When I was a child, my mother had special scissors to cut the tags out of the collars of my shirts and dresses. The stiff, itchy labels of every garment left me fidgeting in my seat during church services and scratching welts into my back during the school day. My aversion to those stubborn labels was clearly a product of sensitive skin, but now, a much more sinister feeling creeps over me as I examine the tag of a new blouse or sweater. “MADE IN CHINA.” “MADE IN HONDURAS.” “MADE IN INDIA.” My closet is more multicultural than the community in which I grew up, or even the large lecture classes of Georgetown now.
Outsourcing of labor by American companies is the product of the ever-developing process of globalization. It allows multinational corporations the opportunity to make their goods cheaper and faster than ever before. Fast fashion is a rapidly growing market that capitalizes on the benefits of outsourcing labor, and it is a prime example of the market’s pitfalls.
Last year, two different cries for help were supposedly discovered stitched into the labels of garments made by laborers in the developing world and sold by UK fast fashion retailer Primark. In 2013, a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing over 1,100 workers. Most of us are aware of the abhorrent conditions in sweatshops, but we do little to understand the lives of the people behind the seemingly monolithic sweatshop industry spurred on by fast fashion.
When a worker in a developing country is employed by a factory that mass-produces garments, they can never clock out. With menial wages and no mobility, the factory essentially owns its workers. Employees from the Dominican Republic to China must often choose between medicine and a day’s food, or between speaking out about working conditions and suffering harassment from local gangs. At home, workers share a one-room apartment with family members, or worse, are confined to factory dormitories where they are forbidden to leave or socialize. If they are allowed to go outside, carcinogens and other toxins from factory trash heaps permeate the streets.
This cycle of poverty is perpetuated as children forsake their education to join their parents in the factories. An undercover reporter for the Toronto Star shadowed child workers at a Bangladesh factory in 2013. The children, mostly girls ages 5 to 14, worked 12 hours a day, 6.5 days a week with no holidays. They were paid around $30 a month, and most of the money went to their family living expenses. Their only dream in the world was to sew.
The system that perpetuates sweatshop labor is structural violence, a term coined by sociologist Johan Galtung in 1990. Unlike direct violence in which physical harm is performed or threatened, structural violence is insidious. It thrives on unequal advantages built into our global economic, political, and social systems. Structural violence is continuous.
First, Western societies convince themselves that outsourcing labor is beneficial to free market capitalism and that the division of labor improves the quality of life of all: consumers profit from low-cost items, producers profit from higher capital, and laborers profit from any income at all. Then, we become dependent on cheap overseas labor to continue this lifestyle. We forget all about the makers of our goods, which allows multinational corporations the flexibility to sacrifice labor rights for even faster and cheaper production. In a race to the bottom, developing countries compete with each other for the opportunity to be that means of production. Their governments ignore poor labor standards and even enlist the help of mafias to ensure the structured work environment that corporations find most appealing. Finally, a worker is pushed to the mental and physical breaking points.
When these stories related to sweatshop labor appear in the news, whom do we blame? That’s the key to structural violence: entire societies are complicit in its performance, leaving no recourse for actions or justice for victims. Every time we exchange a few bucks for cheap clothing, we receive a piece of cloth stitched together by tiny hands in a dimly lit room.
Therefore, we must work together to defeat sweatshop violence at the structural level. Choosing the source of our clothing carefully is certainly important, but a Band-Aid fix by a minority of the population is a type of negative peace. It fixes the consequences of the problem rather than its structural cause. We must institute positive peace by educating consumers about the people behind the clothes. Outsourcing labor can be immensely beneficial to every facet of the global economy, but producers will only be forced change the supply if we change the demand to reflect ethically made garments through the support of organizations such as United Students Against Sweatshops.
Fast fashion is affordable, attractive, and easy, but the price we pay is more than just retail plus tax. The next time you quickly shrug on a shirt before your first class of the day, pay attention to the label. Is it itchy?
