The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

Labor protection language is now written into U.S. trade agreements, “Global Labor Standards” has emerged as a topic on the agenda of the World Trade Organization, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) has endorsed a set of “Core Labor Standards” designed to serve as speed bumps in the race to the bottom. Yet many activists argue that the conditions for workers in Asian apparel factories are comparable to, or worse than, those found centuries ago in Europe and America. The dark Satanic mills have moved but not shut down. Even if the conditions in the factories are better than those on the farm, protestors argue, how can the conditions so deplorable a hundred or more years ago in the West now be acceptable in the East?

The truth, however, is that this comparison, too, is nonsense, as even a cursory review of factory conditions across time and space shows. Today’s protestors have sisters and brothers in time as well, generations of activists who gave their efforts and sometimes their lives to improve the condition of the working classes. Generations of activists—today’s included—have changed the rules of the race and raised the bottom, making it a much better place than it used to be.

While the competitive market forces powering the race to the bottom are strong, there have, since the first factories emerged, been opposing forces at work. As production spiraled down to lower and lower cost locations, there have been generations of activists to throw sand in the gears and erect speed bumps in the race. These opposing forces, forces of conscience, religion, and politics, have continually rewritten the rules of the race and changed the nature of the bottom, making it not a good, but a better, place to be. The forces, then and now, have been governments and labor unions, religious leaders and international organizations, student activists, and most centrally the workers themselves. As the factory experience itself melted away their docility, the workers have stood up and stared down the bosses, raising the bottom for themselves and the workers who followed them.

These opposing forces, competitive markets on the one hand, and political, religious, and labor activists on the other, have long been identified as enemies of sorts, eyeing one another suspiciously and even venomously. Today’s trade skeptics identify the multinationals’ pursuit of profit and free trade as the enemy of the poor and powerless, a greedy force to be stopped and never trusted. The business community in turn scornfully dismisses the skeptics and the activists as a lunatic fringe, a ragtag bunch of ill-informed obstructionists who are blocking the only path available out of poverty. The battle has been put in these terms—greedy inhumanity versus naive and reckless troublemakers—since the first textile factories emerged.

In a larger sense, however, global capitalism and labor activism are not enemies but are instead cooperators, however unwitting, in improving the human condition. As much as the CEOs would like to silence the activists and activists would like to silence the corporations, the fact is that the two sides need each other, and, most important, the workers at Shanghai Brightness Garment Factory and the Shanghai Number 36 textile mill need them both.

In the United States, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the American cotton textile industry, was the first state to limit the hours that children could work. Other states gradually introduced similar restrictions, and in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the first Federal Labor Law restricting child labor. Yet representatives of Southern cotton mills battled the bill to the Supreme Court, where it was struck down by the now-familiar arguments regarding the proper role of the government in the affairs of business. In 1941, however, the Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act, affirming the right of Congress to legislate to protect working children. In Japan, legal protections for child workers came a full century after similar developments in Britain, and in China, the Compulsory Education Act, passed in 1986, prohibits children under the age of 17 from working, and requires minimum schooling for children.

So, just as the production of cheap cotton clothing ignited the Industrial Revolution in countries around the world, it also sparked the forces of conscience for generations of activists determined to protect the most vulnerable from the unrestrained forces of capitalism. While the race to the bottom fueled demand for the cheapest and most docile labor of all, the opposing forces, at first lone, alleged lunatics, and then mainstream citizens, and finally lawmaking bodies, were gradually successful in implementing protections for children from factory work, and fostering the now nearly universal belief that children belong in school.

Those who liken today’s Chinese textile and apparel factories to those of a century or more ago in Britain and North America fail to note that however bad the current conditions, thanks to progressive activists around the world, the machinery is no longer powered by eight-year-olds.

Today, all of the world’s significant textile and apparel producers have ratified the ILO’s convention prohibiting child labor. Though child labor has by no means been eliminated from textile and apparel production, thanks to generations of noisy activists, the employment of children has moved from the ordinary and accepted course of business to the illegal, objectionable, and newsworthy. When investigative journalists in India found children working in a subcontractor’s factory sewing GAP clothing in late 2007, the story appeared on the evening news worldwide within 24 hours. Thanks to the backlash, the story was breaking news—an outrage!—not business as usual.

