of wives and daughters as unpaid labour – a result of fierce market competition and community expectations. A similarly gendered analysis of the Leicester case could provide a more comprehensive understanding of the industry’s structure and labour process.
Challenging unidirectionality: A nuanced analysis must reject portraying women workers as passive subjects of global economic forces.
Analysis should recognise women’s agency in simultaneously constituting and challenging global practices through their actions. Recognition of this agency in analysis of the UKGI is limited, but Ram’s work provides an indication of what this might entail. He explores a study of Manchester’s Pakistani-owned garment businesses, examining claims that ‘trust, kinship ties, ethnic solidarity and the ‘family’’ were vital tools that Pakistani entrepreneurs employed. Ram views the use of this ‘resource’ as predominantly patriarchal and emphasises the role these factors played in shaping the UKGI. In turn, developments in the UKGI impacted global manufacturing patterns: the resulting family-owned firms, with their small sizes and low wages, would eventually become appealing to the emerging fast-fashion market, contributing to the resurgence of the UKGI. Research in Leicester should engage with the way women workers shape the industry through resistance and adaptation.
Conclusion
Ongoing media attention on Leicester sweatshops is both understandable and laudable, given the gulf between the supposedly robust labour laws in the UK, and the working conditions in the factories. However, public attention is not enough: further research is desperately needed, beyond a narrow economistic analysis of the ‘costs and benefits’ for the predominantly women workers. Rather than start from scratch, we should learn from the development of feminist sweatshop analysis, and in so doing, give ourselves the best chance of deciphering a complex and gendered industry.
Reports on Contemporary Sweatshop Conditions in Leicester:
- Hammer, N., Plugor, R., Nolan, P., & Clark, I. (2015). A new industry on a skewed playing field: Supply chain relations and working conditions in UK garment manufacturing [Report]. University of Leicester. https://figshare.le.ac.uk/articles/report/A_New_Industry_on_a_Skewed_Playing_Field_Supply_ Chain_Relations_and_Working_Conditions_in_UK_Garment_Manufacturing/10127120/1
- Hammer, N., & Plugor, R. (2016). Near-sourcing UK apparel: Value chain restructuring, productivity, and the informal economy. Industrial Relations Journal, 47(5–6), 402–416.
- Hammer, N., & Plugor, R. (2019). Disconnecting labour? The labour process in the UK fast fashion value chain. Work, Employment and Society, 33(6), 913–928.
- Gardner, A., Blair, K., Burcu, O., Phelan, K., Pajon, L., Walsh, D., Stirk, M., & Gray, C. (2022). Fashioning a beautiful future? Supporting workers and addressing labour exploitation in Leicester’s textile and garment industry. University of Nottingham [Report]. https://hdl.handle.net/2086/22075
- O’Connor, S. (2018, May 17). Dark factories: Labour exploitation in Britain’s garment industry. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/e427327e-5892-11e8-b8b2 d6ceb45fa9d0
- Levitt, A. (2020). Independent review into the Boohoo Group PLC’s Leicester supply chain.
Key works on women and sweatshops in the UK garment industry:
- Phizacklea, A. (1990). Unpacking the fashion industry. Routledge. http://archive.org/details/unpackingfashion0000phiz
- Ram, M. (1992). Management, control, ethnicity and the labour process: The case of the West Midlands’ clothing industry [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick]. http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b1410968~S1
Key feminist literature on sweatshop labour:
- Elson, D., & Pearson, R. (1981). ‘Nimble fingers make cheap workers’: An analysis of women’s employment in third world export manufacturing. Feminist Review, 7, 87–107.
- Bair, J. (2010). On difference and capital: Gender and the globalization of production. Signs, 36(1), 203–226.
- Freeman, C. (2001). Is local: global as feminine: masculine? Rethinking the gender of globalization. Signs, 26(4), 1007–1037.
- Ward, K. (Ed.). (1990). Women workers and global restructuring. ILR Press, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.
- Lim, L. Y. C. (1983). Capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy: The dilemma of third-world women workers in multinational factories. In J. Nash & M. P. Fernandez-Kelly (Eds.), Women, men and the international division of labor (pp. 70–91). State University of New York Press.
- Safa, H. I. (1981). Runaway shops and female employment: The search for cheap labor. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(2), 418–433.
- Salzinger, L. (2004). From gender as object to gender as verb: Rethinking how global restructuring happens. Critical Sociology, 30(1), 43–62.
Emily Kinder is a policy analyst and philosophy graduate, currently focused on rail policy at the Rail Industry Association. She holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from LSE (2024), where her thesis explored feminist scholarship on sweatshop labour. Emily’s research interests centre on applied philosophy in the political sphere, with a policy focus on workers’ rights, transport, and international collaboration.
