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Chapter 3

Fashion Crimes and Fashion Victims

A Dispiriting Journey as Fashion’s Back Story Unravels

At the risk of sounding jaded, the responses from the retailers are predictable. Overall, the peculiar alchemy of Big Fashion is explained away through the might of their buying power, thriftiness in marketing and advertising (and in some cases design and their avoidance of expensive, flashy offices), their genius at managing stock, and innovations involving swing tags. In the case of major supermarkets, when a price just seems too ridiculously recession-busting to be true – for example, jeans at £6⁰⁹¹ or T-shirts for £4 – you wonder if there might be another unspoken reason: are these garments being used as ‘loss leaders’, with the retailer taking a hit on margins, covering the basics of production just to entice a new type of buyer into its stores? After all, supermarkets trade in fashion just as they do in bananas and potatoes. I’m not suggesting that this is outrageous because it’s undignified for fashion to be traded as if it were a sack of spuds (although it does make me feel a pang of regret), but because by dropping prices still further and absorbing the hit, the multiples goad everybody else to do the same. Prices that are already deflated spiral ever downwards.

The impact of this spiral is felt thousands of miles away by that human element of the Big Fashion jigsaw which is largely absent in the responses from my value-fashion penfriends and from any mention on the label⁰⁹². A staggering one and a half billion pairs⁰⁹³ of jeans and other cotton trousers are sewn in Bangladesh every year, while India manufactures over seven billion pieces⁰⁹⁴ of over a hundred varieties of Western-style garments annually. By 2002 China, famously a powerhouse of consumer production, was reckoned to be churning out over twenty billion garments every year. (This means that were the global wardrobe divvied up equitably – we know it’s not! – every man, woman and child on the planet would have four Chinese items⁰⁹⁵ of clothing.) There are now an estimated 250,000 garment-export factories worldwide – as the name suggests, they produce solely for export. In the UK we are hungry recipients of this fashion bounty. According to industry estimates¹¹⁷, Britain scoops up half of all the apparel⁰⁹⁶ destined for Europe. Does it all arrive by magic?

No, it happens by human endeavour. The Big Fashion engine is powered by an estimated forty million⁰⁹⁷ garment workers toiling away, thousands of miles from the teams of buyers and designers in the European HQs. You could call them the Cut-Make-and-Trim army. Cut Make and Trim (CMT) is the point in the fashion chain where – the raw fibre having been spun and made into fabric, and the patterns and trends having been decided – the garments are actually made. According to fashion theory there are 101 stages⁰⁹⁸ in the supply chain, the first being ‘designer attends fabric show’ and the last ‘order ready for shipment’. (After that, of course, it still needs to be flown and/or shipped and trucked before it gets put under your nose.) The CMT stages, where the thing is actually made, account for just a tiny part of this whole flow chart: ‘only twenty-eight days⁰⁹⁹ and nine operations involve actually making the garment’. But these nine stages involve an extraordinary amount of human effort.

Fortunately for the industry, the new fashion model is the poster child of globalisation, and globalisation tends to specialise in sourcing the cheapest (and often the most compliant) labour on the planet. South-East Asia offers much of this labour, which explains why fast fashion’s global assembly line snakes its way through countries such as Cambodia, India, Vietnam and Bangladesh, all of which have become increasingly dependent on the garment trade to bolster their GDP. But the conditions created by globalisation do not breed loyalty. In fact you might say that they allow global fashion brands to play the poorest countries in the world with all the fidelity of the average tomcat. In this massive juggernaut of an industry, always on the lookout for the best deal and the quickest turnaround, brands and retailers will source not from a handful of trusted suppliers, but from forty or fifty garment factories. If there are preferential trade tariffs they may look at sourcing from African nations, and occasionally South American. The choice is vast, and if one producer isn’t supplying you quickly or cheaply enough, you merely look for a more compliant one.

Not only is the global assembly line long, it can also be brutal. Working conditions are typically very poor, and oft en dangerous. This leaves our CMT army toiling away in some of the most pitiful conditions in the poorest countries on the planet, in facilities that are most accurately described as sweatshops.

There are several ways to define a sweatshop. The original phrase described a system that outsourced or subcontracted labour. This still holds true, but the term is generally extended, applying to any production facility where the house menu includes long hours, unsafe working conditions and low pay, and where workers are not permitted to join unions or form an organisation to represent their interests. On top of this technical description we can add more imagery, gleaned from reports and exposés over recent years, some of which makes uncomfortable reading and viewing. But nothing like the discomfort of spending most of your waking life in these places. When I think of a sweatshop I also think of oppressive temperatures, perhaps the stench of human sweat, the relentless whirr of machines, overflowing toilets, the whole sorry scene policed by a pacing factory manager, possibly with a baton in his hand.

Although definitions are imprecise, the number of garment workers who can be considered highly vulnerable, the victims of a lax and at times inhumane industry, is disturbingly large. Potentially they stretch into millions. Who are they? It is likely that most of your wardrobe will have been made by women. They dominate the CMT army. They are considered to be more easily pacified, especially as cultures throughout the Developing World dictate that they are less likely to question middlemen or subcontractors over pay and conditions. Women, with their smaller hands, are also preferred for stitching: they are more nimble, and if they are physically slight they may also be more easily intimidated.

