Review of 'Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand', by Piya Pangsapa: Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2007, x þ 217 pp., US$18.95 (paper), ISBN 978080147376

Abstract

A defining feature of Thailand's industrialization experience since the 1960s, and especially during the economic boom years between 1985 and 1995, has been the incorporation of millions of young, single, rural migrant women into wage labor across industry, manufacturing, services, and informal sectors. By the late 1980s, almost four million women formed the vast majority of the workforce in labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing sectors that were the main drivers of growth. By the early 1990s, 80% of all workers in Thailand's 10 leading export industries were women. Over the same period, hundreds of thousands of other women were drawn into wage employment in the shopping malls, department stores, restaurants, cinemas, and entertainment areas as well as in the burgeoning informal sectors through sub-contracting, household labour, and piecework. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the contributions that women workers have made in Thailand's transformation from the largely agricultural economy and society that it was 40 years ago to the rapidly industrializing and globally engaged country that it is today.