Figure 1. Garment workers on a ferry crossing the River Padma on Saturday, 1 August 2021. Source: Anonymous, on Facebook.

When the Bangladesh Inland Water Transportation Authority (BIWTA) unexpectedly announced the resumption of ferry services on 31 July 2021, migrant workers from across the country scrambled to return to Dhaka. The majority were garment factory workers responding to news that the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Employers’ Association (BGMEA) had secured government permission to reopen its factories immediately. Hundreds of thousands of men and women poured into ferry terminals and bus stops (see Figure 1). At one point, all major entry points into the capital city were choked and inaccessible. Evidently the 24-hour notice, prevailing fears of the Delta variant of Covid-19 and memories of being stigmatized for ‘irresponsible’ behaviour the previous year (in disturbingly similar circumstances) were not enough to deter the workers. The latter’s obvious desperation, corresponding scenes of ‘multitudes’ on the move in the Covid-19 period and the apparent indifference of the state to workers’ well-being captured the imagination of social media and the public alike. Viral images of a seemingly endless flow of bodies crammed cheek to jowl on ferries and in rickshaws or on foot generated intense anxiety and discomfort among segments of the capital’s middle- and-upper class inhabitants, fearful of the further spread of Covid-19 in their otherwise sheltered environments.

What can we learn about racialization and boundary-making projects in times of crisis from the stigma that came to be attached to these laboring bodies during the pandemic? In what ways are newly emergent forms of stigma continuous with or distinct from the social stigma to which garment workers in South Asia are subject in ‘normal’ times (Hewamanne 2008; Kabeer 2002; Lynch 2007; Siddiqi 2009)? How are such modes of Othering connected to the construction of garment workers as essential at one moment and expendable at others? Finally, what does the ensuing distribution of ‘blame’ conceal, and what does it magnify? In what follows, these questions are addressed through a transnational, multi-scalar analytic that reveals the global dimensions of what appears to be a local or national crisis.

The Covid-19 pandemic serves as a brutal reminder of the many ways ‘crises’ or ‘emergencies’ play themselves out along existing material and ideological fault lines, even as the latter are reconfigured and structurally re-inscribed (Bonilla-Silva 2015). Corresponding to the fear, panic and uncertainty generated by pandemic conditions, 2020 saw an alarming increase in the (re)production of stigmatized bodies and communities along well-worn racial, ethnic and religious fissures (Carswell, de Neve and Yuvaraj 2020; Ruwanpura 2022; Siddiqi 2022). Like the pandemic itself, these developments have been global. Targeted as dangerous and irresponsible vectors of disease, ‘Asians’ in the United States, or Muslims and others (those who ‘look Chinese’) in India, for instance, were vilified in dominant nationalist imaginaries and frequently targeted with violence (Ahmad 2020). At the same time, mobile transnational citizens found themselves framed as racialized threats (Gill 2021). Indeed, the pandemic has produced a fertile environment for redrawing social, political and spatial boundaries of insider and outsider, normal and pathological, familiar and foreign (Ashraf and Mol 2020). Fear of the contagion’s border-crossing propensities rendered suspect otherwise unmarked bodies, making them dangerous ‘enemies within’, as happened with expatriate populations (probashi) who were forced to return to Bangladesh from viral hotspots, such as Italy. As one scholar notes, the purported ‘misconduct’ of the probashi, rather than the lack of preparedness of the state, initially dominated images and imaginations of the coronavirus outbreak, in large part due to media depictions of ‘ignorant, selfish, and unruly returnees’ unwilling or incapable of following public health protocols (Ahasan 2020).

The pandemic also threw into sharp relief fundamental paradoxes embedded in the category of the essential worker. The very people deemed essential – so called frontline workers – also appeared to be the most dispensable and most vulnerable to the disease. There is now a substantial body of scholarship on migrant labour, essential workers and the politics of expendability and othering. Most of this work focuses on international migrants in Europe and North America. This paper moves the focus to the Global South, specifically to Bangladesh and the internal migrants who constitute the bulk of the labour force in the garment export industry.

