Hearing the unheard: theorising the moral fabric against labour precarity

Supply chains operate within a capitalist system driven by patriarchy (Kothari et al., 2019) and rooted in labour exploitation (Quijano, 2000). Despite comprising millions of workers across fragmented production networks, they remain largely invisible to those who govern and profit from their labour (Marques et al., 2025; Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025). For decades, supply chain management has prioritised operational and cost performance at the expense of social and environmental objectives (Hohn and Durach, 2023; Montabon et al., 2016). Grounded in capitalist shareholder primacy, dominant efficiency-driven strategies focused on profit and compliance have failed to account for labour conditions, thereby perpetuating the systemic challenges workers face (Rogerson et al., 2025). Market-based, instrumental governance mechanisms, such as audits and corporate social responsibility programmes, have been criticised for incentivising symbolic compliance while failing to bring about meaningful change (Meehan and Pinnington, 2021; Le et al., 2025). Structural inequalities and power asymmetries sustain firms' relational distance from suppliers and workers, who bear the greatest risks (Gold and Schleper, 2017; LeBaron, 2021). Competing rhetorical framings of responsibility leave the question of who bears the cost of inaction conveniently unresolved (Gutierrez-Huerter et al., 2023). Unless the foundational assumptions of operations and supply chain management (OSCM) are revisited (Luzzini et al., 2024; Matthews et al., 2016) and the structural mechanisms through which global supply chains produce harm are challenged (Marques et al., 2025; Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025), precarious labour conditions will remain a foreseeable systemic outcome (Le et al., 2025).

Operating within labour-intensive global supply chains, the garment industry exemplifies these dynamics with particular intensity (Huq et al., 2014; Karaosman et al., 2023). Cost pressures normalise subcontracting and informality, while dominant buyers leverage their purchasing power to demand lower prices, shorter lead times and greater flexibility in response to abrupt order changes (Anner, 2019). Risks are systematically transferred to the most vulnerable actors in the form of precarious contracts, excessive overtime and suppressed wages (Hickel et al., 2024; Soundararajan and Brammer, 2018).

Recognising workers as individuals embedded within complex cultural and political contexts is a prerequisite for any meaningful interrogation of labour conditions (Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025; Stephens et al., 2024). Universalised and decontextualised approaches impose external logics that silence situated realities and legitimise hypocritical practices (Glover and Touboulic, 2020). Without centring workers' lived realities and indigenous knowledge, social interventions risk reproducing the very problems they claim to address (Corbett, 2024; Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025). Yet, although numerous OSCM studies have examined labour conditions, workers are often treated as voiceless and obedient actors (Le et al., 2025) while the terms of remediation are defined by those most physically and emotionally distant from these conditions (Huq et al., 2014). The agentic power of labour remains unrecognised, and its behavioural, relational and situated dimensions are rendered systematically invisible (Glover, 2020). Hearing the unheard therefore requires critical engagement with both the foundational assumptions and the epistemic approaches that shape OSCM research (McCarthy et al., 2018; Soundararajan et al., 2021).

This study builds on focused ethnography conducted alongside garment workers. The research context is a site where structural precarity is made substantially evident within globalised garment supply chains, with the production stage mainly employing a migrant and temporary workforce. Moving beyond the documentation of precarious conditions, the study asks: How does OSCM, ruled by patriarchal logics, perpetuate precarity on a garment factory shop floor? How do garment workers respond to structural precarity within the conditions in which they are embedded?

Capitalism is an economic system rooted in labour exploitation (Quijano, 2000), which can be understood as the latest stage of patriarchy (Kothari et al., 2019). Patriarchy operates as a self-reinforcing logic that normalises hierarchical control through dominant power and rule-based governance (Demaria and Kothari, 2017; Narrain, 2017), privileging wealth accumulation over social reproduction (LeBaron, 2015; Quijano, 2000), often at the expense of those who sustain the system, and generating power asymmetries that simultaneously produce great wealth and great poverty (Tsing, 2009). In OSCM, this logic is deeply embedded in the objectives of profit maximisation, efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness (Montabon et al., 2016; Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025; Wiengarten et al., 2021). Buying firms pursue cost reduction through cost-extractive standards, predatory purchasing practices and penalty-based supplier management, systematically disregarding suppliers' and workers' needs (Anner, 2019; Karaosman and Marshall, 2023). Flexibility is enforced through informal and temporary labour practices and through irregular, unstable orders imposed on upstream actors (Huq et al., 2014; Marques et al., 2025), while extreme responsiveness concentrates risk on the most vulnerable actors in the chain (Sodhi and Tang, 2021).

Where supply chains are governed by patriarchal logics, relationships are characterised by power hierarchies that increase the dependency of, and pressure on, weaker parties to absorb adverse conditions, since exit from key relationships carries prohibitive costs (Fletcher and Trautrims, 2024; Karaosman et al., 2023). Underpinning economic efficiency measures guide operations to suppress labour costs (Tsing, 2009; Wiengarten et al., 2021), prioritising capital extraction over the conditions of those who labour within them (Kothari et al., 2019). This dynamic exacerbates precarious working conditions and exposes workers to structural precarity (Lewis et al., 2015), an entangled condition of powerlessness, economic dependence and social marginalisation (Wang, 2025; Williams et al., 2025). It manifests in forms of employment precarity, labour intensification and social and communal exclusion embedded within the organisation of work (Campbell and Price, 2016; Peticca-Harris et al., 2025). Workers' well-being requires conditions in which their labour is recognised and their dignity affirmed (Vieno, 2023), yet access to such conditions is contingent on their position within hierarchies shaped by power (Soundararajan et al., 2021). The complex expressions of capitalism result in vulnerability (Omidi et al., 2023), produced and reproduced through the structures that govern production (Tsing, 2009).

