The Oxfam report Trading away our rights: women working in global supply chains was published to coincide with 'Fair Trade Fortnight'. Matt Cooper gives his view.
Walk into any supermarket in Britain and look at the fruit and veg - it's grown in Kenya, South Africa or Honduras. The jeans in the clothes shops and the supermarkets are made in Romania, Taiwan or Cambodia. The cut-throat nature of modern retail means that the clothes are constantly discounted in a culture of the year-round sale, the fruit in two-for-one promotions.
Now consider the case of Rokeya in Bangladesh, who worked sewing clothes. While ill for two months before she took off time to see a doctor, she lost two days' pay, she lost her attendance bonus and she had to work eight hours unpaid overtime to make up the production she had missed. Going to the doctor cost her 11 days' pay.
Women particularly suffer from begin treated as second-class workers. In South Africa women are 26% of the permanent workforce in fruit production, but make up 69% of seasonally employed workers.
As Oxfam's report Trading away our rights points out, Third World working conditions are increasingly shaped by the supply lines of European and American high street retailers.
Although the report is rather bland abut 'sharing the benefits of globalisation' and making 'trade fair', it is nonetheless clear on the inequities that current trade creates. It puts to bed the idea that the actions of big Western retailers simply create a working class in the developing world that in time will acquire the rights and living standards of the west. What is in fact created is a 'race to the bottom', where workers' conditions are squeezed rather than improved.
Wal-Mart (which trades as Asda in the UK) is the world's biggest food and clothes retailer. It has net sales of $245 billion a year - that's about six times the total exports of India. It has relationships with more than 65,000 suppliers around the world. Wal-Mart, and retailers like it, use dominance of markets in the West to demand the lowest possible prices from their suppliers. Its suppliers in turn squeeze their workers. The governments of Third World states weaken, or more often simply ignore, their own labour laws in order to attract work to their country.
Because they have no independent access to markets, the producers have no choice but to accept trade on the terms offered. This often means bearing the cost of promotions and discounts offered in the Western high street. Taco Bell promises that all the animals in its supply chain are treated humanely, but no major corporation will say the same for the workers.
In order to maximise the profits, the high street retailers have developed a system of 'just in time' management. In fashion, this can mean consignments of new designs being required in seven days. The result is long hours of compulsory overtime, harsh labour discipline, and large scale casualisation.
This creates situations like that of Lucy, highlighted in Oxfam's report, who works in a plant in Nairobi making children's jeans for Wal-Mart. She was forced to work for two days non-stop to fulfil an order.
It also relocates profit up the supply chain to the high street retailers and brands, creating a situation where the capitalists and bosses at the bottom of the supply chain drive harder and harder to sweat the workers. And it is the most marginal workers, often meaning women, that are sweated the most.
Governments in the Third World come under a double pressure to weaken labour laws from the corporations of Europe and the US (via the World Bank and other creatures of big capital) and from the owners of the factories that supply them. For example, the biggest force for weakening of labour laws in China is not the World Bank or WTO, but the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The result is a Dutch auction, with work going to those states that pay their workers least.
What can be done? The problem with the report is not its demands - decent labour standards across the world, trading standards that stop the Western corporations encouraging sweated labour down the line, and trade union rights for all workers - but how Oxfam seeks to achieve them. Oxfam identifies no agency of change other than itself and NGOs like it. It sees its role as pressuring government in national and international forums to implement and police codes of practice. However, implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - the report identifies the single biggest force for workers' rights in the working class itself. Building the solidarity of that international working class is the answer.
- The whole report can be read on Oxfam's website
