What does global production sound like? Can the realities of work be captured not in reports, numbers or images, but through the everyday rhythms and sounds of the workers who stitch our clothes? Our sound map of Jordan’s largest industrial zone for clothing production, Al-Hassan, attempts this. We invite listeners to immerse themselves in the sonic environment of the almost 30,000 migrants working there.
The walled Al-Hassan industrial zone was established in northern Jordan as a result of US free trade policies. Inaugurated in 1998, it was the first so-called Qualified Industrial Zone (QIZ) under a scheme that extended US-Israel free trade advantages to extra-territorial production spaces in Jordan.
The idea was to foster Arab-Israeli normalisation through economic integration. Israel and Jordan had signed a peace treaty four years earlier, in 1994. The hope was that, by attracting labour-intensive Israeli industries like clothing production, the two countries would become more closely knitted together.
Israeli investors first targeted rural Jordanian women and Palestinians from refugee camps as a cheap labour force. But exemptions from national labour regulations soon enabled Asian migrant workers to take their place. This proved advantageous to employers. Unlike locals and refugees, foreign workers don’t live with their families in villages and cities. They are accommodated in dormitories right next to the factories, making them available for factory work around the clock. Their visas are also tied to the firm that hired them and come with a time limit. These and other factors making them much easier to control.
Jordan’s industrial zones for clothing production are a showcase for how global mobility mixes with localised confinement to increase profitability under contemporary capitalism.
Factories of sound
On Thursday evening, when garment factory shifts end, the dirt road behind the Phase II women dormitories transforms into a dense street market. Traders hawk live chickens and fresh vegetables from the backs of trucks. Local boys slaughter pigeons for customers on demand. And South Asian women sell green chilies and ginger from piles spread out on cotton sheets.
Behind them, makeshift shops advertise mobile phones, household appliances and tailoring services through large speakers – their blaring sounds mixing with music from restaurants and the calls of vendors in Hindi, Bengali, Burmese and Arabic. The women workers of Al-Hassan are out for their weekend shop.
The biggest crowds gather in the money transfer offices. It’s payday and, cash wages in hand, women wait to send money home. The whirr of money counting machines backdrops their voices, while the shrill shouts of employees speaking ‘factory language’ – a unique lingua franca used by migrant workers of diverse nationalities to communicate – organise people into queues. Mobile phones buzz, vibrate and ping as workers announce the arrival of cash transfers to their families back home.
For most people, including local Jordanians, it’s difficult to imagine what life is like inside a space like a QIZ. The phrase itself seems sterile: lifeless non-places where goods are made but we’ve no idea how. Our recordings of the thick atmospheres of Al-Hassan challenge such conceptions. They show QIZs are not just zones of production but zones of people – and they are bubbling with life.
Al-Hassan’s workforce is predominantly comprised of female, South Asian migrant workers from Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. When they’re not sewing clothing for American brands like Nike, Under Armour and North Face, they spend most of their time confined to their dormitories. Endless factory shifts – up to 10 or even 14 hours per day during peak season – as well as the high cost of travel to nearby cities make excursions beyond the QIZ a rarity. The lives of these women thus unfold almost exclusively in the enclosed space of Al-Hassan for the duration of their three-year contracts.
Cartographies of confinement
Our sonic map of Al-Hassan captures the deafening hum of sewing machines, right down to the quiet escapes where workers retreat for a moment of privacy. It is the result of two weeks of collaborative, in-situ sound recordings, sketching and note-taking. Almost two years of ethnographic research preceded this project. This established trust and rapport, opening doors that typically remain tightly closed.
Unlike cameras, our microphones and paper felt less intrusive. They sparked curiosity rather than suspicion. Once, when we were seeking shelter from a dust storm, we were welcomed into a factory canteen just as over 1,000 workers rushed in for their lunch break. The result is a layered recording: crockery clinking against tin trays, rapid-fire speech in Malagasy and Burmese, footsteps shuffling across the floor. Like all activities in Al-Hassan, this cacophony took place under the pressure of the clock. Timers not only dictate every stitch, but also every food and toilet break.
