Introduction

Sri Lankan labourers in the apparel sector are amongst the most educated workers in the global industry. Sri Lanka's human development achievements, however, came through decades of state intervention in the social welfare of its people, especially through investment in public education and health. The highly educated nature of Sri Lankan workers has played an important role in the apparel sector, cultivating an image in which ‘quality, reliability, and punctuality’, as management repeatedly informed me, are givens. As I noted in Chapter Four, it is an image that, according to suppliers, imbues buyers with the confidence to source from Sri Lanka.

The workforce that Sri Lankan apparel firms make proud proclamations about in their websites is then the product of previous state actions in response to labour agitation during the late colonial and pre-1977 periods (Jayawardena 1971, 1972; Kearney 1971). However, the critical role collective labour struggles played and how the state had to respond to them rarely get the attention or acknowledgement they deserve. They need to be taken account of in order to acknowledge how labour too shapes the state and industrial development (see also Chang 2003; Featherstone and Griffin 2016; Silver 2019; Palpacuer 2020). Chang (2003, 2014) makes this and other related points about the pivotal role of the state in industrial development in several places. He stresses its importance not just for East Asia, but also for most Western nations – including the USA, where protecting infant industries was key in the industrial development trajectory. While it may be that this level of mediation to secure a good quality of life for Sri Lankan citizens was a pre-1977 preoccupation, Sri Lankan apparel firms did not do it alone in the post-neoliberal landscape either. As I outline here, labour struggles were crucial for how the ethical sourcing strategy was secured for the apparel sector. In this chapter, I hone in on three such pivotal moments for post-liberalized Sri Lanka, with a particular emphasis on the post-recessionary phase (circa 2008 onwards).

In the sections to follow, I start by revisiting accounts by labour scholars and historians to allow me to place collective labour struggles in the chronicle of the country's political economy.