Labour-intensive sectors such as food and fashion have been criticised for treating labour as a commodity (Marques et al., 2025; Thompson and Vincent, 2010), thereby disassociating workers from the networks of recognition and relation that render labour humanly significant (Vieno, 2023). Social ties and relations constitute a vital resource in building supply chain partnerships (Celestini et al., 2022), yet the extent to which actors under structural precarity can sustain, manage or disrupt these relations remains poorly understood (Soundararajan et al., 2021). Patriarchal logics reinforce the invisibility of these actors, who are the core constituents of supply chains (Marques et al., 2025), leaving the fundamental assumptions, mechanisms and conditions that generate structural precarity largely unchallenged (McCarthy et al., 2022; Soundararajan et al., 2021).

Governance approaches embedded in patriarchal logics produce epistemic conditions in which voices different from dominant ones are routinely silenced (Gilligan, 1982, 1995). They normalise relational detachment at the expense of already vulnerable actors, whose voices, even when formally included, are interpreted and assimilated through dominant cultural and institutional framings (Chowdhury, 2023; Noddings, 1984).

The ethics of care responds to this condition by reorienting connection as a fundamental condition of human life, emphasising collective well-being through empathic, reciprocal and responsive relations (Held, 2005; Tronto, 1993). Reflecting feminist morality, Gilligan (1982, 1995) presents care as a socially constructed and ontologically diverse concept, closely related to empathy and attentiveness to relationships (Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012). The ethics of care recognises vulnerability, framing it as an embodied and relational openness towards others, a shared human condition that enables connection (Johansson and Wickström, 2023; Reed, 2026), while attending to relations and seeking to avoid harm (Gilligan, 1982, 1995; Held, 2005). Persons are understood as relational beings who are morally and epistemologically interdependent (Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012; Noddings, 1984). Owing to its potential for social good, the concept was later extended beyond individuals, with care situated as a social and political practice rooted in concrete, enduring and reciprocal relationships (Held, 2005), foregrounding moral democracy (Tronto, 1993).

Care manifests a form of ethical agency, crucial to interconnected relationships, through which people's needs are met and relations between them are sustained and repaired (Noddings, 1984). Care as a practice unfolds through several phases: caring about, the moral capacity to recognise need; caring for, the assumption of responsibility to respond; care-giving, the actual work of meeting need; and care-receiving, the response to care received that completes the cycle (Tronto, 1993). Tronto (2013) later extended this framework to include caring-with, portraying it as a co-constitutive relational process among participants grounded in solidarity and trust (Johansson and Wickström, 2023; Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012). It entails an inherently other-oriented dimension (Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012; Tronto, 2013), through which individuals' struggles can only be adequately addressed when their roots in broader social and political contexts are made visible (Reed, 2025; Wang, 2025). Table 1 synthesises the core constructs discussed in this section.

Despite its long presence in feminist scholarship, the ethic of care remains relatively underdeveloped in OSCM (McCarthy et al., 2018). Workers in labour-intensive supply chains are frequently marginalised, silenced and exposed to hazards and violence (Shivakumar and Jerrentrup, 2025), with deep power asymmetries concentrating precarious labour in industries where structural decisions are made exclusively at the top of global value chains (Guerra Scheiwiller et al., 2023; Karaosman et al., 2023). In this light, the ethics of care offer an alternative analytical and normative lens for humanising supply chain research in the service of societal wellbeing (Luzzini et al., 2024; Pagell and Wilhelm, 2025), enabling a deeper understanding of what care means in practice in the critical context of global supply chains (Gümüsay and Reinecke, 2024).

People are inherently embedded in social contexts (Ehrenreich, 2002). An ethnographic approach to knowledge creation involves full immersion in a particular setting to interpret and understand phenomena from the inside out (Jerolmack and Khan, 2018), examining the social world from a naturalistic stance by living in the field rather than merely visiting, while attending carefully to context and background (Emerson et al., 2011; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). Focused ethnography is a particular form well suited to examining clearly delineated social phenomena involving fragmented subpopulations or specialised fields of inquiry (Trundle and Phillips, 2023). The method employs intensive immersion that, although time-compressed, remains powerful in supporting analytically deep inquiry (Knoblauch, 2005; Wall, 2014).

Ethnography offers a strong methodological fit with labour studies through its emphasis on context and lived realities (Pun, 2005). This study is situated in a southern China urban village densely populated with garment factories supplying a global fashion giant, where migrant workers constitute most of the population (see  Appendix 1). An interpretivist-constructivist positioning enables the unpacking of these realities from within, attending to how workers navigate and respond to the conditions that structure their lives (Geertz, 2001).

