Cloth-producing industry

Due to a rapid increase in population, the arrival of foreign factories, and the household system Hukou, there are a lot of people who are forced into an employment with close to no pay. If you compare the sport-shoe industry to the cloth-producing industry, there are many similarities. It is about the same course of development in both businesses. When cloths became to expensive to produce in North America and Europe the companies moved their factories to countries were the labor and manpower were cheaper, for example China. China is a country that have been ideal for cheap production for a long time due to their surplus of worker, low wages and their prohibition of forming labor unions. As in the sport-shoe industry, the companies in the cloth-producing industry negotiated with China to make sure that these favorable conditions would remain. This has, as I mentioned, created an ideal environment for the companies, but it is at the same time devastating for the workers.

When the poor people in the countryside search their way into the cities it is not often that their hopes and dreams about getting a well-paid job come true. Most of the people coming from rural areas are women. These women do on average get 1,690 CNY (≈ 208€ or 273$) in monthly salary, and that is including overtime. For less then a tenth of a normal western salary, these people are working extremely long days, they work seven days a week , they get an average of 4 hours of sleep each day, the environment at their place of employment are in many cases dangerous and they face constant discrimination and abuse. On top of this, few of the women can afford a descant place to live, so they have to share a cramped little dormitory with several other women. Also worth to mention is that few if any of the women get maternity leave if they have a child during their employment, so they have to send their babies to their family back home.

The number of injuries, diseases and even cases of deaths at the working place is alarmingly high. In China there are not many laws controlling the environment in which the employees work in and those that do exist are often disregarded if there is profit in doing so. Just in the year of 2009, about 1,000,000 workers in China were injured at the place of their employment and approximately 20,000 suffered significant decline in health due to a dangerous working environment. The group that is most exposed to dangers at their working place in the cloth-producing industry is the textile workers. There are so many harmful chemicals used in the dying and preparing of fabrics that the majority of the workers suffer from some defect. The method that is used to give denim its worn look is called sandblasting and is extremely harmful to the workers. In this process the textile workers are exposed to silica-dust particles that effects the respiratory system. This can lead to the disease Silicosis that is fatal if no treatment is given. Despite that this method has been banned by the EC since 1966, it is still used today. These health problems caused by the dangerous working environment are devastating for the employees. Since most of the textile workers are people who have migrated from the countryside to the cities in the search of an employment, the Hukou system tells that they have no right to such things as healthcare and education. Without healthcare, most of the people working at the textile factories develop some kind of medical condition and without education they have no chance of ever getting another employment that can provide a higher salary and bring them out of poverty.

There are several organizations that have taken up the battle for the rights of the cloth-production workers, since the government of China has done nothing about this. War on Want, Workers Empowerment and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour have started working with empowering the migrant workers in the Guangdong province. This is done by educating the employees in the cloth-producing industry about their rights. It is first when the workers realize their value that they can start to fight for their own rights and this is what the organizations are focusing on. They are raising awareness among the laborers.