In the USA, anti-sweatshop organisations have been unequivocal in drawing connections between the way we consume fashion and the reality of production. ‘Over the past fifteen years¹⁰⁰, powerful US clothing retailers such as Walmart, Lord & Taylor and The Gap have created a global sweatshop crisis,’ says a report by Behind the Label.org from January 2001, which goes on to say that in 150 countries around the world over two million people, many of them young women and teenagers, work in garment sweatshops producing for American retailers. Globalisation means that clothes in the UK and across Europe are similarly sourced. We can draw our own conclusions as to how much of our fashion can be attributed to sweated labour.

THE HUMAN FACE OF BIG FASHION

Retailers, manufacturing brands and consumers have all become fantastically adept at divorcing fashion from the fact that it has been made by an army of living, breathing human beings. As consumers we’ve been completely anaesthetised by the seemingly incredible value of fashion over the last decade. The kick that buying cheap items gives us makes it easy to forget the reality of their production. We tend to make a joke about the fact that deep down we suspect they’ve been made in loathsome conditions, and sometimes we ignore it altogether. Cue Claudia Winkleman, on a jaunt for Vanity Fair at Paris Fashion Week: ‘So what about¹⁰¹ the couture thing – the freakishly expensive skirt that has been hand-sewn? All I’m throwing in is: has anyone here been to Primark? No, really. Their jeans are eight quid, and I reckon a machine sews those seams together in less than thirty seconds.’ I can forgive Claudia Winkleman a lot – she is the funniest presenter on TV – and of course she’s only trying to show divorced haute couture is from reality (more on which later), but uncharitably I’m going to make an example of her. She is not far off the mark with her estimate of thirty seconds for the seams. The forty million garment workers are expected to conform to a standard (known by the industry as the ‘virtual factory standard’ – more on this later) which generously allows fifteen minutes on the global assembly line for a pair of five-pocket jeans. However, bear in mind that that includes fourteen different pieces of sewing, including ‘fly front with zip’ and ‘leg bottom hems’. She has also omitted to say that a living, breathing human being operates that machine.

The pressure on that living, breathing human being is intense. It is hard to overstate how brutal the assembly line is for the average garment worker. Sixty first-year fashion students at Northumbria University decided to have a go, spending a day in their own sewing room, set up as a simulated version of a typical production line producing T-shirts. From the outset it was deemed impossible for them to achieve the timings expected from garment workers, so our students were allowed 1 minute 55 seconds to sew each sideseam: in a standard factory for export they would be allowed just 48.5 seconds. The film of their efforts, Been There, Done it – Just Not Sure if I am Entitled to the T-Shirt, shows them working hard. But every slight slip – a dropped pair of scissors, a pause to re-align the seams – costs them dear. The team of students managed to produce ninety-five T-shirts in seven and a half hours. The daily target in an export factory such as in Bangladesh with the same ‘line load’ (the same number of machines and the same type of manufacturing conditions) would be nine hundred.

There have been some other notable attempts at conveying the realities of foreign production. The Blood, Sweat and T-shirts TV franchise, broadcast on BBC 3 (and extended to Luxuries and Takeaways), has made a good stab at bringing them home to a young audience, the consumers of the future, in the hope that they’ll have a more engaged and informed understanding from which to make their purchasing decisions. Other stunts to bring the issue to life have included recreating a sweatshop environment in London and staffing it with celebrities (this didn’t make it to transmission, for legal reasons that were never quite clear). Inevitably these programmes adopt a format intended for an audience that, not unreasonably, wants to be entertained. They tend to put either celebrities or teenagers – the most televisually volatile sectors – into uncomfortable positions simulating the reality of production. We watch in part because of the jeopardy. We want to know how long they’ll stick out cotton picking or garment sewing. The answer is, usually, not very long.

But ultimately, because you can rightly only traumatise Western celebrities, teenagers and first-year fashion students so far, such programmes don’t come close to the true horrors of sweated labour. As far as I can see these guinea pigs aren’t exposed to conditions that can include being punched in the face for attending meetings, having their documents and permits taken from them, being denied access to a foetid toilet until their bladders are about to burst, being sexually assaulted or forced to have abortions. And they aren’t locked into factories at night that are swept by fires from an electronic fault, and burned alive. In the end, we, with our comfortable Western lives, simply can’t experience the pain of sweated labour. We can be tired, yes, from a day spent hunched over a sewing machine, but we can fall back on basic enshrined principles of human rights, the laws of the land and health and safety. These are all luxuries that the average garment worker on the real global assembly line can only dream of.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A GARMENT WORKER

I don’t tell Sokny that I’ve watched television programmes simulating the life of a garment worker. I suspect she’d think I was off my rocker, though possibly she’d be intrigued to know how I had enough leisure time to sit about watching TV. She works with female garment workers in Cambodia, and has offered to introduce me by phone to two women who she thinks will talk. As with so many workers, they live in fear of having their contracts terminated, and as with all garment workers, particularly those with young children, they have practically no time off. To make matters worse (for them), Sokny can only catch them while they are on a short break between shift s (more about these shift s in a second), and they will need to talk on her phone outside the factory. ‘If we are spotted,’ Sokny tells me, ‘they may want to leave quickly.’ ‘Fine,’ I say, feeling a) extremely guilty at putting them in this position, and b) very privileged to get to speak to them at all. I call them from London as agreed, and the women answer from outside a large garment operation in Phnom Penh, known for completing subcontracted orders. This is evidently not a show factory.

