Sweatshop Labour

I saw a movie called China Blue on Tuesday evening as part of the Arts Centre's ongoing WOW film festival, which traced the experiences of a young Chinese girl moving to the city to work in a jeans factory. Produced by Teddy Bear Films, it combines documentary footage together with diary excerpts, and highlights the conditions under which jeans, and indeed much of the clothing that we wear are made - 18 hour days, arbitary salary deductions, cramped living conditions, working without overtime...

The low price fashion that we can get at the explosion of chains such as Primark, Peacock's and the Officer's Club (among many others) comes at a human and social price that is far too inconvienient to acknowledge. Short turnaround times for bringing new designs from drawing board to shop floor mean that production time is ever-more squeezed - or rather, workers are ever more squeezed to meet deadlines. The high competition to supply the market - Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi, Indonesian, Thai garment factories mean that the situation is essentially a buyer's market - the buyer sets the terms and has the freedom and flexibility to easily go to whoever can supply garments at those terms. A race to the bottom, nothing less.

But a buyer's market means that the buyer is in control, and ultimately we are the buyers. Do we then draw out that age-old tactic of a boycott? Not without trying to engage and pressure the companies that we purchase from first. Last weekend, People and Planet members in cities up and down the country leafleted Primark customers to ask them that Primark ensure that child labour is not used and basic working conditions maintained in the production of their clothes, and that worker rights are respected. A report by the Environmental Justice Foundation on the working conditions of cotton pickers in Uzbekistan, called White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton, and Fashion Victims: The True Cost of Cheap Clothes at Primark, Asda and Tesco, released last December by War on Want, make for some shocking reading.

Truly ethical, guilt-free clothing brands are readily available now, but still only form a fraction of the market. Getting mainstream supplies to switch wholesale to guarantee production methods, such as Marks and Spencers have done with Fairtrade cotton (40 tonnes a year!), is the best way to transform livelihoods. So I was doubly disappointed to realize that an Elections Committee T-shirt I was wearing (or the Headway t-shirts used to welcome freshers to Aber) today has been produced by Fruit of the Loom - which has been the target of campaigns at Oxford and York universities for working condition violations at its Mexican factories.

Grrr. More to follow in the coming weeks.