Abductive reflexivity was essential throughout the ethnographic research process, shaping how field encounters were approached, interpreted and progressively reoriented over time (England, 1994; Jerolmack and Khan, 2018). The study initially intended to focus on how global supply chains shape workers' lived experience and, consequently, their well-being. The original protocol centred on livelihoods, physical and psychological well-being, as well as workers' responses (e.g. staying or exiting) and motivations. As the labour rhythm was intense and demanding, leaving little time or space for reflection, fieldwork was structured into two phases separated by a three-week interval (Table 2) to ensure reflexive accountability (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). This pause provided an opportunity to step back from the intensity of fieldwork and to discuss and recalibrate the research protocol (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019; Jerolmack and Khan, 2018) based on first-hand experience and a deeper understanding of factory work. Consequently, the research became more attentive to workers' interactions, relationships and agentic capacities as contextualised responses to the system in which they are embedded.

Our approach to accessing the field differed fundamentally from engaging workers through brands or formal channels, which risk mediation or may be perceived by workers as reflecting dominant power. The team began by collecting video footage of garment factory work, and scenes from a particular urban village – a key production hub for a global fashion giant – drew our attention. Further evidence was gathered through formal and informal channels to understand the work regime, operations and hiring practices in the region, confirming that this would be an appropriate setting due to its central role in a global supply chain and the feasibility of gaining access. At this stage, one researcher entered the field by seeking temporary employment as a trimmer, a garment role characterised by extremely high labour turnover in the region while requiring minimal prior experience.

Researchers' self-reflexivity regarding positionality and the field is central to the feminist research approach adopted in this study (Deutsch, 2004). The field was never treated merely as a source of data; instead, reciprocal relationships were grounded in empathy and respect through the process of becoming garment workers (England, 1994). In the first fieldwork phase, the researcher presented herself as a college student seeking temporary income during a school break. While this was genuine and credible, this positioning created a sense of difference, as the researcher did not share the same livelihood urgency as workers. In the second phase, this was adjusted by having another researcher join as an ordinary worker, accessing temporary employment through village job-posting boards and working under the same conditions and schedules as factory workers (Strudwick, 2019).

This study seeks to avoid reproducing hierarchical dynamics that position the field and labour as subjects of externally imposed procedures (Chowdhury, 2023). Recognising the prevalence of informal workers operating outside institutional frameworks, formal procedures and written consent are culturally unfamiliar instruments that would immediately dissolve the relational trust through which the study was made possible. They risk enacting forms of intrusion that the research encounter itself is unable to repair (Shivakumar and Jerrentrup, 2025). To avoid invoking the logic of investigation, often familiar to workers as an instrument of institutional power that may foreclose authentic encounter, the fieldwork began in a covert manner. Disclosure of the researchers' identity and intent was planned for an appropriate and considered moment (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019) to ensure ethical sensitivity. The transition from covert to overt status took place at a later stage of the fieldwork, when sufficient privacy on the shop floor allowed for disclosure through one-to-one conversations rather than a collective announcement, and trust had been established throughout the process. This was met with a warm reception, resulting in verbal consent for participants' stories to be represented. Verbal and flexible forms of agreement were prioritised over formal protocols to ensure that consent aligned with workers' customary practices (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019; Jerolmack and Khan, 2018). Where any worker withheld agreement, the related observations would have been removed without question. Protecting workers and factories from identification remained a core commitment, and all identifiable information has been intentionally omitted.

Immersed in the same physical and emotional environment as workers, the researchers engaged in embodied and dialogical encounters rooted in epistemic proximity (Jerolmack and Khan, 2018). Primary data were gathered through informal and unstructured conversations, attentive observations and interactions on the shop floor during work and breaks, complemented by other forms of data (Table 2). Fieldnote documentation followed an anthropological approach, open and neutral in stance, capturing work processes, relations and interactions, fragments of conversations, tensions and conflicts, as well as the researchers' own feelings and reflections, without prematurely selecting what to record (Emerson et al., 2011; Geertz, 2001). Given the demanding working hours as workers, jottings and self-recorded audio diaries served as the primary documentation tools, recorded privately during breaks and after night shifts and transcribed and reviewed whenever conditions allowed (Emerson et al., 2011; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). This enabled immediate reflection, tracing emotional trajectories and reflexivity and laying the foundation for later analytic memos (Golden-Biddle and Locke, 1993). Triangulation was achieved through cross-phase comparison, sustained contact with workers and supervisors after fieldwork and supplementary public materials (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). Together with the fieldnotes, the team kept research diaries reflecting researchers' positionality, attentive to how it may have shaped the production and interpretation of knowledge (Jerolmack and Khan, 2018). The fieldwork is understood as a process of co-becoming (Tsing, 2015), marked by epistemic proximity, kinship and mutual influence.

Data analysis unfolded as an iterative, interpretive engagement with the material, anchored in perspectival theorising that foregrounds alternative conceptualisations and contextually grounded interpretations (Cornelissen et al., 2024; Darby et al., 2019). Analysis began in the field. Participating as workers, the team accumulated first-hand experience and developed reflexive analytic memos in which emergent themes, patterns and tensions were sketched for further theoretical articulation (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2019). Initial coding followed an open coding approach to construct an interpretive narrative of the data (Emerson et al., 2011). Through iterative cycles between empirical material, conceptual development and manuscript revision, the analysis converged on the ethics of care, with the coding structure (see  Appendix 2) continuously refined to sharpen interpretation (Golden-Biddle and Locke, 1993).

Narrated in the first person, the following three vignettes foreground workers' voices, honouring their lived realities and agentic capacities through three distinct moments in which care becomes an act of ethical agency directed towards one another: when a novice joins, when “everyone is the same” and when orders never end.