For nine long years Yong Li (not her real name), who is thirty, has worked in the garment trade, sewing jeans, T-shirts and other basics. At the moment she thinks they are working on an order just for one factory, but she doesn’t know the brand (as Sokny, who translates, explains, she isn’t able to tell me which brands she produces for because she doesn’t recognise the logos or tags). ‘I have lots of feelings about where I work,’ she says. ‘Lots of bad feelings, really. I feel like we suffer a lot, particularly if we can’t meet the targets we are set.’ At the moment she has to finish two hundred pieces a day. ‘It’s really hard to do that, although I think I am a quick worker.’ And what’s the penalty if she doesn’t achieve it? ‘It is very bad,’ she says. ‘This factory has very low standards, and supervisors think nothing of abusing you with very rude words.’ But Yong Li’s overriding fear is always that her contract will be terminated without notice, leaving her totally penniless.

Ke Ling (again, not her real name), also thirty, has just found a job after months on a blacklist. What did she do to get on the list? ‘I joined a union,’ she explains quietly, ‘but it was very difficult because I have a three-year-old daughter and my husband does not work.’ She will shortly begin her next shift at her new factory on the other side of the compound, working from 7 p.m. until 6 o’clock the next morning. Ordinarily I’d call this the night shift , but in her case it’s more of a continuation: ‘I already worked from seven this morning until 6 p.m.,’ she says. ‘We have been told we must do this to get the orders finished, because we’ve just received a big subcontracted order.’ For a month’s work Ke Ling receives the equivalent of $US92. ‘We just don’t have enough to eat, and it’s very hard because we live in a building behind the factory, but they want rent money every two weeks. If I cannot find it, we will have to leave. That’s just how it is.’ ‘If I want to buy clothes for my own children,’ says Yong Li, ‘I have to borrow money from anywhere I can.’

I ask how they feel about the future, these Cambodian women who spend day after day sewing clothes for such little money. I’m expecting non-committal answers. Instead I get emotional responses. ‘I feel like I cannot cope at all,’ says Ke Ling. ‘I have no choice. Nobody here wants to work in a garment factory like this. It is too hard, and I cannot work out how to feed my daughter. Sometimes I feel as if I just want to cry, cry and run away. Leave everything behind.’ Then, straight away, ‘We must leave now as we have to go back to work.’ It’s a measure of how desperate their situation is that women like this will give up any time to talk to someone they don’t know, thousands of miles away. They are constantly hoping against hope that something will change.

RUNNING ON EMPTY

We know that global food prices are under pressure. In developing countries, where 60 to 80 per cent of a family’s income goes on food, the stress caused by this is intense. Research suggests¹⁰² that for every 20 per cent increase in food prices, a hundred million more people are pushed into the category of ‘the poorest of the poor’, living on less than $US1 a day. Having a job in the garment trade doesn’t keep you safe. Because clothing companies by and large continue to dodge the issue of paying them anything approaching a living wage (i.e. a wage that is sufficient and regular enough to provide a basic standard of living), garment workers have very little security against debt and disaster. It’s no coincidence that hikes in food prices, including staples like flour and rice, have been met with food riots in Asia, notably in Bangladesh and Cambodia. It is even less of a surprise that at the front of many of these riots have been garment workers. As M.K. Shefali, Executive Director of the NGO Nari Uddug Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives), based in Bangladesh, puts it to Labour Behind the Label: ‘For an adult¹⁰³ living in Dhaka city the minimum nutrition requirement for basic living is 1,805 calories per day. At today’s cost of living this means Tk1,400 [just over £12] per person per month for food alone. Many garment workers (particularly female) do not earn this amount, which is severely affecting their health as well as productivity.’ Forget the morality of this for a minute: how sustainable is it to run an industry with a starving workforce?

The rag trade demands the type of physical labour that we – or certainly I, as a soft -skinned desk devotee – can only guess at. From ginning cotton in India or Mali, using a scythe to separate the cotton balls, gathering and feeding them into the pipes that suck them into the processing mill, to carrying the bales, to hunching over a machine sewing, checking, rechecking, folding and aligning, the repetitive work in many factories requires workers to stand or sit in one place for seven to eight hours at a time. Meanwhile the lowest, most menial workers crawl on their hands and knees scooping up errant fibre, waste material or cotton balls from underneath machines. They are nimble-fingered human dustpans and brushes, able to fold themselves under the machines as the blades and pipes whirl above their heads. This is dangerous work for tired, malnourished people: the slightest error of judgement can result in a severed finger. It also requires a phenomenal amount of calories. These garment workers have the opposite dilemma to us. We struggle to expend enough calories and to control our consumption – hence our expanding waistlines (and more, bigger clothes). They struggle to acquire enough energy on a ‘minimum’ wage from low-calorie staples: maize, rice, vegetables and fruit – all of which are subject to the vagaries of global food prices. That’s surely the definition of insecurity.

The garment worker is short-changed at every turn, so don’t be too soothed by a retailer’s promise that it adheres to a minimum wage. Naturally it will be referring to the minimum wage of the host country; and just because the government there has a minimum-wage law, that doesn’t mean workers are being paid enough to live on. In the case of Bangladesh, the minimum wage level was set in 1994 at around Tk930, and stubbornly remained unchanged for over a decade. After a series of protests prompted by a swathe of fires in factories it was upped¹⁰⁴ to Tk1,662.50 a month, and then to Tk3,000 in July 2010. This looks like a big increase – until you work out that Tk3,000 is £27. Labour-rights campaigners were certainly not appeased: ‘The increase isn’t sufficient to support the basic needs of the garment workers and their families, and doesn’t cover the huge increase in living costs of the recent years,’ said Amin Amirul Haque of the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF). ‘Most of these workers are the sole source of income for their families, and £1 a day is far below what a family of three, four or five need to survive.’ It remains one of the lowest minimum wages in the world. We should also remember that just because a minimum wage is recommended by a government wage board, there is absolutely no guarantee that factory owners will observe it.

