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