[asia-apec 1833] Confessions of a sweatshop inspector in China

[Aaron James]

Confessions Of A Sweatshop Inspector

by Joshua Samuel Brown

VISIT <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/sweatshop/index.html>
MONITOR archive of sweatshop articles
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<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/transparent.gif> sweatshop
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Garment workers in mainland china are usually in the 16 - 24 age group, but
many smaller factories in Taiwan employed older women
Halfway over the Pacific it dawns on me that I have no idea what my job is.

It's October 15, 1998 and twelve hours ago, I was in the southern California
offices of an independent monitoring company that inspects factories for
safety violations and human rights abuses throughout the world. I had been
hired over the phone a few days before. My sole qualification for the job? I
speak Chinese and have a friend already working for the company. I assumed
that there would be some sort of lengthy training process to teach me how to
be a human rights inspector. There wasn't.


Arriving in Los Angeles, I'm taken to Denny's by another inspector, then
back to the office, where I putter around for a few hours before being
driven back to the airport to catch my plane to Taiwan. I tell my manager
that I feel a bit unprepared for the task ahead.


"Don't worry, you'll do fine," he tells me, handing me a suitcase full of
folders containing the names and addresses of 23 factories in Taiwan and $26
a day for meals.


"You'll meet your partner in Taiwan, he'll show you the ropes," he says,
passing me the company handbook. "You can learn about OSHA regulations and
the manufacturers' codes of conduct on the airplane."








Inspector Heart Attack <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/bluearrow.gif>

<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/transparent.gif> sweatshop bathroom
<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0108a/bathroom.jpg>


One of the more commonly-heard sweatshop horror stories is that workers are
denied bathroom privileges. More common are situations like this, where the
factory restrooms were so disgusting that only the most desparate workers
would use them
My partner's name is John, but everybody calls him Heart Attack. I find him
sprawled on the floor of our Taipei hotel room early the next morning.
Pieces of reports, violation sheets and photographs of factories are
scattered over the floor. John is rooting through the mess, whining that
he'd been awakened by a call from Marty at 4AM, something about a "failure
to assess back wages in Saipan." Heart Attack looks extremely tense. "Back
wages, John," he babbles in a mocking falsetto. "Assess the back wages,
don't forget the back wages." I introduce myself, telling him I'm to be his
partner, and he's supposed to train me. He looks up at me, eyes wide with
loathing.

"Training you?! Me? They're going to fire me over this Saipan thing, but
first they want me to train my own replacement, right? I'm not going to dig
my own grave, no thanks!"


Things are tense, and I haven't even dropped my suitcase yet. I try to
defuse the situation by offering to buy him a cup of coffee in the hotel
lobby, assuring him that I know nothing about Saipan, or of any plans to
fire him. Heart Attack seems to relax.


"Sorry about that," he says, getting up to shake my hand. "Nobody trained me
to assess back wages, you know."


Not even knowing what he means by "back wages," I nod dumbly. I'm to spend
the next two weeks learning how to be an inspector from Heart Attack.
Despite his apparent neurosis, he has the instincts of a bloodhound, and
proves himself an excellent inspector. On the job just over three months at
the time, he's already considered a veteran at the company.


"This company has a turnover rate higher than most burger joints," he warns
me over coffee.








Bad reviews mean little <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/bluearrow.gif>

<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/transparent.gif> October 18, 1998

I'm learning from Heart Attack how this business works. Inspectors go into
factories all over the world looking for signs of worker exploitation,
egregious safety violations, child labor and quota violations. We are paid
by our clients, major manufacturers whose stores and products are household
names. On a good day, our company earns thousands of dollars from a few
international inspections. The inspectors themselves are paid minimal hourly
wages, with no benefits. Inspectors are expected to work 70-hour weeks, and
to be on call 24 hours a day for calls from the L.A. office. The worse a
factory is, the more often inspectors are sent, and the more money the
company makes.

My first day on the job, Heart Attack and I perform two surprise
inspections. The first factory is a re-audit of a factory producing goods
for Kmart.


"Man, the last guy they sent really botched this inspection," Heart Attack
says. "Look at this report." The report is for an inspection performed a
year ago. It's written so generically that the writer could easily have been
describing half of the medium-sized cookware factories in Taiwan. The
factory had been given a low risk assessment, ending with the often-used
line, "The inspector was unable to find any violations that would be
considered a risk at this medium-sized factory." I think that maybe we were
at the wrong facility, because the one we are in is an unmistakable hellhole
-- a dark basement factory with poor ventilation and dangerous equipment.
There's no first-aid kit, and the fire extinguishers expired around the same
time as Chiang Kai-shek.


