Tuesday, 02 October 2012
By Anne Elizabeth Moore, Truthout | Op-Ed
truth-out.org
A group of Chicago artists feign illness at the city's flagship H&M location. (Photo: Anne Elizabeth Moore)
In November of 2011, in order to think through a situation I later
reported on for Truthout, I staged a group art performance called FEINT
at the flagship downtown Chicago H&M store. A week before Black
Friday, approximately 20 people inside and outside the store fell to the
ground at a predetermined time. Then, they got up and left. If anyone
asked, we explained, calmly, that H&M and other manufacturers were
allowing thousands of women to faint in Cambodian factories making these
[gesture] clothes, but the company, the government and the
media simply weren't paying attention. Our action was intended as a
quiet homage to mass faintings of garment workers that started in April
of that year, and as an attempt to offer visual evidence of a growing
rejection of an increasingly manic production cycle that
disproportionately affects women in developing countries and keeps them
in poverty.
As first reported here in April 2012, around 3,000 workers reportedly lost consciousness over the previous year in 17 separate mass-fainting incidents at 12 of Cambodia's 300 registered garment factories.
The fainting incidents - another 77 at a Svay Rieng factory on Friday,
September 21, according to the Phnom Penh Post - have not abated;
coverage of them has. What I claimed in my April report has only been
proven conclusively now: thousands of workers continuing to
fall ill due to H&M and Zara's constant, "fast fashion" production
cycle still isn't enough to catch the garment industry's attention.
But activists around the world are taking note. The Clean Clothes
Campaign, a pan-European alliance of garment employee unions and NGOs,
has been staging actions inspired by FEINT all over Europe this month.
Called No More Excuses, the campaign aims to stage actions in seven more countries in Europe and increase visibility for an online campaign.
Activists
in Paris with the Clean Clothes Campaign draw attention to mass
fainting incidents in Cambodian garment manufacturing plants. (Photo:
Clean Clothes Campaign)(H&M - by far the most
responsive of the big brands, particularly around Cambodian workers'
issues - replied to the Clean Clothes Campaign's public actions with a
brief email on September 19 underscoring its commitment to the Fair Wage Network.
However admirable, the loose set of standards member companies agree to
do not outline or enforce timelines or benchmarks to achieve standards,
which include a living wage. In a response published September 26 on their web site,
the Clean Clothes Campaign argues that the Fair Wage Network fails to
foreground the living wage as a human right; others point out that a
corporation's decision to join a voluntary, participatory program with
little oversight nor space for direct feedback from workers amounts to
feel-good marketing.)
So, the actions continue. Here's a video from a September 19, 2012, action in Bristol, UK, and another from a Belgian September 21 action in Brussels.
The image above is from a Paris action, according to the Clean Clothes
Campaign's Facebook page; another, so far, has been staged in London.
Of course, there's also Chicago. And lest we forget: Cambodia. Where
malnutrition, insecticides, factory ventilation infractions, overwork, a
particularly nasty strain of cold from Canada, female hysteria,
spiritual possession and partying were each blamed, in turn, for
workers' loss of consciousness on the factory floor. The real story
behind the incidents is much more complicated - and might be more local.
A still from the Brussels action, with leaflets. (Photo: Clean Clothes Campaign)Keep
in mind, the mass faintings did start on the heels of the largest
cohesive labor action in the short history of the nation's garment
industry, which ultimately failed under crushing violence and police and
media repression. The garment industry in Cambodia is the nation's
third-largest moneymaker, but the pay workers receive also supports one
fifth of the country - those who work in rice fields in the provinces.
Therefore, their pay supports the nation's second-largest industry -
agriculture - too. Workers in the factories currently earn a minimum of
$61 per month and have been agitating for an increase closer to the living wage,
last calculated at $93 per month - but likely rising. The precarious
economic situation means workers frequently go without food. Even before
the mass fainting incidents, workers lost consciousness on the factory
floor, on average, between one and five times per week, per factory.
Yet mass numbers of workers - between 20 to several hundred - began
fainting in April 2011. Who's to say that a weakened physical state
couldn't be caused by a deep frustration following managers' dismissals
of well-organized demands? We also can't ignore that since the September
2010 mass uprisings, when between one- and two-thirds of the entire
workforce walked off jobs to demand better working conditions and fair
pay, the industry itself has changed. H&M and Inditex - the company
behind Zara, the world's largest clothing manufacturer (to H&M's
standing as the second largest) both manufacture in Cambodia; both have
long pioneered the constant turnover of merchandise and loss of seasonal
clothing demanded by fast fashion. Now, fast fashion has caught on
throughout the industry, and the result is clear: significantly more clothing is being produced now than it was just a few years ago.
For the already jury-rigged machine of international garment
manufacturing, it's simply too much. Certainly, a living wage would
offer the most immediate and wide-ranging resolution to mass faintings
and the endemic poverty they point to; but the fact is, our global
system of garment trade requires significant reform. Whether we think of
the fainting incidents as well-organized but remarkably autonomous
refusals to work under unlivable conditions or as a purely physical
response to exhaustion is no matter: even fancy Orange County ladies who
spend all day shopping for fashion know that stress kills.
ctivists
in Brussels staged fainting recovery areas—not unlike those set up at
manufacturing plants—to allow "victims" to rest. (Photo: Clean Clothes
Campaign)
Companies will blame such customers, of course, for demanding an
increase in the pace of production at every stage of the industry. But
waste at H&M and Zara - crates upon crates of unsold clothes every
week, according to retail workers here in Chicago - would indicate that
consumer demand isn't actually driving fast fashion. And the Fair Wage
Network, in its current configuration, isn't strong enough to have an
impact.
So whatever is driving fast fashion, really - perhaps
industry leaders are suffering from spiritual possession, or hangovers,
which causes them to accidentally place orders at factories well in
excess of what workers can produce or retailers can sell - that's
what's causing mass faintings. In Cambodia, sure. But also in Paris,
Brussels, London, Bristol and Chicago. Maybe soon in your town, too.
Swooning Over Fashion, the Clean Clothes Campaign is calling it. So clever: I wish I'd thought of it!
Anne Elizabeth Moore has a new book of essays and photographs out, outlining Cambodia's uneven economic development. Hip Hop Apsara: Ghosts Past and Present is available here, but you may be more interested in staging your own version of FEINT.
Anne Elizabeth Moore
Anne Elizabeth Moore is
a Fulbright scholar and author of Unmarketable: Brandalism,
Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press,
2007) and Hey Kidz, Buy This Book (Soft Skull, 2004). Co-editor and
publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet, founding editor of the Best
American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, Moore teaches at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and works with young women in
Cambodia on independent media projects. Her latest book, Cambodian Grrrl
(Cantankerous Titles, 2011), was called "The best travel book I've read
this year," by a USA Today reviewer and "piercingly honest" by The
Rumpus.
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