The Ethics of T-Shirts

I'm old enough to have seen ILGWU ads so many times that I can hum along with the workers.



But the battle to keep clothing manufacturing in the US was lost a long time ago. The International Ladies' Garment Workers Unions, which had been one of the most progressive and powerful unions of the '30s and '40s, collapsed in the '90s under the weight of international outsourcing and restrictive labor laws, and in 1995 merged into "Unite Here".

Periodically, reports have surfaced in the mainstream media regarding appalling conditions for workers in overseas (largely Asian) sweatshops that today produce most Americans' clothing. And sometimes, the good guys do win, as I posted back in November (click here for my post about Russell Athletics' agreement with its Honduran laborers and their union, thanks to the considerable efforts of United Students Against Sweatshops). But if you thought that significant progress had been made generally to improve conditions, well, sadly, you were mistaken.

The current issue of Harper's magazine has an excellent piece by Ken Silverstein on "Shopping for Sweat: the human cost of a two-dollar T-shirt" (the first paragraph is available for non-subscribers online here; the rest is behind a pay wall).

Silverstein writes that "apparel buyers, while quite happy to win accolades for doing business in [supposedly sweatshop-free] Cambodia, have remained unwilling to pay much for the privilege."

As a result, "pay for apparel workers in Cambodia has stagnated, according to a 2008 survey, at 33 cents an hour [I have added the emphasis] .... Labor unions are abundant, but most are funded and controlled by employers or by the government, and independent activists have been fired, suspended, sued, and otherwise targeted for repression."

There is some good news in all of this -- as Silverstein notes, "Until the mid-1990s, Western apparel companies didn't even acknowledge that labor rights or fair pay were legitimate issues for discussion." It took a while for that to happen, and the loud protests of many American consumers.

But where do we go from here? Monitoring apparently hasn't worked, especially as most of the monitors seem to be in the pay of the apparel companies rather than in that of the workers. Moreover, there's a regular round of articles from the neoliberal business types who say that a bad job is better than no job in countries like this (which sound to me an awful lot like the arguments at the turn of the last century that child labor wasn't really such a bad thing for the poor).

Silverstein's article ends with a suggestion from Richard Duncan, chief economist of Singapore-based Blackhorse Asset Management: Wages should rise in Asia to a $5-per-day minimum -- "slightly above starting pay in southern China and more than twice the current rate in Bangladesh. Then, Duncan says, the wage could be raised by $1 each year for ten years. Imposing such a scheme would be quite simple to implement, he points out. The United States and the European Union could slap steep tariffs on imports manufactured by workers earning less than the minimum."

"'If you sell a pair of tennis shoes for $101 instead of $100, no consumer in Chicago will notice the difference, but it will totally transform villages in Vietnam,' he said. 'This is not a moral argument.... We are going to have an international depression if we don't figure out a way to create new sources of global demand -- in which case, all those apparel companies are going to go out of business anyway.'"

Actually, Mr. Duncan, it is a moral argument. It just happens to be an economic one, too.