And a job in textiles and apparel, however unpleasant, no longer presents appreciable risks of death or maiming. Thanks to textile machinery, missing fingers, hands, arms, and legs were so common a sight in Manchester, England, that Friedrich Engels likened Manchester to a place soldiers returned to after war.³ In a two-month period in 1843, the Manchester Guardian reported that:

12 June, a boy died in Manchester of lockjaw, caused by his hand being crushed between wheels; 16 June, a youth in Saddleworth seized by a wheel and carried away with it; died utterly mangled. 29 June, a young man ... at work in a machine shop, fell under the grindstone, which broke two of his ribs and lacerated him terribly. 24 July, a girl in Oldam died, carried around fifty times by a strap; no bone unbroken. 27 July, a girl in Manchester, seized by the blower (the first machine that receives the raw cotton), died of injuries received. August 3, a bobbin tuner died ... caught in a strap, every rib broken.⁴

Even today, most older Southern mill workers recall machinery accidents as a common occurrence. Aliene Walser, who went to work in a North Carolina mill in the 1940s, remembers a coworker with long, beautiful blonde hair, scalped by textile machinery.⁵ Machinery-related accidents that maimed or killed were also regular events in Japanese mills.⁶ Thanks to activists from both the medical and labor communities, Britain began industrial safety inspections in the late 1800s.⁷ In the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was formed in 1970 and today is advising an analogous body that is developing in China. Again, the point is not that industrial accidents no longer occur, but rather that, thanks to the efforts of generations of activists, workers in every country in the world have better health and safety protections than their predecessors.

Today, the most prominent health and safety issue in the apparel and textile industry is ergonomics. Repetitive-motion injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome affect millions of workers each year, according to Eric Frumin, health and safety director for the largest union of textile and apparel workers.⁸ Though the business lobby successfully blocked regulatory reform related to ergonomics during the Bush administration, if history is a guide, Frumin and his colleagues will eventually win, and textile and apparel workers will receive treatment, training, and compensation for ergonomics injuries. Business owners, of course, oppose the ergonomics regulations, echoing familiar objections voiced by their forebears centuries ago. But thanks to his activist ancestors, Frumin can devote his energies to the ergonomics fight, as workers don’t get eaten by textile machinery anymore.

Rose Rosenfeld died at the age of 107, a few months before September 11, 2001. Had she lived a few months longer, she would have no doubt felt a d’jà vu horror. A lifetime ago, in 1911, only a short distance from where the World Trade Center would later be built, Rose had watched her friends’ bodies fall flaming out of the sky. In a garment factory known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 146 people were killed in one of America’s worst industrial fires, in a building with no alarms, no sprinklers, and no escapes. Rose made it out in time to watch her coworkers hit the pavement. Though the factory reopened within days of the fire, Rose never returned to work there. She spent the rest of her life as an activist, speaking to college classes, reporters, and labor rallies. At the age of 106, she said of the fire, “I feel it still.”⁹ Thanks to Rose and her compatriots, fire safety at work, like child labor restrictions and safe machinery, is accepted as a right the world over.

Bysinosis, or brown lung, is a disease that has been largely eradicated. Caused by the inhalation of cotton dust, it slowly asphyxiated generations of textile and apparel workers. The disease is now virtually unheard of, as OSHA-style cotton dust standards have been adopted in virtually all textile- and apparel-producing countries. And, of course, early mill workers not felled by brown lung or maimed by machinery might still fall victim to the myriad infectious diseases caused by poor sanitation, poor ventilation, and overcrowding. Life expectancy in Manchester, England, was under 30 in 1800, while 50 years later in Fall River, Massachusetts, it was 35. Today, life expectancy in Shanghai is 77, slightly ahead of that in New York City.

