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Chapter 4

Tea, Sympathy and Auditing

How Superficial Checks and Balances have Failed to Clean up Fashion

Five men in short-sleeved shirts stand around me. A fan whirrs above my head. I am leaning over a common or garden exercise book, an impromptu visitors’ book, clutching a pen and desperately thinking of something neutral to write that cannot later be construed as in any way condoning what I have seen in the factory I have just been shown around. My main aim is for myself and my colleagues, including the Dhaka native who has brought us here as a huge favour on the condition that we don’t cause an almighty ruckus, to leave as soon as possible.

My mind is completely blank. ‘Write something about your experience and how you have enjoyed the tour of our facilities,’ suggests the General Manager of the Epoch Garment Factory, Shantinagar, Dhaka, helpfully. ‘Say how we gave you a nice tour.’ ‘Hmm,’ I say, pretending to consider this advice, but thinking that it really depends on your definition of ‘nice’. Apart from rather vigorously turning out our handbags to make sure we had no ‘surveillance equipment’, the many masters of the Epoch Garment Factory have been perfectly accommodating. Our visit was unscheduled, and they were clearly under pressure to finish a giant order; this constituted privileged access.

I am in Bangladesh, the country that produces an increasingly large chunk of the UK wardrobe. By 2006 the Bangladeshi ready-made garment (RMG) industry was thought to be the source of nearly 8 per cent¹²² of all the clothes sold into Europe, the USA and Japan. But on this trip, my first, I’m not officially here to analyse the garment trade: I’m the guest of an NGO that is showing me climate-change projects. Bangladesh, already in a hapless geographical position as the biggest rivers in India’s north swell, pick up speed and converge within its borders, leaving thousands of people homeless each year through flooding, will in future also have to deal with rising sea levels further threatening its lowest-lying areas. I’m also taking in a national project focusing on women’s welfare and eradicating domestic violence – 60 per cent of Bangladeshi women¹²³ live with daily violent abuse in their own homes. Other NGO workers tell me that following the country’s latest round of flooding, which eradicated much livestock, women in the south were being used to pull ploughs. But it isn’t long before we come across the garment industry. In my first few hours in Dhaka, meeting women who are for the first time forming groups to resist domestic violence and oppression, I come across dozens of garment workers. Of course, 80 per cent of garment workers¹²⁴ in Bangladesh are female.

I met them late at night in a downtown district, on a precious break from their shift s. It was easy to understand what my friends who work for NGOs meant when they said they felt guilty gathering evidence out of hours from garment workers about pay and conditions when these women cannot speak freely at work, and hardly have an abundance of what we in the West know as ‘downtime’. Lesson number one for me in Bangladesh was that we should be extraordinarily grateful that these workers sacrifice any of their time to give first-hand testimonies about their working lives. It’s a big sacrifice, and one that in itself illustrates just how desperate the majority of workers are to have us understand the truth about garment production, and to help them in their battle against inequality.

I knew I would only get lesson number two by actually experiencing a garment factory in Dhaka. I wanted this to be as authentic an experience as possible, not a carefully monitored tour of a showcase facility that’s kept running for the benefit of Western visitors, particularly the leagues of auditors who troop in and out of them ticking boxes on behalf of Western retailers. But I knew that this would be somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible. A contact had phoned me a few days before I left Britain. ‘You’ve got no chance of getting into a garment factory,’ she told me. The major NGO fixer, a Dhaka native and activist for change among garment workers, had been imprisoned again on account of his ‘campaigning’. This is par for the course in many CMT producing countries: in 2010 three trade union officials working on behalf of garment workers were murdered in Cambodia.

Nevertheless, for four days I am acutely aware that in and around Dhaka there are thousands of whirring machines, operated by the lion’s share of the estimated nearly four million women – many of them very young – who have turned Bangladesh into an RMG superpower. This morning, as on all others, they’re facing at least a ten-hour stretch hunched over their tables producing low-quality fast-fashion merchandise, much of it destined for the UK. Then, just before we’re about to leave Bangladesh we get a lucky break. Ellora, a young woman working for the NGO I am visiting Bangladesh with, has a contact who can get us into a workplace she describes as ‘a good factory’. Naturally I don’t expect to see anything but a flagship advertisement for globalisation, well ventilated, safety aware, with smiling staff who in all probability will be whistling while they work.

