Integration, exploitation, and possibilities for resistance: A case study of female textile factory workers in Thailand

This study tells the story of female textile factory workers in Thailand. Through an extensive use of oral histories, I reveal how the lives of women workers in the apparel industry have been so profoundly affected by the growth of export industries there. This case study sets out to provide a gendered perspective on globalization in a localized context and it seeks to demonstrate that ethnographic fieldwork can be an immensely rich and useful approach for looking at women's experiences of work and living. The study is founded on the premise that worker consciousness does not develop in a uniform way but through the varied and complex dimensions of women's lives that are rooted in a particular industry and work setting.; My dissertation examines the ways in which specific mechanisms of control over labor operate to limit or inhibit possibilities of organization and mobilization. I pay special attention to the structural conditions under which women labor and the spheres of work and daily life are analyzed as dynamic and closely intertwined realms. The objective of this project is twofold: to examine the factors that provoke reaction from some women and not from others and to better understand what role factory work plays in defining women's social and personal relations.; This study attempts to emphasize the poverty of social life for women in this segment of the working class as it highlights the ever changing and highly flexible managerial mechanisms of control over labor that wear out women's collective and individual struggles against the employer and weaken workers' unions as a whole. I argue that it is necessary to look at the complexities and differences in the structure of the production process that shape women's consciousness thereby calling into question the idea of a collective identity and consciousness. I conclude by highlighting the important implications an ethnographic case study may have for future research on working women. The end result is a rich and detailed retrospective account of women workers in this particular sector of industry that helps to place working class consciousness within a larger social and economic context.