Incredibly, retailers often manage to duck this issue. Professor Doug Miller, Chair in Ethical Fashion at Northumbria University (a post funded by Inditex, Zara’s owner), set his first-year students on the simulated assembly line that we saw earlier. After thirty years working around industrial labour issues and specialising in fashion, he is all too aware that ‘the labour cost¹⁰⁵ by and large is embarrassingly low’. He explains that in his experience, retailers tend to avoid the issue of ‘CMT costs’ in their overall plan of how a line of garments will be produced. Instead of independently ensuring that garment workers receive a wage that might cover their living expenses, and are paid for overtime, the industry euphemistically uses a ‘Freight on Board’ (FOB) price which covers every cost connected with the garment leaving the factory: fabric, trim, packaging and manufacturing. Very rarely is the labour cost (sometimes called the ‘make element’) quoted as a separate item.

By bundling everything together and outsourcing all responsibility to the supplier, the retailer distances the brand from the low wage paid to the workers. Meanwhile the buyer negotiates aggressively on the FOB price. An estimated 60 per cent¹⁰⁶ of it is usually accounted for by the fabric. There is not much the supplier can do about the price of cotton or polyester, so the only thing left to squeeze is the wage of the garment worker. The buyer might not have the garment worker at the forefront of his or her mind, but every time he or she squeezes the price there’s a huge chance that the worker is the person down the chain who it will impact on. And it’s not as if there’s much slack in the system. According to Actionaid¹⁰⁷, out of the £4 Asda charges for a T-shirt, it pays the supplier £1.18.5p, retains £2.80 for itself, and the garment worker receives just 1.5p. Is that a fair slice of the pie? As has been noted, through a partnership with GTZ, a German NGO, Asda is working to increase workers’ pay.

RISKY BUSINESS

Risk, in today’s fashion scene, means anything that might wind up costing extra. Cardinal sin number one is missing the window on a must-have garment or accessory, so it will have to be discounted. From the outset retailers will place pressure on manufacturers to underbid other suppliers, and as part of the package will demand ‘just-in-time delivery’, often air freighting to make sure the knits or trousers hit the stores at the precise moment they are in fashion. For most manufacturing facilities that means accommodating every desire of the retailer, or of the agents working on its behalf. If the retailer says ‘Jump,’ the supplier says, ‘How high?’

For the actual garment workers, risk means a very different thing. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that ramshackle production facilities with faulty electrical wirings and boilers under pressure, plus piles of inventory and fabric and yarn, add up to a tinderbox. Sweatshops have been associated with fires for generations.

As a sobering reminder of that fact, 2011 is the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory¹⁰⁸ fire in New York, which killed 146 young female garment workers and remains one of the city’s biggest industrial disasters. It was the beginning of the end for New York’s sweatshop district (though not sadly for the New York sweatshop), as it proved to be a catalyst for campaign and reform – the birth of the labour rights movement, in fact. The Triangle Shirtwaist disaster is commemorated in a museum and several books, and is recalled on its anniversary each year in news packages, with accounts of panic, grief, burned bodies and piles of charred clothing. Those 146 lives would not have been lost in vain if the fire had heralded the end of dangerous sweatshop production in fashion as a whole. But no. One hundred years on, there are more fires in garment factories than ever before. The danger has merely been outsourced to countries where casualties are reported in numbers rather than by name, and often not at all.

Fires continue to sweep through the rag trade, and are not confined to Asia. Time and time again retrospective inspections (surely the ultimate example of shutting the stable door far too late) reveal the same depressing reality. Young female garment workers without unions to represent them or the confidence to raise safety issues are locked into factories to fulfil Western orders. In 2007 the Argentine government shut down seven hundred illegal textile mills, described as ‘clandestine factories’, in Buenos Aires. Illegal trade accounted for around $700 million in the Buenos Aires province in 2007. The clandestine trade had been benefiting from thousands of illegal workers from neighbouring Bolivia¹⁰⁹. In April 2006 the conditions of illegal Bolivian workers trapped in an estimated 1,600 illegal sweatshops were brought sharply into focus when six Bolivians were killed by a fire in an unregulated mill.

In Bangladesh, garment-factory fires cause so many deaths that the country’s Daily Star newspaper published a helpful list¹¹⁰ of the most significant, entitled ‘Major RMG Fires Since ’90’. It runs: ‘62 killed at KTS Garments, Chittagong 2006; 32 killed at Saraka Garments, Dhaka 1990; 24 killed¹¹¹ at Shanghai Apparels, Dhaka 1997; 23 killed at Macro Sweater, Dhaka 2000; 23 killed at Chowdhury Knitwear, Narsingdi 2004; 23 killed at Shan Knitting, Narayanganj 2005; 22 killed at Lusaka Garments, Dhaka 1996; 20 killed at Jahanara Fashion, Narayanganj 1997; 12 killed at Globe Knitting, Dhaka 2000.’ The list is sadly not exhaustive. On the morning of 8 August 2001 in Mirpur, a worker on the sixth floor of the building that housed Mico Sweater sounded the alarm after seeing flames from an electric circuit board. The building was home to several different units, and workers from all of them ran down the stairs, only to find the fire escape locked. In the stampede twenty-four were killed, and a hundred injured.

