The Bangladeshi Tragedy and the Failure of Values

In the aftermath of a garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that  killed almost 300, which followed a November fire in a garment factory there that killed another 112, the debate is heating up again as to whether Western apparel brands and retailers should shoulder the costs to ensure things like fire and building infrastructure safety.

If this rings a bell at all it is because this debate has been reheated so many times it is almost entirely now a matter of routine. But this time it happened in Bangladesh. For reasons that those who know me will easily appreciate, the fires and collapses at textile factories used by suppliers of many high street and fast fashion outlets, have been giving me nightmares.

Before I left my University's politics programme, I put a lot of work into attempting to advance the argument that although the colonial era was over, a financial imperialism remains. This is not my theory. If you are interested in the concept of neo-colonialism but have no context for the study of it, please don't follow the link just now; it's a total rabbit hole.

To restate the facts of this particular story; 350 are dead. 900 are missing. It is not unusual that large factories supplying mass market textiles should catch fire or collapse. The Bangladeshi minimum wage is $37.00 (£23.89) per month. So without employing hyperbole or indeed any rhetorical device to underline the point, here is the case:

Bangladeshis work in death traps for just over a dollar a day to produce cheap clothing for us. Sometimes they die doing so. Sometimes they are physically crushed doing so. Sometimes they suffer 3rd degree burns all over doing so.

Okay, I'm getting creeped out and heading for one of those morose and sickening tailspins... let's return to rhetoric shall we?

If you were to place say... an imitation tweed/wool mix jacket side-by-side with a month of the labour of the seamstress who finished it... it is possible that the RRP would show that the jacket is worth twice as much. How can this be? And, more importantly, what is being done about it?

Well some pressure is being brought to bear on the Bangladeshi government by large retailers. Some demand that they should raise the minimum wage, while others say they will pay for improved workplace safety measures if all the other large firms kick into the pot too. You will note that the answer to my original question could be summarised as, 'nothing at all.'

The retailing high ground here is taken by those who regularly audit their factories and prevent such accidents. This completely side-steps the issue of workers' dignity and the value of the labour, but to do so much at least shows that this kind of imperialism is indirectly acknowledging a duty of care and is not sociopathically driven to consider their workers as organic machinery.

If it can be conceded that the people making the clothes are people, surely it follows that they're human rights should be equally as inviolable as our own (i.e. only up to a point).

The fact that this is not acknowledged leads us toward a deeper economic truth. If you do consider the seamstress an organic machine, she is a highly sophisticated machine. There are many spares to choose from, true and you can pay her off in very small installments. If she were a component of a loom, what would the supplier pay to have it replaced? Half the price of one garment of which she will run off thousands? That seems like a very low price to me.

Over the last 5 years (inconveniently since the date of my graduation) an economic tectonic shift forced us to confront the true quantity and value of our product as a nation and a hemisphere. Our prior perception had been so warped and distorted that the correction was, and continues to be, violent. It is also incomplete.

Imperial economics, or gunpoint economics still abound in every part of the so-called 3rd world. While factories are collapsing or union reps and their families are spirited away in the dark, we are denying the true value of labour. This is the single largest distortion of the global free market and it will destroy our current model.

I tried to write about Thatcher last week but found that I could not address the subject dispassionately. My critique is encapsulated in this way. She cheapened the entire fabric of the British economy. Devalued the price of Labour in Britain certainly. Made it close to impossible to be a viable low-tech manufacturer. The true evil done however was in creating an illusion of wealth that was fuelled by trapping overseas nations into creating products at such a low cost that we were still able to purchase them. This despite the fact that the majority of us produce almost literally nothing in exchange.

Foremost among the tropes of the political class in this country is that we are now a 'services nation'. Financial services, customer services, retail services, legal services: all lucrative concepts that are entirely consistent of the addition of imagined value. To provide telephone and email services for a high street retail outlet can easily be remunerated at a rate roughly 35 times that of the actual production of their stock.

This is the miscalculation inherent in our economic system and so long as we keep freely imagining value in such a madcap fashion, we will be forever teetering on the edge of a financial catastrophe and millions of others will suffer the cruellest exploitation. In Bangladesh, people will continue to die in swathes and even in death their industry's estimation of their value will be measured by their bickering over whether to install a few smoke alarms or build a factory that might stay up.

Imagine it was you. Wouldn't you be thinking pretty seriously about organising?

