Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops

Personal Epilogue: Hearts Starve

Personal Epilogue Hearts Starve In January 2002, having completed a conference on labor and globalization at the University of Beijing, I, along with my coworker, Anita Chan, and the historian-sociologist Peter Alexander, guided by a Beijing friend of Ms. Chan, went in search of a clothing factory. First we went to a market far on the southern side of the city. Beijing city authorities had built the market after they tore down a street bazaar. This part of the city holds many migrants from Zhejiang Province, where there is an active private clothing and textile industry. The market sold soft goods of every description, at prices even lower than the bargains of the central city’s famous “Silk Alley.” The ritual of bargaining, though, is very similar. We asked the owners of the small stalls selling jeans and blouses if they knew of a factory close by. In short order a young man selling jeans told us of a place in some kind of industrial park not very far away. We hopped a bus and after about two stops began to look about. Typically in Beijing, empty parcels or pieces of ground that are not parkland or part of a mainstream economic enterprise are littered with plastic bags and other windblown trash. In one triangle of land near a highway interchange , an impromptu dump had developed, and as we walked by three or four people were picking through the day’s leavings, looking, one supposes, for something of use. We came in sight of some fairly recent, though very dirty, buildings with an entrance gate. The wind was blowing grit from the nearby highway and from the ungrassed pieces of ground. On drying racks we saw dozens of chickens under preparation for some commercial process. 335 We entered a small building and along a dark corridor opened a door to a small workroom. On this winter day a potbellied stove was on, and three people were working in the space. Within seconds of entering the space, the smallest person in our group of four began coughing and had to rush out, feeling faint; then the rest of us became allergic and faint, in order of smallest to largest (Peter, who was quite a bit over six feet tall). Clearly some dose-related toxin was in the air in that room, but the three workers carried on. As we proceeded down the corridor, we did indeed find a coat factory. In a small office with a couch, a desk, and a bed, the owner was interested to show us the workroom next door. There, in a small room (one of us estimated it to be forty square meters) were twenty-two workers making overcoats —for the Russian market we learned. We chatted with the owner. She told us she and her husband had another factory in Zhejiang Province that was much larger, capable of producing tens of thousands of shirts a month. In that impressively crowded workroom most of the people were women sitting at very tightly spaced sewing machines. A fellow was pressing by applying his iron to the coats draped on a dressmaker’s dummy. When we Slaves to Fashion 336 Beijing trimmer, January 2002. Photographer: Robert J. S. Ross. asked if we could take a picture, the workers smiled and giggled with each other about what the foreigners were doing. The picture is one of amused operators, packed in but smiling. At the front of the workroom was a very large pile of sewn coats. Two women were sitting on the floor, working on this pile. They were trimming— cutting off the loose ends of thread at buttons, buttonholes, and labels and otherwise tidying up the work. This is among the lowest paid work in a garment factory, and these workers didn’t even get chairs. The young women trimmers were not smiling. The coats were black, and their part of the room was not well lit (the sewing stations were bright with fluorescents), so my photograph of a young woman trimming coats is a bit dim. But as I close this work, it is to her that my thoughts flow. A migrant, no doubt without full residence papers, she will not have rights to the public schools or to the public health system. She will be boarding, many people to a room, where someone else is the nominal renter, because of her lack of...