You could easily put together a similar list for many of India’s garment districts. I’ve chosen just one example. In October 2007 eleven workers were killed when a short circuit caused a fire at RR Textiles¹¹² in Panipat, forty miles north of Delhi. They were reportedly trapped in the main spinning room. Local trade unions claimed that their escape route had been blocked by locked gates. Laws – unchanged since colonial times – penalise such breaches with a fine of around $3: the price of a garment worker’s life.

Since visiting Bangladesh and meeting journalists there while researching this book, I have started reading Bangladeshi newspapers online. Frequently there are reports of fires, and impassioned articles asking when they will end. A recent image that I almost wish I had never seen is a photograph accompanying one of these. It shows a dozen young women lying on the floor of a room. They died in a stampede from a fire in a Dhaka garment factory. They look like a collection of china dolls lying next to each other.

They died facilitating fast fashion. It is probably impossible to tally all such workers and to memorialise them. Even for those we do hear about, it’s highly unlikely there will be any museums commemorating their lives and untimely deaths, or the contribution they may have made to labour rights. The only tribute we can pay them is to insist that things are done differently in future.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS

‘Listen, love,’ a middle-aged man said to me on a Sunday-morning TV discussion programme on which the ‘sweatshop’ issue came up, ‘they’re glad of the work.’ I’m not unfamiliar with this sentiment; I must hear it at least ten times a week. It is second only to the classic ‘They’re just having their industrial revolution now.’ Cheap fast fashion is so often still presented as a wealth-creation scheme for poor brown people that it is frankly a wonder Primark hasn’t been given a Social Justice Award. It’s not an attractive line of argument. First, there’s the crude division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Second, it just seems too convenient to rebrand our unsustainable, exploitative habits of consumption into a beneficent means of assisting unfortunates in the Developing World.

Garment workers are, after all, individuals with aspirations, just like non-garment workers. For their jobs to offer genuine opportunity would require them to be trained and to have a chance to become better-skilled. The reality isn’t like that. Yet again, the pressurised nature of the global assembly line all but rules out the investment, time and training needed for a worker to build a genuine career path.

In fact, when the journalist Akshai Jain¹¹³ took a walk around the garment units of Gurgaon in Delhi in 2010, it seemed that skills in garment production were actually being downgraded. His resulting article centred on the heartrending story of Santosh Kumar Kaushal, who had come to Delhi from Allahabad twenty years before to work as a tailor. Initially he found employment at a small ‘fabricator’ shop (a thirty-person unit where tailors both live and work) earning enough to lead a modest life because he was paid according to the number of pieces he produced. ‘We worked to our own schedules,’ he told Jain wistfully. ‘The atmosphere was friendly, and newcomers learnt on the job.’ But when Jain discovered him in the Nali Wali Gali (the aptly unpromising translation is ‘the street by the drain’ – an area Jain describes as being

‘infamous for its filth’), working in the garment factories of Udyog Vihar, the tailor was an employee rather than a craft sman, and was close to despair because his skills had become virtually useless. The fabricator shop where he had once worked had long shut down as manufacturing shift ed to factories. Kaushal described his existence as a robotic stream of monitored productivity. No longer did he work on a single garment from source to completion (a source of professional satisfaction for him as a tailor), but on a production line where, he said, ‘An army of thirty to forty workers would work on a single garment. One would do just the hem, the other the zip and the third the collar.’ And so on. He also spoke of the lifestyle of himself and his fellow workers, preyed on by ruthless landowners who rented them matchbox-sized fleapit rooms: ‘Four to five workers are crammed into a windowless room, for which they pay Rs1,000 [about £14] a month. Their wages are around Rs3,600 [£50] if they are lucky. But the work hours stretch at times to fifteen hours. If they get overtime it’s just their average hourly pay.’

Whereas it would take a year on the job to learn to stitch a full piece as a tailor, newcomers to the modern assembly lines were given a two-hour tailoring course that taught them little more than how to sew a straight line. It cost Rs300 (£4.20). To train a checker or a garment inspector was reckoned to cost Rs800 (£11.25). ‘The tuition is brutal. [The teacher] Siddiqui paces between the machines shouting at the students, rapping them occasionally on the knuckles. “I need to train them with a stick,” he says, loud enough for all the students to hear. “If I train a student in fifteen days I make a profit of Rs100 [£1.40]; if they take a month to learn, I make a loss.”’ The piece ends with Santosh Kumar Kaushal giving up after twenty years, deciding that the industry has deteriorated to such a point that he really can’t take it any more. ‘Gurgaon,’ he tells Jain, ‘is no place for tailors.’

The sprawl of garment factories housing millions of workers on production lines is by no means confined to inner cities. EPZs (export processing zones) are part of the architecture of globalisation. Their use is not confined to the garment industry – medical supplies, toys and computers are also produced in them. But they are a model that lends itself well to the international garment industry. At thousands of square metres, and growing in scale every year, it won’t be long before these vast factories and workshops are visible from space in the same way that Fresh Kills Landfill outside New York apparently is. They dominate entire cities, and represent the cornerstone of what we have come to call globalisation. The International Labour office (ILO) has been monitoring them now for twenty years, and defines them as ‘industrial zones with special incentives set up to attract foreign investors, in which imported materials undergo some degree of processing before being (re-)exported again’. They are also often called free trade zones, special economic zones, bonded warehouses, free ports and, in Central America, maquiladoras. They are the powerhouses of contemporary high-street fashion, the link between transnational global fashion corporations and some of the poorest workers on earth.

