It was a spring day like any other for the 4 million people working in the 3,000 textile factories spread across the heaving mega-city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, the fourth largest urban metropolis in the world. Workers made their way from crowded bedrooms into crowded streets, on to crowded rickshaws, down crowded alleys and into crowded workshops, weaving their way through the noisy thoroughfares strewn with discarded rubbish. They took up their places at sewing machines and assembly lines, to earn their 32 US cents an hour, no different from workers starting their day in workplaces all over the world.
Except that on that day, 24 April 2013, one of those workplaces, the complex of makeshift factories that was known as Rana Plaza, collapsed, killing 1,134 people. It turned out that some of those workers were as young as thirteen years old. A further 2,500 people were injured and had to be rescued from the rubble, some regaining consciousness only weeks later. It was the deadliest structural failure in human history.
The story soon emerged that dangerous cracks in the building’s facade had been reported the day before, and parts of the building had been evacuated. But the seamstresses and machine workers had been ordered to return to work the next day or face dismissal.1 Cheap jeans, bound for Western markets, will not sew themselves.
On the day that Rana Plaza collapsed, the lives of the surrounding community were changed for ever. The news ricocheted across the world, making headlines in the US, UK and across Europe. Under intense media scrutiny, clothing brands and suppliers frantically tried to establish whether their garments were made in that factory, revealing the awful truth that many of them were not immediately sure either way. But then the global news agenda moved on, and the ‘fast fashion’ machine ‒ built on a business model of cheap, disposable clothes and cheap, disposable workers – cranked back into gear, with the brands giving only hollow commitments to increase safety.
The Rana Plaza collapse is often labelled an accident, even though it was foreshadowed just a few months before by the Tazreen factory fire in Dhaka, which killed over 100 people. Fashion is considered a competitive industry. If safety standards are not adequately enforced or maintained, if unappealing work and appalling working conditions land in the poorest countries, and if tragedy is the price of productivity, it is no one’s fault ‒ no one has the power to do other than what the market allows.
But the commercial pressures that squeeze factory owners, clothing brands, and even the workers and consumers, suggest that the tragedy was not an accident – it was systemically inevitable. The product is not ‘clothes’, the product is ‘cheap clothes’, and the business model is simple: outsource manufacturing to the cheapest possible factories, remaining wilfully blind to the real sources of the cost savings. Primark, Matalan, Benetton, Bonmarché – these are high street brands, worn by millions of people in the West. The clothes are cheap but the business is enriching. In fact, the owner of Zara, one of the brands implicated at Rana Plaza, is one of the richest people in the world.2 If we treat Rana Plaza as an accident, we cannot learn the right lessons and prevent such a disaster from happening again.
We need to see Rana Plaza for what it is: an extreme manifestation of a system designed to value money over human lives, and which does not place enough responsibility on those who could do something about it. Corporations, with the power to push costs on to the public, enriching those who are already wealthy, with businesses that take more than they give back to society, face little in the way of accountability or punishment. It is raw power, embedded within our economic system, which we consistently fail to see. The moment of reckoning never seems to come.
Unless the executives of the companies whose clothes were produced at Rana Plaza happen to have been uniquely sociopathic, we must assume that no human being involved in the chain of decisions and omissions that led to the collapse wanted it to happen. So how did it happen? How did they get away with it? And why, after such a catastrophe, have things not fundamentally changed?
For me, the tragedy at Rana Plaza held a personal resonance. Although I have lived most of my life in the UK, I am Bangladeshi by origin and my mother’s family comes from Dhanmondi in Dhaka, just fifteen miles from the Savar Upazila district where Rana Plaza sat. My parents rarely tell us stories of home, in an effort, I think, to insulate us from the weight of our history. But with the precious few family legends they do recount, the moral of the story is always the same: my parents uprooted themselves and made a life in a foreign land, thousands of miles removed from their families, traditions and culture, so that their children would never have to suffer the fate of those 1,134 people.
We were raised in the UK, with the opportunity to attend some of the best universities in the world. But, unlike my siblings, I opted not to fulfil my parents’ wishes to save lives, one by one, by becoming a doctor. No, I would save them en masse by becoming a competition lawyer, spreading freer and more efficient markets around the world with every legal submission and brief.