Women and Fundamentalism - Part 1

Three stories coincided this week, which formed that perfect kernel of poignancy, which one feels cannot help but reside in the world's consciousness. These are the dots in the matrix of history that can smudge and bleed over one another. They leave an impression in the typescript that cannot be tidied up or skipped over; the reader is forced to return to the passage to check and inevitably to conclude that either the printer made an error or something here went very wrong in the writer's mind.

Malala Yousafzai was returning home on a school bus when militants boarded the bus and shot her twice. Once in the head and once in the neck. Malala is often described as being a 'teenage education activist', by which we might suppose that she were an undergraduate developing a political consciousness. Malala is 15 and has been actively writing and speaking on education for girls for 4 years. Her improbable survival, which hinged on incredible medical expertise and a level of goodwill not necessarily available to all, is a great relief to the soul.

Across the Pakistan/India border, in what many consider to be a more civilised country, an unnamed woman's murder/rape trial is to be held in what is being seen as a moment of national self-reflection. The details of this crime are horrific enough but the news, by hinting at further, unpublishable horrors, leaves the reports with a sense of the unheimlich. To put it as baldly as possible, it appears that a group of 6 men, including the driver of the bus on which the attack occurred, set out one evening to capture and rape a woman. In a statement from the driver, which may yet prove to have been coerced by police, the driver described the motive as being the pursuit of 'a lot of fun'.

Which is one of those things after which you cannot help but take a new paragraph. Somehow the movement of breath and pulse demands it.

Again to be as crisp as one can, the group carried out their intent. A young woman of 23 was being escorted home on the bus by a male friend when they were set upon by the group. The man was beaten with a metal bar to incapacitate him while the woman was raped and assaulted to the point of death. They were then thrown from the bus. Whether the statement was coerced or not, these things were certainly done. A group of human beings made a collective decision to put their desire for some form of atavistic pandemonium ahead of the most basic form of human solidarity. There is no relief for the soul here.

In the meantime - across the globe at Westboro Baptist Church - a tiny but beautiful symbol of hope arose at the heart of western bigotry and patriarchy.

For those unfamiliar with the WBC - this church was the one who protested at fallen US soldiers funerals, coined the term 'God hates fags' and generally sat like a bleeding sore on christian America's conscience for the past 57 years. Despite their relatively small number, the WBC distinguished themselves by their gift for media manipulation and stirring up of controversy. The face and voice of the WBC in the media was a lady by the name of Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of community founder Fred Phelps. In several memorable TV appearances, Megan would duck and weave and was always identified by the presenter as the one with whom they could tangle safely. Because she was nice.

Before you call come at me with sharp sticks for suggesting that someone could be nice and clearly a bigot at the same time, Megan left WBC with her 19-year-old sister, Grace and has renounced the church's positions on homosexuality and the responsibility of the Jews for the death of Christ. She was born into a family who loved and cared for her and expected her to join the family religion. At 27, she has finally broken free and has written well on her own behalf on her reasons for leaving WBC.

What these stories together have captured for me is the need for a renewed political solidarity with the women's movement. For my lifetime after the age of consciousness, feminism has been at a standstill; creative industries and service industries were close to conquered by the end of the eighties. Together these sectors seem to cover so much of daily life that many declared the struggle over. The stereotype of the angry feminist could then be safely mocked our of existence again.

Well I say that that is a very poor show indeed. The violation, brutalisation, subjugation and annihilation of womankind is happening right now across the world. There is a spectre haunting the regressivist politics, which it dare not face and in order that it need not do so, it has bound that face in cloth. In America, actual politicians proposed the use of 'trans-vaginal ultrasound' which is exactly what it sounds like - medicalised rape - as a mandatory procedure for patients seeking abortion.

In Britain, our Prime Minister is a comfortably polite misogynist, capable of addressing parliamentarians as if they were maids if they happen to be women. Until we have a new Feminist International, with the power to exert influence on the wealth, health and sex lives of men in the Swat Valley, at bus stops in New Delhi and Kerala and within the Westboro Baptist Church compound, the standstill will remain.

Imagine what kind of momentum might be gained however, if women like Malala Yousafzai, Megan Phelps-Roper, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy could come together in a recognised cause. It is not merely a gender taboo that keeps women oppressed - it is the prohibition on sexual freedom that unites all forms of oppression. Whether totalitarian, theocratic or the cruel mixture of both, the subjugation of women is a function of the cheap thrill of domination and will only end once the perverted torturers are forced to step back.