Looking behind the Label by Tim Bartley

Author:Tim Bartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

5 APPAREL AND FOOTWEAR

Standards for Sweatshops

ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN MARCH 1911 A FIRE BROKE OUT ON the eighth floor of a garment factory in New York City. The blouses and scrap materials at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned quickly. Workers struggled to get out of the building, blocked by locked doors, flames, and the collapse of the fire escape, and many resorted to jumping. In total 146 people, mostly young women, died. The Triangle fire became the deadliest accident in the American garment industry and inspired a generation of activists, unionists, and reformers.

Eighty-two years later, in 1993, the Kader toy factory in Thailand experienced a similar fire, killing 188 workers, again mostly women. This time activists raised questions about the responsibilities of retailers and brands such as Toys R Us and Hasbro that were sourcing from Kader. In the ensuing years, as the apparel and footwear industry aggressively embraced the supply chain revolution, similar questions began to be asked about the responsibilities of Nike, Walmart, and others. The rise of anti-sweatshop movements in the United States and Europe led most apparel and footwear brands to adopt “codes of conduct” and to promise to better police their suppliers, spawning a growing field of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR).

Mounting questions about these activities’ effectiveness became especially acute in 2010–2012, when a series of factory fires in Bangladesh killed nearly two hundred people who had been producing apparel for H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, C&A, Walmart, and others. Then, in Bangladesh in the spring of 2013, the Rana Plaza complex of factories collapsed, killing more than eleven hundred workers—once again, mostly women. This was the worst industrial accident in the history of the garment industry, and it happened despite the codes of conduct and CSR programs of Primark, Benetton, the Children’s Place, and other companies that were sourcing there. In the same industrial district, a factory producing sweaters for H&M had collapsed eight years earlier (Miller 2013), but the scrutiny that ensued was clearly not enough.

In this chapter we examine the emergence and influence of voluntary labor standards (codes of conduct, factory auditing, and certification) for apparel and footwear production. As these industrial accidents suggest, despite the rise of CSR and many calls for “ethical fashion,” clothing sold in the United States and Europe comes with few meaningful guarantees of decent production. The reason, we argue, stems from a combination of factors—namely, the power of companies in standard-setting initiatives, questionable factory auditing, weak links between companies’ compliance and sourcing decisions, and a highly mobile industry that has relentlessly chased low prices at the expense of decent labor conditions. These forms of “unruliness” have greatly limited improvements and undermined certification of “good” factories. Some firms have done little to make their codes of conduct meaningful, but even the brands and retailers that have become known as leaders in the field of CSR, such as Nike, the Gap, and H&M, have often worked at cross-purposes. They have asked suppliers to improve but have continued to push for low prices and quick delivery times and to move in search of them.

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