An investigation into just why transnational corporations are attracted to set up shop in these zones isn’t really necessary. Multinationals, the brands that you and I know, are kept sweet by EPZs, which anaesthetise them from the shock of doing business in political tinderboxes while ensuring the maximisation of profits through a series of tax and duty breaks. Plonked in an EPZ, a transnational can lead something of a charmed existence. Most are subjected to only 15 per cent corporation tax, and benefit from greater autonomy from the host country, which is useful in places like China. From Hungary to Bangladesh, countries are desperate to attract foreign investment, so all a transnational fashion company needs to do is shop around to get all sorts of concessions. EPZs are everywhere. And you can expect more of them, bigger and better, with bigger and better tax incentives, as they come up to their twenty-year anniversary.

Another big advantage for a multinational company is that it can up and leave without notice. After all, what is there to keep them in a particular EPZ or city when every other developing country is waiting to shower them with tax breaks and preferential access to markets? Depending on the vagaries of international free trade, inter-country hookups and tariff quotas, all sorts of global alliances guarantee countries with access to cheap workers a temporary market in big economies such as the US or Europe. Of course these agreements are as solid as a dust cloud, and as likely to be blown elsewhere. But that’s OK: factories can be set up as informally as you like, low-cost workers need no contracts or guarantees, and if preferential rates evaporate, the whole operation can be shut down. Fast fashion doesn’t require permanence, which is why it fits today’s globalised economy like a glove.

So, for example, Levi Strauss & Co. closed its factory in Manila in July 2008, at a cost of 257 jobs. ‘We have examined¹¹⁴ comprehensively all other options, including cost containment and improving the efficiency and productivity of this plant as first options,’ Ramon Martelino, Country Manager of Levi Strauss Philippines, said comfortingly to industry magazine Clothesource in March 2008, when the decision was taken. ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued less comfortingly, ‘such measures cannot overcome the significantly lower costs of outsourcing.’

And if you can pick and choose your ‘host’ country, why not pick and choose a cheap but skilled workforce and bring them with you? In 2007, 832,000 Bangladeshi workers left the country for jobs overseas in the garment trade. This serves as a reminder that most garment workers are migrants. Of these, eight hundred were recruited by agents for four textile factories in Batu Pahat district in Malaysia’s Johor state. After just a few weeks, thirty-four of them returned to Bangladesh with claims of horrifying torture and ill-treatment. Among the catalogue of abuses they endured were electric shocks at the hands of the Malaysian immigration police. According to their testimonies they were paid $60 a month in Malaysia, a percentage of which had to go to the recruiting agent, and were not given a proper place to stay. One of the workers told reporters he had paid over $3,000¹¹⁵ to an agent in Bangladesh, and was promised a salary of $400 and accommodation. He ended up camping in Kuala Lumpur airport car park.

An extensive New York Times investigation¹¹⁶ exposed the lot of Bangladeshi workers who had been ‘supplied’ to Jordan, where garment manufacturing was booming thanks to a trade agreement with the US. Jordan was able to produce low-cost garments for some of the biggest fashion retailers on earth. Conditions for the Bangladeshi nationals – this time predominantly men – who had paid between $1,000 and $3,000 to work in Jordan, and were taken to the Paramount Garment factory, near Amman, were described as ‘dismal’, and indeed they were. Their passports were confiscated on arrival, and they were forced to work from 8 a.m. to one or two in the morning, seven days a week. Some of these ‘guest workers’ were placed ten to twenty people in a dormitory, but others had to sleep on the floor in between shift s. When the men objected they were physically assaulted by managers. At 4 p.m. the Jordanian nationals who worked on the production floor left for home. It was clear that the immigrant workforce was being ruthlessly exploited.

‘These are the worst conditions I’ve ever seen,’ said Charles Kernaghan, Executive Director of the US National Labor Committee, who travelled to Jordan to investigate Paramount and other garment facilities. ‘You have people working forty-eight hours straight. You have workers who were stripped of their passports, who don’t have ID cards that allow them to go out on the street. If they’re stopped, they can be imprisoned or deported, so they’re trapped, often held under conditions of involuntary servitude.’

‘Involuntary servitude’ sounds a lot like slavery to me.

HOME-MADE OPPRESSION

Looking for something to wear one day, I idly pick out from my wardrobe a garment I can’t even remember buying: a black embroidered top with an intricate textured pattern. It strikes me suddenly that I have no idea who made it, where it came from, or in what conditions it was produced. It was cheap – under £20 – and yet I wonder if it was handmade. If so, shouldn’t that have made it more expensive? When I hold it up to the light I can see the way the black beads fall not quite symmetrically down each shoulder, delicately sewn in so that they lend the fabric a careful sheen. What sort of machine could do that? Was all this embellishment added by human hands? If so, whose hands were they?

‘It’s handmade, isn’t it?’ This is a question I often find myself asking shop assistants, friends and colleagues. How do you know if embellishments have been added by machine or by hand? There are machines that can apply and attach sequins and other decorations in seemingly random patterns that look like handiwork, but they require a considerable capital investment by a garment factory. Ask yourself this: is it likely that the piece you are buying has been sourced from a production facility that has invested in that scale of equipment? If it’s from a fast-fashion label, particularly from the value end, that is highly unlikely. Industry estimates suggest that 20 to 60 per cent of garment production (particularly children’s and women’s clothing) is produced at home by informal workers. They are most likely to be adding beading, embroidery and general embellishment. In the absence of any clues on the label, by and large we’re left guessing.

