Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Kanchana Ruwanpura ’93

JUST FUTURES

A professor and researcher, Ruwanpura reflects on economic growth in South Asia, the tenets of equitable development, and the takeaways for the rest of the globe.

Since 2019, Sri Lanka has endured a snowballing economic crisis. Inflation and inequality have been amplified by national debt, political strife and economic mismanagement, terrorism, the pandemic, and now the far-reaching consequences of war in Ukraine. In March 2022, Sri Lankan demonstrators took to the streets to denounce fuel, power and food shortages and call for the president’s resignation. While these challenges developed under specific national conditions, they highlight the international threats of economic stagnation, rising authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism and environmental destruction. These strands converge in the research of Kanchana Ruwanpura ’93, a professor of human geography at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, whose newest book draws attention “to the collective agency of workers” in Sri Lanka’s garment industry. Ruwanpura, who was born in Sri Lanka, has spent her career studying how economic inequality interacts with social and political systems globally — and the people and communities impacted. She says the attempts to reclaim democracy in Sri Lanka, and other international movements for economic justice, suggest a promising if messy path to progress.

Your new book, Garments without Guilt?: Global Labour Justice and Ethical Codes in Sri Lankan Apparels, was published this spring by Cambridge University Press. What questions did you set out to explore, and what did your research reveal?

In a nutshell, I wanted to explore how the Sri Lankan garment industry mobilizes the concept of “garments without guilt,” what makes it an outlier in ethical sourcing and ethical manufacturing in the global garment industry, and how workers make sense of it.

The success of the Sri Lankan garment industry is a capital-management-labor story. This dynamic means that Sri Lankan apparel, from the viewpoint of labor, does very well in several areas. Work conditions within factories are usually safe and hygienic, child labor is scarce, regular employment is provided and often workers choose to work.

Yet, there are sore points: lack of a living wage and the inability to freely associate and collectively bargain. To quote former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “If you can’t afford to pay your employees a living wage, you do not have a viable business model.” Put differently, Sri Lankan manufacturers need to look at their salary distribution from corporate owners to managers to workers — and reconsider how workers ought to be paid a living wage. It will certainly go some way towards alleviating Sri Lanka’s growing and relative income inequality.

This last point also has global resonance. The global garment industry has a plethora of voluntary governance codes to protect and champion worker rights across the supply chain and global production. Yet, the commitment to living wages in supplier countries is poor. I would go so far as to argue that if retailers are unable to guarantee living wages to workers far away, all other ethical codes are on fragile ground.

This spring, the World Bank predicted that growth in South Asia “will be slower than previously projected, due to the impacts of the war in Ukraine and persistent economic challenges.” Considering these headwinds, what does development in the region look like long-term? What are the challenges of doing it equitably?

I suspect that these will be troubled times for the region, and maybe for the global South more generally. The ousting of Imran Khan in Pakistan, and Nepal expressing concerns about the sustainability of foreign reserves in the Central Bank, are potentially the tip of the iceberg. The World Bank’s announcements echo what many heterodox commentators have been underlining for a while; mainly that more and more countries in the global South are likely to find their debt is unsustainable and default. Sri Lanka may be the bellwether case, with the Central Bank declaring on April 12 that it is temporarily defaulting — the first time since Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948 from the British.

In Sri Lanka today, we have an authoritarian dynastic family at the helm; corruption, crony capitalism, militarization and economic policy mismanagement are all factors that explain current economic and political crisis. However, we also need to critically reflect on how an increasingly integrated global economy and open market policies have led authoritarian rulers to be omnipresent — from Sri Lanka and India to Turkey and even perhaps the U.K.

There is a sliver of hope. For the first time in Sri Lanka’s recent history, people have united — after at least four decades of war, violence and bloodshed — recognizing that ethnic and religious schisms were created and aggravated by the political class to mask growing inequality and economic differentiation. In Sri Lanka, public protests this spring and the first nationwide strike in 40 years come across to me as a reclaiming of the democratic deficit. To me, this is the silver lining. It will be a messy process, as politics and economics are, but people will keep claiming their political and economic rights. David Harvey talks about the current phase of neoliberalism as both authoritarian and anti-democratic; in Sri Lanka that phase is being pulled asunder. This is hope.

Where does the pandemic fit in to the story of Sri Lanka’s economic standing?

In Sri Lanka, the start of the pandemic was a positive story. A tripartite agreement was reached to protect jobs while industrial workers were on furlough; the country was effectively managing COVID-19 until early October 2020, when, likely because of corruption between a leading industrialist, the military and the state, community transmission began through a neglected outbreak at a factory setting. Ultimately, COVID-19 was a moment in which the flaws within the Sri Lankan apparel industry came to full view, including the poor housing conditions of workers, who are jammed into shared rooms in private boarding houses. Overcrowded and unregulated boarding rooms are all fertile ground for COVID to spread, and spread it did — rapidly amongst working class communities.

What long-term impediments — or opportunities to reimagine the economy — do you see in a post-COVID world?

I think it is premature to speak of post-COVID futures when much of the global South is still without vaccines; the WHO estimates that it will take another two to three years for everyone in the world to be vaccinated. The current phase is still living with COVID, although the war in Ukraine has overshadowed that reality.

How do we reimagine a future where war, soaring global prices, climate change and a pandemic are a daily feature? The pithy response would be to ask: how did we come to this? How do we tame and regulate capitalism to promote life-making activities, including the environment, which ironically is also essential for the global economy?

Feminist scholars past and present have underlined the need to redistribute wealth and resources to ensure that lifemaking and ecological protection are promoted. To redistribute wealth, we have to tax and, to paraphrase Adam Smith — often considered the father of economics — make those with the broadest shoulders pay their due.

Considering the global economy more broadly, what big changes do you see on the horizon, and what role can educators and researchers play in shaping that future for the better?

I think rising income inequalities and economic differentiation will get challenged globally — and politically, this may mean a pull to the radical right or to the left. It is this opening that, as researchers and educators, we should explore further. I think all of us in academia attempt to do this to varying degrees; in fact, it is because this was my experience as a William Smith student that I find myself as an educator and a researcher. Instead of ignorance and denial, if we adopt a reflective approach to our spaces of learning, educating and researching, then we are more able to acknowledge our possible complicity in structures that shape our unequal lives. Even as this moment seems bleak (and it is at one level), our constant attention to the ways in which we are complicit and have to compromise allows space to invest in a future that is more just — although the path to get there is likely to be both meaningful and messy.