We interview the workers. They tell me they're paid only half of what they
had been promised by contract, and one of the Thai workers confides in me
that he wants to run away, but the boss keeps all his documents locked in a
safe. I ask them why they didn't tell this to the last inspector, and they
stare at me blankly.


"A foreigner visited last year, but he didn't talk to us. Was he from your
company?"


I bring these problems up to the factory manager, and he looks at me as if
I'm insane.


"What problem?!" the manager says. "Last guy say everything OK! I sign
paper, he leave! Why you bother me again!?" Later I call into our office and
ask a manager just how the previous inspector could have given this
sweatshop a low risk rating. "That guy didn't work out," I'm told.



A few days later, Heart Attack and I are in central Taiwan, and I'm learning
a lot more about the business. There seems to be an absolute lack of
consistency in the attitudes of inspectors working for us.


"Everybody has their own focus," John tells me. "Like, there are some who I
call eye-wash inspectors. They can go into the worst factory in China and
head straight for the first-aid kit. They'll ignore all of the other
violations, and write three paragraphs in their report about how there was
no eye-wash in the kit. Then they come back home and brag about how they can
do five factories a day." I ask him why these eye-wash inspectors don't get
fired for incompetence. He smirks and rubs his thumb and forefinger together
in the universal symbol for payola. "This company cares about quantity, not
quality," John says. We approach the factory, a place producing belt buckles
for Calvin Klein. The facility has been under inspection for quite some
time, and not by slacking eye-wash inspectors. This place has been
thoroughly raked over.


"Look at this last report!" Heart Attack hands me the previous inspection
team's violation list. It has some pretty damning violations:



* Dangerous metal-melting chemicals being mixed in vats by workers
wearing flip-flop sandals




* overtime not being paid at legal rate




* imported workers denied access to their passports




* 90 hour work weeks


sweatshop housing <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0108a/rooms.jpg>


Inside of worker's dorms, Donguan, China. With few exceptions, living
conditions in factory dormitories in China ranged from bad to utterly
appalling. This particular factory made shower curtains, and so the workers
used ruined or otherwise unsellable vinyl curtains for privacy in a room
that housed 24 workers
There is a tacit agreement that what we write in our reports will be read by
the manufacturers, who are supposed to pull out of those factories found to
be continually in violation of their codes of conduct. Were this truly the
case, we would not even be here: This factory has been on the high-risk list
for two years. I ask Heart Attack if he thinks the client will pull out of
this factory soon, and he snorts derisively.

"We've been here five times already, and every time the factory gets a high
risk," says Heart Attack. "Calvin Klein won't pull out of this factory until
we find 9 year-olds chained to arc welders and strung out on speed. The boss
knows that we're only paper tigers." Nonetheless, I try to convince the boss
to mend his ways. Heart Attack is a crude man, a rare breed of sinophile,
able to speak Chinese without an ounce of Chinese manners.


I, on the other hand, have spent much of my adult life in Asia. I understand
the use of polite shaming. I appeal to the boss's sense of patriotism and
reputation.


"News crews might come here one day," I tell him, switching from Mandarin
Chinese to the native Taiwanese dialect. "The poor conditions we've found
here might cause a loss of face to both you and the Taiwanese business
community. Mainlanders will look at you and tell the world that the
Taiwanese have no heart."


The boss nods politely, promises to make the improvements suggested in our
report, and invites us to have dinner with him. We decline, explaining that
it goes against our own company's code of conduct. We are forced to give
this factory yet another high-risk rating. The owner signs our findings
sheet without a glance.


Two weeks after our swing through Taiwan began, Heart Attack and I are
trying to get all our reports in before returning to America. We have been
awake for 30 hours straight. He tells me we've had a successful trip. Of the
23 factories on our list, we found 22 of them, and were only denied access
to one. Tallying up our profit and loss sheet, we figure that we've earned
the company more than $20,000 profit. I've been working 13-hour days for two
weeks, and am looking forward to reaching San Francisco for some R&R.


While I am excited by my new job, I'm beginning to wonder just whose needs
I'm serving. Am I helping the industry clean up its dirty laundry, or just
to bury it a little further from the noses of the American consumer?








The dog meat man <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/bluearrow.gif>
<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/art/transparent.gif> November 15, 1998

There is a long trench with imposing razor ribbon fences on either side, and
one bridge running across it. This is the path that leads from Hong Kong to
China. This is where I'll be spending the next three weeks.