In the early 1900s, minimum wage legislation was virtually unheard of in the United States, though state-level legislation sometimes applied to women and children in certain industries. Only in 1938 did the U.S. Congress pass a national minimum wage law. Today, however, virtually all apparel-producing countries have legislated minimum wage levels, and have also placed limitations on hours of work and mandated overtime.¹⁰

And finally, a day’s work in the cotton yarn factory is not at all what it used to be. Perhaps 100 years ago, children worked as “piecers,” running from spindle to spindle watching for broken yarns. Spotting a break, they would climb up, tie the piecer’s knot, and resume their watching. Less than 100 years ago, women in Shanghai performed the same task, not climbing but tottering on bound feet. Today, however, the Shanghai Number 36 mill has many simple devices—the red blinking light, the chair on tracks, etc.—that make all the difference to the experience of a day’s work. And at the cotton mills in the American South today—as well as in many Chinese mills—piecers are now industrial history: On a walk through modern mills, one might see no people at all; the piecers are robotic devices that know where the broken yarns are and how to fix them. Gradually, the worst jobs in the production of T-shirts are fading into old photographs.

In the mid-1990s, a variety of labor abuses came to light in factories that produced shoes and apparel for the Nike Corporation. Charges of underage workers, coerced or forced overtime, safety violations, and generally poor conditions began to surface, especially in factories in China and Indonesia. The factories, while supplying goods to Nike, were independently owned and operated. As a result, Nike argued, it bore no responsibility for conditions in its suppliers’ facilities. Nike’s general manager in Indonesia, while acknowledging that violations might exist, essentially argued that they were neither his nor Nike’s affair: “I don’t know that I need to know (about them),” he replied in response to questions.¹¹

Nike was not alone in its practices. By the late 1980s, it had become common business practice for apparel companies to outsource the production of their clothing to manufacturers around the world, and indeed it became unusual for brand-name companies such as Nike and GAP to own any factories at all. The notion that apparel companies should be responsible for the conditions in their suppliers’ factories—the so-called “supply chain”—was a novel and unwelcome idea to most companies. Indeed, the idea that a customer could be responsible for what happened behind the factory gates of its suppliers was unheard of.¹²

This changed radically over the next several years. Levi Strauss became the first U.S. apparel company to create and enforce a code of conduct for its suppliers, and other companies, under pressure from consumers, activists, and religious groups, began to follow suit.¹³ Companies began to require that their suppliers commit to a variety of fair labor practices as a condition of their business relationships, and organizations emerged to help companies monitor conditions in their suppliers’ factories. Verit’, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995, assists dozens of multinationals in their efforts to oversee working conditions in supplier factories, and was recently honored as one of the country’s leading “social entrepreneurs.”

As with the struggles over child labor or minimum wage, the idea that large corporations should be responsible for workplace practices in their supply chains went from radical notion to mainstream business practice. Corporate codes of conduct for suppliers to the footwear and apparel industry are nearly universal in the United States today, and the mainstream business press now routinely advises large companies on how to address labor conditions issues in Asia.¹⁴ Corporations are also investigating social issues “further back” in their supply chain. In the summer of 2008, a number of U.S. and European apparel firms announced that they would no longer allow Uzbeki cotton to be used in their apparel, because of concerns over child labor on the cotton farms.¹⁵

Nike today employs nearly 100 professionals in its “corporate social responsibility” activities (including several of my former Georgetown students) and publishes annually a comprehensive report related to labor and environmental issues in its supplier factories. The report includes factory names and addresses, code of conduct and monitoring details, and remediation efforts.¹⁶ Nike publishes a separate report on its Chinese suppliers. An executive in Nike’s social responsibility practice told me that while the company’s early efforts were designed to protect Nike’s reputation in the face of anti-sweatshop protests, today the firm is motivated also by the belief that “you can’t make good products in bad factories.”

