ABSTRACT
It was a sunny morning in May in a small village 30 kilometres off Colombo, Sri Lanka. I was in the human resource manager’s office of an apparel company, a congested partitioned room without a door. The left-side wall of the room was covered by a large poster of a few smiling factory women—‘the employees of the year’. A thoughtful man in his early thirties, the human resource manager, was in his comfortable office chair. He was a graduate of human resource management and was supposed to be a participant of the fieldwork of my doctoral project. I began my dialogue with the manager, a semi-structured interview conducted in Sinhala. The interview was aimed at understanding managing factory women, if not (female) shopfloor labour in the company and Sri Lanka’s apparel industry. The manager narrated:
There is a policy in our company to treat everyone equally. Even if our director1 comes, there is only one canteen to eat. Even lamai [little ones] eat there. We don’t have separate transport [for workers]. We have the same buses [for everyone]. Employees come in those buses. And lamai also come in those buses. That is a value that ChillCo [pseudonym] appreciates.
