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Taking an impartial look at the hell created by the textile industry

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Jun 01, 2003, Page 19

Making Sweatshops By Ellen Israel Rosen 336 pages University of California Press

Why do we read, not once but many times, of textile workers in southeast Asian countries and China being burned to death, unable to escape from their workshops because the doors are locked, and dying as they leap from windows through sheets of flame?

Some people know the answer, and the author of Making Sweatshops is one of them. It's because their employers, who have already sited their factories in countries where wages are very low, try to force their profits still higher by maintaining barbarous work-places, spending nothing on safety equipment such as fire-extinguishers, and keeping dormitory doors locked to prevent their frequently indebted employees from running away.

Sweatshops are factories in which such appalling conditions prevail, usually in the clothing industry. Employers responsible for such places keep their workforce cutting, stitching and ironing for, according to this book, sometimes even 20 hours a day, with minimal facilities. The appalling accidents we read about are only the tip of the iceberg. These workers are suffering in their health, and maybe their sanity, on a daily basis.

The argument in favor of such conditions is that the employees are happy to have work at all, and that the rates of pay are reasonable by local standards. These are hardly excuses, however, for burning people alive.

The subject of this book is the way famous American clothing brand names have their wares manufactured by such labor in Third World countries -- its subtitle is "The Globalization of the US Apparel Industry." But it also incorporates a historical over-view, including how sweatshops located on the US mainland were the subject of bitter labor disputes in the early years of the 20th century.

Ellen Israel Rosen is an academic with a background in labor activism. Before embarking on this book she spent a decade studying American apparel workers made redundant by the movement of textile manufacture to Asia. Her mother was a textile worker and her father, she writes, still occasionally wears his union pin.

Nevertheless, Making Sweatshops is a learned and scrupulous investigation into why globalization and the liberalization of trade generally is so markedly beneficial, not to employees or consumers necessarily, but to manufacturers. It's moral is that big business rules, and the rest of us often suffer as a result.

There's a lot of space given to such things as tariffs, the demise of protectionism, NAFTA, and textile retailing in the US. There are diagrams and statistical analyses. But there is plenty of human detail as well, and some of it makes shocking reading.

The author describes, for example, conditions in textile factories in China's Guangdong Province. China is one of the world's biggest manufacturers of clothing -- as well as shoes, handbags and the like -- for the big Western retailers.

Most of the employees are women of between 16 and 25, she writes. They lodge in state-provided dormitories in which nine to twelve workers sleep in rooms measuring about 3m by 7m (rather smaller than the main room of my modest Taipei apartment). The floors are concrete and one fluorescent light is attached to the ceiling. These girls work, on average, 12 to 13 hours a day, with two days off a month. They earn from three to ten US cents an hour.

This may sound bad, but the punch is still to come. "Nearly half the workers surveyed (46 percent) actually owed the company money after deductions were taken from their paychecks for dormitory fees, food, job placement fees, temporary residence permits, and various fines." These statistics are for December 2000, and their source is two reports, Visiting the Company Dorm and Wal-mart's Shirts of Misery, which can be read on the National Labor Committee's Web site (www.nlcnet.org).

Similar conditions prevail in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines -- countries, in other words, whose names adorn the labels of the shirts, jeans and shoes you're probably wearing while reading this review.

What makes this book additionally persuasive is that the author is able to take a long historical view. She compares, for instance, wages and conditions in Asia now with those in the US 100 and even 200 years ago. She looks at how these were improved by hard struggle, and how such wages and conditions are nowadays illegal (unless, of course, the workers are themselves illegal immigrants, in which case no rules apply because appeal for legal protection is impossible).

How does Taiwan fit into this picture? It generally appears alongside places like Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore where better conditions prevail. Even so, I interviewed a Filipino contract-worker who made computer parts recently, and he told me that his monthly pay was NT$15,840, of which two-thirds disappeared in payments to his Taiwan agent, payments to his agent in the Philippines (US$744 before he can even come here), fines for "defective products," and withholding tax that he may find hard to get back once he's out of the country.

The point here is that all these workers are human beings with human talents. Some will be musical, others perhaps with a mathematical skill, and all have families, lovers, and so on. Yet these industries, like so many others, treat them essentially as robots, and their individual talents go into hiding. They are diminished as people.

Making Sweatshops makes grim reading, but it's not in any way fanatical. In fact, Rosen is remarkably, even surprisingly, reasonable. She writes, for instance, that producing more good-quality clothing more cheaply is a desirable objective in itself. But she also believes the American public would be willing to pay slightly more for its clothes if it knew of the terrible conditions so many are currently produced in (though the effect would be slight as wages account for less than one percent of the cost of many items).

But it would be wrong to end on anything but a horrifying note. An appropriate one would be that, in 1993, the total number of workers burned alive in dormitory fires in China reached 2,500. That's something to think about while regarding yourself in the mirror in your fashionable new jeans.
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