Who carries the weight of a global supply chain? Whose lives are bound in its fetters? There is a grotesque quality to the Guardian’s revelations of the conditions under which Bangladeshi women in the garment industry labour to make Western women feel charitable and empowered. The T-shirts made in Bangladesh will ultimately sell for £19.60, of which a little more than half, £11.60, will go to Comic Relief, to help champion equality for women. The celebrities who promote them, and whom the T-shirts in turn promote with their slogan “I wanna be a Spice Girl”, are well-paid; the women who make them are paid around 35p an hour and expected to sew up to 2,000 in the course of a working day, which is anything from eight to 16 hours long. To put it another way, a Bangladeshi seamstress would have to sew at least 7,000 T-shirts to afford the price charged for one in the west – and buying or wearing one is supposed to be a way of championing “equality and people power”.
No one suggests that the westerners involved are insincere. They genuinely want to improve the lives of women around the world, and Comic Relief has done really impressive work. The people who buy the shirts will be horrified by this story. They would happily pay for their empowering T-shirts to be produced in conditions that actually empowered the workers who made them, as well as contributing to the empowerment of others elsewhere. Why is this so difficult?
Continue reading...from US news | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FEr317
No comments:
Post a Comment