Competition law ‒ or ‘antitrust’, as it is called in the US ‒ is about maintaining fair competition in undistorted markets. Free markets, I believed, were the key to delivering education, healthcare, democracy, peace ‒ and, above all, the flourishing of the human spirit. No profession could be more noble than the one tasked with defending the freedom of the markets. And so I embarked on a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, studied competition law at graduate school at Georgetown, Washington, and went to work for some of the biggest law firms in the world.
Fast-forward ten years into my free market career and I found myself with my eyes glued to the television screen. It is not often that you see so many petite, brown women on every major news channel, but here they were ‒ women who looked just like myself and my sister, except for the saris and salwars, the bindis and betel nuts. And they had been crushed to death by the hazardous building in which they worked. How could such a thing happen in the twenty-first century? Surely this was too terrible a price to pay for free market competition? Was this the benevolent freedom of markets that I, as a competition lawyer, was supposed to be upholding?
Around the same time as the catastrophic Rana Plaza collapse, with these seeds of doubt about free market competition just taking root in my mind, I found myself working day and night on something far less consequential: calculating the respective market shares of two merging fizzy drinks companies ‒ a statistic referred to in the business, rather graphically, as the ‘share of throat’.
I had worked on all sorts of cases as a competition lawyer, in all sorts of markets, but somehow it was this fizzy drinks merger that got me. It could have been groceries or banking or memory chips or ready-mix concrete or shipping or waste or trucks or computer screens, all of which I had worked on. But stuck in the office at 3 a.m. in an attempt to meet yet another deadline, I had an epiphany: lowering the price of carbonated sugar water and increasing the output of the company – the primary goal of competition law – would never be good for society.
In that moment, I realized that the idea that companies fixated on a need to deliver maximum returns to shareholders would somehow benefit the public at large through free market competition was completely backwards. It suddenly seemed that trying to make markets fairer, with even more intense competition, was entirely beside the point; it was like carefully packing and pressing a parachute with a great big hole in it.
I saw that an economic system producing more and more stuff was not necessarily better, that free markets are not really free, and fair competition, within such markets, was not really fair.
It was unnerving to discover the inconvenient truths ignored by the free market paradigm, but which had been there all along. Rana Plaza was the loose thread in the fabric of my understanding, but when I started to pull it, the whole thing unravelled: more competitive markets could be harmful; but also, looking closely, it seemed that many, if not most, markets were actually not that competitive. Big, powerful companies abound. How did that happen?
It was as if I had stepped from firm, solid ground into a formless void, outside the framework and enclosure of free market thinking. Growing up, I had been a teenage conservative. My sister even gave me the nickname ‘Thatch’ for my sympathies with Margaret Thatcher’s policies on trade unions and the minimum wage. At one point my favourite book was Ayn Rand’s libertarian fantasy of godlike tycoons, Atlas Shrugged. I was a true believer in free markets ‒ before and, even more so, after studying economics ‒ and I became a competition lawyer to spread that gospel. I had made my home in the neoliberal consensus.
But by 2013, as I clocked endless billable hours, my doubts were piling up. Having dedicated my whole career to competition, it was confusing for me to contemplate the inadequacy of free markets ‒ toiling to defend a £1.4 billion fizzy drinks merger was not going to make the world a better place.
It is hard to convey how painful the process of completely changing my own world view has been. But in adopting a new perspective I am in good company: Keynes once said, ‘When the information changes, I change my mind. What do you do?’ What I began to understand, slowly – too slowly, no doubt ‒ was that the information had changed; the old economic models were no longer accurate (if they ever had been).
Competitive markets, it seemed, were extremely effective at consumption and destruction. But efficient? Beneficent? Hardly. I could not sleep for thinking about how to fix this fundamental mistake in the design of the economy. For some people this would have been an academic question, something to ponder with a friend over a glass of wine whilst putting the world to rights or perhaps something to tuck away into a mental folder marked ‘Capitalist Contradictions’ (because we all have one of those!). For me, it was an existential crisis, so closely had I tied my career and identity to the notion of free markets.
And with that disquiet came a radically different way of thinking about capitalism. I started to wonder if our focus on the benefits of the market – the low prices and plentiful output that we get as consumers – was distracting us from the costs – the pollution and inequality and poor health and powerlessness – that hit us as workers, parents, citizens, and as people living on planet Earth.
I am not a radical person ‒ I am by nature risk averse, if anything ‒ but having caught a glimpse of the world as it really is, there was no going back to wilful ignorance. It was daunting to contemplate all the things that our free market model does not consider. But the time had come for me to question some of my core beliefs and take action to see if markets could be made to be truly fair.
