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Introduction The Condition of Women Garment Workers in Thailand Imagine having to work twelve straight hours every day of the week, 360 days a year, in a rundown building, a converted car garage, or a makeshift warehouse with floors made of cardboard boxes and roofs of thin aluminum siding. Imagine working when it’s hot and humid, 98 degrees outside and over 100 degrees inside, and there’s only one old ceiling fan whirling above. Imagine not being allowed to drink any water when you work. Imagine that the only drinking water provided comes from a pipe attached to the sewer. Imagine having to tolerate your thirst until you get home at night because you simply refuse to drink water from that pipe. Imagine having to prop open an umbrella above your work station because the rain is trickling in through the cracks and holes in the ceiling, and then imagine the risk of being electrocuted because all the sewing machines are electric. Imagine working alongside 800 other women every day under these conditions and having to share six toilets with this many co-workers. Imagine voluntarily giving up bathroom and lunch breaks because you need to put together at least 1,000 pieces to make enough money that day. Imagine being paid less than 80 cents at the end of that day. In outsourced manufacturing and export processing zones throughout the world, women continue to be subjected to the same conditions: meager wages, long hours, hazardous work environments, physical and verbal abuse, and job insecurity. Fewer and fewer manufactured goods today are made in the West but have been outsourced to countries and regions 2 Textures of Struggle around the world where labor is very cheap and where labor regulations are weak or nonexistent. On a global scale, the situation of women workers in transnational factories has been well documented following the extensive relocation of manufacturing industries to low-wage countries: garments in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand; shoes in Indonesia; electronics in China; leather goods and garments in India and Bangladesh. Who makes the many products that you use or wear on a daily basis? Consumer goods are sometimes assembled and finished in Western countries, but for the most part the clothes, shoes, socks, handbags, toys, electronic gadgets, and all those objects in which we invest our identities and through which we reveal our personalities are made in sweatshop factories that lie out of our sight and out of our minds. The conditions of these factories are often harmful to the people who work in them, and many of the rules we expect factories to have in place to protect workers do not exist―or, if they do, are often not observed. In the garment industry the global supply chain consists of a range of actors who are involved in the marketing and production of ready-made apparel. Typically, a large retailer or brand-name company sends its production to hundreds of thousands of workers in over a hundred countries because it is cost-effective for them to do so. Large retailers such as WalMart and JC Penney and brand companies such as Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Gap outsource their production in this manner. Workers are hired by outsourced factories that are, in turn, contracted by manufacturers acting as the main suppliers for the brand-name companies or retail giants that sell and distribute finished garments to the consumer.1 You, the consumers, are at the top of this supply chain, and at the other end hundreds of thousands of people are sweating away fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, to get those goods out “just-in-time” for you. In a nutshell, the outsourcing of textile and garment production depends very much upon the low cost of labor at the end of the global supply chain. The competitive nature of the retail business drives down wages and conditions for workers around the world, who essentially are competing with one another to make clothes for the global consumer. For the most part, this reserve of labor is readily available in developing countries of the Global South. It appears that nobody can do anything to stop it because we want the goods to be there when we need them, whether they are cell phones, PCs, shoes, clothing, or accessories. This book is designed to alert people in developed societies about where the things they buy (and use and throw away) come from, the conditions in which...

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