And like child labor, fire safety, minimum wages, and occupational health, the activists’ fringe-like demands continue to go mainstream and work their way into law. By 2008, it seemed clear that the United States would include labor protections in all of its future trade agreements.¹⁷ By 2009, students studying in apparel, design, or textile programs had their first textbook exclusively devoted to social and environmental responsibility in the industry.¹⁸

At Georgetown, on February 4, 1999, junior Ben Smith left yet another meeting with university administrators, unhappy with the pace of change and the university’s unwillingness to act. “I guess it’s time for Plan B,” he remarked to Andrew Milmore, a fellow student who served as President of the Georgetown Solidarity Committee.¹⁹ The next day, about 30 students occupied the office of Georgetown President Father Leo O’Donovan. This was not your 1960s sit-in. For 86 hours, the students were peaceful and pleasant (one of my favorite students—Michael Levinson—wore a tie the entire time). But they refused to budge until the University had committed to an acceptable course of action.

I served on the newly formed Licensing Oversight Committee for six years, and this brief experience is a microcosm of the unwitting conspiracy at work. Early meetings were tense and often heated, the students on one side of the table and the faculty and administrators on the other. I remember clearly thinking that the students, however noble and impassioned, just weren’t being reasonable. Names and addresses of all of the factories in this fleet-footed industry with its global supply chain? Unannounced visits by independent monitors? Who would these “monitors” be and what exactly would be they be monitoring? And why would the factories let them in, even assuming we did have names and addresses? And of course we would never get names and addresses, since every company producing the clothing had stated flatly that they would never release this information. I see now that my responses in these early meetings were very close to the responses the business community has had to social, environmental, or labor activists since the days of Thomas Percival: How could all of this possibly work? And how would we know we were doing more good than harm?

Since the heyday of Georgetown basketball in the 1980s, the production and sale of Georgetown-logoed apparel has not been a billion-dollar business. Indeed, for companies such as Nike or Adidas or Puma, the Georgetown T-shirt business was a drop in the bucket, a drop so small that it certainly appeared that Georgetown would have no leverage to force companies to disclose their suppliers’ factory locations. Yet, the new generation of student activists was armed with technology—cell phones, chat rooms, the Internet—technology that linked together students at Duke, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Wisconsin, and dozens of other schools. In aggregate, the university apparel business was more than a drop in the bucket and within a few months of the protests, the major apparel companies whose supply chains produced most university-branded apparel—including such powerhouses as Nike, had backed down and agreed to make public their suppliers’ factory locations. By 2005, Nike—quickly followed by many other sportswear firms—had posted its global factory database on the Web, where it remains today. Recent research suggests that factory disclosure and student activism had benefited both the companies and the workers in their suppliers’ factories.²⁰

After a few months of meetings at Georgetown, we had agreed on a code of conduct for the firms producing Georgetown-logoed apparel. Briefly, the code meant that if a company wanted to produce T-shirts bearing the Georgetown logo, the company had to commit to enforcing our code of conduct in their suppliers’ factories. The code bound the companies to a variety of fair labor practices, including prohibitions on forced labor and child labor, implementation of sound environmental and health and safety practices, and fair pay practices.²¹

Of course, the code carried little weight if it could not be monitored or enforced. By 2000, the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) was founded by international labor rights experts, universities, and students. Funded by member universities as well as outside sources, the WRC began to perform in-depth factory investigations for code-of-conduct compliance, and began to issue public reports containing its findings. The WRC also committed to work with factories to help them comply with the codes. By spring of 2008, the WRC had 175 affiliate colleges and universities, ranging from Luther College and Middle Tennessee State to Princeton and Harvard.²² A similar organization, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), had 200 member schools.

For most of the six years that I served on Georgetown’s Licensing Oversight Committee, we met twice per month. In the early years, the issues were challenging, the debates often heated, as we hammered out the details step by step. I stepped down from the committee in 2006. For one thing, my schedule made it increasingly difficult for me to make the frequent early morning meetings.

