Big bidness

Sweatshops have been a problem for so long that talking about them feels almost unfashionable, like a Save The Whales bumper sticker fading on the arse end of a VW. But despite decades of whistle-blowing, campaigning, lawsuits and settlements, sweatshops still exist. They’re still fashionable. Because the fashion industry depends on them.

In the interests of getting you cheap clothes and themselves big buckaroos, corporate arseholes pack people into hellish factories where they’re forced to work punishingly long shifts and unpaid overtime; where human rights are ignored; where trade union rights are crushed; where wages are so lousy they make life intolerable; where physical and sexual abuse are expected; and where child labour is not just fine but also dandy. In sweatshops we have a modern descendant of slavery: Humans kept and crushed and ruined because we like cheap shoes.

The model, not the exception
Sweatshops are intentional. And they are everywhere. In 2011, ActionAid reported on the horrific conditions in factories supplying Asda, finding workers slogging through 11-hour days, paid a third of the living wage and suffering verbal and physical abuse.  In 2016, ASOS and Marks & Spencer were found to be using child labourers who were doing 60-hour weeks. In 2018, Disney was caught using a factory that paid workers 85p per hour and fined or fired them if they had the audacity to take more than three days off – unpaid – for illness. In the same year, Gap and H&M were caught using factories rife with physical and sexual violence.

This isn’t just in far-flung countries you’ve been trained to not care about. In 2016, Forever 21 were found using factories in California that paid workers $4.50 an hour. In 2020, Boohoo, Oasis and Warehouse were found using a factory in the UK that paid workers less than half the minimum wage and crammed them in without PPE while the Covid pandemic was raging. And this isn’t just in the fashion industry. In 2022, archbastards Facebook were found using sweatshop-like moderation farms in Kenya, where workers were paid $1.50 an hour in conditions that one whistle-blower described as “mental torture.”

When caught red handed, the response from companies is that those aren’t their hands. They claim they were unaware of abuses in their supply chains and that they’re shocked – shocked! – when told about them. They promise to do better but do very little, and in their lack of care, lack of action and lack of transparency are again shocked – shocked! – when the next scandal hits. Outsourcing gives them arms-length deniability to evade responsibility and escape prosecution.

Psychopathic capitalism
What this all means is exactly what we already know: That companies don’t give two shits about human beings. That lives don’t matter if they’re caught up in supply chains. The Rana Plaza outrage is one of the worst examples. In 2013 the Plaza, an eight-story building in Bangladesh, collapsed after its owners shrugged off the cracks that had appeared in its walls the day before. While the good people in its shops and bank were evacuated immediately, garment workers were forced back inside under threat of losing a month’s pay if they refused. The building came down on them, killing 1,134 people and injuring another 2,500. The factories supplied a ton of our favourites: Benetton, Bonmarché, Prada, Gucci, Versace, Mango, Matalan, Primark and Walmart, all of which were shocked – shocked! – when told about their supplier’s casual disregard for human beings. Before the accident, Walmart had rejected reforms that would have forced retailers to pay more to their supply chains so they could improve safety standards. After the accident, Walmart and a bunch of others refused to join efforts to compensate the victims. On the plus side, though: Bargains at low, low prices.

This is on us
Like these companies, that when caught red handed deny those are their hands, as customers we deny our role in this thing. We position ourselves as unwitting accomplices shocked – shocked! – to discover the same outrages over and over again. We deny reality, telling ourselves wages are low because you don’t pay much rent on a one-room hovel, happily ignoring the cause and effect that keeps people in poverty. We tell ourselves paying people a pittance for our shit is better than paying them nothing for no work, happily ignoring that the alternative is not no work but better wages and higher prices. We know the true cost of our £3 T-shirts as we carry them to the checkouts, and we buy them anyway. For as long as we continue to do so we are not unwitting accomplices. We are perpetrators.

Sweatshops exist. And we are their customers.

Photo credit: Organized-Kaos at DeviantArt

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