US “blacklists” put forced labour into context

There's a truth about forced and child labour in our industry few dare admit in public.

There's very little of it about – and, compared to other ethical problems, child or forced labour cause relatively little human misery in garment manufacture.

In a week where about four Bangladeshi garment workers were killed in riots over minimum wages, and at least 30 killed in a factory fire, it's hard to convince ourselves that child labour, whether forced or not, is the single most important ethical problem facing clothing buyers. Indeed the 800-page report into the issue published by the US Department of Labour (DOL) makes that quite clear: it sometimes happens (though rarely in making clothes for export to the US or other wealthy countries), but it's very hard to find real human misery created as a result. Certainly compared with the problems buyers face every day - lethally unsafe factories, abuse of minimum wage laws or unrealistically low wages, illegal or unpaid forced overtime, serious pollution or physical abuse in factories – almost certainly cause more human misery than the isolated cases of child or forced labour in this industry.

The practices that really cause deaths, poverty and human abuse are rarely exclusive to a few countries: they occur when specific vendors take short cuts either through greed or in response to buyer pressure for quick and cheap turnaround. But no Western government devotes the energy to analysing the incidence of factory fires (which have killed at least 50 people in Bangladesh garment factories alone this year) that the US devotes to hunting down child or forced labour.

Why? Should they? And are governments diverting attention from serious and widespread problems when they focus so obsessively on something that happens so rarely?

The reason child and forced labour preoccupies governments is partly that it's emotive and clear-cut: customers dislike the idea their clothes might have been made by children, and when the practice is found it's rarely open to dispute. But one more important benefit is that government blacklists really do help buyers avoid time-wasting audits for non-problems, and therefore put more energy into monitoring suppliers for real problems.

The DOL's lists limit the number of places where child or forced labour might be a problem to relatively few.

These products from these countries can't be sold to US Federal buyers without the vendor carrying out real investigations about the use of forced or indentured child labour:

• cotton from Benin, Burkina Faso, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

• embroidered textiles (zari) from India and Nepal

• garments from Argentina, India and Thailand

• hand-woven textiles from Ethiopia

 

The DOL is required to ensure these products from these countries are not imported into the US if they are made with forced or child labour:

• cotton from Benin, Brazil, Burkina Faso, China, Kirghiz Republic, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Paraguay, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Zambia

• footwear from Bangladesh, Brazil, China and India

• garments from Argentina, China, India, Jordan, Malaysia and Thailand

• silk fabric and thread from India

• textiles from China, India and North Korea

• hand woven textiles from Ethiopia

And that means buyers aren't likely to be using anyone's time effectively if they impose child labour questionnaires on garment factories in Honduras or Bangladesh. So they can concentrate on problems more subjective to define, tougher to monitor – and a great deal more damaging to their victims.

Claims of sloppy fire safety being the reason for this year's Bangladesh fires aren't the result of the kind of government imposition of unethical practices we see in the use of child labour in Uzbek cotton fields, for example: they're almost certainly the result of poor safety procedures and a few catastrophic mistakes, which are probably the result of faulty wiring and shift managers convinced unlocked exit doors encourage theft. Routine auditing won't stop that: if the Bangladeshi government can't create and enforce the kind of safety laws the US eventually introduced (and mostly made stick) after the 1911 Shirtwaist Factory Fire, buyers need to pool resources to do that. If, as is often claimed, many factories in Sri Lanka or Honduras have actively suppressed workers' representatives, buyers need to conduct – and share with their competitors – hard-nosed monitoring into whether the specific factories alleged to be misbehaving are really as committed to the human rights they publicly claim.

With the constant pressures on garment factories, there's really very little Western governments can do to alert buyers to the real abuses in many places that can kill or impoverish people. In this industry, the US blacklist of countries with potential forced labour problems is of limited use. But it can help buyers concentrate their compliance monitoring on issues and businesses where there's a real risk of serious problems.