The meetings had become boring because the big battles were over. What had seemed in 2000 or 2001 to be a radical idea—that universities could control or at least influence how their apparel was produced in factories around the world—was by 2006 a widely accepted notion within university administrations and corporations. Supply chain codes of conduct, factory monitoring and disclosure, and a host of other practices had become standard business practice. Whether they like it or not, the students on the committee today are part of the establishment: They now meet every two weeks with LaMarr Billups, the new Assistant Vice-President for Business Policy, a job that exists because of the students’ activism. At the meetings, students and administrators discuss the problems that have surfaced in various factories making Georgetown apparel, and how the university should respond to the problems. The students still keep pushing on a variety of fronts; the latest push is for a Designated Supplier Program (DSP) that would grant long-term contracts to model factories.²³ But there is no need occupy anybody’s office; the activists have a spot at the table. Actually, it’s their table.

With a long historical perspective, it seems clear that when the meetings get boring, we have taken a step forward. Boring meetings mean that the radical has become mainstream, and that the establishment has changed its mind about the very nature of right and wrong. The struggles for bans on child labor, or for fire exits or minimum wage or factory codes of conduct, are never boring. But when the fight is won, the meetings get boring. While the battle rages for and against, it is interesting. But when the battle is over and the fight is no longer about whether to have fire exits but where to put them, not whether to have a minimum wage, but how to administer it, not whether to disclose factory locations but by what means and how often—when the establishment has changed its mind and we are just working out the details in (yet another) early morning committee meeting—it gets boring.

The saga of the collegiate anti-sweatshop movement would have rung familiar to Mahatma Gandhi. In encouraging an earlier generation of social and political activists, Gandhi described the historical pattern that has proven to be every bit as ineluctable as the race to the bottom: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

There is little doubt that without appropriate regulations in place, the production of T-shirts can be toxic to the planet, just as without labor laws and codes of conduct the race to the bottom will lead to children working in sweatshops. Environmental behavior is the classic case of an economic “externality” that necessitates regulation: Firms that dump toxins into rivers or burn cheaper fossil fuels for energy are able to reduce their own costs, but higher costs are borne by society at large. Just as a T-shirt can be used as a symbol of the evils of globalization, my T-shirt’s life story can also be easily spun into a doomsday scenario for the environment: pesticides, herbicides, water, bleach, energy, fuel, and chemical dyes are all part of the story. Many readers have asked especially about the environmental effects of the transportation involved in my T-shirt’s life story.

Shortly after the first edition of this book was published, researchers at Cambridge University released a study that presented an environmental case study of a cotton T-shirt.²⁵ The study assumed that the T-shirt was made of American cotton that had been shipped to China to be manufactured into yarn, fabric, and finally a T-shirt. The T-shirt was then shipped to the UK, where it was purchased by a consumer and ultimately disposed of.

The environmental impacts were many, but the bottom line of the study is that the energy use and climate change impacts of the T-shirt’s life story were largely decided by each of us. The impacts of the “consumer use” phase of the T-shirt’s life dwarfed the impacts of production and transportation. The location of production—that is, international trade—had virtually no effect on the energy profile of the T-shirt. Remarkably, the energy use and climate change impact of the T-shirt’s life was reduced by 60% if the consumer made the simple shift from clothes dryer to clothesline and to a lower temperature of washing water. Another study found that the consumer phase of the T-shirt’s life accounted for an even greater share of the environmental impacts. The study concluded “that the consumer holds the best possibilities for influencing the product’s overall environmental profile.”²⁶ While continued advances in green production processes are clearly important, those of us who wear T-shirts have a greater role to play in environmental sustainability than those who produce them.

In 2008, I took another look at my T-shirt. The parrot on the front had become as familiar as an old friend. I had spent most of the prior decade researching, writing, or speaking about where my T-shirt had come from, but I suddenly realized that I had no idea where the parrot had come from. I soon realized that the parrot was just one example from my T-shirt’s life story in which the question of “where it came from” led to an environmental quagmire.

The bright-red bird, I soon learned, was made of plastisol ink, and plastisol in turn is typically made by combining polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and phthalates. Phthalates are used to make plastics soft and pliable, and are ubiquitous in our everyday life. Phthalates are in our printed T-shirts, our rubber duckies, our plastic wrap, and our shower curtains.

