Sweat Shops:You should care where your T-Shirt was made: The true cost of a T-shirt - by M. MacKinnon and M. Strauss

A Sweatshop making your T-Shirt

At about 8:30 a.m. one morning in April, a generator rumbled to life at Rana Plaza – rattling the building, as it always did when it started.

Work had just begun at the welter of garment factories when the power went out. So a manager on the seventh floor, home to the New Wave Style factory, was quick to stand up as the lights went back on and announce that the building was safe. Everyone should continue doing their jobs.

But this time, Rana Plaza didn’t stop shaking.

“He died on the spot as he was announcing that we should keep working,” Raehana Akhter recalls. Then she fell, too. “It was like stepping into an elevator [shaft]. I felt this feeling in my stomach, and then everything fell.”
When she landed, Ms. Akhter, a 22-year-old mother who worked as a quality control officer for about $2 a day, was in complete darkness, with her left leg trapped under shattered cement.

“The ceiling was just here,” she says, putting her hand about 30 centimetres above her face. “I felt like this would be my little grave.”

The building did become a grave – for 1,129 people. Its collapse was the world’s worst industrial accident in almost three decades. Fatal accidents in the garment-trade belt around Dhaka have become all too regular.

Sweatshop

The Rana Plaza deaths added to a toll of 117 who died in a November, 2012, fire at Tazreen Fashions. And that disaster was echoed by another fire this week, which claimed 10 lives at the Aswad Composite Mills factory.

The collapse of Rana Plaza spotlighted the potentially tragic costs of the cheap T-shirt – now a staple of fast fashion – and sparked debate about just how much responsibility retailers should have for the supply chain that moves product onto their shelves.

Yet as the ties between countries have become stronger, accountability has become a loose thread. The Globe’s investigation shows how companies such as Loblaw place their orders through middlemen, who in turn source work to a network of far-flung factories. The retailer whose shelves are stocked with cheap T-shirts in many cases does not know where in the world it or its materials is going to be produced when an order is placed. Inspecting buildings and working conditions has been beyond the retailer’s scope.

Note EU-Digest: Maybe it is high time that the EU Parliament approves legislation which only allows in products made overseas into the EU that have a 'Trade Mark' which  says: "This product has been produced in a workplace which meets EU approved standards for safety". Just talking about the issue with the Governments in question that allow these sweatshops or corporate entities which import these products has had very little effect. 

In the meantime consumers should check the label of the products they are buying and think twice about buying the product if it is not clearly specified that it was produced in a safe workplace.

 Read more: Spinning tragedy: The true cost of a T-shirt - The Globe and Mail