The Twilight Zone

You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination—next stop, socialism.

Modern life seems strange. If you are wealthy person and/or successful business owner, you might be doing well (in economic sense) but, if you are working class it should be easy for you to relate to questions such as: What’s happened to all the half decent jobs with employee benefits? Where did they go? How then are we supposed to make a living these days? These are the questions that many people are asking! So much for saving for retirement– people are simply trying to make do week-to-week, and month-to-month! This is the state of our economic existence. In today’s modern world the corporation is the lord and master. A generation across much of the globe has known nothing other than growing insecurity and rising inequality the very goals of the liberal Keynesian reformers who sought to remove post-war with the welfare state and the neo-liberals of the Hayek ilk, in the name of unchallengeable ‘market forces’, said they would solve.

There have been many false dawns but in the end very little changed. In fact, often it has grown worse. The Marxian understanding of revolution as a radical emancipation goes against the grain of those who seek gradual social change, hoping for eventual improvements in society.

In the UK alone, £21 billion is spent on “fashion” each year, and the average household is home to 100 items of clothes per person. Women aged between 18-30 spend 2/3 of their disposable income on fashion/clothes. That means if you are working a 9 to 5, Monday through Friday job, all the work you do Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday just goes to buy clothes and other fashion accessories. Men in the same age group spend a quarter of their disposable income in the same manner, so they are not far behind. Regarding production, there are 40 million workers employed in clothing factories throughout the world, mainly in third-world countries. The average wage is around $43 USD per month, with Bangladesh clocking in with the lowest wages worldwide. These mammoth enterprises produce 80 billion garments annually.

Factories in three countries – the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – were surveyed, and not one of them paid a living wage to their combined 100,000-strong workforce. Many of them didn't even pay the legal minimum wage. What the report also makes clear is that this is a gender issue: 76% of the surveyed workforce are women. Globalised supply chains exploit predominantly female labour. It's an irony that probably escapes most of the women who do the bulk of high street shopping in the west. Women shopping for products made by other, underpaid, exploited, women.

More than a decade after sweatshop labour for high street brands became a mainstream issue, and after plenty of companies have instituted monitoring of their supply chains, the problem still seems endemic right across the global clothing and footwear sector. What's more, things seem to be getting worse, rather than better. Employment is becoming more precarious as more workers are put on to temporary contracts, day labour, on call rather than with permanent jobs. That enables employers to dodge holiday pay, sick pay and written contracts. Employers also imposed compulsory overtime, lower wages and higher production targets on workers on these short-term contracts. Such precarious employment makes it harder for trade unions to organise and recruit, because contracts are not renewed if the worker has been involved in trade union activity. On average, 25% of workers in Indonesia were short-term or temporary, while in the Philippines it rose to 85% in one factory, 50% at another. In the Philippines, 24% of workers said that they did not receive additional pay for their overtime. Typical hours can be 6am to 8pm.

In Sri Lanka, wages were paid on productivity targets – despite such a practice being illegal. At one factory in Girigara, basic pay was cut if targets set by the management were not achieved. At another factory owned by the same company in Katunayake, workers didn't receive any incentive pay unless the entire quota was reached, but workers reported that the targets were impossible to meet so they never got their bonuses, even if they missed toilet breaks and rest periods to try and reach the target. At other factories, workers were forced to work overtime to meet productivity targets. In Sri Lanka, workers were forced to work up to 130 hours per month in overtime, and anyone asking to leave would be verbally harassed. Many of the workers at these factories in Sri Lanka are young women from rural areas. They are told when recruited that the factories prefer them not to marry, and some companies even carry out pregnancy tests to weed out pregnant women. Sexual intimidation and abuse was common. 

But there is a stirring. While these are early days we see mounting resistance, increasing pressure, not among the consumers on the High St or the shopping malls but in the streets and on the shop-floor of the factories.