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12听闯耻苍别听2008

On The Rack

Many of the clothes bearing some of the best-known labels in the high street are made by exploited workers in developing countries. Some retailers stand accused of selling goods made with child labour, or by workers not paid a living wage. That鈥檚 what the campaigners say. So what are they - and the companies they accuse of foul play - doing about it ? Peter Day finds out.

On The Rack by Peter Day

Clothes leave me cold. I wear them but that鈥檚 about it. Like cars, watches, mobile phones, I can鈥檛 see what all the fuss is about.

So maybe I am not the best person to ask what鈥檚 behind the label on many of the clothes on the racks of our high street suppliers.

Ethics and clothing has recently become a Big Subject for television. Several programmes are promised if they do not get tangled up by the lawyers.

But for In Business, the quest for ethically supplied clothes seems part of a fascinatingly wide story.

Thirty years ago, companies mostly regarded how they went about making money to be nobody鈥檚 business but their own.

In a famous article in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, the monetarist economist Milton Freidman of Chicago argued that that the only social duty of a corporation was to increase the return for its shareholders. Well, capitalism seems to have evolved a bit since then.

In 1999, protestors from all over the world rioted around the meeting of GATT which was poised to transform itself into the World Trade Organisation in Seattle.

This seems to have been a watershed; or maybe one of those new fangled things, a tipping point.
Many protestors seem to have realised they may get further by creeping inside the tent. And many corporations are paying at least lip service to their external responsibilities. Corporate Social Responsibility is becoming a big issue.

Corporations are beginning to realise that their reputations are not public relations banners to be rolled out when convenient through sponsorships and special events. Companies are trying to show that what they do can be judged in ethical terms, and what they make or produce.

Customers, suppliers, employees are beginning to ask more and more of the organisations they work for or buy from.

Raised expectations become the norm. Coffee and cocoa and bananas are agricultural sectors which have quickly been colonised by the fair trade and organic lobbies, with striking success.

Clothing is more difficult. High Street retailers say their supply chains are too complicated to police (though they manage to specify orders and delivery times pretty efficiently).

There鈥檚 a dramatic example of a big international retail chain trying to get to grips with just one part of its complex supply chain in Bangladesh even as we were making the programme. Alerted by what workers at one factory told In Business, the Spanish giant Inditex (owners of the Zara retail chain) said it would stop contracting with one Bangladesh plant unless a sister factory was closed, the workers protected and local unions recognised.

But consumers are still intoxicated by cheap clothing, even when it cries out that it cannot be made without cheap labour or even more unpleasant practices. Influential companies sign up to the Ethical Trading Initiative, as a sort of badge of good intent.

But they go on resisting a 鈥渇air trade鈥� label for clothes like the Rugmark for handmade carpets.

And consumers love their cheap clothes far too much to demand to know too much. The tipping point for clothes cannot be far off, though, if the fair trade food people have anything to do about it.