It’s very likely that my top was embellished by human hands. That connects me to the legions of hidden home-workers also operating in some of the poorest regions on earth. In fact for real invisibility it’s hard to beat these millions of workers, hunched over, stitching and embroidering the contents of the global wardrobe in their own living spaces in slums where a whole family can live in a single room. They are responsible for sewing, beading and embellishing many thousands of garments every month, the clothes that become everyday stock in our high-street stores. They work as fast as they can and as long and as daylight allows, and then into the night using oil lamps. Some have access to old sewing machines and sporadic electricity, but they must absorb the cost. They are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to rights and remuneration. Such home-workers represent the unseen, isolated, bottom rung of the global fast-fashion industry. They live hand to mouth, presided over by middlemen, tyrannical go-betweens who hand over some of the lowest wages in the garment industry (and that is really saying something). They’re proof that gross exploitation doesn’t just exist in factory sweatshops. SEWA, or the All India Federation of Self-Employed Women’s Associations, battles for rights for these most marginalised workers in the fashion economy. ‘The wages paid to homeworkers are nowhere near even close to the minimum wage,’ organiser Sanjay Kumar, one of the few male faces at SEWA, explained to me, ‘and that is a direct result of layers of middlemen.’

Strangely, as I don’t often hang out with supermodels, it’s the British model Erin O’Connor who crystallised the issue of home-workers for me. I interviewed her in 2010 after she had come back from seeing a SEWA initiative in India. The purpose of her trip was to fact-find and then publicise the lot of home-workers, who just hadn’t been on the radar. She went to their houses, saw where and how they worked, and had a go at making some products herself. Admittedly the latter is a standard NGO photo op (I remember pictures of Chris Martin pulling a plough in Mexico on an Oxfam trip to highlight endemic problems in trade tariffs), but it did give her huge respect for their skills. ‘I have previously been a very enthusiastic consumer, and I didn’t assume the origins of garments enough,’ she says. ‘The thing is, when you see an article – whether it be a bejewelled pen from Monsoon, or a top in Gap that requires embroidery – you almost don’t believe that it is made with a pair of very determined hands, and that it is time-consuming and that each garment in a sense is bespoke, because the way in which they do it – the chalk is their guideline, like a tailor. There’s not much to make us aware of women using their hands and their heritage, is there?’

No, there isn’t. Instead I think, scanning my wardrobe and flicking through the hangers, looking up close at a bag or a shoe, there is a huge effort to distance us from the people who make our clothes, and their skills. Branding, labelling and trends tend to remove those people’s heritage and their history. We’d prefer to believe that our clothes were produced by a fully automated industry.

SMALL HANDS AND THE INEXORABLE SLIDE OF GARMENT PRODUCTION

From unseen workers we turn to what many consider the least acceptable side of a chaotic supply chain, and the one from which companies will do most to dissociate themselves: child labour. Many people’s perception of sweatshops will automatically include child workers, based in part on the historical imagery of children toiling in the cotton mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire at the time of the Industrial Revolution.

I was seventeen, and on a trip to northern India with a friend, when our hosts thought it would be interesting for us to visit a small carpet factory. I think they were hoping we’d also buy some carpets. But the only thing I remember is that it was the first time I saw child labour: a small boy propped up at a loom, where he lurched from side to side weaving a carpet, as his feet tried to reach for the pedals. We were told he was eight, but he looked younger, and he was obviously blind. My friend started crying, and we were unceremoniously thrown out, thus failing even to be proper eyewitnesses. We talked about mounting some kind of rescue (this would have been idiotic, obviously), of confronting the carpet factory owner, which I think we tried to do, but he refused to look at us. In the end of course we achieved nothing. This was not an unusual experience in India in the early 1990s, when child labour was not as sensitive an issue as it was to become. I can only say that it’s an image that has continued to motivate me.

Child labour in garment production remains the emotive issue. How could it not be? The pathos is almost too much to bear. Children have small, nimble fingers, cannot resist violence and intimidation easily, and are bought from desperate parents in rural areas all over the world. Their expendability made them a mainstay of the nascent sports apparel factories that have popped up all over Sialcot in Pakistan in the past twenty years. The major brands are adamant that they have applied so much pressure on the child labour issue that it is in decline in the garment industry. It is true that big brands act very swiftly if they are connected to child labour. When campaigners are able to demonstrate that a brand is using children the news is flashed all over the world by a rapacious media. (This is not always motivated by altruism: there is no denying that brand-slaying is a good story.) In turn this acts like a touchpaper to consumer outrage. There’s no ethical story like a child labour story.

Despite the industry’s keenness to sort out child labour, it is still rife. In the decade from 1997 to 2007, India gained the ignominious title of the world capital of child labour: it contributes an estimated 20 per cent of the country’s gross national product. In effect we are pretty powerless to know whether a child gets home from school and then has to crack on with a needlework project that might make the difference between whether or not the family eats that week. But I don’t have to go far to see footage of Indian children doing precisely that: sewing beading onto fashion tops that look rather like the one in my wardrobe. The garment-worker mother was up against a deadline, so the children were expected to pitch in. The five-year-old worked so deft ly with a needle that it was clear that this wasn’t a rare occurrence by any means. There is no room for sentiment at their end. The supervisor might be a neighbour and possibly a friend (although the one I observed was pretty severe), but he won’t allow ‘lazy’ children to jeopardise an outsource contract: the livelihoods of several hundred villagers rely on a group of five-year-olds pulling their weight with the adults, sitting cross-legged in poor light for four to five hours an evening. Just as the old show-business maxim dictates that the show must go on, these orders must go out.

