“My mother died when I was so small that she still breastfed me,” a 19-year-old Cambodian girl says. She has been working at a garment factory for 14 years now and talks about her family of a single parent and eight siblings. “My mother died because she didn’t have enough to eat.” She is just 19 and has to live with the cruel fact that in such modern times as today, her mother died not because she had an illness or was killed, but because of starvation.
The young teen began her life like that. This is just one of myriad tragedies that plague destitute countries like Cambodia, exploited by “superpower” countries like the United States. We hear about news of horrible working conditions or protests for better wages on TV while sitting in our bedrooms with a bag of chips in one hand and phone in the other. But what we can’t feel and empathize with are the millions of garment workers who are heading to work at 6am, standing in a crowded space on the back of a truck. What we can’t see are these workers sewing the same monotonous thread while slouching on stiff stools for 12 hours straight. What we can’t see are the bent backs of the exhausted figures heading back home with only $3 in their pockets, wondering how they will sustain a dinner to feed all of their children with that money. SWEATSHOP: Cheap Dead Fashion is a reality series that tries to show us just that. Three fashion bloggers from Norway travel to Cambodia to talk and interact with the garment workers there. Ludvig, Frida, and Anniken are normal people like us, hearing news around them but unable to truly feel the echoing influence fast fashion leaves on the daily lives of the workers. They listen to and know about these injustices but do not get a true taste of how the world is truly unfair -- until now. The three first spend a day at a garment factory as actual employees. There is no proper toilet for the workers. Chairs are no such thing; they are only given small stools to sit on while working. For 8 hours with an hour break in between for a lunch of fish with flies and bitter rice while sitting on the factory floor, they become one with the rest of the workforce in sewing one line of seam, passing it on to the next person in line, and continuing this cycle again and again. The awful truth is that this is one of the only places that allowed the crew to film -- then this really makes me question how just worse conditions in factories that aren’t so open to being videotaped are. “You just sit here and sew the same seam over and over again,” Friday says. “It is like an eternal vicious cycle. It never stops.” Ludvig adds, “It’s unfair that for 12 hours you’re just sewing and sewing until you collapse from dehydration and hunger.” After a long day of both mental and physical exhaustion, workers receive $3 for that day’s worth of work. “I should be getting $20 worth after working like this,” Frida says. The next morning, the staff alerts the three that their mission today is to build a meal for ten people (staff and themselves) with only the money they earned yesterday -- a meager $9. First, they head to the supermarket, only to find that with less than $10 in their budget, everything is expensive. With $6 of their inheritance gone from just a head of cauliflower, broccoli, and a small package of meatballs, they come to their last resort of the local market to buy the remaining ingredients of carrots, squash, onions, and soup packets for $2.42. For dinner, the menu digresses from the anticipated chicken and Bearnaise sauce to “garlic water” soup. For a real worker, the wage must cover not only food, but also rent, electricity, clothes, not to mention expenses covering children and health as well. Watching this experiment will clearly show you that this is almost a brutally impossible task. The big fashion chains are starving their workers. “We are rich because they are poor,” says 20-year-old Ludwig. We are rich because we are able to buy shirts that cost us $10 at H&M, but what we don’t realize is that somebody else has to starve so that you are able to buy it. “Don’t just sit on your ass and take everything for granted,” Frida says. “These people work for you!” It’s easy for us who only see the outcome to do just that because we are so detached from the actual process of how these products we buy from the store are made. It’s as simple as a click out of this screen to block out this resonating message from our minds. But we are a global community that no longer can do with the “not my problem” attitude. We are responsible for the welfare of all members of this community, even if it means sacrificing our own time and energy to do so. “You can’t solve everything or fix such a global problem,” Anniken says. “But they don’t really ask for much. To get a bit more money, a better chain, some fans in the ceiling in a factory.” “We just have to push to get it done. Push the right buttons and push them some more.” --------------------------------------------------- Here is the entire link to the series: http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/#!/video/21032/sweatshop-ep-1-how-many-will-die-here-every-year If you feel compelled to help garment workers worldwide receive a minimum monthly wage of just $160 a year, donate here: http://labourbehindthelabel.org/donate/
2 Comments
Jake
9/16/2016 02:18:35 pm
I am currently wearing a jacket that I got from H&M, and I feel like taking it off and shedding my skin. The sad truth is that we just go around from store to store, buying "cute" and "fashionable" clothing, to be hip and cool.
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Adira Kruayatidee
9/18/2016 09:30:13 am
It is now extremely disturbing for me to go through my closet because I realize that the prices I paid pales in comparison to the price of workers' lives. It is also unsettling that people will continue this tragic cycle of buying "cute" clothes without understanding, or sadly caring, that workers go through 12 hours of misery daily, yet do not even make enough to sustain a living.
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