What's the Solution to the World's Sweatshop Problem?

But the Bangladeshi economy is dwarfed by the size of the companies that consume the apparel it produces. Bangladesh’s total 2011 G.D.P. was $111 billion. Wal-Mart’s total revenue last year was $447 billion. Furthermore, Bangladeshi labor activists point out that numerous government figures are also involved in the country’s apparel trade, making them unlikely to pass the necessary reforms. What business owner votes for more regulation? The Rana Plaza building was owned by Sohel Rana, a leader of the ruling political party’s youth wing. Many have speculated that Rana’s political influence was what allowed him to build without proper permits, and to illegally expand.

American multinationals that use Bangladesh as a source of cheap labor have a responsibility to make these basic reforms — and unlike the Bangladeshi government, they have the means to pay for them. For Wal-Mart to argue that the impoverished nation of Bangladesh needs to take sole responsibility for these problems, even as Wal-Mart is trumpeting a $15 billion annual profit, is deeply cynical.

Four million Bangladeshis work in the garment sector, 70% of whom are women. Apparel and textile manufacturing accounts for nearly 80% of the country’s exports, and Bangladesh has grown to become the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China. It also has one of the lowest minimum wages for garment workers in the world, although it’s risen a little since the days Akter was toiling in a factory: $37 per month.

The reason Wal-Mart and Gap Inc. oppose the Bangladesh safety accord, which is a formal set of reforms proposed by Bangladeshi activists and the union IndustriALL, is that the accord recognizes workers’ rights to unionize, and mandates that companies work with workers and unions to resolve disputes via arbitration. Wal-Mart is notorious for its hardline anti-union policies both in the U.S. and overseas. Spokespersons for Wal-Mart and Gap Inc. agree that worker safety is an important ideal — but apparently it’s not one as important to them as preserving that anti-union stance.

Shame on them.

And also, in a smaller way, shame on us: it must be pointed out in any discussion of inexpensive clothes and the conditions of their manufacture that the ability to buy a t-shirt for $9.99 is not a legitimate entitlement. A $9.99 t-shirt is not the natural result of capitalism and the free market: it is the the result of discrete policy decisions undertaken in recent decades by the U.S. government and the W.T.O. not only to permit but to favor outsourcing to countries that lack environmental protections and basic labor protections. What many consumers do not understand is that the cheap prices we can pay for clothing now are not just low, they are historically unprecedented. Adjusting for inflation, clothing was many times more expensive in the U.S. in the middle part of last century — when it was mostly manufactured domestically, by workers who had access to basic legal and safety protections — than it is today. And last time I checked, there were poor people around back then, too, who somehow managed to clothe themselves despite those slightly higher prices. The truth is that most people aren’t shopping all this slavery-priced clothing out of poverty or necessity — they’re shopping out of desire. If people were truly buying only out of necessity, the average U.S. wardrobe wouldn’t comprise dozens more garments now than at any time in history. Don’t get it twisted: I don’t think consumers bear even one-one-hundredth of the moral responsibility of the retailers who together define the clothing market. Multinationals like Wal-Mart and Gap Inc. have this game rigged, they are the ones whose tireless, successful lobbying for tax breaks and favorable legislation has permitted them to extract savings of pennies per piece at the cost of their workers’ safety. And the onus falls on them and on the governments of this world to reign in their enormous cruelty. But that doesn’t change the fact that $9.99 is not a price that anyone should be paying for a t-shirt. That t-shirt, and t-shirts everywhere like it, are not cheap at all: they could well cost the life of a young woman in Bangladesh or Vietnam or Cambodia or China or anywhere else. Shame on us.

Wal-Mart’s annual shareholder meeting is tomorrow. Akter and other labor-rights activists are using the occasion to draw attention to the company’s record of mistreating workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Wal-Mart is the second-largest buyer of clothing from Bangladesh. It has also been criticized for its record of mistreating U.S. workers: there was the famous sex-discrimination lawsuit, and more recently, it has fired American employees who tried to organize for better wages and conditions.

Akter told the Nation that she doesn’t want consumers to stop buying goods produced in Bangladesh: she wants them to raise their voices. She wants us to raise our voices. Akter doesn’t support a boycott of Bangladeshi goods — the millions of women employed by the garment industry depend on their jobs for income. Foreign companies, says Akter, shouldn’t divest from Bangladesh; the consequences for the local economy would be disastrous. Instead, they should put up the cash to improve working conditions, pay a living wage, and shoulder the full moral responsibility of their manufacturing.

“If consumers stop buying, that is like a boycott and a boycott doesn’t help us,” says Akter.

“Instead, we want people to write letters to Walmart, talk to their communities and friends about what is happening, raise their voice and protest at the stores with their physical presence. We want US consumers to say, ‘We’re watching you and we demand that you pay attention.'”

You can contact Wal-Mart here.

Image by Jim Cooke, photos via AP.