BY JUSTINE DRENNANAPRIL
Laundering the Global Garment Industry’s Dirty Business
From time to time, activists concerned about abuses in the global garment industry stage protests in front of gleaming department stores in New York, Paris, and London. They’ve even entered clothing outlets across Europe and pretended to faint from overwork in a show of solidarity with exhausted workers in Asia. Those workers themselves protest loudly and often for better conditions, blocking roads with burning tires near sprawling, dingy factories on the outskirts of Dhaka or Phnom Penh, and sometimes fall to bullets fired by riot police dispatched to return them to work.
Between those two extremes of anger aimed at the global garment supply chain, most attempts at accountability fall away. Linking the dusty Asian factories to the big, bright shops of Europe and North America is a convoluted network of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors with little-known names, based in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or South Korea — and in small, unmarked buildings in the poorer countries that produce the clothes. These middlemen keep far away from both desperate factory workers and outraged activists — and they’re low-profile enough to escape the international scrutiny given to a Walmart or a Gap.
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