I hope some of us will have some empathy for the labor of persons likes Aisha, Akhi and Miriam and their lives. Not make unqualified assertions of homegrown anarchists & Indian agents running amuck to destroy the garment industry just to make a political point.
The story of the blues: Tracking the journey of the £9 pair of jeans
Thursday, 28 February 2008
The Independent
Fred Pearce wanted to know where his £9 jeans really came from. So he travelled to
Five women lived in the room altogether. Three of the women, Aisha, Akhi and Miriam, lined up on one bed. I sat on the other.
The room had corrugated iron for roof and walls. There was a black-and-white television flickering in the corner and a fan overhead to make the hot evening bearable. "We've lived here for two years," said Akhi, the most talkative of the women. They worked shifts of 11 hours, and sometimes more, in a nearby garment factory in Dhaka, the capital of
I had travelled to Dhaka to find where the jeans I was wearing came from, and the numerous other cheap garments labelled "Made in
I had found the women by ducking beneath a flyover in the Mohakhali district of Dhaka, one of the city's many garment manufacturing zones, then taking a dark lane down beside the railway tracks towards a food market and entering a warren of alleys through an unmarked door. There were 84 families packed in here, each occupying a single room. This was typical of where the seamstresses and occasional male co-workers of
Aisha, Akhi, Miriam and the two other absent women each paid 500 taka a month for their room. Or £3.70. You wouldn't expect much for that money. But on wages of 1,660 taka a month, it was all they could afford. The overcrowding was severe.
I could not visit their factory, but I saw others. Dark, dingy sweatshops up narrow flights of stairs, often with bars on the windows and blocked fire exits. The noise of sewing machines could be deafening; the managers could be intimidating; the drudgery unimaginable.
One of the women hemmed trousers, another sewed collars on to shirts, the third put in zip fasteners. Day in and day out. "Officially, we get one day off a week, but if there is extra work we have to carry on working," Akhi said. In
Whom do they cut and sew and press shirts and jeans for? You and me, of course. The biggest customer at the factory where two of the women worked was H&M, or Swedish fashion company Hennes & Mauritz. My daughter buys a lot from H&M. And H&M buys around half of its cotton textiles from Bangladeshi garment-makers. Most analysts believe the company is the biggest European customer in the whole of
I asked these women what they thought about H&M, expecting an angry reply. But no. The garment workers constantly swap notes about working conditions, and H&M has a better than average reputation. The company pays more attention to their needs, they felt. So it was disturbing to hear claims that even H&M, for all its goodwill, was being hoodwinked.
The buyers – the brands' representatives in
Most of the 4,000-plus garment factories in
I heard dozens of similar stories, both scandalous and petty. Some said that if they took a day off sick, they would be refused admittance to the factory and then fired for non-attendance. One was excluded for taking five days off work when her husband died. Others had no contracts of employment at all. They reeled off the brand names that their employers contracted for: Wal-Mart and Gap, H&M and M&S, Sears and Asda.
But the women also told me about their former lives in rural
Aisha and Akhi both had children back in their villages. They said they hoped to go back one day. But that seemed an idle hope.
Most don't go back, and these women already seemed caught between two worlds. I noticed a cheap bag on a hook at the back of the room. "Gucci," it said in large letters on the front. It was a fake, of course. But unlike their mothers and sisters back in the village, these women had heard of Gucci. They aspired. What else was there to dream of when making clothes for Western consumers than of joining them?
But the economic gap between their world and ours is huge. In 2006, the Bangladeshi government raised the minimum wage across the country for the first time in a decade. It was now 1,662 taka a month – or 5 pence an hour. No wonder the likes of M&S are moving here. Why pay 18 or even 36 pence an hour when you can pay 5 pence instead?
Child labour is largely banished now from the factories that Western buyers know about. But it persists on a small scale among the subcontractors that the factories call on to meet customers' deadlines. During my visit to
Nazma Akter, the founder of the Awaj Foundation, said some buyers were sympathetic about the obvious exploitation of both children and adult workers, but "in the end they are not serious. Price comes first. Every time the buyers make another order, they want lower prices."
One top manager at a garment company told me: "These big-brand companies have corporate social responsibility departments, but the people who make the orders don't talk to them. We see it here all the time. The CSR people come in and stipulate basic standards. Then the next day the buyers come in and drive down prices and bring forward deadlines." The truth is that retailers talk about little else but price. And the "race to the bottom" in the mass marketing of cheap clothes is intensifying.
Nazma Akter dismissed Western hand-wringing, and said she thought that it would be pressure from within that would ultimately clean up the industry. But she pleaded with customers in
"We just want the customers in
Caught up in the human stories, I had lost track of the story of my jeans. I had bought a pair of Blue Horizon jeans for £9 in Marks and Spencer a few months before. Made in
This is an edited extract from Confessions of an Eco Sinner – Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From by Fred Pearce, published by Eden Project Books, £12.99. To obtain copies for the special price of £11.69 (including free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897, or visit independentbooksdirect.co.uk
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