Economics professor Shahidur Rahman's book focuses on “the impact of globalization on the global south” (p. x) through three specific questions:

The answers to these questions are no, no, and not well.

I approach this as a scholar of Cambodia who pays attention to union movements in Cambodia and Bangladesh. I am not a scholar of Bangladesh, nor an economist. The publisher describes this book as “an ethnographic study,” which is undoubtedly part of why I received the book. I will return to the issue of how this book is framed in terms of genre and discipline at the end of my comments, but want to first attend to Rahman's arguments, which are important and deserve close examination by economists and others.

Regarding vulnerability, Rahman's argument is that the form of development in contemporary Bangladesh is “deformed” and creates a new matrix of vulnerability for women workers in the country (p. xvi). The national economy has moved from jute production to garment production in just a few decades after decades of civil and military conflict (similar to Cambodia). But this transformation has not reduced Bangladesh's national economic vulnerability as much as shifted it to a different context. Rahman indicates the limits of standard economic business practices through a case study of the Bantai factory, which he describes as creating reasonable and decent working conditions with foreign partners. This situation worked fine until the “foreign partner left the company in 2001 and invested in China for lower costs and better infrastructure” (p. 52). The ability of the garment industry to reduce the vulnerability of its workers is sharply limited by the well-understood logic of global capitalism: reduce labor costs. Similarly, women's prior vulnerability was located in the village-based “patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal social system” (p. 29) underscored by the institutions of the shamaj and the shalish. With mass migration to the cities and waged work, where there are different social circumstances, new potentials exist, but take place within a nationally patriarchal context, which reframes women's particular forms of vulnerability.

When Rahman turns his attention to the different origins, strategies, and outcomes of union organizations versus welfare committee groups, he notes that women often prefer the welfare committees—at least at first—but that these are less successful at reducing women workers' vulnerability. In his most significant argument, Rahman deals with the choices women workers make between organizing for their rights and working conditions through company-organized welfare committees, or through labor unions. He notes that other analysts have pointed out the dominance of men and male leadership in the union sectors, as well as the widespread political party affiliation of most unions—problems labor unions share across most of the globe—and compares them with the company-organized welfare committees and the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF), a woman worker–dominated and led union. It is unclear why Rahman selects BIGUF instead of the similarly politically unaffiliated National Garment Workers Federation. Rahman finds that welfare committees rarely achieve the level of success of unions.

Finally, there is a business case for Bangladeshi businesses that frames the vulnerability discussion in global terms—pointing out that “in LDCs sustainable existence for companies is not guaranteed in the global market even if they follow good practices in the workplace” (p. xvii).

The concluding three chapters discuss state-level policies that could improve the Bangladesh economy, and workers—women workers specifically—within it. As a consequence, Rahman considers various likely solutions and generally rejects them as unworkable. This contradictory aspect of this part of Broken Promises of Globalization is made clearer by Rahman's engagement with Marxist and Marxian ideas of capitalism and its processes, which would necessarily reject the notion of a possible “win-win” strategy for employers and workers alike.

Unfortunately, the book is not well line-edited, and many minor errors remain in the text. Additionally, the publisher has decided to describe the book as “an ethnographic study,” which it is not. It may represent a bit of an oddity within the discipline of economics, but it is difficult to imagine an anthropology course using this text in any primary manner. Such publisher-based difficulties add to the challenges that scholars in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia have in being heard by the global scholarly world.

Rahman begins and ends with the specter of the Rana Plaza Factory collapse of 2013, in which 1,129 mostly women workers died because of poor and unsafe conditions. His work makes successful arguments regarding the state of the Bangladesh garment industry and women's place within it. These perspectives are commonplace within the organized global left today, but are often seen as either antique holdouts or fringe perspectives by many within economics: capitalism does not provide security to anyone, women's waged work has transformed but not liberated women, and no policy directed by a weak partner such as Bangladesh in the global market will be successful on its own. If neither owners nor states are capable of reducing the vulnerability of Bangladesh's workers, those interested in economic equality for the working class will need to focus instead on the workers in factories across the globe, and their organization—especially their international organization—rather than on states, employers, or consumer campaigns.