This was the first scene after I started at the second plant (Factory Z), where I was employed. I thanked the woman and did not dare say another word. I returned to my stool and began working through the bundle, when I soon realised that the trimmer was too blunt. I had hundreds of hours ahead: with each thread requiring several attempts to trim, it would not suffice. I needed to get a pair of my own. As I then understood, a “proper trimmer” always had her own.

The trimming section is the first stage of the garment finishing division, which flows into ironing, piece-by-piece quality checks, packaging and warehousing (shipping). Trimmers were expected to bring finished bundles of garments to the ironing station once completed. Slightly over an hour later, I managed to deliver my first bundle of 20 units to the mountain-high pile behind the ironing workers by the window. While returning to my spot, I gathered the courage to ask Chen, seated beside me, where she had bought her scissors. Workers in this village are predominantly rural migrants from other regions of the country, which is reflected in their strong regional accents. Chen was one of those whom I found particularly difficult to understand.

In the following days, I also came to notice that whenever I hesitated over an unfamiliar garment, pausing for too long to figure things out, someone would appear to offer guidance before I had a chance to ask. Workers would spontaneously step in the moment a novice's confusion became apparent. No one was instructed or monitored to do so. It felt like a consistent, unspoken pact, an attentiveness and support extended quietly to the “little ones”.

Chen was among the most attentive to me. While her hands kept moving, her eyes would drift across the piles of garments between us towards the work in my hands. She had joined the factory only two months earlier. Having shown up for 20 consecutive days, she was already classified as a “steady” worker, qualifying for a small monthly housing subsidy. Yet this distinction offered little protection, as the piece-rate payment system bore equally on both temporary and “steady” workers. It did not take long for me to understand why Chen kept her attention on me, as she eventually expressed her concern.

Her conclusion was clear: at my pace, trimming work would not sustain my livelihood. Day after day, she encouraged me to find other work, suggesting waitressing, retail or hotel reception – anything but garment work. In her words, “Only older women like us do this kind of work”, adding that I was too young and decent to be trapped in work of this kind.

She was so concerned about the life of a novice that her care soon extended beyond words. I felt guilty each time I fell short of the hundred-yuan daily threshold she had set for me, as I could not refuse her insistence on quietly shifting simpler bundles from her own allocation to mine, so as not to disturb the section's equilibrium. I was fully aware that exchanging easier tasks for mine meant she would take on the more burdensome ones herself. To my surprise, she eventually began sharing what might be called survival knowledge: certain thread ends could be left untrimmed, as no one would ever notice.

It would be strange to admit that what I felt in response was not gratitude alone but also a sense of obligation. It was a pull towards mastering the trimming work that had little to do with research and more with not wanting her care to be wasted on someone undeserving. Amid the help and generosity I received from fellow workers, I felt a persistent guilt in accepting their support in “making a living”. Out of a sense of reciprocity, I became fully transparent with the workers within a few days. I did not expect that they would continue to care for me even after learning that I was not there to earn a living. This fostered a sense of collectivity, to the point that I came to see myself as an actual trimmer, and I sensed a shift in the section as I began to be accepted as one of them. I worked hard to improve my trimming skills so as not to benefit unfairly from their support. Chen recognised my effort. A few days later, when the supervisor passed by and teased that I would soon become a “professional trimmer”, Chen corrected him without hesitation: “She already is!”

Though generosity was never unconditional. Care was something earned and sustained, not exploited. This became evident in the case of a novice who routinely selected easier bundles and avoided more complicated tasks by claiming inability. What followed were jokes about her “speed” and teasing remarks intended to keep certain tasks out of her reach.

In this space, care towards novices was never a single gesture. It was a collective practice built on attentiveness to the distinct needs of different individuals at different moments, resulting in plural expressions of caregiving in practice. Workers' generosity rested on an implicit reciprocity, an unspoken expectation that novices were there to learn and grow, to integrate and contribute and to support one another.

Among all the garments that passed through the trimming section, one dress had earned its own nickname: huahua (flowery). It was the only piece with a name, and for good reason. From a trimmer's perspective, huahua was a headache. Trimmers' pay was based on piece rates, regardless of the labour involved, yet huahua – effectively a top and a skirt joined together – counted as a single “one-piece”. To make matters worse, its design details – an elasticated off-shoulder neckline, puffed sleeves, a gathered waistband and a multi-panel skirt – multiplied the number of thread ends that needed trimming. huahua took significantly longer and required more effort to process than anything else. Yet it was a bestseller, appearing on the trimming table almost every day.

Becoming a trimmer myself, I came to see the dark side of this renowned small-batch, on-demand production model and how its costs were borne by the factory and its workers. The setting in which I was embedded was one where absolute fairness was structurally impossible: the agile production model was sustained by a purchasing tactic of ultra-low minimum order quantities produced on demand, which translated into persistent chaos on the factory shop floor. Every day, the number of bundles per garment model was unpredictable and rarely matched the available workers; the number of units per bundle also varied significantly, from single digits to over eighty pieces. Urgent orders frequently arrived at short notice, disrupting the existing workflow and prioritised prototypes meant constant interruptions and extremely tight lead times. Any delay in delivery would incur economic penalties from “the company”, in the workers' own terms. Combined with high labour turnover resulting from precarious working conditions, these garment factories were simply not a context conducive to effective production planning.

