To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
the stress caused by this is intense. Research suggests102 that for every 20 per cent increase in food prices, a hundred million more people are pushed into the category of ‘the poorest of the poor’, living on less than $US1 a day. Having a job in the garment trade doesn’t keep you safe. Because clothing companies by and large continue to dodge the issue of paying them anything approaching a living wage (i.e. a wage that is sufficient and regular enough to provide a basic standard of living), garment workers have very little security against debt and disaster. It’s no coincidence that hikes in food prices, including staples like flour and rice, have been met with food riots in Asia, notably in Bangladesh and Cambodia. It is even less of a surprise that at the front of many of these riots have been garment workers. As M.K. Shefali, Executive Director of the NGO Nari Uddug Kendra (the Centre for Women’s Initiatives), based in Bangladesh, puts it to Labour Behind the Label: ‘For an adult103 living in Dhaka city the minimum nutrition requirement for basic living is 1,805 calories per day. At today’s cost of living this means Tk1,400 [just over £12] per person per month for food alone. Many garment workers (particularly female) do not earn this amount, which is severely affecting their health as well as productivity.’ Forget the morality of this for a minute: how sustainable is it to run an industry with a starving workforce?
The rag trade demands the type of physical labour that we – or certainly I, as a soft -skinned desk devotee – can only guess at. From ginning cotton in India or Mali, using a scythe to separate the cotton balls, gathering and feeding them into the pipes that suck them into the processing mill, to carrying the bales, to hunching over a machine sewing, checking, rechecking, folding and aligning, the repetitive work in many factories requires workers to stand or sit in one place for seven to eight hours at a time. Meanwhile the lowest, most menial workers crawl on their hands and knees scooping up errant fibre, waste material or cotton balls from underneath machines. They are nimble-fingered human dustpans and brushes, able to fold themselves under the machines as the blades and pipes whirl above their heads. This is dangerous work for tired, malnourished people: the slightest error of judgement can result in a severed finger. It also requires a phenomenal amount of calories. These garment workers have the opposite dilemma to us. We struggle to expend enough calories and to control our consumption – hence our expanding waistlines (and more, bigger clothes). They struggle to acquire enough energy on a ‘minimum’ wage from low-calorie staples: maize, rice, vegetables and fruit – all of which are subject to the vagaries of global food prices. That’s surely the definition of insecurity.
The garment worker is short-changed at every turn, so don’t be too soothed by a retailer’s promise that it adheres to a minimum wage. Naturally it will be referring to the minimum wage of the host country; and just because the government there has a minimum-wage law, that doesn’t mean workers are being paid enough to live on. In the case of Bangladesh, the minimum wage level was set in 1994 at around Tk930, and stubbornly remained unchanged for over a decade. After a series of protests prompted by a swathe of fires in factories it was upped104 to Tk1,662.50 a month, and then to Tk3,000 in July 2010. This looks like a big increase – until you work out that Tk3,000 is £27. Labour-rights campaigners were certainly not appeased: ‘The increase isn’t sufficient to support the basic needs of the garment workers and their families, and doesn’t cover the huge increase in living costs of the recent years,’ said Amin Amirul Haque of the National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF). ‘Most of these workers are the sole source of income for their families, and £1 a day is far below what a family of three, four or five need to survive.’ It remains one of the lowest minimum wages in the world. We should also remember that just because a minimum wage is recommended by a government wage board, there is absolutely no guarantee that factory owners will observe it.
Incredibly, retailers often manage to duck this issue. Professor Doug Miller, Chair in Ethical Fashion at Northumbria University (a post funded by Inditex, Zara’s owner), set his first-year students on the simulated assembly line that we saw earlier. After thirty years working around industrial labour issues and specialising in fashion, he is all too aware that ‘the labour cost105 by and large is embarrassingly low’. He explains that in his experience, retailers tend to avoid the issue of ‘CMT costs’ in their overall plan of how a line of garments will be produced. Instead of independently ensuring that garment workers receive a wage that might cover their living expenses, and are paid for overtime, the industry euphemistically uses a ‘Freight on Board’ (FOB) price which covers every cost connected with the garment leaving the factory: fabric, trim, packaging and manufacturing. Very rarely is the labour cost (sometimes called the ‘make element’) quoted as a separate item.
By bundling everything together and outsourcing all responsibility to the supplier, the retailer distances the brand from the low wage paid to the workers. Meanwhile the buyer negotiates aggressively on the FOB price. An estimated 60 per cent106 of it is usually accounted for by the fabric. There is not much the supplier can do about the price of cotton or polyester, so the only thing left to squeeze is the wage of the garment worker. The buyer might not have the garment worker at the forefront of his or her mind, but every time he or she squeezes the price there’s a huge chance that the worker is the person down the chain who it will impact on. And it’s not as if there’s much slack in the system. According to Actionaid107, out of the £4 Asda charges for a T-shirt, it pays the supplier £1.18.5p, retains £2.80 for itself, and the garment worker receives just 1.5p. Is that a fair slice of the pie? As has been noted, through a partnership with GTZ, a German NGO, Asda is working to increase workers’ pay.
RISKY BUSINESS
Risk, in today’s fashion scene, means anything that might wind up costing extra. Cardinal sin number one is missing the window on a must-have garment or accessory, so it will have to be discounted. From the outset retailers will place pressure on manufacturers to underbid other suppliers, and as part of the package will demand ‘just-in-time delivery’, often air freighting to make sure the knits or trousers hit the stores at the precise moment they are in fashion. For most manufacturing facilities that means accommodating every desire of the retailer, or of the agents working on its behalf. If the retailer says ‘Jump,’ the supplier says, ‘How high?’
For the actual garment workers, risk means a very different thing. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that ramshackle production facilities with faulty electrical wirings and boilers under pressure, plus piles of inventory and fabric and yarn, add up to a tinderbox. Sweatshops have been associated with fires for generations.
As a sobering reminder of that fact, 2011 is the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory108 fire in New York, which killed 146 young female garment workers and remains one of the city’s biggest industrial disasters. It was the beginning of the end for New York’s sweatshop district (though not sadly for the New York sweatshop), as it proved to be a catalyst for campaign and reform – the birth of the labour rights movement, in fact. The Triangle Shirtwaist disaster is commemorated in a museum and several books, and is recalled on its anniversary each year in news packages, with accounts of panic, grief, burned bodies and piles of charred clothing. Those 146 lives would not have been lost in vain if the fire had heralded the end of dangerous sweatshop production in fashion as a whole. But no. One hundred years on, there are more fires in garment factories than ever before. The danger has merely been outsourced to countries where casualties are reported in numbers rather than by name, and often not at all.
Fires continue to sweep through the rag trade, and are not confined to Asia. Time and time again retrospective inspections (surely the ultimate example of shutting the stable door far too late) reveal the same depressing reality. Young female garment workers without unions to represent them or the confidence to raise safety issues are locked into factories to fulfil Western orders. In 2007 the Argentine government shut down seven hundred illegal textile mills, described as ‘clandestine factories’, in Buenos Aires. Illegal trade accounted for around $700 million in the Buenos Aires