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.