Owing to the significant differences in throughput time, any unbalanced work distribution meant varying hourly earnings under the piece-rate system, in addition to already suppressed incomes. It was not surprising to learn that workers who made a living from trimming preferred to avoid complicated tasks. Fair distribution among workers was never guaranteed and became a daily puzzle to solve. Whenever huahua appeared, it became a quiet spark beneath the surface, and a subtle tension developed across the section.

Peng had caught my attention from my first day in the section. Whenever a trimmer was about to take a new bundle to work on, she would watch and, at certain moments, intervene. I was so curious that I once tentatively asked Chen what I should be doing next. She redirected me without hesitation: ask Peng.

The factory's sewing division occupies another floor in the same building, employing over 50 workers. Several times a day, once a batch of bundles is completed, a few male workers transport freshly sewn pieces down to the finishing division using large cargo carts. Orders are relentless, and there is never enough space in the trimming section to stack all the arriving bundles. When storage space runs out, transport workers lay woven sacks on the floor wherever they can find space and stuff garments into them, frequently blocking the aisles.

Peng paid close attention whenever the supervisor arrived to announce which bundles were part of urgent orders. She developed a habit of helping distribute upcoming work during lunch and dinner breaks, pulling garments out of the woven sacks and piling them in the narrow space beside each worker's seat. It was her break too, yet she would stay behind to lay out the work before the others returned. Whenever the bundles allowed, her aim was to give every trimmer an identical bundle: same garment, same count. This would mean identical throughput and, as closely as the system permitted, identical pay.

It was a quiet but visible form of compensation in Peng's way of ensuring that no one took advantage of others while also ensuring that no one was left at a disadvantage. There were neither formal rules nor authority. Peng was, like everyone else, an ordinary trimmer with no formal title, yet she recognised that the only way to protect every worker was to ensure the shop floor operated in equality. Over time, her role became impossible to ignore, even for the supervisor. When urgent orders arrived and a particular sequence needed to be maintained in the trimming section, he would seek her out directly. Care in this case extended beyond a one-directional act, developing through individual agentic actions and collective response. The trust that trimmers placed in Peng's sense of equality, attentiveness to fairness and willingness to intervene had quietly settled into an unspoken tradition: when in doubt about what to pick up next, ask Peng.

A national holiday fell in the middle of the fieldwork. The factory I was working in at the time was supposed to be closed, but the pressure of on-demand orders arriving from the brand with penalising lead times made closure effectively impossible. The workload was evident to everyone, and with no possibility of planning, there had been no confirmation of arrangements until the night before. While we were busy trimming, the supervisor arrived with a visibly apologetic expression and tentatively asked whether anyone would be willing to come in on the holiday. The workers, and I among them, quickly inferred two things: the next day was theoretically a day off; yet the factory would remain open for those who wished to come. A silence fell over the shop floor. It had been the first possible day off in over two months. As the news settled in, I overheard fellow workers beginning to talk about how they would spend the day off. In private, I volunteered myself to the supervisor. He, grateful, told me that I could come at any time, with no need to follow the ordinary work schedule.

The next day, I arrived an hour later than usual. Only a handful of workers had shown up on the shop floor. At the trimming station, there were only myself and another young novice who had come in to earn her tuition fees during her school holiday. The ironing and packaging sections were both unattended. When I spotted the supervisor, he appeared visibly concerned that the workers present that day could hardly form a production line capable of meeting delivery schedules. The factory offered daily lunch subsidies to present workers in the form of food vouchers, each linked to a specific “canteen” in the area. As I had come in on a holiday, he kindly offered me one from what he called “the best one”. I gathered my courage and asked if I could join him for lunch. He did not refuse.

The village was not small, yet the workers – migrants from other regions of the country who stayed only to make a living – would spend time together even on their days off. It was an extraordinarily hot day. At the canteen, we bumped into fellow workers who were chatting beneath the barely perceptible breeze of a ceiling fan. Seeing the supervisor, they broke into dialect. It took me a moment to piece together what they were discussing: the night before, Peng had intervened in a dispute in the trimming section and, at one point, had slapped the table. Peng argued that without her intervention, things would have escalated. The supervisor made clear that he supported both her motivation and her capacity to act, only asking that she soften her approach. The conversation soon drifted towards the more pressing concern that there were not enough workers on the shop floor to meet the day's deadlines. I excused myself from the lunch table to find a space to record the field notes from the morning. It was only after returning to the factory that I understood what that conversation had implied: a few more workers had shown up, and a production line had assembled itself.

On ordinary days, the trimming section followed an unwritten rule: complicated garments were to be completed during the daytime so that by nightfall, the remaining work would be lighter for those still at the tables. However, relentless urgent orders often disrupted any possibility of planning, making this arrangement difficult to maintain. One might expect that under a piece-rate pay system, workers would focus solely on delivering their own units. Yet when operational pressure peaked, there was an impulse to share the burden – a collective response that cut across individual interest. On one such night, Han noticed at a glance that a fellow trimmer had drawn a bundle of sixty huahua with no realistic prospect of finishing on time alone; she simply offered, “Split it in half; I'll help you trim thirty.”

It was beyond my comprehension at that moment, but days later, I came to notice something had shifted in me. A feeling I had not expected: a sense of responsibility whispering that I too was part of this.