Scientists agree that heavy exposure to phthalates is very bad news if you are a boy rat.²⁷ Phthalate syndrome, a term coined by EPA scientist Earl Gray, refers to the propensity of male rats exposed to phthalates to develop a range of reproductive difficulties, including deformities in their sexual organs, reduced fertility, and a variety of more feminine characteristics. In essence, boy rats exposed to higher levels of phthalates are more like girl rats, both in their physical characteristics and in their behavior. In 2005, a team led by Dr. Shanna Swan at the University of Rochester published a study showing that the same type of genital differences that had been found in male rodents were also present in humans. Baby boys whose mothers had been exposed to higher levels of phthalates had measurable feminization of their sexual organs.²⁸

Of course, another problem is that unlike the T-shirt itself, which will eventually decompose somewhere, the parrot, made of plastic, will live forever. The phthalates are but one more element of the complex and evolving environmental story of the T-shirt’s life: the science is advancing, the impacts are uncertain and evolving. Of course, our choice is not to destroy the planet and our health or to go naked. In textiles and apparel, as well as in other industries, clean technologies are increasingly available, though often at higher cost than traditional technologies.

The doomsday scenario that links free trade with environmental degradation, however, is just that: a scenario. Significant research has been devoted to the relationship between trade and environmental quality during the past several years. While there are valid elements in the doomsday scenario, there are—just as in the race to the bottom in labor standards—opposing forces at work.

Most evidence to date points to the existence of the inelegantly named environmental Kuznets curve. This curve suggests that as countries first industrialize, they experience environmental degradation as economic activity moves from subsistence farms to cities and factories. However, as incomes continue to grow, citizens become more and more willing to pay for cleaner water and air, and environmental quality begins to improve as cleaner technologies are adopted.³⁰ In brief, “Poor countries appear relatively unpolluted, middle-income countries more polluted, and rich countries clean again.”³¹ As Copeland and Taylor write, “If higher real incomes generate a greater ability and willingness to implement and enforce environmental regulations, then the logical chain linking trade liberalization and environmental destruction is broken.”³²

Indeed, as international trade boosts incomes, the result is not a race to the bottom but instead to the top as wealthier countries are increasingly willing to pay for environmental quality. Arik Levinson found that for the 30-year period ending in 2002, total pollution emitted by U.S. manufacturers fell by 60%, even though real manufacturing output increased by 70%. Levinson concluded that the cleanup of American manufacturing was due largely to the adoption of cleaner technologies, while shifting polluting industries abroad played at most a minimal role.³³

Of course, free trade also allows clean technologies to spread across borders: recent research suggests that freer trade regimes have not only facilitated access to clean technologies but have also led to more rapid adoption of these technologies by poor countries.³⁴ In addition, trade allows rich-country consumer preferences to influence technology choice in poor countries. And there is reason to believe that trade enables a race to the top of another sort: In a globalized economy, companies will often design products to meet the environmental standards in the most heavily regulated market. (For a number of years, California has had emissions standards for automobiles that were the strictest in the United States. Companies exporting cars to the U.S. market must therefore “race to the top,” i.e., produce to meet the strict California standards.) In mid-2008, the European Union was preparing to ban a number of chemicals that were legal in the United States. As a result, global firms were planning to shift production methods to meet the new European standards.³⁵ Without international trade, there would be no incentive for companies to adapt to the stricter standards outside their borders.

By mid-2008, it appeared that my red parrot was in trouble. Following negative publicity as well as street protests, Toys’R’Us, Wal-Mart, and Target announced plans to phase out phthalates and PVCs in a number of products, and big toymakers such as Mattel started to test plastics made from corn.³⁶ A quick walk around my local shopping center revealed phthalate-free baby products, water bottles, and T-shirts. Rather than wait for something to happen at the federal level, as of the spring of 2008, California had placed strict limits on the sale and manufacture of phthalates, and perhaps a dozen other states were considering similar rules.³⁷ Such limits were already in effect in Europe. Predictably, most apparel firms in China began to offer “phthalate-free inks” in their manufacturing processes. It seemed clear that the red parrot of the future would be greener. Also in 2008, the world’s first carbon-neutral apparel factory opened. The factory, in Sri Lanka, produces underwear for U.K. retailer Marks and Spencer.³⁸

The unwitting conspiracy, then, can work in environmental protection as it does for labor issues. While international market competition might appear to threaten the environment, it also creates the wealth that leads in turn to demands for environmental protection and for sustainably produced products.

