Who Is Excluded from the Future? The Invisible Women of Cambodia’s Garment Sector

For many countries in the Global South, the garment sector is presented as the pathway to a bright and prosperous future: a source of wealth for both nations and workers. Yet for many women the reality is insecure contracts, cramped dormitories away from the family home, overcrowded and dangerous trucks to factory sites, and underpaid work. This thesis explores how this disjuncture is sustained in discourse and policy and how the everyday struggles of workers are invisibilised by the received wisdom of industrial growth.

This thesis contributes to scholarly debates on invisible labour and the future of work for a workforce of women with a very physical presence in Cambodia. Human geography is increasingly concerned with the future but there’s a gap in how people interact with futurity in their everyday lives. Building on literature on the future of work and invisible labour, I provide a space for workers to consider their own futures and to understand how women on the factory floor are interacting with the future in their day to day lives, as well as how the future of their every day is being shaped by power structures beyond the factory walls.

Future of work scholarship has recently have focused on the industry moving beyond its current state, and this futurology is hard wired into policy. This thesis therefore focuses on labour, its complexities and the fact that some elements of labour are more visible than others. Building on feminist conceptualisation of invisible labour, I extend ‘invisible labour’ beyond the home. I address a gap in the literature to understand invisible labour within formal labour spaces through firstly, cognitive dissonance, commodity fetishism and alienation whereby consumer and producer as individuals are separated intentionally by the global factory system. And secondly, through power and governance structures in which workers are subjugated, and their voices are marginalised and silenced within factory settings.

Their invisibility takes the form of de-valuation and expendability as individuals, hidden from past, present and most likely the future of decent work. Ultimately women are excluded from the modelling of the future. Alternative futures of work are therefore being pursued by women currently driving economic activity in Cambodia’s manufacturing sector, rejecting the prescribed futures set out by top-down decision makers and policy.