The unforgiving fluorescent light had been unrelenting since morning. By this hour, my eyes were too tired to catch the tiny thread ends with any confidence. Looking around the factory floor, garments were piled everywhere, and the pressure in the air to meet the day's delivery deadline was palpable. It was obvious that the division would be running well past midnight. Everyone was busy. The clothes waiting to be processed loomed like monsters to me; to the workers, this was probably just another ordinary day. It was only later that I started noticing unfamiliar faces appearing on the shop floor.

To me, these were all strangers, yet the ease with which they settled in suggested this was nothing out of the ordinary. At that precise moment, I felt an emotional bond and caring attachment between myself and the others. I was no longer a researcher, but simply one of the ordinary trimmers on the factory floor, shouldering the workload so that others would not be overburdened.

To be precise, it was never the workers but the factory that would receive penalties for missing delivery deadlines. Yet, as the factory offered them shelter and a predictable income, the workers responded with a sense of belonging and considered themselves part of a collective, protecting it from adverse consequences. Something that had been a vigil became, briefly, almost convivial. The warmth of a night on the shop floor was tangible and real.

The garment sector is known for its labour-intensive supply chains in which workers often experience long working hours, low pay and physically and psychologically demanding tasks (Anner, 2019; Shivakumar and Jerrentrup, 2025). Despite numerous efforts to address labour issues in this context, critical concerns persist, compounded by significant power asymmetry and relational distance between buying firms and those who labour within their supply chains (Huq et al., 2014; Kothari et al., 2019).

The global fashion giant is the largest client of the factories in this production hub, known for its fast-refreshing designs at affordable prices. This research reveals how its small-batch, on-demand production model generates recurrent conditions that structurally shape the production context and workers' livelihoods. In pursuit of efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness and enforced through penalty-based supplier management, brands' purchasing practices systematically prioritise profit over labour conditions. Factories are required to absorb irregular and unstable orders with urgent delivery dates, resulting in extreme production pressure, driving excessive labour turnover and progressively eroding their capacity to plan workloads and manage their workforce. These conditions cascade to workers, entrenching them in multifaceted dimensions of structural precarity (Lewis et al., 2015). They confront employment precarity alongside chronic social and economic instability, often excluded from public welfare systems. To secure adequate earnings, workers resort to labour intensification and, at times, self-exploitation (Tsing, 2009), as a response to structurally imposed income insecurity. Their identities and needs are systematically neglected, reinforcing social and communal exclusion and compounding adverse material exposure (see Table 3).

Patriarchal logic positions the brand as the key power-holder, yet this further increases the physical and emotional distance between brands, suppliers and workers, who absorb the greatest risks (Gold and Schleper, 2017; LeBaron, 2021). This framing not only fails to address underlying injustices but actively perpetuates conditions of dependence (Gutierrez-Huerter et al., 2023). Garment workers need jobs; those jobs depend on factories remaining operational, and factories remain operational only if brands issue orders. This economic dependency increases pressure on the weakest party to absorb adverse conditions (Fletcher and Trautrims, 2024; Karaosman et al., 2023), producing further social marginalisation (Williams et al., 2025). Precarity thus becomes a structurally produced outcome (ILO, 2023), representing the unequal intensification of vulnerability through patriarchal logics in the form of exploitation and dependence (Hamington and Flower, 2021).

Although the OSCM discipline acknowledges the need for alternatives (Luzzini et al., 2024), the dominant logic continues to frame values such as diversity and inclusion as instruments of operational performance (Matthews et al., 2025), normalising an appropriation that forecloses genuinely alternative approaches. Supply chain practices will continue to perpetuate structural precarity at individual, organisational and supply chain levels unless the patriarchal logics and epistemological assumptions underpinning them are fundamentally challenged (Soundararajan et al., 2021). Grounded in the ethical agency of garment workers manifested under conditions of system-induced precarity, the next section envisions an OSCM shaped by the ethics of care.

The ethics of care (Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 2013) presents an alternative logic for reorienting OSCM practices in addressing labour precarity (Figure 1), treating workers as individuals with ethical agency while recognising their vulnerability (Johansson and Wickström, 2023). This care orientation not only captures how workers develop their own mechanisms of fairness, mutual support and collective care in addressing their conditions, grounded in their everyday interactions, but also elucidates how attentiveness to relations enables potent ethical agency – dimensions that remain largely invisible to instrumental, compliance-based governance models (Glover and Touboulic, 2020; Wilhelm et al., 2025).

Workers carry diverse lived experiences and are embedded in different contexts (Glover, 2020), making the plurality of their needs ontologically grounded in their relational and interdependent nature (Held, 2005). As needs are not homogeneous and require situated responses, it is fundamental to recognise their plurality through attentive interpretation (Bellingan et al., 2020; Chowdhury, 2023), resisting universalised framings. The ethics of care are uniquely positioned to attend to this plurality, establishing epistemic proximity in the process (Reed, 2025). Senior workers offered diverse forms of care based on what they understood from the cared-for: helping novices when recognising their vulnerability due to limited tacit knowledge; intervening out of concern for others' livelihoods; and seeking to include newcomers in the collective by building relational ties. Expressions of a relational care ethic respond to others' particular needs, while remaining contingent on the receivers' responses. It requires the one-caring and the cared-for to relate to one another as equals in a shared understanding, where reciprocity is a constitutive condition of the caring relation (Tronto, 2013). In the absence of reciprocity, care that flows only in one direction risks reproducing the very asymmetries it seeks to address (Johansson and Wickström, 2023).

