https://globalmarch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/GJIA-Article-Tim-Ryan...
Western Consumers, South Asian Workers—A Conflict Forgotten by Whom? Timothy Ryan As over two billion people from South Asia and the West (principally the European Union and the United States) are inequitably connected in the global economy— a system often characterized by Western brands exploiting marginalized workers of color—the conflicts inherent in global capitalism’s explosive growth play out on a daily basis. Western consumers’ and multinational corporations’ attention waxes and wanes, but if there is a ‘forgotten conflict’ here, it is certainly not forgotten by the South Asian garment, seafood, crafts, agricultural, and other workers, who are at the forefront of fighting the inequities created by global supply chains.
This article will examine how the antisweatshop movement momentarily captures the limelight, advances, and then recedes, and why the relationship between consumers and workers is more realistically framed as a conflict pitting Western brands, local/Asian third-country producers, and South Asian factory workers against each other. The globe-girdling economic strategy brands and multinationals have evolved as a profit-maximizing strategy that has the corollary impact of rendering the entire supply chain more opaque and less accountable from both consumers’ and workers’ perspectives.
Timothy Ryan was the Asia Regional Program Director for Solidarity Center, based in Washington, DC, between 2001 and his retirement in 2021, and the Solidarity Center’s Country Director Indonesia and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. He currently is the Chairperson of the Global March Against Child Labour, and his writing on labor and politics has appeared in Foreign Policy, Thomson-Reuters, Foreign Policy in Focus, Huffington Post, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and in national newspapers in South Asia and Latin America