In December 2007 the journalist Dan McDougall, working with German broadcasting company WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), uncovered ten- and eleven-year-olds working in horrific conditions in the back streets of New Delhi. He met Amitosh, a ten-year-old who along with forty other boys had been sold into the garment trade to men who visited his village in Bihar (a thirty-hour train journey away). His life in a derelict industrial unit was a vision of hell. The corridors flowed with raw sewage from a flooded toilet, food was scarce, and Amitosh and the other boys were forced to work day and night, their tiny needles puncturing the fabric of clothes that could be found on any British high-street rail. Jivaj, a boy from West Bengal who looked about twelve, burst into tears and whispered, ‘Last week, we spent four days working from dawn until about one o’clock in the morning the following day. I was so tired I felt sick … If any of us cried we were hit with a rubber pipe. Some of the boys had oily cloths stuffed in our mouths as punishment.’

As the boys sewed the labels into these unremarkable clothes, it became clear which unremarkable stores they were going to end up in: those of Gap Inc. When this was brought to the company’s attention Gap ‘admitted the problem, sought to fix it and promised to radically re-examine the working practices of its Indian contractors’, according to McDougall. The company’s policy and ‘rigorous’ social audit systems launched in 2004 mean that if it discovers children being used by contractors the contractor must remove the child from the sweatshop, and the child must be provided with access to schooling and a wage.

In 2008 Primark was ‘let down’ by three Indian factories in Tirupur (soubriquet: T-Shirt City), that apparently contravened the company’s ‘strict ethical standards’ by outsourcing the embroidery¹¹⁸ of 20,000 pieces to small children (again the story was broken by McDougall, this time with the BBC’s Panorama). Primark moved swiftly over the allegations about the Tirupur Three (as we’ll call the factories in question) that were due to be broadcast and exposed in the Observer, pulling out of the factories. This was despite signing up in the previous year to UK trade magazine Retail Week’s ‘A Source for Good’ campaign, which pledged to work with ‘failing factories rather than abandon them’. The company was at pains to point out that this unfortunate use of child labour was not in any way connected to the low price of the fashion it sells. This is not a view shared by the whole garment and accessory industry. There are people who have worked extensively on the ground who think that the continued use of child labour and low-priced fashion are indelibly linked. Lawrence Warren, for example, who spent twenty years sourcing shoes for major labels, is very much of the opinion that ‘Retailers who sell clothes at particularly low prices tend to use a lot of middlemen and not have much contact with their suppliers.’ This, he says, makes the use of child labour more likely, and heightens the odds that it will go undetected.

I’m not saying that globalised companies go out looking for children to employ. In fact they actively try to avoid it. Some even work hard to try to eliminate child labour. Certainly they are very keen to keep their hands free of it. But economic cycles, styles, volume of orders – these are all variables that affect the fast-fashion cycle. Sometimes they’re unpredictable. Sometimes not so much. Take Tirupur, for example. According to research¹¹⁹ this area alone is the source of 40 per cent of all ready-made garment production in India. The garment industry here has increased by twenty-two times since 1985. It is huge. You have to wonder whether part of the attraction is that it is just so cheap. And then you need to ask why that should be. Following the Panorama Primark exposé and the local government’s and textile exporting associations’ subsequent rebuttals and disclaimers, including a statement that there was absolutely no child labour in Tirupur, Indian journalist N. Madhavan¹²⁰ went to have a look at the garment district himself. He found plenty of children to talk to, busy working away in the international fashion industry.

It’s all very well for governments, manufacturers and retailers to make big noises about getting rid of child labour altogether, but doing it is quite another thing. This is especially true if you refuse to change a system that always wants more for less. It will become even more so as prices climb and buyers continue battling to squeeze that Freight on Board price. That will mean even more pressure on a system that is already at breaking point, even more orders being accepted by suppliers who will subcontract, and even more pressure being applied from European HQs. Any claims about the death of child labour are likely to be premature.

DOLE-CHEAT COUTURE

I imagine that, like me, you’re pretty used to the cycle of fashion exposés by now. For every step forward there are a dozen steps back into the type of squalid, clandestine operations you’d have very much hoped would have been consigned to history.

In January 2009 it was once again the turn of Primark to step into the interrogation zone – thanks yet again¹²¹ to Dan McDougall, a prolific thorn in the side of retailers that didn’t appear to have control of their supply chains. Hot on the heels of the Tirupur Three example, the company had once again been caught using a contractor that was in turn using illegal immigrants, paid just over half the minimum wage to fulfil knitwear orders. Workers were found in cold and cramped conditions, working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. I still have the Kimball tag details of the pieces they were producing (given to me at the time by Dan): ‘petrol-coloured cardigan 80646’ and ‘black sleeveless atmosphere cardi 81742’. By the time I got down to Primark they’d either sold out of the off ending items or removed them from sale. Again, the retailer said it had been badly ‘let down’ by a supplier. A spokesperson added, ‘We are extremely concerned about the very serious allegations made against our supplier TNS Knitwear and against TNS’s unauthorised subcontractor, Fashion Waves,’ and vowed to launch its own internal investigation. TNS Knitwear denied the allegations. Unfortunately (for Primark), the post-exposé vernacular seems to play better when the subcontractor is thousands of miles away in downtown Dhaka or southern India, not a stone’s throw from your flagship store in Manchester.

At TNS Knitwear, Pakistani, Afghan and Indian garment workers were toiling on Primark’s bargain fashion for £3 an hour. Since they were paid cash in hand, some were also signing on. The tabloids dubbed this ‘dole-cheat couture’. It seemed that, nearly two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, the British sweatshop had not been consigned to history.