Approaching labour precarity requires an epistemological perspective that remains attentive to the structures and conditions in which it is situated (Soundararajan et al., 2021). It emphasises the value of locally grounded knowledge and solutions over universal prescriptions. Extensive global supply chains exacerbate this challenge, as engaging with diversity while attending to the particularities of the human condition demands contextual attentiveness that universal governance frameworks struggle to provide (Tsing, 2009). Labour theory must acknowledge contextual ambiguity and remain open to theoretical and epistemological plurality (Roehrich et al., 2025). Care practices are deeply rooted in relational and contextual nuances (Gilligan, 1982), and the values observed in this study are no exception. Within the intricate tapestry of Chinese culture, values and care practices at the research site are intrinsically intertwined with Confucian thought, serving as indigenous moral principles. These principles encapsulate virtues such as Ren (humaneness), Yi (righteousness), Li (propriety) and Xin (trustworthiness). These virtues collectively form a moral framework that emphasises relational attentiveness, harmony, contextual discernment of just action and commitment to those in vulnerable positions (Li, 1994), which consequently shapes appropriate conduct within the relational contexts of everyday work (Kang et al., 2017; Li, 1994; Yuan et al., 2023). Just as nuances of meaning may be lost or distorted in translation across cultures, remediation frameworks developed in one context may not be directly applicable to others with distinct epistemic foundations. The moral fabric against labour precarity can only be established through the cultivation of trust and respect via epistemic proximity, attentiveness and sensitivity in the process of knowing (Chowdhury, 2023; Noddings, 1984).

Contextualised approaches are a prerequisite for ethically sound engagement with labour precarity. Attentiveness to the conditions that limit observation and framing is constitutive of this process, a commitment that shapes how interaction with labour realities can be meaningfully conducted (Shivakumar and Jerrentrup, 2025). Approaches and methods must adapt to context while examining how labour realities are constructed and negotiated (Chowdhury, 2023; Soundararajan et al., 2021). This prioritises workers' own narratives and sense-making, alongside researchers' grounded engagement in comparable conditions that enables interpretation from within (Ehrenreich, 2002; Pun, 2005). Solidarity is what makes this possible and sustains care. Without a commitment to speaking with those whose conditions are being studied, methodological approaches risk reproducing the asymmetrical power relations and epistemic distance on which precarity is built.

The instrumental logic governing supply chains is contingent on a disconnection from workers that takes the form of epistemic dissociation, a process of inner separation through which workers come not to know what they know and not to feel what they feel (Gilligan, 1995). When these dissociations become normalised, workers are expected to take care of relations and absorb the consequences induced by the structure, echoing colonial patterns of enforcement (Chowdhury, 2023; Spicer and Alvesson, 2025).

Theorising connection as central to human life directs attention to the relational dimensions of labour that dominant supply chain research and practice consistently overlook (Held, 2005; Tronto, 1993). These dimensions cannot be fully incorporated within existing paradigms characterised by rigid, instrumental structures (Kothari et al., 2019). As long as the patriarchal social order, understood as the structure that sustains imbalanced relationships and structural precarity, remains unchallenged, caring becomes an obligation rather than a shared responsibility (Tronto, 1993). Workers are left to navigate and respond to chronic precarity on their own terms (Glover and Touboulic, 2020; Karaosman et al., 2025).

An ethic of care is a voice of resistance, attentive to relations in context (Gilligan, 1982). Grounded in the recognition of persons as relational, vulnerable and interdependent, feminist ethics of care speaks directly to the dissociations that lead people to systematically neglect different voices (Gilligan, 1995). It challenges the patriarchal logic that governs labour discourses through elite-led narratives, enforcing universalised standards and advancing remediation with epistemic distance (McCarthy et al., 2018). Labour conditions are complex and frequently entangled with contextual and cultural nuances that universalised solutions cannot address. Framing labour issues as matters of human rights risks reducing remedy to uniform prescriptions, neglecting the social realities of those they intend to serve (Kuruvilla and Li, 2021; Reinecke and Donaghey, 2021). It is therefore vital to challenge the assumptions inherent in prevailing narratives and engage in epistemological and methodological reflection, viewing workers as individuals with agentic power (Glover, 2020; Gutierrez-Huerter et al., 2023). Only when silenced voices surface and enter into connection do they begin to create difference and open an ontology of possibility (Gilligan, 1982; Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012). Equally important, the care orientation does not displace concerns with justice, rights and power (Karaosman et al., 2023; Wilhelm et al., 2025) but complements them with sensitivity to context (Gilligan, 1995; Tronto, 2013).

We envision avenues for future research to examine individual and contextual nuances to further develop the moral fabric across diverse settings. Moving beyond representations of supply chains as technical configurations of flows, we seek to revitalise the notion of an anthropology of the supply chain (Price, 1996), approaching supply chains ethnographically as lived fields where agentic actors form responses under contextualised and constrained conditions. This epistemological shift repositions workers as agentic subjects whose situated responses and voices cannot be fully interpreted without acknowledging their embeddedness (Gilligan, 1982), thereby shaping supply chains from the microscopic level. Similarly, supply chain systems cannot be fully captured and explained without remaining grounded in the everyday realities of those who sustain them.