And so we set off in our little bus, heading slowly (all travel in Dhaka is painfully slow) into the centre of town. This surprises me, because I thought bright, shiny new production facilities would be based in the surrounding areas. It is at this point I realise this visit is not going to be to a cosmetically perfect working environment, of the type that would leave an external auditor from a multinational sleeping happily, but to something slightly more haphazard, more real. When the bus finally pulls up, the striking thing is that this is not a purpose-built garment factory.

The most accurate description would be that it looks like an office block. There are thousands of similarly impromptu garment factories dotted around the city. Ostensibly Dhaka is booming. The real-estate price has hit the proverbial roof, and there is constant pressure to provide readymade garments for export. Factories will therefore set up anywhere they can. If no premises can be found, new ones are thrown up in weeks, or new storeys added to existing buildings. This explains how one infamous Bangladesh factory catastrophe took place. In 2002 the owner of the Spectrum factory, built on swampland just outside Dhaka, added five new storeys on top of a four-storey factory. In her book Clean Clothes, labour-rights activist Liesbeth Sluiter chillingly makes the link between what happened next and our wardrobes: ‘1 a.m. of 11 April 2005¹²⁵. To add injustice to injury, they should all have been lying in bed at home, because their shift had officially ended at 6 p.m. the day before. The urgency of meeting orders had prevailed. The accident killed sixty-four workers and injured more than seventy – some for life. They were found between the red children’s pullovers the factory had been making for Inditex-Zara, and under the purple-stripe women’s tops ordered by the German Bluhm fashion group.’

It’s into a similar, seemingly improvised facility that I troop with two friends of mine from the UK, two of our NGO hosts, and a local female communist politician who has worked with local garment factories on the issue of conditions and pay. We are very lucky to get access to any part of Bangladesh’s garment trade for export, and she has been instrumental in getting us through the doors today.

The General Manager meets us, his assistant searches our bags for cameras, and we follow him up a narrow stairwell to the sewing floor, where about 250 women, mainly young, in bright saris are hunched over their machines, running pieces of dark denim through them while male supervisors – there look to be one to every fifty or sixty women – in yellow vests stand over them. When I say ‘stand over’ I am actually shocked at how physically close the supervisors stand, their necks arched so they can watch every single stitch appear from the machines. Incongruously it reminds me of playing netball, in which you’re not allowed to touch an opponent with the ball, but as long as your feet are a metre away from her you can crane your face over until you are invading her space. I cannot imagine how it would feel to work under that sort of pressure.

Our hosts are magnanimous. ‘You can ask any questions, to anyone! Any one of them!’ says the factory-floor manager, waving his hands to include a generous section of the assembly line. But truth be told these girls look terrified, and the pace they are working at, plus the volume of the machines, are not conducive to an exploratory chat. I pick on a poor girl with a bright yellow headscarf. She is momentarily petrified, and stops her machine. ‘How old are you?’ ‘I am nineteen,’ she replies. ‘How do you find working here?’ ‘It is good to have a job.’ ‘What kind of wages do you earn here every week?’ ‘It is good to have a job.’ Clearly I am not going to get anything but the party line under these conditions. One of the friends who are accompanying me is clearly shocked. ‘Everyone is so close together,’ she says. ‘When do they get breaks?’ ‘I’ll show you the cutting floor,’ says the factory manager. ‘It is nice.’

On the way to the staircase that leads to the cutting floor I notice hundreds of boxes marked for Carrefour, a huge European multiple that after Walmart is the world’s second-largest retailer, with an extraordinary 12,500 stores¹²⁶ across the world. The boxes are stacked up along the side of the assembly floor, masking the fire regulations and the yellow signs pointing to the exits. But then, given that the staircases are almost completely blocked by more boxes, presumably waiting to be picked up to start their long journey to the stores, the exits might not be all that much use. ‘These boxes,’ I say, pointing out the bleeding obvious, ‘they’re blocking the stairs. The fire escape! The fire risk!’ My voice is becoming increasingly shrill. As you’ll know from the catalogue of fires in the previous chapter, my paranoia is hardly without foundation. The factory manager is unmoved by my persistent heckling, and continues to clatter down the staircase. ‘I can show you the cutting floor,’ he says brightly. I persist, and to my surprise it is our communist leader of garment workers’ rights who fixes me with one of those smiles the subtext of which is clearly ‘Stop this nonsense.’ ‘There will be no fire today,’ she says, the smile still in place.

