A Contract to End Sweatshops
Time to Abolish the More Grotesque Excesses of Capitalist Exploitation
A Contract to End Sweatshops
by ASHOK KUMAR
On February 10th, as activists in Manhattan boisterously protested the New York Fashion Week brand Adidas runway, factory-level union producing Adidas clothing in Indonesia, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, India, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic were delivering a letter to their bosses. The letter announced the formation of the International League for Brand Responsibility and demanded that Adidas agree to collectively negotiate a Jobbers Agreement with workers. Such an agreement would circumvent subcontracted factory owners to negotiate with brands around issues such as wages, conditions and union recognition. The announcement represents a rebirth of a historic tactic for the globalized garment sector, and a watershed moment for global labor rights.
Return of the Sweatshop
When a fire raged in November 2012 through a subcontracted garment factory in Dhaka’s Tarzeen Fashion Factory it left 112 workers dead and 200 injured. Tarzeen produced clothing for Wal-Mart, Sears and Disney. In the last four months of 2012 alone there were nearly 500 deaths in four factory fires across three different countries, making it one of the deadliest years for garment workers. The latest incident has often been compared to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory of 1911 that caused 146 deaths in New York City.
In the decades preceding the Triangle factory disaster, New York’s garment district had risen to become a national center for apparel production and where the word “sweatshop” was first coined. Then, as now, garment production was vertically disintegrated and independent from the retail/brand buyers. The subcontracted factory arrangement offer brands flexibility of orders, lower costs, and minimal risks and responsibilities: these are instead passed on to the workers. When workers unionized, brands would simply stop orders, ‘cutting-and-running’ to the next sweatshop. Then, this happened domestically; now, a hundred years later, it is global. Yet relationship between workers, factory and brand remain unchanged.
Globalized garment production fuses retrograde manufacturing practices with some of the most innovative techniques of labor domination. At its most fundamental level the industry’s engine is no different than that of a century ago: overworked, underpaid women still crouch behind a sewing machine. The only real change is the mechanization of just-in-time supply chains, which have advanced radically. The garment sector uses variable production: supply must meet ever-changing consumer demands, seasonality, and ephemeral fashion trends. The industry has remained labor-intense, not lending itself to the automation found in other sectors. As in the early 20th century, brands have limited fixed capital investment in production, which decreases liability whilst increasing labor flexibility and capital mobility. A brand’s profit margins are squeezed out through variable capital such as labor, whilst constant capital, like raw materials, remains largely fixed. Today’s global sweatshops, like New York’s garment sector pre-1930s, are marked by an absence of unions, below poverty-line wages, as well as miserable, unsafe conditions.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/12/a-contract-to-end-sweatshops/