This think piece was written by Karin Fernando and Chandima Arambepola as part of our ‘Re-wiring India's Digitalising Economy for Women's Rights and Well-being’ project, supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the European Union.
Supply chains linked to manufacturing have been instrumental in creating a pathway to economic progress in the Asia-Pacific region. Chief among the sub-sectors has been the apparel industry–with its promise of employment generation for women and largely uninterrupted supply chains with a global reach. The sector, however, has become highly specialized and competitive. With fast fashion trends and the pressure to keep up, the labor-intensive sector is fast replacing its simple cut-make-trim model with technological innovations.
But, how well are the respective economies holding up against this digitalization of their workplaces? What impact does this have on women, who have been traditionally assigned these factory floor jobs? What can be done at the policymaking level to respond to the possible displacement of female workers from the manufacturing and apparel sector?
Informed by feminist thinking on women and technology, this paper uses a sustainable labor lens to review secondary data and literature on the supply chains in a few select countries in the Asia-Pacific, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India from South Asia. This paper raises the question of whether automation of a labor-intensive sector such as apparels can displace women’s work, and draws out some measures to possibly minimize its impact in the face of rapid introduction of automation.
Read the full paper here.