Our host wasn’t overstating the comparative merits of the cutting floor. A large, well-air-conditioned space, with computerised, high-definition cutting machines, it is indeed much nicer than the sewing floor. It is also, I notice, exclusively staffed by men. As I learned subsequently, in the RMG trade women predominantly do the basic stitching, which is why it is correctly (if you’re going on numbers alone) perceived as a ‘women’s industry’. But the higher-skilled tasks such as cutting are done by men. It’s notable that if technology is upgraded in factories or across the industry, women will be replaced¹²⁷ by men.

We end up for tea and biscuits in the factory manager’s office, where again we are told we can ask about anything we like – cue more arm-

waving. And so I bang on about the boxes and the fire escape again. ‘Big order,’ he says. ‘Huge order!’ Yes, I say, but the 500,000-piece order for men’s, women’s and children’s jeans is currently blocking the fire escapes. ‘This is not,’ he admits, ‘a perfect factory. This is just a B-rated factory.’ Who has rated it ‘B’, I ask. ‘It is rated B,’ he says, and we continue in this vein for thirty minutes. The ‘B’ rating, I’m finally led to believe, is a Bangladesh trade standard, meaning that the factory is not perfect. Then suddenly the manager turns, his tone becoming increasingly impassioned and accusatory. ‘How can I get a good factory when you [in the West] pay so little? It is not possible to be perfect.’ I can only agree that what I have seen falls somewhat short of perfection. Which is how I end up writing in the visitors’ book in a somewhat shaky hand, ‘A very INTERESTING visit. Highly interesting.’

My foray into factory life didn’t uncover what might be termed a classic sweatshop environment, but it did bring me face to face with a huge order for a European value chain being made in a supplier facility in which there was clearly a flagrant violation of any self-respecting European retailer’s code of conduct. Surely this is something that should have been picked up by the audits that we are assured are carried out on the Developing World suppliers of our clothes. After all, the Carrefour Group has apparently performed 2,067 social audits¹²⁸ in seven years, working in Bangladesh with local NGO Karmojibi Nari.

Audits are the checks that are supposed to reassure us that the horrors sketched out in the previous chapter are being consigned to history. Indeed, fleets of inspectors are employed by Western fashion retailers and manufacturers to visit factories and make sure fire escapes are clear and working, children aren’t employed, workers have freedom of association and are wearing proper safety equipment when they are carrying out potentially health-ruining activities such as sandblasting our jeans. Go to the website of any of the multifarious brands that make up the fashion jigsaw and you’ll be accosted by a Code of Conduct, or Social Responsibility. While some retailers and manufacturers would like us just to take their word for it (I’m loath to do this), most have employed auditors to tick the boxes for them, and happily display their credentials somewhere on their websites, and occasionally and more showily in-store.

This is the sort of practice that allows the British Retail Consortium (the trade association for UK retail, and as such the high priest of shopkeeping and the flogging of all consumer goods, including fashion) to assert at number two in an online section on ‘retail myths’ – just under the bit about UK retailers not being responsible for binge drinking – that there is no connection between Big Fashion’s offerings and backstreet factories. The rebuttal is what I would call unequivocal:

It’s a myth¹²⁹ that UK retailers source from exploitative, badly run sweat-shops. That would be unethical and unworkable. For example, China is producing shoes for the world on an unprecedented scale. That requires safe, modern attractive factories, not the backstreets. Standards in factories located in developing countries often surpass those in Europe and America. To provide goods in the quantities, of the quality and to the timescales UK retailers require, they have to … Any factory which cannot compete on this level will simply not be able to meet the standards demanded by BRC members and their customers. Retailers work with the ETI (Ethical Trading Initiative) to ensure that high standards are adhered to. Suppliers are systematically inspected. If they are not able to meet these standards contracts are ended and business is taken elsewhere.

And, broadly speaking, we all want to believe that all supply-chain problems have been attended to. Even I have better things to do than suspiciously check every label and website. We’d like to buy with confidence, and I would love to believe the consumerist comfort offered by the BRC, but there is a huge discrepancy here. While audits might be carried out and codes of conduct published, circulated and publicised, it’s debatable how much effect they actually have. Some twenty years after the first exposés of sweated labour, and despite teams of auditors and countless reports, we are still flooded by clothes made under the type of miserable conditions we saw in the previous chapter. Critics suggest that this is because the only thing an audit ever taught anybody was how to pull the wool over an auditor’s eyes.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTI-SWEATSHOP CAMPAIGNING

The first big modern-day ‘sweated labour’ stories broke in the early 1990s, beginning with the Washington Post’s examination of Levi-Strauss jeans’ – at the time (and arguably still) one of the most revered and sought-after brands on the planet – use of prison labour¹³⁰ in Chinese jails to make jeans for a few cents each. In what has become the standard practice in mass globalised fashion, they were then marked up by hundreds of times their cost price and sold to worldwide, fashion-hungry consumers.

