Bangladesh's successful entry into the world apparel market has been predicated on the deployment of a predominantly female industrial labour force. Bangladesh can be seen as a quintessentially global site - where the language of public discourse is dominated by a developmentalist vocabulary of civil society - human rights, women's development, citizenship. This essay points out that reducing the lives of Bangladeshi garment workers to a local variation on either the universally subordinated woman or the global worker exploited by capital obscures the implications of work for these women. Shifting the frame of analysis to a more experiential level allows us to overcome the more exclusionary aspects of an ostensibly culture neutral human rights discourse and offers a more complex lens with which to examine the conditions and contours of resistance.