Inside Labour: Women's Day, garment workers and globalisation

THIS week started off with International Women’s Day (IWD), so it seemed a good time to look again at the global garment industry as well as our own emaciated sector. I justify this historically because it was women in this industry who provided the impetus for this day.  

And it was women in the same industry in St Petersburg in 1917 who triggered the Russian revolution, when they celebrated IWD by rebelling against their appalling wages and conditions. Although the day now tends to be claimed by feminists and elements of commercialism, it belongs to the labour tradition and, specifically, to garment workers.

This is an industry that, more than a century after the 1911 launch of the first IWD, is still staffed largely by women. And it remains one of the most exploitative anywhere. It also happens to provide one of the best examples of what globalisation really means - and should be an antidote to the patriotic prattling of various parochial politicians and their acolytes.

Locked into burning building

The day was established to commemorate a strike in 1908 by garment workers in New York. And, only weeks after the first international IWD demonstrations in 1911, the importance of the day was underlined by a fire in the Triangle shirtwaist factory in that city. The workers had been locked into the factory and 123 women and 23 men, garment workers all, perished.

This highlighted the insistence of the IWD founders that they would support human liberation and not pursue the interests of any elite. As the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollantai told the IWD founding congress: “It matters not who is the ‘master’, a man or a woman.”

This, as I have mentioned before, was a difference starkly illustrated in South Africa in 1930 when local suffragettes won the vote for white women. At the same time, they supported the removal of the qualified franchise that then still applied to black men in the Cape Province.

Such specific divisions may not exist as widely today, but divisions and the resultant exploitation are just as rampant in our now globalised world. South Africa’s garment industry, for example, is a mere shadow of its former self, having collapsed under a flood of imports, especially from China: our slightly better wages and conditions meant that our products could not compete.

But workers in China rallied and there was a series of strikes, protests and wage rises.

So now the great garment boom in that country has slowed down, and a number of Chinese-owned factories have relocated to countries such as Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma). Retail organisations and global design companies have followed suit, just as they did when they moved their production to countries such as China.

Scant regard for human welfare

These companies are compelled to do so by the competitive logic of a global economic system that has scant regard for the welfare of humanity. So brand names and retailers chase the lowest possible prices of production, destroying lives and livelihoods in the process. Even the global agreements signed in Bangladesh after the horrific 2013 fire at Rana Plaza that killed more than 1 000 garment workers provide only a faint flicker of hope for meaningful, global change.

This is because some governments, concerned about losing revenue, are clamping down on worker militancy that may increase the cost of production and lose cut-price contracts. Five unionists were, for example, shot down in Cambodia this year where the minimum wage - under union pressure - rose in January to $128 (R1 540) a month from $100.

The fall-off in orders in that country, one of the results of higher wages, has also meant less of the overtime necessary for workers to earn at least a living wage. And Cambodian company owners now complain that the new basic wage is twice that of Bangladesh.

Even closer to home for Cambodia is Myanmar (Burma), where union leaders were arrested following strikes at South Korean- and Chinese-owned factories. There, workers are demanding a wage of $78 (R1 040) a month.  

This is the global reality of that the labour movement correctly categorises as “a race to the bottom”; a situation of diminishing wages and worsening conditions. In fact, a situation very little different from what the workers of 1911 had to endure.

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