Few could have imagined how resonant that page-six story would become. While presumably somewhere along the supply chain someone thought they had hit on aningenious way of producing this all-American classic garment, a significant chunk of the public was appalled. The story touched a nerve in the burgeoning anti-globalisation movement, and chimed with the international NGOs which had already tracked down super brands to child-labour sweatshops in the Far East. Denims were cast in a new light. Over the next eighteen months Nike, The Gap and Reebok were all shown to be in violation of basic human rights, never mind labour laws. One by one the major fashion brands were implicated in troubling sourcing chains that involved allegations of violations and exploitation. Twenty years on, the situation appears little improved. In 2008 alone the international alliance against sweatshops, Sweatfree, inducted six major garment brands into its Sweatshop Hall of Shame: American Eagle, Carrefour, Disney, GUESS, Speedo and Tommy Hilfiger. A number are repeat off enders.

Allegations were made and substantiated by investigative reporters, sometimes in alliance with campaigners on the ground. With every piece of smuggled footage or testimony another discomforting aspect of the international fashion chain was uncovered. One particularly seismic piece of video footage from 1995 shows Charles Kernaghan (an American NGO worker who became known ‘the Sweat Detective’ for his dogged pursuit of evidence of worker abuse in the garment trade) and his colleagues, who have dressed as business executives in order to gain access to a Central American factory in a free-trade zone producing for major US brands. A fifteen-year-old worker tells them that she is routinely hit and forced to take birth-control pills in front of supervisors – enforced contraception is apparently routine. Aft erwards, a fourteen-year-old worker takes the investigators to a dump outside the factory, where the camera zooms in on hundreds of empty blister packs¹³¹ that had held the contraceptive pills prescribed to the entire workforce.

Obtaining stories like this is no mean feat. ‘We have lost a number of activists, murdered in the course of their duties. Others have been dragged in chains behind cars and had threats made against their families,’ said Bhuwan Ribhu of the New Delhi-based Global March against Child Labour when he was confronted with yet another sweat-shop scandal involving a UK high-street giant in 2008. ‘A lot of money¹³² is at stake here, and life becomes cheap in such a desperate and greed-filled environment. Remember, above all, the money that is creating this desperation comes directly from the wallets of Western consumers.’ The onus is entirely on the campaigners to prove allegations of the abuses suffered by desperate workers. The smallest flaw in their investigations inevitably leads to aggressive lawsuits by multinational brands. David and Goliath doesn’t quite do this situation justice. Cam paigns are run on a shoestring, and investigators put their own lives at risk. Many I know have at the very least been subjected to beatings by the goons who watch out for trouble in sweatshop areas. If cameras are discovered on them they are at huge personal risk.

When a story can be supported by footage, and the painstaking checking of inventories against retailers’ codes and lists, there is a receptive mainstream global audience. Fury and disgust at sweatshops has become the stuff of front-page headlines, editorial leaders and television documentaries. The decade up to 2000 was an intense period of allegations by campaigners and NGOs, invariably followed by the corporations trotting out the same excuse: they outsourced their supply line, and therefore they could not be blamed if some unscrupulous Developing World factory owner chose not to follow their code of conduct. Unfortunately, the brands argued, their hands were tied, and while they would love to do something about such unfortunate conditions, it was out of their control.

To a great extent it was this ‘Out of our control’ defence that stoked the fires of anti-sweatshop campaigners for an entire decade. The Clean Clothes Campaign, No Sweat, Labour Behind the Label and other groups refused to allow the corporations any wriggle room. Millions of consumers worldwide were incensed by the hypocrisy of brands making money hand over fist from aspirational products while the reality of the physical production of the brands was far from the ideals they espoused publicly. By contrast with their slogans like ‘Just do it’, which were all about freedom, at times the super brands looked at best hypocritical and at worst downright evil – as activist artists realised to their delight, this was an anagram of Levi, which made for some provocative guerrilla campaigning.