It's my second trip as a sweatshop inspector, and my first trip into
mainland China. Before leaving the office in L.A., one of the senior
inspectors took me aside and told me that "no factory in China should ever
get a low-risk rating." It was explained to me that all factories in China
were so far against the clients' stated codes of conduct that if one were to
be given anything other than a high-medium risk, whoever reviewed the report
in the office would assume the on-site inspector hadn't really looked. I
naively asked him why we even bothered inspecting factories if we knew that
they'd fail; the senior inspector looked at me like I was nuts.


It is also the first trip for my Hong Kong partner, Jack Li. Despite the
fact that I've been on the job only one month, I will be training him.
Before I leave the office, I'm given a chunk of cash to pay Jack's salary.
His pay is half of my own, with no overtime pay. His per diem food allowance
is $6 less than mine. How ironic, going overseas to uncover disparity in the
workplace while committing it myself on my employer's behalf.


I feel disgusted with myself, and decide to split the difference of our per
diems between us.


Jack and I inspect a typical Chinese factory a couple of days later. We find
almost every violation in the book. The workers are pulling 90-hour weeks.
The place has no fire extinguishers or fire exits, and is so jammed full of
material that a small fire could explode into an inferno within a minute.
There are no safety guards on the sewing machines, and the first-aid box
holds only packages of instant noodles. Most of the workers are from the
inland provinces, so I conduct the employee interviews in Mandarin while
leaving Jack to grill the owners in Cantonese.


With the bosses out of earshot, I fully expect the workers to pour out their
sorrows to me, to beg me to tell the consumers of America to help them out
of their misery. I'm surprised at what I hear.


"I'm happy to have this job," is the essence of what several workers tell
me. "At home, I'm a drain on my family's resources. But now, I can send them
money every month."


I point out that they make only $100 a month; they remind me this is about
five times what they can make in their home province. I ask if they feel
like they're being exploited, having to work 90 hours a week. They laugh.


"We all work piece rate here. More work, more money."


The worst part of the day for them, it seemed, was seeing me arrive. "I
don't want to tell you anything because you'll close my factory and ruin any
chances I have at having a better life one day," one tells me.

sweatshop <http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0108a/sweatshop.jpg>


I ask if they feel like they're being exploited, having to work 90 hours a
week. They laugh

Jack and I tell the owner that she needs to buy fire extinguishers, put
actual first-aid supplies in the first-aid kits, install safety equipment on
the sewing machines, and reduce worker hours to below 60 per week. We figure
if she takes care of the first two tasks, we've helped to make the world a
slightly less ugly place.


It's too late to hit another factory, so we sit down for some tea with the
owner. We've just finished faulting her for just about every health, safety
and payroll violation in the book, but she remains an excellent host.


"Thank you for caring so much about our poor Chinese factory workers," she
tells us. "But really, it's all about profit. If I paid my workers more
money, I'd have to raise the price to my buyers, the people who are sending
you here to inspect my factory. Do you think they would accept that?"


I try to explain to her that a new consciousness is developing among
American consumers, and that all of the American garment producers are
trying their best to clean up their factories.


"Gua yang tou, mai gou rou," she replies, quoting an old Chinese proverb.


Translated: "Hang a sheep head but serve dog meat."


"Calvin Klein, Wal-mart, Kathie Lee: They all want the same thing. Chinese
labor, the cheaper the better," she smiles, pouring the tea. "They all want
to project a smiling face, to appear to be caring and compassionate, because
that makes people feel better about buying the products that have their
names.


"But we both know that all they care about is money," she continues. "If I
did all the things you told me to do, my clothing would become more
expensive to the manufacturers. Then they would just use a cheaper factory,
one in Vietnam or someplace even less regulated than China."


Finally, it hits me. I understand why my employer doesn't care if we do a
good job or not. We aren't here to help change anything; we're only a PR
prophylactic. Hiring an industry-friendly "independent" inspection company
is the most cost-effective way for the manufacturers to maintain their
profits while claiming to care about the people on whose sweat their profits
depend.


Jack and I finish our tea, thank the owner for her hospitality, and head
back to our hotel, just a couple of sheep heads working for the dog-meat
man.








Joshua Samuel Brown has written for The Hong Kong Daily Standard, The Taipei
Times, The China Post, Beijing Scene, and many others. His last article for
the Monitor appeared in May, A Simple Fix
<http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0105a/taiwanusa.html> For Our China Crisis.
He is currently enroute to mainland China, where he will report regularly
for the Monitor
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Albion Monitor September 1, 2001 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)


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Jock Nash
Washington Counsel
Milliken & Co.
(202) 775-0084
jocknash at millikendc.com <mailto:jocknash at millikendc.com>




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Aaron James
26 Bluebell Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba R2V 2M3
Phone: 204-339-4484
Email: aaronj at interchange.ubc.ca
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