Textures of Struggle

Reveals what it is like for women to feel powerlessness and passivity in Thai sweatshops but also shows how they are equally able to resist and rebel.

Piya Pangsapa is Assistant Professor of Global Gender Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Pangsapa offers a nuanced, and yes, 'textured' comparative ethnography of how industrial wage work and broader economic crises condition women's lives and consciousness. One of the strengths of the book is its focus on older women workers-many of whom arre mothers and family breadwinners who have worked in the industry for up to thirty years-which shatters the image often replicated in such studies that export factory work is done exclusively by young, single women. But beyond a descriptive defense of women's agency, Pangsapa seeks to explain patterns of worker politicization and collective action and why different workers, despite similar backgrounds and circumstances, may choose to accommodate or actively resist the grueling demands of factory employment. Textures of a Struggle provides a rich portrait of Thai workers and their activism. Because the political economic conditions-both local and transnational-these workers face loom over an ever-growing swath of the globe, their voices and stories of struggle deserve to be heard.

By creatively applying an ethnographic approach, Piya Pangsapa allows us to hear women speaking with their own voices as they talk about their work, their relationships with each other, the meaning that they attach to their labor, and the search for dignity, justice, and fair treatment that has constantly animated their struggles. She has written an excellent book that demonstrates great compassion and understanding for her subjects, and yet she is cognizant of the real difficulties and contradictions that women workers confront in their efforts to develop and sustain autonomous and collective responses geared toward improving the conditions under which they exercise their labor.

Kathryn B. Ward, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale:

This book provides a much-needed analysis of the voices and experiences of women garment workers in Thailand about their accommodation and resistance amid economic restructuring before and after the East Asian crisis. Ethnographic studies of multiple rural and urban factories revealed how long-term women workers with comparable backgrounds and deplorable working conditions either intensified their intersecting work experiences and socio-emotional connections as a survival strategy and/or connected with workers from other factories and outside organizations to jointly resist their working conditions. These strategies may be time- and place-dependent, while generating directions for future research in different countries and regions on the continually evolving and shifting global assembly line.

Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics, author of Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives:

This book knocks another few nails in the coffin of the reactionary stereotype of the timid, unmilitant, fatalistic woman sweatshop worker. Through insightful ethnography, Piya Pangsapa takes us into the lives of some bold, militant, and politically effective women workers and helps explain their successes and setbacks in the context of the political economy of Thailand and the Global South as a whole.

Mary Beth Mills, Colby College:

Piya Pangsapa opens a valuable new window onto the lives and aspirations of Thai women toiling on the global assembly line. Pangsapa's case studies explore how women live with and adapt to the demands and constraints of industrial labor, demonstrating the complex and varied ways in which women's experiences are shaped both by different modes of labor management and by the shifting booms and busts of global capitalism. Textures of Struggle offers a moving portrait of Thai workers and the difficult choices they face, both on and off the factory floor.