Though the research continues to evolve, at least to date the evidence suggests that countries more open to trade have better environmental profiles, and that the environmental doomsday scenario linking globalization with environmental degradation has little empirical support. Researchers have failed to find evidence of the “race to the bottom,” or pollution haven hypothesis.³⁹ Indeed, in reviewing this research, Jeffrey Frankel concluded that the net effects of trade on the environment were instead positive.⁴⁰

In The China Price, Alexandra Harney documented the astonishing manner in which some Chinese apparel factories evade the code-of-conduct requirements of their American and European customers.⁴¹ Harney discovered “falsification engineers” who helped companies deceive the social auditors, and also discovered software that could generate fake payroll, overtime, and benefits data for a large factory in under 30 minutes.⁴² Perhaps most ingenious was the network of “5-star factories”—some companies have model factories open to the social auditors, while actually producing most of the goods in shadow factories that are unknown to even the local Chinese authorities.⁴³

In 2006, Chinese government investigators went to visit the Fuan textile mill in South China.⁴⁴ The factory is owned by Fountain Set, the largest manufacturer of cotton knit T-shirt fabric in the world. The authorities had paid a visit because farmers nearby had protested that the river flowing downstream from the factory was dark red. (In a joke that was repeated to me many times, you can tell which colors are coming into fashion by looking at the rivers in southern China.) The investigators found a hole in a concrete wall. When they crawled through, they found a concealed pipe that was dumping 22,000 tons of dye water per day directly into the river. Though the factory had a wastewater treatment system, bypassing the system and dumping directly into the river shaved the costs in their highly competitive business. In another factory a few miles west, employees took boats out into the river and dumped dye neutralizer in an attempt to turn the water from red back to its brackish brown. The neutralizer was even more toxic than the dye, and dead fish bobbed to the surface. Local farmers were afraid to water their crops.⁴⁵ Elizabeth Economy has discovered similar widespread cheating all over China as companies attempt to evade environmental regulations.⁴⁶

Economic growth alone will not generate labor and environmental protections; the other elements of civil society must function as well.⁴⁷ Ideally, citizens make their views known through a democratic process, and lawmakers respond with effective regulations. Abuses are brought to light by an independent press, and violators are dealt with by a noncorrupt regulatory and judicial system. In sum, protections are most effective in well-functioning democracies. Fortunately, most measures of democratization are improving for the world at large.⁴⁸

Less fortunately, however, while China’s economy is booming, its performance in these other spheres of civil society is not. It is not an accident, then, that China, a one-party state with rampant corruption, a party-controlled judicial system, and tight controls on journalists, has been a wellspring of environmental disasters and labor abuses. Yet even in China, the tide continues to turn.

Chinese citizens are also increasingly making their voices heard on issues of environmental protection. The Chinese government itself has warned that environmental degradation is a potential source of social instability, and has released a report pointing to the “alarming” increase in environmental activism in both cities and rural areas.⁵²

Chinese authorities have responded with a variety of laws strengthening protection for the environment.⁵³ Indeed, one industry expert argued that the stringency of the new environmental regulations would make it impossible to construct a traditional knitting and dyeing mill in southern China,⁵⁴ which is just as well, according to the newly wealthy surrounding communities, which prefer clean waterways to factory work. At the same time, pressures from the global community and especially from western companies for China to clean up both labor and environmental problems continue.⁵⁵

The market forces were pushing in the same directions as the activists. Wealthier workers are increasingly likely to eschew garment factory work, and factories have responded by trying to woo workers with higher salaries and better perks, ranging from roller rinks to swimming pools. A worker in a South China shoe factory explained the transition simply: “Now it’s not the factories choosing me. It’s me choosing the factory.”⁵⁶ And researchers continue to confirm the commonsense proposition that better working conditions are a market-led result of higher-skill industrialization.⁵⁷ Yet markets alone do not generate protections for workers or for the environment. Instead, as Peter Dougherty argues, it is often the protections demanded by the activists that facilitate the development of the markets.⁵⁸

