Last year, it was reported that Bangladesh, after China, was the world’s second-largest exporter of ready-made garments, largely due to duty-free access to Western markets and extremely low wages — about R932 per month at the time. In 2013, a multi-storey commercial building in the Bangladeshi capital city of Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,135 people and injuring thousands more. The factories that operated inside the building were suppliers to many international fashion brands.
After the Rana Plaza disaster, many international fashion brands signed onto worker protection accords, however, advocacy groups later found out that many factories that supplied brands such as Gap, Walmart and H&M still worked long hours in overheated and dangerous conditions. In 2016, two Swedish investigative journalists published a book detailing how the Swedish fashion brand H&M sourced garments from factories in Myanmar that employed 14 year old children. Oxfam’s research on labour practices in the country’s garment factories found forced overtime and low pay was not uncommon.
Last year Zara was in deep waters over a controversy when shoppers in Turkey found notes from unpaid workers sewn into clothes. Bravo Tekstil, the factory where these notes came from, shuttered shop in 2016 for failing to pay its workers. John Morrison, Chief Executive of the British-based Institute for Human Rights and Business, disclosed Turkish workers of Bravo Tekstil resorted to this desperate plea for help because they were afraid of voicing their concerns on the shop flow. The International Labour Organisation’s research into child labour in the fashion supply chain is damning. At each level of the supply chain – from cotton farming to garment factories, children are employed and often violently abused.
The Dutch-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) has also conducted research that confirms the same. Customers benefit as fashion retailers deliver these items of clothing at ‘reasonable prices’, but the cost of making them has been heavy on factory workers in countries such as Bangladesh, China and Myanmar. These clothing are cheap to consumers in the West where they are blind to slave labour, child labour and criminally hazardous working conditions. These business models would never be acceptable in Western countries, but ironically is acceptable for Western businesses to implement the very same models, as long as it is done in faraway “shithole countries”.