The anthropology of the supply chain foregrounds the challenges we face today as social rather than technical and invites dialogue with established domains of anthropology and sociology (Pun, 2005; Tsing, 2015), possibly through interpretive and constructivist methods and perspectival theorising (Darby et al., 2019; Cornelissen et al., 2024). As researchers, we must remain conscious and reflexive about our approaches when investigating groups that do not share the same epistemic ground as our own (Chowdhury, 2023; Deutsch, 2004). The ethics of care, and the feminist lens more broadly, are not only a theoretical orientation but also a guide to how we approach the field (Johansson and Wickström, 2023; McCarthy et al., 2018), attend to contextual nuances and position ourselves in ethical relation to those we study (Shivakumar and Jerrentrup, 2025). The goal should not be to represent workers but to create conditions for them to express themselves, ensuring their voices shape rather than merely illustrate our understanding (Chowdhury, 2023; Glover, 2020). Plurality in research methods can cultivate insights that complement the language of our own (Gilligan, 1995; Soundararajan et al., 2021).

This study provides several practical implications for companies and OSCM managers operating in labour-intensive global supply chains. First, brands and buying firms must recognise the hidden consequences of their practices and understand how purchasing decisions shape the conditions of those who labour within their supply chains. The imposed structural instability does not stop at the factory gate but directly reproduces workers' everyday labouring conditions through irregular workloads, income insecurity and excessive labour turnover. Workers are relational actors whose well-being, dignity and agency are structurally determined by upstream decisions, and they carry significant leverage over product quality, supply chain stability and reputational exposure. The pursuit of efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness has delivered measurable gains for buying firms over recent decades, yet the human costs externalised onto suppliers and workers through practices such as small-batch on-demand production are rarely accounted for. Workload stability, employment security and workforce retention are currently overlooked dimensions in managing supplier relationships.

The findings demonstrate that workers operating under conditions of system-induced employment precarity develop their own mechanisms of fairness, mutual support and collective care. OSCM managers must recognise workers' ethical agency, which sustains productivity and collective resilience under structural pressure, rather than treating it as incidental workplace culture. Management practices that disrupt these relational networks (e.g. excessive reliance on temporary labour, irregular scheduling, punitive supervision) would actively erode the informal social infrastructure that keeps production running. Investment in stabilising employment conditions and acknowledging workers' relational practices yields returns in skill continuity and collective commitment that current performance framings fail to capture.

Finally, this study calls on buying firms and OSCM managers to move beyond philanthropic and compliance-based narratives of labour responsibility. Audits, codes of conduct and social certification schemes that impose universal standards without attending to the particular, local and contextual dimensions of workers' lives risk producing a facade of accountability while leaving the structural causes of precarity unaddressed. Effective labour governance requires a contextually grounded, relational and care-oriented approach, attending to plural needs, building locally grounded solutions and responding adaptively to the conditions workers actually face.

Reflecting on the blind spots of dominant narratives of labour conditions, this study presents a moral fabric grounded in local, contextualised and relational responses. It challenges the dominant portrayal of supply chain workers as passive and voiceless in labour interventions, illustrating how local and contextual values shape individual and collective care practices. Based on an interpretivist-constructivist ethnographic approach, the study examines how structural precarity is normalised in the day-to-day operations of a garment factory shop floor and how workers draw on ethical agency and care practices to navigate and respond to the conditions in which they are embedded.

This paper was not written to document workers' suffering but to evidence an alternative perspective on labour by foregrounding workers' agency in their own voices. Such agency should be recognised and acknowledged rather than systematically neglected. We intentionally obscured the site and omitted quantitative metrics to protect the field that embraced us. Such measures, when decontextualised, risk being weaponised against the context we aim to protect. The ethics of care served as both the theoretical lens and a guide to this endeavour, calling for attentive and conscious action to avoid harm when approaching labour in different contexts.

Jinou (Valentina) Xu: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Visualization, Writing–Original Draft, Writing–Review and Editing; Hakan Karaosman: Investigation, Visualization, Writing–Review and Editing; Linglong Xiao: Investigation, Methodology.

This paper – a story we wrote about, for, with and as garment workers – is dedicated to all garment workers we encountered in the field.

As the world's largest apparel producer and exporter, China holds a central position in the global textile and garment supply chain, relying on its fully integrated production system that spans from raw materials to finished goods (World Trade Organization, 2024). Although recent debates have suggested the potential relocation of production to lower-cost countries, China retains a strategic role due to its scale, flexibility and capacity amid geopolitical uncertainty (Financial Times, 2025).

Garment production in China often gives rise to industrial clusters, where geographical concentrations of factories benefit from shared labour markets, infrastructural networks and institutional support. As workers migrate towards these areas in search of opportunities, such clusters are strongly associated with large-scale labour migration, resulting in distinctive settlement forms known as urban villages. These villages offer low-cost housing in proximity to manufacturing hubs, functioning as transitional neighbourhoods shaped by rapid urbanisation (Liu et al., 2010). By 2025, Guangdong Province alone had attracted more than 43 million migrant workers across various sectors, of whom over 24 million were from outside the province (Qiu and Liu, 2025), underscoring its pivotal role as a destination for migrant labour.

Migrant workers, having left their hometowns in pursuit of higher incomes, often endure longer working hours and more physically demanding conditions as a consequence of their social context (Dou et al., 2026). Limited educational attainment compounds this vulnerability, with many lacking formal contracts or adequate awareness of labour protection and social insurance provisions (Marques et al., 2025). Against this backdrop, the urban village selected for this study is significant as a core production hub of a global fashion giant, operating through contract suppliers where these workers constitute the majority of the labour force.