After this festival of excess (aka Christmas), we should give some thought to where much of our stuff is made. The hair-raising documentary/docudrama China Blue provides an inside look at a plant in China that makes jeans for many different global brands. For the historians among you, the information will not be new. Fast industrialization has typically come with low wages and wide spread violation of workers’ rights. As it was in early nineteenth century Britain, early twentieth century Russia, so it now is in early twenty-first century China. The difference, of course, is that we are wearing the products of this exploitation.
China Blue depicts one of the better factories in the current Chinese industrialization boom. Workers have fairly decent housing and food. Still, the new-comers are not paid for the first few months so they will not return home. For big orders, the labor force works long hours, sometimes even twenty-four hour shifts. The toilers are mainly young girls, some as young as twelve. Foreign inspections of working standards are an open joke; factory managers coach the workers to lie about their wages and hours, lies which the foreigners are all too eager to believe.
What solutions are there for consumers? We can investigate the labor standards of the brands we wear. Some promise to be “sweat shop” free. Even more radical, we can buy used clothes instead of new, working to wear down the mountains of excess we have created.
