Mr Jones then introduces the topic of labour rights. He flags up Tesco’s ‘proud’ membership of the Ethical Trading Initiative, and highlights the fact that the company is also working on improving the skills of workers: ‘A broader example of our commitment to support improvement is shown in our current work to establish a Skills Academy for the garment sector in Bangladesh, which will help suppliers to both local and international markets improve production efficiency, raise wages for workers and reduce working hours. The challenges of ensuring decent working conditions, of course, face all clothing suppliers,’ he acknowledges, before ending with a flourish: ‘We’re conscious of how valuable the garment sector is to many developing countries’ economies and believe strongly that the right thing to do is to face challenges in working conditions head on and help improve them – continuing to provide opportunities for jobs and for economic growth – rather than reduce our trade and see those jobs and the opportunities for growth also reduce.’
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