I still believed in the power of the private sector to do good; that business did not have to be bad for our planet and species. I believed that a free society and political democracy could be bolstered by free enterprise and economic democracy. But more competition between profit-hungry firms did not seem to be the complete solution, not even close.
So, I quit my high-flying job at a big law firm and went in search of companies trying to have a positive impact on the world. What I found was a vibrant fringe of businesses operating at the edges of capitalism. They were still competing, but in a completely different way. Instead of existing in opposition to society ‒ seeing what harms they could get away with and how much profit they could amass in the meantime ‒ these businesses were actively trying to serve society, often inviting society into the boardroom to help guide their influential reserves of corporate power and resources. It was free markets, but not at all as I knew it.
What I discovered on my journey was that free market competition is not what it seems to be. We have a growing problem of corporate power in our societies because we have failed to understand how free market competition actually works. Competition does not disperse power, it creates power. Not all competition is good for us.
The insistent mantra of free, competitive markets is a distasteful joke, to which our impoverished planet and society are the unfortunate punchline. This, in itself, is increasingly well understood ‒ at least outside of the mainstream ‒ but amongst the people who could actually change the way things work, this observation generally elicits an exasperated throwing up of hands. What to do about it? they ask, fatigued with the repetition. In fact, we already do plenty, and that is half the problem: there is a vast and busy industry of regulators, lawyers, economists, lawmakers, consultants and scholars, nudging companies incessantly, and self-servingly, with a complex system of incentives and punishments. But the net effect is alarmingly deficient.
As someone who positioned themself on the front line of this well-intentioned but wholly inadequate effort to remedy the less palatable tendencies of market capitalism, I had to eventually, and reluctantly, face the reality that we are pushing and prodding markets not nearly hard enough, and often in entirely the wrong direction. I began to fear that the whole exercise was pointless, or worse – a mere distraction from what we should really be doing.
I came to see that the regulatory infrastructure designed to maintain free markets and contain corporate power – antitrust ‒ is a half-hearted, technocratic effort that is simply not working. We are prevented at every turn from taking decisive action by a few pervasive myths about free market competition that keep us in perpetual hope, ignorance and wilful complacency. We are paralysed into cultural and political inertia, even as the economic system charges devastatingly ahead. And we have not developed another way of doing things; there are woefully few alternative narratives for how we can succeed in a capitalist economy.
Competition itself is the creator of power – markets inexorably tend towards concentration, and we seem incapable of enforcing the required level of restraint to prevent the accumulation of money and power. The critical questions that go unasked are: Creation of power for whom? And at whose expense?
We hesitate to identify the winners of the race to market dominance as ‘monopolists’. We do not want to seem ungrateful or unworldly. We cannot see that the ‘competition’ that got them to the top is not the same kind of ‘competition’ that keeps them there. We cannot see that a market, an economy, a society dominated by big companies acting with impunity cannot be competitive. We may all benefit from innovation, productivity, efficiency – if these are, indeed, handmaidens to monopoly (itself a debatable proposition). But it is an absurdly lopsided bargain. Free market competition has become a euphemism for the accumulation of power by the already powerful. And the immeasurable harms of the so-called competitive system proceed under this intellectual cover.
This is a book about power, the power that is embedded in every market interaction and which flows so freely towards those who already have it that we tread the paths it clears in its wake, without realizing that there are other paths not taken. This is a book about the structures of influence, the landscape of leverage and the contours of control. This is a book about who gets to take up space in our societies and for what purpose. This is a book about the economic systems that make a tragedy like Rana Plaza possible, even inevitable, and what we can do about it.
It is with great trepidation, but with a strong and irresistible conviction of spirit, that I seek to expose the myths surrounding free market competition. Other campaigners take on other pieces of the puzzle, the fight is fought on many fronts, and the myths themselves have a tendency to resist challenge. They have become so enmeshed in the capitalist system that the entire economy is coordinated according to their logic. I expect fierce resistance from the many agents of competitive markets – companies, investors, governments, even consumers – for the interlocking nature of the myths operates like a maddening psychological puzzle, whereby shaking yourself free involves burrowing deeper into the matrix. If I am successful in my attempts to disabuse you, dear reader, of what may be some of your most strongly held beliefs, you may experience confusion, disorientation, or disillusionment. Fear not: you will not have me alone for company and encouragement. We are many, seeking new and better answers, and we are not giving up.