Many enlightened consumers found the branded posturing unbearable. Typical of them was the American campaigner Marc Kasky, who found himself unable to stomach any more of Nike’s denials of allegations that it profited from sweatshop labour, including the full-page newspaper advertisements the company issued in 1997, such as the following:

Workers who make¹³³ Nike products are protected from physical and sexual abuse, they are paid in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations governing wages and hours, they are paid on average double the applicable local minimum wage, they receive a ‘living wage’, they receive free meals and health care, and their working conditions are in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations regarding occupational health and safety.

Kasky sued Nike on the grounds of false advertising. The case trundled on for a number of years before being rejected by the US Supreme Court in 2003, and the sides eventually settled out of court. In fact, as we’ll see, Nike has become one of the more transparent brands, in common with Gap, another company that has had its hands publicly burned.

Meanwhile, a global anti-sweatshop campaign had surged into action. The genie would not be returned to the bottle. The more strategic campaigners didn’t just bleat about injustice, they very quickly understood that for the super brands image was everything. They didn’t just care about the style of a shoe or the slick direction of an ad campaign, they also held their corporate reputations very dear. And they were not as self-assured and impenetrable as they could appear. For all their posturing about giving us choice and delivering dreams, they were vast corporations set up to deliver profit for shareholders and to maintain their value on the global stock exchanges. But the pesky alliance of investigative reporters and do-gooder campaign groups kept unveiling new stories of enforced labour, criminal wages and physical violence. The backdrop to these ultra-glamorous brands was a horror show of human suffering and exploitation. Shareholders and investors began to get twitchy. The anti-sweatshop movement had found globalisation’s Achilles heel: the big brands simply could not afford to lose their corporate reputations.

A GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE

At the end of this book I’ll return to campaigning – and what those early campaigners taught us – but mainly this period will be remembered as the era of the boycott. As in, if you didn’t like what a brand was doing, you were encouraged to boycott it. And not only were you encouraged not to buy its products, but to write letters, tell all your friends, campaign on campus and stage sit-ins. By the end of the 1990s significant numbers of consumers were starting¹³⁴ to boycott brands connected to exploitation.

There is of course a big problem with boycotts, which the brands used in their defence: even the mere threat of one can encourage companies to cut and run. They still had little control over the supply chain – it could be argued that they didn’t want any – but each time there was another revelation of sweatshop conditions a CEO would just come out and express disappointment at how the brand had been let down by a subcontractor, and announce that it would now pull out of the off ending factory/country. In a giant game of cat and mouse that traversed the poorest economies, mighty corporations abandoned ‘bad’ factories and took production elsewhere (often to a similarly awful production facility). The effect on local communities was likely to be devastating.

Eventually the big brands changed tack. After years of stonewalling and denying responsibility, a 2003 exposé of Gap’s connection to child labour in India prompted the company to issue an extraordinary statement: ‘We do have problems in our global supply chain, but we’re working to put them right.’ For once the brand wasn’t just talking about a new marketing campaign, although there did follow a series of star-studded advertisements featuring Missy Elliot, Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker and Joss Stone. The new buzzword among the biggest brands and retailers was ‘transparency’. It was out with the old subterfuge and bucking of responsibility, and in with working with suppliers in a conciliatory fashion while communicating to consumers and media that the brand was trying its best.

Big-fashion names are keen to represent themselves as more sinned against than sinning, and as unwilling partners in the global jaunt to find the most compliant country that can best keep up with cheap, fast fashion. For that reason they have implemented an extensive programme of audits.

In the years since 2003, audits have become¹³⁵ big business. In essence, sweatshops spawned an industry to monitor them. Auditing programmes work in so many different ways that frankly as a consumer it can be difficult to know what’s going on. Some offer independent approval, others offer to work with a company on self-assessment and then give final assurances. Any brand worth its salt boasts big teams of inspectors: in 2009 Nike boasted eighty in-house employees¹³⁶ working on what is termed Corporate Social Responsibility (known by its acronym, CSR), while by 2001 Gap had 115 compliance officers keeping a beady collective eye on 4,000 factories. You won’t find many companies that are shy about telling you exactly how many audits they have, and the numbers seem reassuringly large. So, Walmart conducts 16,000 social audits across its supply chain every year, and Carrefour audited 609 factories¹³⁷ in 2007. Factories that are found to be slipping or below standard can expect extra scrutiny. Tesco increased¹³⁸ the number of ‘high-risk’ sites audited from 87 per cent in 2008 to 94.7 per cent in 2010.

