Textures of Struggle

Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, Textures of Struggle focuses on the experiences of Thai women who are employed at textile factories and examines how the all-encompassing nature of wage work speaks to issues of worker accommodation and resistance within various factory settings. Why are some women less tolerant of their working conditions than others? How is it that women who have similar levels of education, come from the same socioeconomic background, and enter the same occupation, nevertheless emerge with different experiences and reactions to their wage employment?Women in the Thai apparel industry, Piya Pangsapa finds, have very different experiences of labor "militancy" and "non-militancy." Through interviews with women at two kinds of factories—one linked to the global economy through local capital investment and another through transnational capital—Pangsapa examines issues of worker consciousness with a focus on the process by which women become activists.She explores the different degrees of control and coercion employed by factory managers and shows how women were able to overcome conditions of adversity by relying on the close personal ties they developed with each other. 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.

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., 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.

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