Do you remember when in 2013, in Bangladesh, a nine-storey factory collapsed and over a thousand workers died and around two thousand were injured? At the time of the accident the victims were making clothes — working for a pittance — to be sold in high street shops.
Inspired by an interactive article on The Guardian UK, I write this to raise awareness about what goes on behind the scenes of the price you pay for your clothes.
The outskirts of the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh are plastered with textile factories most probably manufacturing clothes you are wearing while reading this article.
Mahmuda, an ordinary low-class woman seeks employment at a factory. Her job is to stitch 120 seams and 120 pockets on trousers per hour. Multiply that for ten hours a day and 300 days a year. That’s 360,000 seams and 360,000 pockets. All this slave work for €75 a month. Her husband works there too. For every euro Mahmuda has earned, retailers sold hundreds of thousands of euro worth of goods.
Going to work suddenly turned into fear of death. In addition to these inhumane working conditions, the building was certified as unsafe. The workers refused to go inside. But they were encouraged to start their shift so they could earn money and pay their bills. The building collapsed minutes after. Mahmuda’s husband never returned home. Just forty-seven days earlier he had witnessed the birth of his baby girl.
People — if they were lucky — found their family members thirteen days after the collapse. Others never found their dearest’s dead bodies. Retail workers in other factories protested and demanded better wages but a week later everything returned back to normal. The rhythm of the city is composed of people going to work in poorly-paid jobs in terrible working conditions.
Few months later, Mahmuda returns to work in the textile industry as “she has no choice” due to financial constraints.
Have you ever thought the iPhone and Smartphone you love so dearly come from supplier factories where employees are so depressed they leave their bench to jump from the roof to put an end to their miserable lives? In a sad move of damage control, the management has placed nets around the buildings to prevent further suicide attempts.
I’m sure we will always look for cheap buys. However, even the expensive buys are most of the time a result of cheap labour. Companies who always strive for better profits have made it impossible to not buy goods produced in China, Bangladesh, Taiwan and Vietnam.