The fleets of inspectors and social compliance teams borrow their phraseology and zero-tolerance sentiments from the anti-sweatshop campaigners. But although they may sound alike, there are important distinctions. The auditing offices and businesses are, in the main, commercial organisations with beating corporate hearts, and have in common with their clients a need to generate and maximise shareholder return.

Most retailers, and certainly the huge agents they use to facilitate production overseas, consider their operation private business, and information about it commercially sensitive. ‘It is very difficult to know what to do with some retailers, particularly at the value end of the chain,’ admits a contact who works in drafting legislation relating to fashion’s supply chain, ‘because they are not interested in discussion.’ There are only so many cancelled meetings that can be rearranged, only so many approaches that can be made. As all offers to monitor human rights within the fashion industry appear to be voluntary, there is nothing to compel an errant brand to the discussion table.

With such a huge range of audits on offer, there are enormous variations in standards and practices. Some inspectors are trained for weeks, some for hours, and some, alarmingly, not at all. Similarly, levels of abuses and violations vary. Inspectors essentially need eyes in the back of their heads. There are health and safety factors to consider – as we have seen, the characteristics of a badly run or makeshift CMT enterprise can include fire hazards, fumes (sandblasting jeans, for example, produces toxic particulates) in the presence of which masks and goggles should be worn – underage workers, a lack of records and payroll evidence, intimidation and the absence of basic sanitation facilities. Writing down a list of measures that need to be undertaken is easier than actually carrying them out.

Many audits rely on interviews with workers. And many interviewees are likely to be the opposite of forthcoming. In an unusually frank account, ‘Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector’, former American inspector T.A. Frank remembers entering a supplier’s facility to see a sign reading: ‘If you don’t work¹³⁹ hard today, look hard for work tomorrow’. It is, he concedes, motivation of a kind, but he wonders how open employees working in such an environment are likely to be, and how likely they are to raise problems with an inspector.

Interviews are often tortuous. It is clear that they need to be in private, rather than elements of a staged and accompanied walkabout of the type I was granted at Epoch in Dhaka. But even then inspectors can be at the mercy of a translator, and as interviews are carried out in work time there’s always likely to be a manager breathing down the inspector’s and the interviewee’s necks. ‘I don’t know’ is often the staple response to questions about how many hours a week an employee is expected to work, or whether he or she has freedom of association (one of the tenets of an ethical working policy). Interviewees are coached, proffered for interview (rather than being randomly selected), and in fear of being fired for saying the wrong thing.

Where once brands used the excuse that they had outsourced their production (let’s call it the ‘Not my problem’ defence), they have now adopted a more nuanced strategy. To paraphrase: ‘The factories that supply us are fully audited by independent auditors, but on this occasion the auditors failed to spot the particular problem.’ The auditors claim they were hoodwinked, and very often this is indeed the case. It is hard to overestimate the level of duplicity to which some factory owners will go in order to trick them: there is evidence in many export zones of entire units being created for an auditor’s visit, to give the impression of a perfect production environment. Of course these have extravagantly labelled fire escapes, a generous provision of toilets, charts advising mandatory rest periods, and smiling managers. They are the show houses for the RMG industry, and their purpose is to make Westerners feel that all is well in the fast-fashion bubble, that we can have our cake and eat it. I read of one incident where an auditor was unduly impressed by the ‘high quality’ toilet paper in a staff lavatory. I say unduly because by the time of the next, unannounced, inspection the toilet paper had gone. As indeed had the toilet itself. Just for show, it wasn’t even plumbed in. Other inspectors tell of pushing through a door hidden by boxes to find pregnant employees hiding out on the roof, or a room full of sacks in which child garment makers were hiding.

Even when the subterfuge hasn’t been so carefully craft ed, auditors are missing things, and sometimes you have to deduce that they are turning a blind eye. Pressures of time and a lack of power mean they don’t tend to force the issue if they are told payment records aren’t available. One former inspector¹⁴⁰ tells of incompetent or feckless colleagues: one man would habitually dash past obvious serious violations and make straight for the medical kit. On his tick-box form he would make a note that it was devoid of ‘eyewash’, his only recommendation being that the factory must remedy this as fast as possible. His nickname became ‘Eyewash’. Another could clock up five inspections per day thanks to their slapdash nature. Rather than a cause for concern, this made him the star of his auditing firm. But then, time is money, and there’s plenty of money in auditing.