The effects of Covid-19 dramatized yet again the fragilities and asymmetries built into global supply chains and the marginal structural location of Bangladesh – the world’s second largest clothing manufacturer – within the apparel supply chain (Saxena 2017; Siddiqi 2020; Tighe 2016). It was a reminder that the distribution of risk is highly asymmetric and falls disproportionately on gendered, classed and raced laboring bodies at the bottom of the chain, usually located in the Global South (Mezzadri 2017; Miller 2013; Prentice and de Neve 2017; Wikramasinge and Coe 2021). The impact of the cancellation and non-payment of existing orders (around 90%) was immediate and devastating. In a cascade effect, hundreds of factories closed down more or less overnight, leaving over a million out of a four million strong workforce jobless or furloughed. The material consequences for the national economy and for workers in this critical industry, which accounts for around 80 percent of Bangladesh’s total exports, have been well-documented (see, for instance, Anner 2020; Ali et al. 2021, Siddiqi 2020). The government and factory owners have been rightly criticized for policy decisions that prioritized safeguarding the industry over the welfare of its workers.

Little attention has been paid to the ways in which pandemic discourses of stigmatization and othering congealed in and through the bodies of garment workers, or the relationship between Bangladesh’s Covid-19 containment policies and its marginal structural position in the global apparel supply chain. Represented as productive, desirable citizens in non-emergency times, garment workers found themselves deeply stigmatized and made expendable, even as the garment industry and the workers came to be hailed as essential. At the heart of the paper is the question of how ostensibly essential labor is made expendable through governmental techniques and discursive practices that draw on gendered and classed tropes with strong colonial precedents. These contextually and historically specific techniques and practices intersect with the global racial hierarchies embedded in apparel supply chains, contributing to the racialization of Bangladeshi garment workers as dispensable labour during the pandemic.

What logics are at work in the making of the garment industry as essential, as a zone of exception, such that exclusionary state policies and the prioritization of the ‘needs’ of the garment factory owners over the welfare of their workers appeared to be necessary, indeed essential, in an emergency? How do we account for what appeared to be the state’s apparent refusal to manage or regulate this particular population? We approach these questions using a transnational feminist lens, taking into account the mediation of nation, race, caste/class, imperialism and geopolitics in the production of difference (Abu-Lughod 2013; Alexander and Mohanty 1996; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Tambe and Thayer 2021). At the same time, we critically foreground the relatively neglected category of class in re-animating projects of Othering and racialization in the field of Bangladesh Studies, especially in relation to an otherwise excellent body of scholarship on the garment industry that takes gender as its primary organizing category.

As we show, state ‘indifference,’ public health-related governance techniques, corporate rhetoric and media discourses effectively re-distributed blame for the virus on to garment workers (and to a lesser degree on to foreign returnees, that is, on migrant labor also of ‘lower class’ standing). The redistribution of values attached to gendered labouring bodies relied on longstanding middle-class anxieties that separate and hierarchize manual from intellectual labour. Pandemic discourses draw on and amplify an enduring grid of valuation in which working-class populations are understood to be not quite civilized or developed, always on the verge of irrationality or unruliness, and who must be disciplined accordingly. In this respect, older colonial tropes are joined to newer classed anxieties and developmentalism. These discourses are neither timeless nor stable; informed by colonial modes of exclusion and vilification, they are critically reconfigured by the neoliberal logic that structures power along the global apparel supply chain.

The pandemic has dramatically reconfigured ethnographic research methodologies. This paper is based on multiple online and offline research rather than classic ethnographic fieldwork, informed by the dictates of digital ethnography.¹ Through social media platforms such as Facebook and Tiktok, we were able to track workers’ responses to shifting policy directives, as well as to “misinformation” emanating from management and mainstream media. This entailed following individual status updates at times, and at other moments, a close reading of debates on popular threads. We also collected newspaper clips from major news outlets in Bangladesh (and selected international media) for the last eighteen months and tracked coverage on private television channels on Facebook. It soon became clear that the latter reported on incidences such as police brutality toward protesting workers that were generally ignored or intentionally avoided by more corporatized mainstream media outlets. In the early months of the pandemic, we also spoke on zoom with several labour leaders and workers.

