The shirt you are wearing was made by someone. Not by a “supply chain.” Not by a “labor market.” By a person, with a name, who woke up this morning in a place you have never been and went to work in conditions you have never seen.
I start here because the language of global commerce is designed to make this person disappear. “Supply chain” is an abstraction. “Sourcing” is an abstraction. “Labor costs” is an abstraction. The person sewing your shirt for a wage that does not cover food and rent is not an abstraction. She is real, and the system that pays her that wage is a choice, not a natural law.
What I Saw
I will describe one factory. Not because it is the worst – it is not. But because it is typical, and the typical is what needs to be understood.
The building is concrete, four stories, poorly ventilated. The workers – mostly women, mostly under thirty – operate sewing machines in rows that leave approximately fifty centimeters between stations. The machines run twelve hours per shift. Overtime is technically voluntary. In practice, workers who decline overtime do not receive assignments the following week.
The wage is set by the government’s minimum wage board, which includes representatives of employers but not of workers. It covers rent in a shared room. It does not cover three meals a day. Workers supplement their income by skipping meals on alternate days, a practice so common that it has a local name.
The factory produces clothing for brands you recognize. The brands’ codes of conduct prohibit the conditions I have described. The brands’ auditing programs have not identified these conditions. I identified them in a single visit by asking the workers directly.
The Audit Fiction
Corporate social responsibility audits are the mechanism by which brands claim oversight of their supply chains. I want to describe how they work in practice, because the gap between the theory and the practice is the space where exploitation lives.
Audits are announced in advance. The factory is notified weeks ahead of time. Workers are instructed on what to say. Hours are adjusted. Safety equipment is installed for the day and removed after the auditors leave. In some cases, a separate “show floor” is prepared.
The auditors arrive, walk through the prepared facility, interview workers who have been selected by management, and file a report that the factory is in compliance.
This is not oversight. This is theater.
The brands know this. The auditors know this. Everyone in the system knows this. It continues because the audit report is not designed to ensure compliance. It is designed to provide legal cover. As long as the report exists, the brand can claim due diligence. The workers’ conditions remain unchanged.
The Price Calculation
When a brand negotiates pricing with a factory, there is a calculation. The price per unit must cover materials, labor, overhead, and margin. In a competitive market, the variable that gets compressed is labor.
This is presented as an economic inevitability. It is not. It is a decision. The brand could accept a higher unit cost and absorb it into margin. The brand could pay the factory a price that allows a living wage. The brand chooses not to, because the market does not require it, and the consumer does not demand it, and the worker has no power to insist on it.
The consumer price of a garment does not reflect the cost of making it under humane conditions. It reflects the cost of making it under the cheapest conditions the brand can find without generating a scandal.
What Changes This
I am asked, often, what an individual consumer can do. The honest answer is: not much, acting alone. The problem is structural, and structural problems require structural solutions.
What changes this is regulation. Mandatory supply chain due diligence laws that require brands to identify, prevent, and remediate human rights abuses in their supply chains – with legal liability for failure.
What changes this is worker organizing. The single most effective intervention in labor conditions is the ability of workers to bargain collectively. Every improvement in working conditions in the history of industrial labor has been driven by organized workers, not by corporate goodwill.
What changes this is transparency. Not audit theater, but genuine, public, verifiable disclosure of factory locations, working conditions, and wage data. When the information is public, the pressure to act on it becomes real.
The Name
The supply chain has a name. It has thousands of names. They are the names of the women and men who make the products that fill your stores, your closets, and your lives.
Their labor subsidizes your comfort. The least you owe them is to know they exist.
The least the companies that profit from their labor owe them is a living wage, safe conditions, and the right to organize.
This is not a radical demand. It is the minimum.