To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
red children’s pullovers the factory had been making for Inditex-Zara, and under the purple-stripe women’s tops ordered by the German Bluhm fashion group.’
It’s into a similar, seemingly improvised facility that I troop with two friends of mine from the UK, two of our NGO hosts, and a local female communist politician who has worked with local garment factories on the issue of conditions and pay. We are very lucky to get access to any part of Bangladesh’s garment trade for export, and she has been instrumental in getting us through the doors today.
The General Manager meets us, his assistant searches our bags for cameras, and we follow him up a narrow stairwell to the sewing floor, where about 250 women, mainly young, in bright saris are hunched over their machines, running pieces of dark denim through them while male supervisors – there look to be one to every fifty or sixty women – in yellow vests stand over them. When I say ‘stand over’ I am actually shocked at how physically close the supervisors stand, their necks arched so they can watch every single stitch appear from the machines. Incongruously it reminds me of playing netball, in which you’re not allowed to touch an opponent with the ball, but as long as your feet are a metre away from her you can crane your face over until you are invading her space. I cannot imagine how it would feel to work under that sort of pressure.
Our hosts are magnanimous. ‘You can ask any questions, to anyone! Any one of them!’ says the factory-floor manager, waving his hands to include a generous section of the assembly line. But truth be told these girls look terrified, and the pace they are working at, plus the volume of the machines, are not conducive to an exploratory chat. I pick on a poor girl with a bright yellow headscarf. She is momentarily petrified, and stops her machine. ‘How old are you?’ ‘I am nineteen,’ she replies. ‘How do you find working here?’ ‘It is good to have a job.’ ‘What kind of wages do you earn here every week?’ ‘It is good to have a job.’ Clearly I am not going to get anything but the party line under these conditions. One of the friends who are accompanying me is clearly shocked. ‘Everyone is so close together,’ she says. ‘When do they get breaks?’ ‘I’ll show you the cutting floor,’ says the factory manager. ‘It is nice.’
On the way to the staircase that leads to the cutting floor I notice hundreds of boxes marked for Carrefour, a huge European multiple that after Walmart is the world’s second-largest retailer, with an extraordinary 12,500 stores126 across the world. The boxes are stacked up along the side of the assembly floor, masking the fire regulations and the yellow signs pointing to the exits. But then, given that the staircases are almost completely blocked by more boxes, presumably waiting to be picked up to start their long journey to the stores, the exits might not be all that much use. ‘These boxes,’ I say, pointing out the bleeding obvious, ‘they’re blocking the stairs. The fire escape! The fire risk!’ My voice is becoming increasingly shrill. As you’ll know from the catalogue of fires in the previous chapter, my paranoia is hardly without foundation. The factory manager is unmoved by my persistent heckling, and continues to clatter down the staircase. ‘I can show you the cutting floor,’ he says brightly. I persist, and to my surprise it is our communist leader of garment workers’ rights who fixes me with one of those smiles the subtext of which is clearly ‘Stop this nonsense.’ ‘There will be no fire today,’ she says, the smile still in place.
Our host wasn’t overstating the comparative merits of the cutting floor. A large, well-air-conditioned space, with computerised, high-definition cutting machines, it is indeed much nicer than the sewing floor. It is also, I notice, exclusively staffed by men. As I learned subsequently, in the RMG trade women predominantly do the basic stitching, which is why it is correctly (if you’re going on numbers alone) perceived as a ‘women’s industry’. But the higher-skilled tasks such as cutting are done by men. It’s notable that if technology is upgraded in factories or across the industry, women will be replaced127 by men.
We end up for tea and biscuits in the factory manager’s office, where again we are told we can ask about anything we like – cue more arm-
waving. And so I bang on about the boxes and the fire escape again. ‘Big order,’ he says. ‘Huge order!’ Yes, I say, but the 500,000-piece order for men’s, women’s and children’s jeans is currently blocking the fire escapes. ‘This is not,’ he admits, ‘a perfect factory. This is just a B-rated factory.’ Who has rated it ‘B’, I ask. ‘It is rated B,’ he says, and we continue in this vein for thirty minutes. The ‘B’ rating, I’m finally led to believe, is a Bangladesh trade standard, meaning that the factory is not perfect. Then suddenly the manager turns, his tone becoming increasingly impassioned and accusatory. ‘How can I get a good factory when you [in the West] pay so little? It is not possible to be perfect.’ I can only agree that what I have seen falls somewhat short of perfection. Which is how I end up writing in the visitors’ book in a somewhat shaky hand, ‘A very INTERESTING visit. Highly interesting.’
My foray into factory life didn’t uncover what might be termed a classic sweatshop environment, but it did bring me face to face with a huge order for a European value chain being made in a supplier facility in which there was clearly a flagrant violation of any self-respecting European retailer’s code of conduct. Surely this is something that should have been picked up by the audits that we are assured are carried out on the Developing World suppliers of our clothes. After all, the Carrefour Group has apparently performed 2,067 social audits128 in seven years, working in Bangladesh with local NGO Karmojibi Nari.
Audits are the checks that are supposed to reassure us that the horrors sketched out in the previous chapter are being consigned to history. Indeed, fleets of inspectors are employed by Western fashion retailers and manufacturers to visit factories and make sure fire escapes are clear and working, children aren’t employed, workers have freedom of association and are wearing proper safety equipment when they are carrying out potentially health-ruining activities such as sandblasting our jeans. Go to the website of any of the multifarious brands that make up the fashion jigsaw and you’ll be accosted by a Code of Conduct, or Social Responsibility. While some retailers and manufacturers would like us just to take their word for it (I’m loath to do this), most have employed auditors to tick the boxes for them, and happily display their credentials somewhere on their websites, and occasionally and more showily in-store.
This is the sort of practice that allows the British Retail Consortium (the trade association for UK retail, and as such the high priest of shopkeeping and the flogging of all consumer goods, including fashion) to assert at number two in an online section on ‘retail myths’ – just under the bit about UK retailers not being responsible for binge drinking – that there is no connection between Big Fashion’s offerings and backstreet factories. The rebuttal is what I would call unequivocal:
It’s a myth129 that UK retailers source from exploitative, badly run sweat-shops. That would be unethical and unworkable. For example, China is producing shoes for the world on an unprecedented scale. That requires safe, modern attractive factories, not the backstreets. Standards in factories located in developing countries often surpass those in Europe and America. To provide goods in the quantities, of the quality and to the timescales UK retailers require, they have to … Any factory which cannot compete on this level will simply not be able to meet the standards demanded by BRC members and their customers. Retailers work with the ETI (Ethical Trading Initiative) to ensure that high standards are adhered to. Suppliers are systematically inspected. If they are not able to meet these standards contracts are ended and business is taken elsewhere.
And, broadly speaking, we all want to believe that all supply-chain problems have been attended to. Even I have better things to do than suspiciously check every label and website. We’d like to buy with confidence, and I would love to believe the consumerist comfort offered by the BRC, but there is a huge discrepancy here. While audits might be carried out and codes of conduct published, circulated and publicised, it’s debatable how much effect they actually have. Some twenty years after the first exposés of sweated labour, and despite teams of auditors and countless reports, we are still