Labor costs in coastal China are increasing rapidly, and garment workers in this region now make approximately triple the wage as in lower-cost producers such as Pakistan and Vietnam, as well as significantly more than the workers in the rural areas of China.⁵⁹ In 2008, stories abounded of firms moving apparel sourcing to less expensive areas of China and to other countries. All in all, the higher market wages, as well as the cost of complying with greater environmental and worker protections, have pushed light manufacturing costs up by 20 to 40 percent in recent years.⁶⁰ Garment factories in eastern China are shrinking, closing, and moving on to the next stops in the race—the inland areas of China as well as Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan.

The garment workers in Shanghai and south China may no longer stitch T-shirts, but there will be plenty to do. Chinese production of machinery, electronics, automobiles, and other high-end goods is growing, and the former seamstresses will take their new confidence and their new wardrobes to jobs at Coca Cola, General Motors, and Starbucks—or perhaps to Lenovo, which in 2005 purchased the personal computer business from IBM.

Other garment workers will take their savings back to the rural areas, where economic growth is now accelerating. The factory wages brought home are building houses, sending siblings to school, and starting businesses. In 2008, after a decade in Shanghai garment factories, He Yuan Zhi returned with her savings to Jianxi province.

A few years ago, I was given a coffee-table book of photos taken in Shanghai before the Communist revolution of 1949.⁶¹ One section of the photo book is titled “Cotton Thieves,” and the desperation, the fear, the abject poverty of the Shanghai mill workers nearly leapt from the pages. In one photo, children chase after a horse-drawn cart that was bringing raw cotton from the port into the mill. The children were hoping a fluff or two of cotton would fall from the cart. If they could grab a fluff, then perhaps they could spin a few inches of yarn themselves, to sell or to mend with; or perhaps the fluff could help to pad a jacket for the winter. In other photos, the mill workers themselves tried to tuck small fluffs into their clothing. The photographs show the bloody results for those who were caught.

I thought of these photographs on a 2007 visit to the Number 8 spinning factory not far from downtown Shanghai. Using typical Communist flair, the Chinese government gave companies numbers, not names; the Number 1 cotton yarn factory, the Number 2 factory, and so forth, all the way up to number 40. Today, just six of these remain open, the rest razed and remodeled to make way for the new Shanghai as the race to the bottom moves on. The cotton mill I was visiting in 2007 was no longer a mill; it had been transformed into a complex of contemporary art galleries. Yet the bones of the mill were still in place, and plaques informed visitors that they were entering “the cotton receiving room” or “the spinning room.” The complex contained perhaps a dozen buildings.

Of course, if the walls could talk they would tell of the workers killed in the Communist Revolution, and the managers who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. They would tell of the cotton thieves in the photo book and the mail slots where unwanted babies were dropped. They would tell of the hope of the reform era, when China began to sell cotton T-shirts to America. They would tell of the activists who fought for bathroom breaks or fire exits or overtime pay. They would tell of the race that stopped here for just a moment in time.

I sat near the old spinning room, which was now a chic cafe’ for the art gallery visitors. The waiter had a nose ring and streaked hair, and spoke perfect English. The “cotton thieves” photos had been taken near here just 60 years before, but it could have been a different universe. The race to the bottom had moved on, and in the cotton spinning room was not a sweatshop worker but a chef. She told me that she had come from the countryside to attend cooking school. Her mother had worked in a garment factory, which had paid for the tuition, but the garment factory had recently closed, and her mother was now comfortable in retirement. I asked the young woman whether she could sew. “No,” she laughed. “But I can make tiramisu.”

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Activists Raise the Bottom, 1780-2008

Back at Georgetown, Bored Is Good

Bad for Boy Rats

Trade: Friend or Foe of the Planet?

The China Challenge

The Race Moves On