To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
exposés by now. For every step forward there are a dozen steps back into the type of squalid, clandestine operations you’d have very much hoped would have been consigned to history.
In January 2009 it was once again the turn of Primark to step into the interrogation zone – thanks yet again121 to Dan McDougall, a prolific thorn in the side of retailers that didn’t appear to have control of their supply chains. Hot on the heels of the Tirupur Three example, the company had once again been caught using a contractor that was in turn using illegal immigrants, paid just over half the minimum wage to fulfil knitwear orders. Workers were found in cold and cramped conditions, working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. I still have the Kimball tag details of the pieces they were producing (given to me at the time by Dan): ‘petrol-coloured cardigan 80646’ and ‘black sleeveless atmosphere cardi 81742’. By the time I got down to Primark they’d either sold out of the off ending items or removed them from sale. Again, the retailer said it had been badly ‘let down’ by a supplier. A spokesperson added, ‘We are extremely concerned about the very serious allegations made against our supplier TNS Knitwear and against TNS’s unauthorised subcontractor, Fashion Waves,’ and vowed to launch its own internal investigation. TNS Knitwear denied the allegations. Unfortunately (for Primark), the post-exposé vernacular seems to play better when the subcontractor is thousands of miles away in downtown Dhaka or southern India, not a stone’s throw from your flagship store in Manchester.
At TNS Knitwear, Pakistani, Afghan and Indian garment workers were toiling on Primark’s bargain fashion for £3 an hour. Since they were paid cash in hand, some were also signing on. The tabloids dubbed this ‘dole-cheat couture’. It seemed that, nearly two hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, the British sweatshop had not been consigned to history.
Chapter 4
Tea, Sympathy and Auditing
How Superficial Checks and Balances have Failed to Clean up Fashion
Five men in short-sleeved shirts stand around me. A fan whirrs above my head. I am leaning over a common or garden exercise book, an impromptu visitors’ book, clutching a pen and desperately thinking of something neutral to write that cannot later be construed as in any way condoning what I have seen in the factory I have just been shown around. My main aim is for myself and my colleagues, including the Dhaka native who has brought us here as a huge favour on the condition that we don’t cause an almighty ruckus, to leave as soon as possible.
My mind is completely blank. ‘Write something about your experience and how you have enjoyed the tour of our facilities,’ suggests the General Manager of the Epoch Garment Factory, Shantinagar, Dhaka, helpfully. ‘Say how we gave you a nice tour.’ ‘Hmm,’ I say, pretending to consider this advice, but thinking that it really depends on your definition of ‘nice’. Apart from rather vigorously turning out our handbags to make sure we had no ‘surveillance equipment’, the many masters of the Epoch Garment Factory have been perfectly accommodating. Our visit was unscheduled, and they were clearly under pressure to finish a giant order; this constituted privileged access.
I am in Bangladesh, the country that produces an increasingly large chunk of the UK wardrobe. By 2006 the Bangladeshi ready-made garment (RMG) industry was thought to be the source of nearly 8 per cent122 of all the clothes sold into Europe, the USA and Japan. But on this trip, my first, I’m not officially here to analyse the garment trade: I’m the guest of an NGO that is showing me climate-change projects. Bangladesh, already in a hapless geographical position as the biggest rivers in India’s north swell, pick up speed and converge within its borders, leaving thousands of people homeless each year through flooding, will in future also have to deal with rising sea levels further threatening its lowest-lying areas. I’m also taking in a national project focusing on women’s welfare and eradicating domestic violence – 60 per cent of Bangladeshi women123 live with daily violent abuse in their own homes. Other NGO workers tell me that following the country’s latest round of flooding, which eradicated much livestock, women in the south were being used to pull ploughs. But it isn’t long before we come across the garment industry. In my first few hours in Dhaka, meeting women who are for the first time forming groups to resist domestic violence and oppression, I come across dozens of garment workers. Of course, 80 per cent of garment workers124 in Bangladesh are female.
I met them late at night in a downtown district, on a precious break from their shift s. It was easy to understand what my friends who work for NGOs meant when they said they felt guilty gathering evidence out of hours from garment workers about pay and conditions when these women cannot speak freely at work, and hardly have an abundance of what we in the West know as ‘downtime’. Lesson number one for me in Bangladesh was that we should be extraordinarily grateful that these workers sacrifice any of their time to give first-hand testimonies about their working lives. It’s a big sacrifice, and one that in itself illustrates just how desperate the majority of workers are to have us understand the truth about garment production, and to help them in their battle against inequality.
I knew I would only get lesson number two by actually experiencing a garment factory in Dhaka. I wanted this to be as authentic an experience as possible, not a carefully monitored tour of a showcase facility that’s kept running for the benefit of Western visitors, particularly the leagues of auditors who troop in and out of them ticking boxes on behalf of Western retailers. But I knew that this would be somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible. A contact had phoned me a few days before I left Britain. ‘You’ve got no chance of getting into a garment factory,’ she told me. The major NGO fixer, a Dhaka native and activist for change among garment workers, had been imprisoned again on account of his ‘campaigning’. This is par for the course in many CMT producing countries: in 2010 three trade union officials working on behalf of garment workers were murdered in Cambodia.
Nevertheless, for four days I am acutely aware that in and around Dhaka there are thousands of whirring machines, operated by the lion’s share of the estimated nearly four million women – many of them very young – who have turned Bangladesh into an RMG superpower. This morning, as on all others, they’re facing at least a ten-hour stretch hunched over their tables producing low-quality fast-fashion merchandise, much of it destined for the UK. Then, just before we’re about to leave Bangladesh we get a lucky break. Ellora, a young woman working for the NGO I am visiting Bangladesh with, has a contact who can get us into a workplace she describes as ‘a good factory’. Naturally I don’t expect to see anything but a flagship advertisement for globalisation, well ventilated, safety aware, with smiling staff who in all probability will be whistling while they work.
And so we set off in our little bus, heading slowly (all travel in Dhaka is painfully slow) into the centre of town. This surprises me, because I thought bright, shiny new production facilities would be based in the surrounding areas. It is at this point I realise this visit is not going to be to a cosmetically perfect working environment, of the type that would leave an external auditor from a multinational sleeping happily, but to something slightly more haphazard, more real. When the bus finally pulls up, the striking thing is that this is not a purpose-built garment factory.
The most accurate description would be that it looks like an office block. There are thousands of similarly impromptu garment factories dotted around the city. Ostensibly Dhaka is booming. The real-estate price has hit the proverbial roof, and there is constant pressure to provide readymade garments for export. Factories will therefore set up anywhere they can. If no premises can be found, new ones are thrown up in weeks, or new storeys added to existing buildings. This explains how one infamous Bangladesh factory catastrophe took place. In 2002 the owner of the Spectrum factory, built on swampland just outside Dhaka, added five new storeys on top of a four-storey factory. In her book Clean Clothes, labour-rights activist Liesbeth Sluiter chillingly makes the link between what happened next and our wardrobes: ‘1 a.m. of 11 April 2005125. To add injustice to injury, they should all have been lying in bed at home, because their shift had officially ended