These extracts of everyday life tell complex stories of confinement, exhaustion, frustration and at times also joy. Factory shifts start at 7am and end at 3pm, six days a week, for Jordanian workers only. To combat unemployment, the Ministry of Labour forces garment producers to employ at least 25% locals; a rule that is contested and at times circumvented by the transnational clothing producers that relocated to Jordan to benefit from US free trade advantages.
Jordanian workers have children and families to care for. They commute from far-away places and generally refuse to work overtime. In contrast, migrant workers are geographically separated from their families and children. They live on-site and are permanently available for work. Meanwhile, meagre monthly salaries below the Jordanian minimum wage encourage foreign workers to constantly accept overtime. They routinely end their shifts three to six hours later than their Jordanian colleagues.
Even when workers eventually leave the factories, their exhausting routines are far from over. Employers act as landlords in Al-Hassan, and their control extends into the private lives of migrant workers off the clock. Adult women are subjected to strict curfews, and their dormitories are under the constant surveillance of private security. Employers encourage mutual denunciation among workers through intricate systems of reward. Privacy is an illusion in the worker dormitories. As one Malagasy worker poignantly told us, “walls have eyes and ears in Al-Hassan.”
To capture sounds from the inside of dormitories – inaccessible to outsiders – we collaborated with female workers from Madagascar who work in a Chinese-owned factory in Al-Hassan. They recorded their daily lives in a room shared by eight women. On the tape, one of the workers explains how even mundane tasks like cooking, showering or washing clothes are major challenges in the overcrowded dormitories. Broken infrastructure and the harsh time constraints of the factory labour regime make simply living an onerous chore.
The loss of community
The only space that offered some respite from the harsh routine was the Al-Hassan Workers Centre. Built by the largest garment producer at Al-Hassan, Classic Fashion, and run by the International Labour Organisation since 2014, this community centre offered sports and educational activities, as well as legal support.
The multinational team running the centre offered an open ear for workers’ grievances, as well as personal advice in an environment characterised by rampant mistrust and labour abuse. Removed from the immediate control of employers, the centre provided a space to meet and mingle, organise celebrations and leisure activities, and voice complaints.
Yet as of January 2025, the workers centre is no more. It has been closed due to the US administration’s sweeping cuts to foreign aid, which also affected international worker solidarity programmes funded through the US Department for Labour. As one Pakistani worker said, as he stood outside the centre’s locked gates, more was lost than just the cherished heart of social life in Al-Hassan. “Our employers know that since the centre is closed there is no one we can go to complain to”, he said. “So they can treat us as they please and there won’t be any consequences.”
The current withdrawal of funds for workers’ rights programming threatens to further exacerbate labour exploitation in Jordan’s garment industry. The organisation of production in enclosed factory and dormitory zones enables the imposition of hyper-intense work rhythms that underpin ‘high productivity’ and render clothing producers in Jordan globally competitive.
The recruitment of a predominantly female, foreign work force that is structurally bound to their employers for both work and residency permits further facilitates labour control, as any attempt to complain or collectively organise can result in the termination of contracts and deportation. Our sound map, Soundscapes of Global Production, makes these hidden worlds of global clothing production audible. It invites listeners to step inside the everyday geographies of a dormitory migrant labour regime – not through statistics or policy reports, but through the voices, noises, and rhythms that fill the spaces where our clothes are made. Take a moment and listen.
Katharina Grüneisl is a geographer and ethnographer who studies work in the global clothing value chain, from second-hand markets in Tunisia to automated factories in Jordan. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham (UK) and an affiliated researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (Tunisia).
The sound mapping project is a collaboration with, Mélanie Forné, archaeologist, graphic designer and independent illustrator; David Lagarde, geographer, independent cartographer and sound artist; Sara Lana, artist and interactive maps developer. The research was funded by Research England/UKRI and forms part of the Invisible Women, Invisible Workers project.
