Rachel Louise Snyder talk at UCF

I attended the talk on UCF by Rachel Louise Snyder on January 19th, which was hosted by the UCF Global Perspectives Office. The title of the talk was "Fugitive Denim: A Global Story." referencing Snyder's book Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.

The talk was somewhat refreshing in that it was not simply about how terrible sweatshops are and how we need to stop buying products that support them. Snyder took as granted that her audience was aware of the problem of sweatshops; her talk was focused more on some of the efforts that have been made to address the problem, and how it is often more complicated than Western awareness tends to assume.

Snyder opened her talk with a clip from an American TV show in which a character talked about sweatshops in Cambodia. This was noteworthy to Snyder because Cambodia is the only developing country in the world which is considered "sweatshop-free." Because Cambodia only began industrializing in the mid-90s, its new government had the opportunity to design a legal framework for regulating industrialization that was not hampered by an already-entrenched manufacturing sector. This, plus liberal labor laws which have allowed the formation of some 700 labor unions (which can be formed by as few as three workers), mean that Cambodian workers are nominally afforded protections which make their working conditions comparable to those in the developed world, and significantly better in terms of vacation time and health care than the US. This is the kind of fact that often gets lost in Western conversations about labor issues in developing countries—we tend to think of the "Third World" as a monolithic entity with similar conditions everywhere, and are often unaware of the distinctions in history and law that make the issues faced in every developing country unique.

Snyder referred frequently to the "Cambodian model" as represented by the policies of Better Factories Cambodia, a program managed by the International Labour Organization in cooperation with the Cambodian government, as evidence that it is possible for a country to establish fair labor standards while still being economically viable. (Manufacturing in Cambodia is still relatively expensive according to Snyder, but this is due more to transportation costs and unstable infrastructure than to the cost of labor.) A greater knowledge of what has worked in Cambodia would be very useful in Western discourses about sweatshops, which tend to take as given the corporate argument that there is a necessary tradeoff between worker protections and economic viability.

Snyder also used a story about prison labor in Cambodia to frame the difficult questions that arise in enforcing the anti-sweatshop policies adopted by Western brands. Late in her time in Cambodia, Snyder was informed of a prison where female inmates were required to work making garments for practically no pay, contrary to the stated policies of the garment brand. When Snyder attempted to interview the inmates, however, they refused, fearing that attention would lead to the prison labor program being halted. This was because the inmates' children were with them in prison, and accompanying their mothers outside to the garment processing area was the only opportunity these children had to leave the prison cells. This is a common reality—even in clearly abusive workplaces, workers, especially those in vulnerable populations, are too dependent on some aspect of the work to risk losing it. Simply shutting down these workplaces when abuses are made public is often not a solution that serves the actual needs of the workers. The policy of Better Factories Cambodia, cited by Snyder as a better solution, is to aim for continuous improvement through remediation rather than full compliance with labor standards. This might mean, for example, that a brand contracting with a factory in violation of standards might compensate the affected workers by making up the difference in their pay or by sponsoring their education. This allows the workers the possibility of improving their lives without interfering with their immediate survival by completely eliminating the job they depend on.

Labeling of product origins is another issue Snyder considers important. Almost any garment tag identifying a country origin is deceptive, as nearly all products in the global economy rely on supply chains that cross borders numerous times before the final assembly. Sometimes the origin stated on a garment tag represents only a nominal amount of work, done there only to get around export restrictions in the country where most of the work is actually done. Snyder touched on more recent approaches to product labeling that require multiple origins to be identified, or even attach a digital fingerprint to each garment that allows the buyer to trace its full history through an online database.

The issue of labor standards in the developing countries the West relies on for manufactured goods is a complicated one, but Snyder's talk was generally optimistic about current developments. Viewed from a global level, the problem seems overwhelming, but the more localized perspective on a particular area such as Cambodia offered by Snyder suggests that small, continuous improvements are ongoing and will eventually lead to meaningful progress.