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?