Some twenty years ago, early in my
career recording sound for documentary film, I traveled to Honduras
and El Salvador as part of a team working to expose the slave-like
conditions suffered by the workers who make the billions of garments
that Americans consume every year. What we found was that the typical
individual sitting behind a sewing machine was an uneducated woman in
her late teens or early twenties, often forced to take birth control
against her will (to preserve the factory’s “investment” in
having trained her), routinely subject to the predatory sexual
advances of the floor managers. Many were naïve country girls lured
to the city’s favela outskirts by the hope of a job. They
were chosen because they were the most compliant and powerless
segment of the population. Shifts were absurdly long, overtime
routinely withheld. The pay was derisory, some tiny fraction of a
dollar an hour; many women we clandestinely spoke with reported
spending more than a quarter of each day’s earnings on bus fare and
a meager lunch. The huge factories required no more investment than a
few hundred sewing machines, some fluorescent tubing, and just enough
fans to prevent the workers from fainting on the line in the tropical
heat. Invariably, these maquilas were located inside the gates
of a tax-advantaged “free trade zone,” protected by a private
security force beholden only to the managers. Any demands for better
conditions or wages were met with beatings, and promises from the
garment contractors to simply pull up stakes and relocate in some
even more inexpensive and unregulated country: Haiti, perhaps, or
Nicaragua, or Bangladesh.
The stories emerging from this last
country in the wake of the deadly Tazreen Fashions factory fire last
weekend suggest that little has improved in the globalized world of
garment manufacture. Scattered in the wreckage of the factory, among
the charred bodies of the 112 dead, were scorched labels for
Wal-Mart’s house jeanswear brand, “Faded Glory.” (An apt
description of the American garment industry, demolished by “race
to the bottom” outsourcing). The spokesmouths of the global
retailing titan quickly announced that although Tazreen had once
produced clothing for Wal-Mart, they were “no longer authorized”
to do so. They blamed, and immediately fired, a supplier who they
suggested had illicitly subcontracted with the unauthorized Tazreen,
as if the conditions there were uniquely bad, or particularly
dangerous. If you believe them, in today’s global marketplace, the
world’s biggest companies don’t have the vaguest control over who
is manufacturing their products, and under what conditions. Public
relations departments and other corporate spin doctors have
apparently become so sophisticated that huge international brands can
manage to “stand behind their products” while simultaneously
denying any knowledge of the savage conditions under which they are
produced. Clearly the programs of “voluntary” self-policing put
in place by many gigantic international brands are essentially
window-dressing. The many contractors and sub-contractors operating
their independent freelance factories from Dhaka to the Dominican
Republic serve an important role: they obfuscate the supply chain.
When something goes wrong, Wal-Mart, or Hanes, or the Gap, or any of
countless others claim to be just another disappointed customer,
(albeit a bulk customer) sorry to hear that some “renegade”
factory didn’t live up to the exacting standards on the
mimeographed form they had once held a photo-op to insist should be
posted prominently on the wall near the exit doors.
I’m not the first to note the grisly
similarity between the Tazreen inferno and the notorious Triangle
Shirtwaist fire of Greenwich Village, New York, which killed 146
mostly young, mostly female, mostly uneducated recently immigrated
seamstresses, just over a century ago, in March of 1911. That
disaster was instrumental in the creation of the International Ladies
Garment Worker’s Union, and a catalyst for the discussion of
worker’s rights in the United States. In an age when the clothes we
wear are produced on the far side of the continent, in a distant
country most people cannot locate on a map, it seems optimistic to
hope that Tazreen might inspire the same kind of movement. Instead,
companies must be held to account, by their customers. We need to
change our ideas about what makes a brand worth wearing.
On that trip
to El Salvador twenty years ago, Charles Kernaghan, our guide from
the National Labor Committee, estimated the cost of the labor spent
on the production of a t-shirt at one half of one percent of its
ultimate retail price. The cost of the fabric itself, and the
shipping involved in offshore operations represented larger
fractions, but most companies spend vastly more on advertising and
marketing than on anything actually reflected in the quality of the
shirt on your back. This means that doubling the pittance
these exploited workers are paid would have a negligible effect on
the in-store cost of most garments. Uh, I don't know about you, but I'd be okay with that.
Photos from my own wardrobe.
