CLOTHING COMPANIES ARGUE that global garment production has been good for women and girls. (And the World Bank has commissioned studies to prove it.) If not for jobs created by Nike or Gap, the argument goes, rural women would languish in isolated villages, pulling plows like oxen. Or, worse, they might be sold into sex slavery. Since “the Nike Foundation first began investing in girls,” the corporate-funded foundation says, “we’ve spent thousands of hours . . . to fully understand . . . their hopes, dreams, opportunities and challenges.”1
Nike, the world’s largest shoe company, started pushing the idea of a “girl effect” in the mid-1990s. Coincidentally, this was just when activists had begun to focus on the company’s sweatshops in Asia, where millions of girls and women worked under horrendous conditions. Unions and students threatened a global boycott if things did not improve. Nike’s slogan, “Just Do It,” became the rallying cry “Just Don’t Do It.”
To sell the idea that garment work was liberating for Asian women, the Portland sneaker company brought in the former president of Smith College, well-known feminist historian Jill Ker Conway. She promised an investigation of working conditions in Nike’s Asian plants. If abuses were found, she swore, they would be fixed. Conway hired Asian women academics to visit plants and interview workers. Meanwhile, she toured college campuses in the United States, making the case that global garment manufacturers like Nike were educating the world’s poorest women and rescuing them from a life of poverty.2
By 2008, Nike had succeeded in rebranding itself as a champion of global feminism. The company launched a campaign called the “Girl Effect” that promised to make girls “aware of their economic potential” and to “prepare them to work.” Nike insisted it was giving girls in poor countries “control over their future . . . many for the first time.”
The Girl Effect became an independent foundation in 2015. Its website opens with this statement: “We exist to create a new normal with and for girls.” Girl Effect has won praise and funding from the World Economic Forum (a global consortium of business and political leaders), USAID (the foreign aid arm of the US government), and the Clinton Global Initiative. The foundation partners with the United Nations and NGOs throughout the world and is seen by many as promoting a successful strategy for women’s economic empowerment.3
Asian garment workers are skeptical. The Messenger Band paints a picture of garment work that is not so uplifting. “This is the life of garment workers. We dare not take a day off because they will never allow it. We work though we are ill because if we dare to take leave, they will reduce our salaries. Oh. My tears please stop falling down because it solves nothing. As women, we have to be strong and overcome our hardship.”4
Sok Thareth of United Sisterhood Alliance says Cambodian garment factories are run in ways that intentionally undermine women workers’ solidarity. Women must work on teams, required to finish as many as 1,000 shirts a day. (Or, in Bangladesh, says Kalpona Akter, 1,200 pairs of jeans.) As a result, “workers cannot even go to the toilet,” says Sok. “They cannot dream at their machines. They cannot talk to each other. They cannot even make friends because the team as a whole is responsible for the job. So if one woman cannot complete her part on time, she is blamed by her coworkers.”
Pressure to fill quotas causes repetitive stress injuries, bladder infections, and hemorrhoids, says Sok. Women sit for eight or ten hours without standing. Slower workers worry they will get their entire team fired. “It’s incredibly stressful physically and mentally.”5
In a song called “Fate of Garment Workers,” Vun Em summarizes the stories women clothing makers have told her: “We are insulted by society. There is no pity for garment workers like us. We work from early in the morning till the dark of night. We work very hard to earn a few US dollars.” Workers tell her they like that song, Vun says, because “it validates their feelings, their weariness, their frustration.”6
Nike is not completely wrong, Sok and Vun admit. Garment manufacturing jobs provide higher incomes than women could have earned working on family farms. But many garment workers do not leave their farms voluntarily. They are violently evicted.
In the music video “Land and Life,” Vun stands in a boat as images of struggle are projected onto her face: Women fighting men in uniform. Thatch-roofed homes set aflame by soldiers. Rice paddies uprooted by bulldozers. For anyone over fifty, the images call to mind news footage of the Vietnam War. Young Cambodians see it as a war too.
“Because of dollars, we have lost our homes and lands,” Vun sings. “With a war of words, we have been evicted, beaten, and abused. Dollars are the weapons.” Images of police with truncheons raised, flash on her face. Bloodied protesters lie on the ground by her feet. “Using all means, they confiscate our land where we used to live peacefully.” Images of women cooking for children in squatter camps. “The land must be returned to the people.”7
Hundreds of thousands of rural women like Em have been forced from their ancestral lands since the 1990s. Leaving children, parents, and spouses, they move to Phnom Penh where they pay exorbitant rents for a spot on a mattress in a dark room with other workers. Em lived in a dormitory with forty other garment workers when she first moved to the city in 2004. Sending money home to her family, she was left with little for herself. She sings: “We are away from our parents and friends; we struggle to work even though our hearts suffer; all so that the lives of our families will be peaceful.” Even so, says Vun, sometimes whole families are forced to move.8
In Vietnam, Nike employs a million-plus workers, most of them women. The corporation boasts that these women are “the first in their families to work in the formal economy.” While it is true that garment work has given many of them an independent income for the first time, a 2016 investigation found that Nike workers in Vietnam earned just a quarter of what they need to feed, clothe, and shelter their families. City life is strained and poor.9
In Philippine export zones, where Ann Taylor and Ralph Lauren clothes are made, garment workers can’t afford more than a few spoonfuls a day of powdered Nestlé drinks to feed their children, says Asuncion Binos. And Kalpona Akter says that many women garment workers in Bangladesh are expected to turn wages over to parents, husbands, and brothers. “Liberation?” Akter laughs aloud. “I would like to ask anyone to try to live for a while as a garment worker in my country. Then she can tell me if that is liberation.” And yet, workers “need the jobs,” says Akter. “Of course. We just don’t want to die for them.”
Thai worker Noi Supalai insists that if Nike really wanted to empower women it would let its workers form unions. The company has been celebrated for turning around its image as an exploitative employer. But Noi, who toured US colleges in 2016, says that Nike continues to close factories when workers try to organize. She wants to see UN oversight to hold transnational companies accountable. Otherwise, she thinks the abuse will continue. In 2016, her factory was shut down, and Noi burned a pile of Nike sneakers in front of the closed shop in protest. “Nike says that it has humanity, that it has morality.” Noi scoffs. “That’s not true.”10
What is true is that almost no garment workers earn a living wage. In China and Indonesia, they make one-third of what is needed to feed, clothe and house their families. In Vietnam, they earn less than one-quarter. In Bangladesh, the women, girls and men who make clothes for American and European consumers earn just 14 percent of what they need. Indeed, as profits exploded in fashion, wages have fallen. In Cambodia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, all major apparel exporters, wages declined by almost one-third between 2003 and 2013.11
The rising tide of fast fashion has lifted only yachts. Workers’ small boats are sinking. As demand for cheap clothing has grown, dramatically enriching top executives and shareholders, fierce competition for market share has caused regular price slashing. This delights consumers. But it has squeezed small cotton growers and manufacturers. And what it has done to workers is far worse: nothing short of mass murder.12