To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle
in the previous chapter. Critics suggest that this is because the only thing an audit ever taught anybody was how to pull the wool over an auditor’s eyes.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTI-SWEATSHOP CAMPAIGNING
The first big modern-day ‘sweated labour’ stories broke in the early 1990s, beginning with the Washington Post’s examination of Levi-Strauss jeans’ – at the time (and arguably still) one of the most revered and sought-after brands on the planet – use of prison labour130 in Chinese jails to make jeans for a few cents each. In what has become the standard practice in mass globalised fashion, they were then marked up by hundreds of times their cost price and sold to worldwide, fashion-hungry consumers.
Few could have imagined how resonant that page-six story would become. While presumably somewhere along the supply chain someone thought they had hit on aningenious way of producing this all-American classic garment, a significant chunk of the public was appalled. The story touched a nerve in the burgeoning anti-globalisation movement, and chimed with the international NGOs which had already tracked down super brands to child-labour sweatshops in the Far East. Denims were cast in a new light. Over the next eighteen months Nike, The Gap and Reebok were all shown to be in violation of basic human rights, never mind labour laws. One by one the major fashion brands were implicated in troubling sourcing chains that involved allegations of violations and exploitation. Twenty years on, the situation appears little improved. In 2008 alone the international alliance against sweatshops, Sweatfree, inducted six major garment brands into its Sweatshop Hall of Shame: American Eagle, Carrefour, Disney, GUESS, Speedo and Tommy Hilfiger. A number are repeat off enders.
Allegations were made and substantiated by investigative reporters, sometimes in alliance with campaigners on the ground. With every piece of smuggled footage or testimony another discomforting aspect of the international fashion chain was uncovered. One particularly seismic piece of video footage from 1995 shows Charles Kernaghan (an American NGO worker who became known ‘the Sweat Detective’ for his dogged pursuit of evidence of worker abuse in the garment trade) and his colleagues, who have dressed as business executives in order to gain access to a Central American factory in a free-trade zone producing for major US brands. A fifteen-year-old worker tells them that she is routinely hit and forced to take birth-control pills in front of supervisors – enforced contraception is apparently routine. Aft erwards, a fourteen-year-old worker takes the investigators to a dump outside the factory, where the camera zooms in on hundreds of empty blister packs131 that had held the contraceptive pills prescribed to the entire workforce.
Obtaining stories like this is no mean feat. ‘We have lost a number of activists, murdered in the course of their duties. Others have been dragged in chains behind cars and had threats made against their families,’ said Bhuwan Ribhu of the New Delhi-based Global March against Child Labour when he was confronted with yet another sweat-shop scandal involving a UK high-street giant in 2008. ‘A lot of money132 is at stake here, and life becomes cheap in such a desperate and greed-filled environment. Remember, above all, the money that is creating this desperation comes directly from the wallets of Western consumers.’ The onus is entirely on the campaigners to prove allegations of the abuses suffered by desperate workers. The smallest flaw in their investigations inevitably leads to aggressive lawsuits by multinational brands. David and Goliath doesn’t quite do this situation justice. Cam paigns are run on a shoestring, and investigators put their own lives at risk. Many I know have at the very least been subjected to beatings by the goons who watch out for trouble in sweatshop areas. If cameras are discovered on them they are at huge personal risk.
When a story can be supported by footage, and the painstaking checking of inventories against retailers’ codes and lists, there is a receptive mainstream global audience. Fury and disgust at sweatshops has become the stuff of front-page headlines, editorial leaders and television documentaries. The decade up to 2000 was an intense period of allegations by campaigners and NGOs, invariably followed by the corporations trotting out the same excuse: they outsourced their supply line, and therefore they could not be blamed if some unscrupulous Developing World factory owner chose not to follow their code of conduct. Unfortunately, the brands argued, their hands were tied, and while they would love to do something about such unfortunate conditions, it was out of their control.
To a great extent it was this ‘Out of our control’ defence that stoked the fires of anti-sweatshop campaigners for an entire decade. The Clean Clothes Campaign, No Sweat, Labour Behind the Label and other groups refused to allow the corporations any wriggle room. Millions of consumers worldwide were incensed by the hypocrisy of brands making money hand over fist from aspirational products while the reality of the physical production of the brands was far from the ideals they espoused publicly. By contrast with their slogans like ‘Just do it’, which were all about freedom, at times the super brands looked at best hypocritical and at worst downright evil – as activist artists realised to their delight, this was an anagram of Levi, which made for some provocative guerrilla campaigning.
Many enlightened consumers found the branded posturing unbearable. Typical of them was the American campaigner Marc Kasky, who found himself unable to stomach any more of Nike’s denials of allegations that it profited from sweatshop labour, including the full-page newspaper advertisements the company issued in 1997, such as the following:
Workers who make133 Nike products are protected from physical and sexual abuse, they are paid in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations governing wages and hours, they are paid on average double the applicable local minimum wage, they receive a ‘living wage’, they receive free meals and health care, and their working conditions are in accordance with applicable local laws and regulations regarding occupational health and safety.
Kasky sued Nike on the grounds of false advertising. The case trundled on for a number of years before being rejected by the US Supreme Court in 2003, and the sides eventually settled out of court. In fact, as we’ll see, Nike has become one of the more transparent brands, in common with Gap, another company that has had its hands publicly burned.
Meanwhile, a global anti-sweatshop campaign had surged into action. The genie would not be returned to the bottle. The more strategic campaigners didn’t just bleat about injustice, they very quickly understood that for the super brands image was everything. They didn’t just care about the style of a shoe or the slick direction of an ad campaign, they also held their corporate reputations very dear. And they were not as self-assured and impenetrable as they could appear. For all their posturing about giving us choice and delivering dreams, they were vast corporations set up to deliver profit for shareholders and to maintain their value on the global stock exchanges. But the pesky alliance of investigative reporters and do-gooder campaign groups kept unveiling new stories of enforced labour, criminal wages and physical violence. The backdrop to these ultra-glamorous brands was a horror show of human suffering and exploitation. Shareholders and investors began to get twitchy. The anti-sweatshop movement had found globalisation’s Achilles heel: the big brands simply could not afford to lose their corporate reputations.
A GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE
At the end of this book I’ll return to campaigning – and what those early campaigners taught us – but mainly this period will be remembered as the era of the boycott. As in, if you didn’t like what a brand was doing, you were encouraged to boycott it. And not only were you encouraged not to buy its products, but to write letters, tell all your friends, campaign on campus and stage sit-ins. By the end of the 1990s significant numbers of consumers were starting134 to boycott brands connected to exploitation.
There is of course a big problem with boycotts, which the brands used in their defence: even the mere threat of one can encourage companies to cut and run. They still had little control over the supply chain – it could be argued that they didn’t want any – but each time there was another revelation of sweatshop conditions a CEO would just come out and express disappointment at how the brand had been let down by a subcontractor, and announce that