The Half-year Period of Workers Returning to Work in 2020: Changes in Labour Conditions of Garment Industry in the Pearl River Delta Region

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had brought changes to the production, supply and sales activities of the global production chain, with workers’ livelihood badly hit by decrease in production orders and work suspension.  This came in a period of recent years when China, as the world’s major exporter of its manufactured products, has undergone draining of production orders away from home to overseas for certain industries like the garment one.  At the same time, China has also started to put weight on developing its domestic market.  All the above situations may, as projected, impose long term influence on the structure of China’s production value chain as well as employment of workers.

In such contexts, the labour organisation, Worker Empowerment, wanted to understand the labour conditions of various industries upon production resumed after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.  Worker Empowerment conducted an in-depth research on the garment industry in particular to examine the workers’ employment situation changes after the COVID-19 pandemic had somewhat been under control.  The research also explored the extent to which the pandemic-caused situations such as work suspension, unemployment and change of occupation among workers could be reverted.   

The research focused on the labour conditions during the half-year period (from Feb to Sept 2020) when workers returned to work in factories after the pandemic outbreak.  However due to limits of time and resources, the research did not explore how the garment industry would be affected by the pandemic in the long run.  The interviews told that there has already been moving of garment production lines out of China before the emergence of the pandemic, which has led to closing down of factories or massive diminution of production scale.  The pandemic is only to aggravate the existing operation difficulties, but has yet to bring a complete halt of production in the industry.  How the outlook of the garment industry is affected by the pandemic is beyond exploration of this study.