To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?. Lucy Siegle

the big brands changed tack. After years of stonewalling and denying responsibility, a 2003 exposé of Gap’s connection to child labour in India prompted the company to issue an extraordinary statement: ‘We do have problems in our global supply chain, but we’re working to put them right.’ For once the brand wasn’t just talking about a new marketing campaign, although there did follow a series of star-studded advertisements featuring Missy Elliot, Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker and Joss Stone. The new buzzword among the biggest brands and retailers was ‘transparency’. It was out with the old subterfuge and bucking of responsibility, and in with working with suppliers in a conciliatory fashion while communicating to consumers and media that the brand was trying its best.

      Big-fashion names are keen to represent themselves as more sinned against than sinning, and as unwilling partners in the global jaunt to find the most compliant country that can best keep up with cheap, fast fashion. For that reason they have implemented an extensive programme of audits.

      In the years since 2003, audits have become¹³⁵ big business. In essence, sweatshops spawned an industry to monitor them. Auditing programmes work in so many different ways that frankly as a consumer it can be difficult to know what’s going on. Some offer independent approval, others offer to work with a company on self-assessment and then give final assurances. Any brand worth its salt boasts big teams of inspectors: in 2009 Nike boasted eighty in-house employees¹³⁶ working on what is termed Corporate Social Responsibility (known by its acronym, CSR), while by 2001 Gap had 115 compliance officers keeping a beady collective eye on 4,000 factories. You won’t find many companies that are shy about telling you exactly how many audits they have, and the numbers seem reassuringly large. So, Walmart conducts 16,000 social audits across its supply chain every year, and Carrefour audited 609 factories¹³⁷ in 2007. Factories that are found to be slipping or below standard can expect extra scrutiny. Tesco increased¹³⁸ the number of ‘high-risk’ sites audited from 87 per cent in 2008 to 94.7 per cent in 2010.

      The fleets of inspectors and social compliance teams borrow their phraseology and zero-tolerance sentiments from the anti-sweatshop campaigners. But although they may sound alike, there are important distinctions. The auditing offices and businesses are, in the main, commercial organisations with beating corporate hearts, and have in common with their clients a need to generate and maximise shareholder return.

      Most retailers, and certainly the huge agents they use to facilitate production overseas, consider their operation private business, and information about it commercially sensitive. ‘It is very difficult to know what to do with some retailers, particularly at the value end of the chain,’ admits a contact who works in drafting legislation relating to fashion’s supply chain, ‘because they are not interested in discussion.’ There are only so many cancelled meetings that can be rearranged, only so many approaches that can be made. As all offers to monitor human rights within the fashion industry appear to be voluntary, there is nothing to compel an errant brand to the discussion table.

      With such a huge range of audits on offer, there are enormous variations in standards and practices. Some inspectors are trained for weeks, some for hours, and some, alarmingly, not at all. Similarly, levels of abuses and violations vary. Inspectors essentially need eyes in the back of their heads. There are health and safety factors to consider – as we have seen, the characteristics of a badly run or makeshift CMT enterprise can include fire hazards, fumes (sandblasting jeans, for example, produces toxic particulates) in the presence of which masks and goggles should be worn – underage workers, a lack of records and payroll evidence, intimidation and the absence of basic sanitation facilities. Writing down a list of measures that need to be undertaken is easier than actually carrying them out.

      Many audits rely on interviews with workers. And many interviewees are likely to be the opposite of forthcoming. In an unusually frank account, ‘Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector’, former American inspector T.A. Frank remembers entering a supplier’s facility to see a sign reading: ‘If you don’t work¹³⁹ hard today, look hard for work tomorrow’. It is, he concedes, motivation of a kind, but he wonders how open employees working in such an environment are likely to be, and how likely they are to raise problems with an inspector.

      Interviews are often tortuous. It is clear that they need to be in private, rather than elements of a staged and accompanied walkabout of the type I was granted at Epoch in Dhaka. But even then inspectors can be at the mercy of a translator, and as interviews are carried out in work time there’s always likely to be a manager breathing down the inspector’s and the interviewee’s necks. ‘I don’t know’ is often the staple response to questions about how many hours a week an employee is expected to work, or whether he or she has freedom of association (one of the tenets of an ethical working policy). Interviewees are coached, proffered for interview (rather than being randomly selected), and in fear of being fired for saying the wrong thing.

      Where once brands used the excuse that they had outsourced their production (let’s call it the ‘Not my problem’ defence), they have now adopted a more nuanced strategy. To paraphrase: ‘The factories that supply us are fully audited by independent auditors, but on this occasion the auditors failed to spot the particular problem.’ The auditors claim they were hoodwinked, and very often this is indeed the case. It is hard to overestimate the level of duplicity to which some factory owners will go in order to trick them: there is evidence in many export zones of entire units being created for an auditor’s visit, to give the impression of a perfect production environment. Of course these have extravagantly labelled fire escapes, a generous provision of toilets, charts advising mandatory rest periods, and smiling managers. They are the show houses for the RMG industry, and their purpose is to make Westerners feel that all is well in the fast-fashion bubble, that we can have our cake and eat it. I read of one incident where an auditor was unduly impressed by the ‘high quality’ toilet paper in a staff lavatory. I say unduly because by the time of the next, unannounced, inspection the toilet paper had gone. As indeed had the toilet itself. Just for show, it wasn’t even plumbed in. Other inspectors tell of pushing through a door hidden by boxes to find pregnant employees hiding out on the roof, or a room full of sacks in which child garment makers were hiding.

      Even when the subterfuge hasn’t been so carefully craft ed, auditors are missing things, and sometimes you have to deduce that they are turning a blind eye. Pressures of time and a lack of power mean they don’t tend to force the issue if they are told payment records aren’t available. One former inspector¹⁴⁰ tells of incompetent or feckless colleagues: one man would habitually dash past obvious serious violations and make straight for the medical kit. On his tick-box form he would make a note that it was devoid of ‘eyewash’, his only recommendation being that the factory must remedy this as fast as possible. His nickname became ‘Eyewash’. Another could clock up five inspections per day thanks to their slapdash nature. Rather than a cause for concern, this made him the star of his auditing firm. But then, time is money, and there’s plenty of money in auditing.