The Pandemic and Its Disorders: Colonial Continuities

Perhaps in a bid to stem criticism of its handling of the pandemic, at certain moments the BGMEA invoked explicitly classed language. Then President Dr Rubana Huq declared at one point that ‘sromikder shorire ekta alada shokti thake,’ which roughly translates as ‘working class bodies possess a distinct kind of strength.’ Colonial tropes of effeminate middle-class bhadralok Bengalis, too effete for manual labour, are turned around here to assert that working-class bodies are biologically less vulnerable to disease. The idea of working people possessing exceptional or singular strength maps on to widely shared middle-class tropes of divisions between mind and body. As noted earlier, historically, labouring bodies have been imagined in opposition to the bhadrolok classes. When asked why employees should not be paid even if factories remain closed, owners frequent invoked the phrase ‘sromik pala’ (literally rearing or bringing up workers, as in animal husbandry) to mark their relations to their workers. The verb pala is used generally with reference to pets or poultry, as in raising pets, raising children in the abstract, or fostering an inferior dependent. The implication is that paying wages under emergency conditions would be equivalent to treating workers like pets, who expect to be fed and housed but offer nothing in return. Here workers are constructed not as agentive contract bearers but in a relationship of dependence made possible only by the generosity of the owner. The lines between humans and animals become blurred in this imagery, even as racialized class lines are sharpened. Dehumanized and animalized, their subjectivities as workers with rights protected by unions or the state are completely erased. Bestiary tropes, as Frantz Fanon noted long ago, are critical to drawing lines between civilized and uncivilized. Colonial racialized tropes of the lazy native are also folded into bhadralok constructions of the labouring classes. In relation to paying wages, a question that workers and labour advocates faced repeatedly is why and for how long factory owners should ‘support workers to sit idle and eat’. It is difficult to capture the layers and the nuances of ‘boshe boshe khawano,’ a Bengali term that implies laziness and exploiting hospitality. Elora Chowdhury reports that labour organizer Taslima Akter was asked a version of this question on live television (Chowdhury 2020: 619). Such ‘misrecognition’ is made possible by prior associations and markers of class and labour. The English term ‘freeloaders’ comes closest to capture the meaning of both sromik pala and boshe boshe khawa. Here we see a complex intersectionality at work — colonial racial tropes intersecting with classed and gendered discourses to produce a narrative that valorizes otherwise exploitative working conditions and constructs workers as non-agentic and animal-like, in need of paternalist disciplining.

The cultural and political category of bhadralok was crystallized in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal, as an increasingly English educated, professional and salaried urban middle income group, largely upper-caste Hindu, sought to distance itself from ‘backward’ agricultural and cultivating classes, who came to be seen as chotolok (literally ‘small people’). As an emergent category, bhadralok self-presentation hinged on the rejection of manual labour, especially ploughing and cultivating the fields. Manual work set the boundary between those who associated themselves with the life of the mind and the so-called lower orders, the latter associated with unruliness and sexual/moral laxity. This took place at a time when Hinduism itself was undergoing redefinition, so that the binary between elite and non-elite also separated intellectual labour from ritual practices considered the work of chotolok. In short, bhadralok subjectivities were constituted through and against caste/classed, gendered, and sexualized others. This form of indigenous othering intersects with the racialized hierarchy in the global garment industry, contributing to the social stigmatization and troubled mobility trajectories of female garment workers in Bangladesh.

Bhadralok status refers to an ethos or world view as much as it does class or status (Roy 2016: 23). What might be called bhadralok sentiment or mentality saturates everyday interactions in contemporary Bangladesh, not least in phrases such as ‘arguing like a rickshaw wallah’s wife’ (that is, in an ‘uncultured’, ‘unladylike’ manner, within hearing of the public, with no sense of propriety or privacy) or ‘made-up like a garment worker’ (a reference to garish make-up and clothing, aspiring to but failing to emulate middle class tastes). Class boundaries are constantly secured through such gendered and sexualized tropes.

Gender and class hierarchies materialized through spatial disciplining and distancing map on to dominant development and middle-class concerns over subaltern others. These discursive and spatial techniques of discipline have long enduring colonial legacies. Dhaka city has always had containment zones carved out on the basis of class: the elite Gulshan residential area is now proudly a ‘beggar-free’ zone, and the diplomatic zone of Baridhara was declared Lungi-free¹⁰ for a while (Begum 2020; Habib 2014; Lata 2020). These zones of containment, like urban planning practices in general in Bangladesh, are rooted in colonial modes of planning and dividing up the city (Baffoe and Roy 2022). They echo colonial urban-management practices that carved out spaces marked by racial and class segregation. The expulsion of ‘undesirable’ populations in the name of beautification or for ostensibly health and sanitation purposes also has its roots in colonial management ideologies (Chhabria 2019). In this backdrop, one scholar insists that official contempt for the poor constitutes a major feature of urban governance in Bangladesh today (Lata 2020). In her words, cities such as Dhaka, ‘the poor do not fit well with a new urban vision’, being subject instead to discourses that portray them as criminals, producers of filth and encroachers (ibid.: 4).¹¹ Expendable labour, even if it is also essential, must be contained in particular zones, slums being the most obvious. The project of disciplining and keeping out working-class bodies is explicit and open in contemporary Bangladesh.