The Sydney Morning Herald
March 3, 2010
Illustration: John Spooner
The AFR Review (26 February 2010) contains a four page article titled Life is Sweat by Ken Silverstein from Harpers Magazine. It describes the working conditions and lives of 350,000 women working in the Cambodian clothing industry.
The author said that the average production employee generated about $ US 200,000 in annual retail sales and received $US750 in income. The factory price for a small quantity and without bargaining was $US1.87 for a garment (including door to door shipping). The garment retailed for $ US25. The women workers received 0.375 of one per cent of the retail price.
In our Age Opinion piece on 1 September 2008 John Spooner drew a portrait of Kevin Rudd in his flash $100 shirt and tore a piece of it for every finger in the retail pie. We estimated that the Customs duty protecting our own miniscule garment industry was worth about a fifth of a cent in the retail dollar. We estimated that the workers actually got fifty cents or 0.5 cent of the retail dollar. This is twice as much as the Cambodian women get.
The first blindingly obvious point is that the supply chain generally and the retailer in particular is benefiting from the Asian sweatshops that have been bowdlerised by the spin kings. I still gag on the view expressed at a public meeting ten years ago when a woman Liberal Senator ( so much for sister solidarity) said that if women in Thailand weren’t employed in sweatshops they would be prostitutes in Bangkok. The Harpers’ article quotes Julia Macgruder (1907) and Senator Knute Nelson (1906) as arguing for child labour on the basis that the alternative was worse.
The evil is that the alternative isn’t the only alternative. We could always pay a dollar more or force the retailers to reduce their margin from 800 % to 700%. I wonder what would happen if they had to make their pricing structures public? The trouble is that the additional sellers’ margin would be appropriated by the factory or brand name owners. It would not filter down to the workers living on $ US50 a month. That’s right. A month. Not a week or a day. Oh, that amount includes overtime. It works out at 33 cents an hour.
In the lucky country you can’t park your car in the city for a day for the $A dollar equivalent of $50. You can’t buy a sandwich lunch for a week.
We used to employ 160,000 people in our textiles, clothing and footwear industries mostly in Victoria. They were hounded out of existence by the claim that they were inefficient. I’d like to see how the government’s mantra of productivity improvements would have any impact at all on our competitiveness against the sweatshops of Asia. Why would they bother swapping capital equipment for reduced labour? The ultimate sanction in the sweatshops is that you get sacked if you don’t produce your quota. They don’t have unemployment benefits.
The textiles clothing and footwear industries have been constantly derided by the Productivity Commission, the media and everyone else beating the drum of free trade. They have been caustic about our inability to compete. I’d like to know how we could or why we would want to treat our workers so badly. I also want to know why we think that we can regard a huge number of women living on the edge in other countries so callously.
The answer is that ignorance is bliss. No one advertises their retail margins or the number of steps in the supply chain. There aren’t too many now. The major retailers have simply by-passed importers and sourced directly from the manufacturers .They make their own arrangements for sea freight. They negotiate directly with the brand name owners and the sweat shops. They are very profitable.
Too much information about the sweatshops makes us uncomfortable. We don’t really want to know. There is a trend to get information on the origin of food (especially fresh food) but this is an issue that potentially affects us.
I remember seeing workers clear the slag from the blast furnaces at BHP where the hot metal flowed under the slag. I stood on a platform about three times further away from the furnace mouth than the workers. I could feel my eyelashes burning away. The superintendent told me that “they are used to it”. Maybe the Cambodian women are used to the unremitting agony of endlessly remorseless work with no hope of ever getting out of it.
Their agony is something we don’t want to know about. Saying the consumer is king is a sick joke.
The author said that the average production employee generated about $ US 200,000 in annual retail sales and received $US750 in income. The factory price for a small quantity and without bargaining was $US1.87 for a garment (including door to door shipping). The garment retailed for $ US25. The women workers received 0.375 of one per cent of the retail price.
In our Age Opinion piece on 1 September 2008 John Spooner drew a portrait of Kevin Rudd in his flash $100 shirt and tore a piece of it for every finger in the retail pie. We estimated that the Customs duty protecting our own miniscule garment industry was worth about a fifth of a cent in the retail dollar. We estimated that the workers actually got fifty cents or 0.5 cent of the retail dollar. This is twice as much as the Cambodian women get.
The first blindingly obvious point is that the supply chain generally and the retailer in particular is benefiting from the Asian sweatshops that have been bowdlerised by the spin kings. I still gag on the view expressed at a public meeting ten years ago when a woman Liberal Senator ( so much for sister solidarity) said that if women in Thailand weren’t employed in sweatshops they would be prostitutes in Bangkok. The Harpers’ article quotes Julia Macgruder (1907) and Senator Knute Nelson (1906) as arguing for child labour on the basis that the alternative was worse.
The evil is that the alternative isn’t the only alternative. We could always pay a dollar more or force the retailers to reduce their margin from 800 % to 700%. I wonder what would happen if they had to make their pricing structures public? The trouble is that the additional sellers’ margin would be appropriated by the factory or brand name owners. It would not filter down to the workers living on $ US50 a month. That’s right. A month. Not a week or a day. Oh, that amount includes overtime. It works out at 33 cents an hour.
In the lucky country you can’t park your car in the city for a day for the $A dollar equivalent of $50. You can’t buy a sandwich lunch for a week.
We used to employ 160,000 people in our textiles, clothing and footwear industries mostly in Victoria. They were hounded out of existence by the claim that they were inefficient. I’d like to see how the government’s mantra of productivity improvements would have any impact at all on our competitiveness against the sweatshops of Asia. Why would they bother swapping capital equipment for reduced labour? The ultimate sanction in the sweatshops is that you get sacked if you don’t produce your quota. They don’t have unemployment benefits.
The textiles clothing and footwear industries have been constantly derided by the Productivity Commission, the media and everyone else beating the drum of free trade. They have been caustic about our inability to compete. I’d like to know how we could or why we would want to treat our workers so badly. I also want to know why we think that we can regard a huge number of women living on the edge in other countries so callously.
The answer is that ignorance is bliss. No one advertises their retail margins or the number of steps in the supply chain. There aren’t too many now. The major retailers have simply by-passed importers and sourced directly from the manufacturers .They make their own arrangements for sea freight. They negotiate directly with the brand name owners and the sweat shops. They are very profitable.
Too much information about the sweatshops makes us uncomfortable. We don’t really want to know. There is a trend to get information on the origin of food (especially fresh food) but this is an issue that potentially affects us.
I remember seeing workers clear the slag from the blast furnaces at BHP where the hot metal flowed under the slag. I stood on a platform about three times further away from the furnace mouth than the workers. I could feel my eyelashes burning away. The superintendent told me that “they are used to it”. Maybe the Cambodian women are used to the unremitting agony of endlessly remorseless work with no hope of ever getting out of it.
Their agony is something we don’t want to know about. Saying the consumer is king is a sick joke.
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