Op-Ed Contributors

The high cost of cheap fashion

By Naomi Wolf (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-03 07:56

For example, The Financial Times reported on June 23 that, "Hundreds of Bangladeshi garment factories supplying Western buyers such as Marks and Spencer, Tesco, Walmart, and H&M gradually reopened under heavy police protection after days of violent protests by tens of thousands of laborers demanding higher wages." A thousand riot police personnel used rubber bullets and tear gas on the workers, and hundreds were injured, but they did not back down.

Most of the 2 million people working in Bangladesh's garment industry are women, and they are the lowest-paid garment workers in the world, earning $25 a month. But they are demanding their monthly wage be almost tripled, to $70. Their leaders point out that, at current pay levels, workers cannot feed themselves or their families.

Economists predict that strikes and unrest will escalate in Bangladesh, and also in Vietnam, with even investment bankers quoted by The Financial Times calling wages for women garment workers in these countries "unsustainably low".

The factories have reopened - for now. But Bangladesh's government is considering an increase in the minimum wage. If it happens, one of the world's most oppressed legal workforces will have scored a major victory - largely symbolic for now, but one that will inspire other women garment workers around the world to rise up in protest.

Western women, we should challenge ourselves to follow this story and find ways to do what is right in changing our own consumption patterns. It is past time to show support for women who are suffering systematic, globalized, cost-effective gender discrimination in the most overt ways - ways that most of us no longer have to face. Let us support a fair-trade economy, and refuse to shop at outlets targeted by activists for unfair employment practices (for more information, go to http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1485).

If women around the world who are held in the bondage of sweated labor manage to win this crucial fight, that cute dress at Primark may cost a fair amount more. But it already costs too much to the women who can't afford to feed and house themselves and their children.

That $3 pair of adorable lace-up sandals? The price - given the human costs - really is too good to be true.

The author is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Project Syndicate

(China Daily 07/03/2010 page5)