This said, while I fully concede that labour standards in emerging markets involve a messy, complicated and frustrating set of circumstances, I agree the Toronto Star article hits a particularly crass note that I don’t appreciate.

Helene
The Luxe Chronicles

Thanks for sharing your point of view, it’s not often we get to hear about the current sweatshop/factory situation in Asia and I certainly didn’t expect Cambodia placing fair labour laws in their country.

Indeed when I was thinking about low paid workers, I had thought about the situation that if they didn’t have their factory jobs, what else could they possibly work in? In this sense, it’s quite unfortunate that some countries aren’t yet able to offer more options for workers.

I was also told by someone who works in the couture industry that there were illegal immigrants working the Italian factories as well. When asked if they were happy to be paid minimum wages, they said “yes,” because minimum wage in Europe is a great deal more than the salary they would make in China or Vietnam, thus they don’t mind working long hours and being paid minimum wage (to our standards). So it’s quite a dicey situations, if the manufacturer can pay less AND keep his workers happy, it’s a win-win situation. Work conditions are probably better there, but we can only speculate what really goes on in those factories.

As for Africa, that’s even bigger question mark of where its future lies with the rest of the world. But I can see what you would like to happen to Africa. However, every continent has a different way of governing their labour practices, so I’m not quite sure if giving Africans manufacturing jobs will help their situation in the long run.

Fast fashion is not only environmentally toxic, but it also diminishes the appreciation of well constructed clothes. We’re settling for cheaper and cheaper clothes, wasting our money on it when you could invest in something that you really love and you know will last you a while.

My answer is also quite lenghthy, so thanks for sharing your thoughts on the subject. The more knowledge we can spread the better!

While I also agree with you that fast-fashion phenomenon is bad (for the environment imho), I have a more nuanced view on sweatshop and goods made in third world countries.

I come from Hong Kong, and like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, etc, we all at one point have sweatshops of our own. If you look at the situation at the time, with a huge population moving into the urban area from the country side, having a sweatshop job was the only option open to them and the only way the country can feed its people. But more importantly, all these countries I mentioned eventually moved away from sweatshops, started producing more high value goods or in the case of Hong Kong build a huge financial sectors and reached where they are today amongst other countries with highest GDP. They managed to do that with the capital saved up from years operating sweatshops.

I’m saying this just to show that cheap labour aren’t necessarily universally bad, but it doesn’t mean I condone child labour or other bad labour practices. In Hong Kong at least, the British colonial gov’t eventually implemented measures to stamp out labour abuse and corruption (mostly for political reason, to keep the workers away from the Left wing parties). Moreover there’s a welfare and housing system in Hong Kong that ensured to an extent a distribution of wealth that in turn build up a big middle class within one generation, which I’m a part of. It’s from this experience, I want to say that if there’s a good government in the origin country, buying goods made from cheap labour can be a good thing in the long run. In the case of South Korea and Taiwan, once the country got wealthier, people start to demand more and it helped put the country on the path of being a democratic state ( Well, Hong Kong and Singapore weren’t so lucky in this aspect).

So for me, the reason not to buy made in China/Vietnam goods is because I don’t agree with their government and their lack of regard for the general population but not so much because their labour is cheap. That is also why I find Cambodia’s policies admirable and should be more publicized and supported.

Fundamentally, sweatshop/cheap labour is just a short phase and there’s all the sign that China is already moving out of it with their inflation running high. What’s more disturbing would be China taking their money and invest it in Africa; creating the next generation of sweatshops and supporting their corrupt rulers and evil dictators. This is what infuriates me when people keep insisting on only buying local when Canada’s money, business and investment can benefit a lot of African countries that have barely anything going on in their economies (except the sale of their natural resources). If more Canadian/American/European money is invested in Africa, even if it creates factories that paid low wages at first, our presences I pray can help steer the countries towards an open responsible government for the ordinary people rather than going down the Chinese authoritarian style of governing…. the thought of this only makes me want to pull my hair out.

this is a long and convoluted response, I hope I didn’t bore you or confuse you.