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The Glitz & the Gloom
In a few months, the fashion world will once again be aglitter as models strut, designers bow, photographers click, celebrities mingle, and the rest of the world watches in rapt envy the spectacle known as Fashion Week.
For seven days (February 11 through February 18, 2010), in the world's fashion capital of New York, the industry's elite, the media's, and thus our attention too, turns to the glitz side of garments.
Eight thousand miles away on a little island in the Pacific, a young woman turns her attention on the nine years she spent as a garment factory worker, toiling 14-hour days, sleeping on bamboo mattresses, enduring verbal abuse from monitors, living in cramped living quarters, suffering back pain, and more--an experience documented in her book, Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin:Diary of a Chinese Garment Factory Girl on Saipan.
Yes, garment factories. It's the not-much-talked-about gloomy side of the fashion industry that gets the occasional headline, the brief spike in public interest and then, all too predictably, a return to the status quo.
The Formula & the Fight
That status quo is based on a simple formula: produce garments at the lowest possible cost, in order to make the greatest possible profit. That simple formula is part of a bigger picture of jobs, opportunity, human rights. Workers in countries with higher minimum wages, like the United States, lament the loss of garment manufacturing jobs to countries with lower wages like Vietnam and Mexico. Meanwhile, human rights activists lobby and fight on behalf of presumably exploited workers in those countries, securing better work conditions and higher wages.
The Contradiction & the Coverup
There have been successes in these efforts. Saipan the capital island of the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is a perfect example.
Saipan was home to a once-thriving garment industry which, at its height, hosted 36 factories which employed over 15,000 contract workers (mostly women from China, Thailand, the Philippines and other Pacific islands), generated (taxes of) $40 million/year for the CNMI government, and $994 million in annual exports to the world.
After years of bad press about labor abuses, disgraced lobbyists, political corruption,and coverup, Saipan's labor and immigration laws have now been federalized and on their wayto US mainland standards.
Federalization has resulted in higher wages for contract workers on the island. However, those same higher wages resulted in lower profits for the garment factories who then ceased operations and moved elsewhere depriving those same workers of the opportunity to earn what was considerably more than they earned in their home countries.
The Starving & the Stars
"Saipan's is a fascinating story, but much remains hidden about what things were really like here, and what they continue to be like in other countries," says Walt Goodridge, freelance columnistfor the Saipan Tribune, and editor of Chun Yu Wang's book, Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin, the only first-hand account of the life of a Chinese garment factory worker on Saipan. "Opinions vary among those on the outside, but most workers here on the inside felt it was a benefit to earn the moneythey did."
Told directly in her own words--Chicken Feathers is simple, yet full of profound insights, and comes from an entirely untainted viewpoint. It is a directly transcribed account, told without the bias of reporters, journalists, case workers, human rights activists or western worldviews.
"It's not a black and white issue," Goodridge adds. "You can't simply call it good or bad, because you can't really appreciate all the contradictions without hearing the workers' side of the story."
"Fashion Week will come and go, but the situations these young women are going through willcontinue, at least for the foreseeable future. You can't really appreciate the glamour on stage, without a fuller understanding of the gloom behind the scenes. Not to take anything away from the models, but perhaps you might change--or at least include the workers, too--in your perception of who the real stars are in this story."
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