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The Asian Connection: The U.S.-Caribbean Apparel Circuit and a New Model of Industrial Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Cecilia Green
Cecilia Green*
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University
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This article seeks to accomplish four goals. First, it will examine the historical circumstances of the rise of the U.S.-Caribbean garment production circuit from the standpoint of economic restructuring within the U.S. industry and U.S.-Caribbean trade relations and from the perspective of the major political interests involved. It will also examine the impact of this restructuring on local garment sectors and the wider host economies in the Caribbean. The article will then explore the role of the “Big Three” Asian suppliers in the contemporary restructuring as well as their role in the offshore garment sector in the Caribbean. The latter effort constitutes a preliminary investigation of an emerging area of political and scholarly interest, and it will be partly integrated into the treatment of the first two topics. Finally, while I will refer more broadly to the major garment-producing Caribbean islands, Jamaica will provide a case-study focus for my remarks here. The essay will conclude by looking briefly at the “free-zone” or “free-trade-zone” model of industrial relations and its impact on older traditions of trade unionism and labor-management practices, taking the experience of a number of Hong Kongese garment factories in the state-owned Kingston and Garmex Free Zones in Kingston, Jamaica, as an example.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , 1998 , pp. 7 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I wish to thank in particular two anonymous LARR reviewers whose extensive useful comments contributed to considerable improvement and fine-tuning of an earlier draft of this article.

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