To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
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