is a huge effort to distance us from the people who make our clothes, and their skills. Branding, labelling and trends tend to remove those people’s heritage and their history. We’d prefer to believe that our clothes were produced by a fully automated industry.
SMALL HANDS AND THE INEXORABLE SLIDE OF GARMENT PRODUCTION
From unseen workers we turn to what many consider the least acceptable side of a chaotic supply chain, and the one from which companies will do most to dissociate themselves: child labour. Many people’s perception of sweatshops will automatically include child workers, based in part on the historical imagery of children toiling in the cotton mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
I was seventeen, and on a trip to northern India with a friend, when our hosts thought it would be interesting for us to visit a small carpet factory. I think they were hoping we’d also buy some carpets. But the only thing I remember is that it was the first time I saw child labour: a small boy propped up at a loom, where he lurched from side to side weaving a carpet, as his feet tried to reach for the pedals. We were told he was eight, but he looked younger, and he was obviously blind. My friend started crying, and we were unceremoniously thrown out, thus failing even to be proper eyewitnesses. We talked about mounting some kind of rescue (this would have been idiotic, obviously), of confronting the carpet factory owner, which I think we tried to do, but he refused to look at us. In the end of course we achieved nothing. This was not an unusual experience in India in the early 1990s, when child labour was not as sensitive an issue as it was to become. I can only say that it’s an image that has continued to motivate me.
Child labour in garment production remains the emotive issue. How could it not be? The pathos is almost too much to bear. Children have small, nimble fingers, cannot resist violence and intimidation easily, and are bought from desperate parents in rural areas all over the world. Their expendability made them a mainstay of the nascent sports apparel factories that have popped up all over Sialcot in Pakistan in the past twenty years. The major brands are adamant that they have applied so much pressure on the child labour issue that it is in decline in the garment industry. It is true that big brands act very swiftly if they are connected to child labour. When campaigners are able to demonstrate that a brand is using children the news is flashed all over the world by a rapacious media. (This is not always motivated by altruism: there is no denying that brand-slaying is a good story.) In turn this acts like a touchpaper to consumer outrage. There’s no ethical story like a child labour story.
Despite the industry’s keenness to sort out child labour, it is still rife. In the decade from 1997 to 2007, India gained the ignominious title of the world capital of child labour: it contributes an estimated 20 per cent of the country’s gross national product. In effect we are pretty powerless to know whether a child gets home from school and then has to crack on with a needlework project that might make the difference between whether or not the family eats that week. But I don’t have to go far to see footage of Indian children doing precisely that: sewing beading onto fashion tops that look rather like the one in my wardrobe. The garment-worker mother was up against a deadline, so the children were expected to pitch in. The five-year-old worked so deft ly with a needle that it was clear that this wasn’t a rare occurrence by any means. There is no room for sentiment at their end. The supervisor might be a neighbour and possibly a friend (although the one I observed was pretty severe), but he won’t allow ‘lazy’ children to jeopardise an outsource contract: the livelihoods of several hundred villagers rely on a group of five-year-olds pulling their weight with the adults, sitting cross-legged in poor light for four to five hours an evening. Just as the old show-business maxim dictates that the show must go on, these orders must go out.
In December 2007 the journalist Dan McDougall, working with German broadcasting company WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), uncovered ten- and eleven-year-olds working in horrific conditions in the back streets of New Delhi. He met Amitosh, a ten-year-old who along with forty other boys had been sold into the garment trade to men who visited his village in Bihar (a thirty-hour train journey away). His life in a derelict industrial unit was a vision of hell. The corridors flowed with raw sewage from a flooded toilet, food was scarce, and Amitosh and the other boys were forced to work day and night, their tiny needles puncturing the fabric of clothes that could be found on any British high-street rail. Jivaj, a boy from West Bengal who looked about twelve, burst into tears and whispered, ‘Last week, we spent four days working from dawn until about one o’clock in the morning the following day. I was so tired I felt sick … If any of us cried we were hit with a rubber pipe. Some of the boys had oily cloths stuffed in our mouths as punishment.’
As the boys sewed the labels into these unremarkable clothes, it became clear which unremarkable stores they were going to end up in: those of Gap Inc. When this was brought to the company’s attention Gap ‘admitted the problem, sought to fix it and promised to radically re-examine the working practices of its Indian contractors’, according to McDougall. The company’s policy and ‘rigorous’ social audit systems launched in 2004 mean that if it discovers children being used by contractors the contractor must remove the child from the sweatshop, and the child must be provided with access to schooling and a wage.
In 2008 Primark was ‘let down’ by three Indian factories in Tirupur (soubriquet: T-Shirt City), that apparently contravened the company’s ‘strict ethical standards’ by outsourcing the embroidery118 of 20,000 pieces to small children (again the story was broken by McDougall, this time with the BBC’s Panorama). Primark moved swiftly over the allegations about the Tirupur Three (as we’ll call the factories in question) that were due to be broadcast and exposed in the Observer, pulling out of the factories. This was despite signing up in the previous year to UK trade magazine Retail Week’s ‘A Source for Good’ campaign, which pledged to work with ‘failing factories rather than abandon them’. The company was at pains to point out that this unfortunate use of child labour was not in any way connected to the low price of the fashion it sells. This is not a view shared by the whole garment and accessory industry. There are people who have worked extensively on the ground who think that the continued use of child labour and low-priced fashion are indelibly linked. Lawrence Warren, for example, who spent twenty years sourcing shoes for major labels, is very much of the opinion that ‘Retailers who sell clothes at particularly low prices tend to use a lot of middlemen and not have much contact with their suppliers.’ This, he says, makes the use of child labour more likely, and heightens the odds that it will go undetected.
I’m not saying that globalised companies go out looking for children to employ. In fact they actively try to avoid it. Some even work hard to try to eliminate child labour. Certainly they are very keen to keep their hands free of it. But economic cycles, styles, volume of orders – these are all variables that affect the fast-fashion cycle. Sometimes they’re unpredictable. Sometimes not so much. Take Tirupur, for example. According to research119 this area alone is the source of 40 per cent of all ready-made garment production in India. The garment industry here has increased by twenty-two times since 1985. It is huge. You have to wonder whether part of the attraction is that it is just so cheap. And then you need to ask why that should be. Following the Panorama Primark exposé and the local government’s and textile exporting associations’ subsequent rebuttals and disclaimers, including a statement that there was absolutely no child labour in Tirupur, Indian journalist N. Madhavan120 went to have a look at the garment district himself. He found plenty of children to talk to, busy working away in the international fashion industry.
It’s all very well for governments, manufacturers and retailers to make big noises about getting rid of child labour altogether, but doing it is quite another thing. This is especially true if you refuse to change a system that always wants more for less. It will become even more so as prices climb and buyers continue battling to squeeze that Freight on Board price. That will mean even more pressure on a system that is already at breaking point, even more orders being accepted by suppliers who will subcontract, and even more pressure being applied from European HQs. Any claims about the death of child labour are likely to be premature.
DOLE-CHEAT COUTURE