Simon Willison’s Weblog

True but incomplete.

The disconnect occurs because the incredibly low price that the worker gets is vastly vastly vastly lower than the low price that the consumer pays. Often it isn't even that low a price.

In between is a distribution chain that gets far more in markup than the poor "people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives."

You pay $100 for a pair of sneakers, the worker gets 15 cents for making them. That differential is not just surplus labour (if you're feeling like taking a Marxist view of it), it is a system of arbitrage that exploits these poor people, soaks consumers, all the while enriching distributors often for not much more than running enterprise software on a server.

huxley - 23rd July 2009 00:06 - #

I was recently treated to some British programme on television - Simon can possibly fill us in on which programme it was, living as he does in Britain - about fashion-obsessed young adults being sent to India to work in the factories which produce the kind of clothes that they presumably buy in large quantities - I missed the bit which set the scene for the whole thing, so maybe they weren't huge consumers after all, but anyway...

One aspect of the show was presumably that of confronting the supposedly spoilt British people with living and working conditions in the countries which produce such goods, to make them feel guilty about their consumer habits. As a kind of Jack Osbourne-style intervention it probably functioned well, but one does have to wonder about the economics beyond the factory workers' wages and the price on the garment.

It wouldn't surprise me if the clothing import and retail business were completely inefficient, especially from what I've heard previously, with the aim being to sell relatively small numbers of garments at high prices, marking down or even disposing of large volumes of now-unfashionable items in order to make way for (and take advantage of) large volumes of items being made at exploitatively low cost elsewhere, with money being burned in keeping up this conveyor belt of apathy towards the product and the people who had to stitch it together, with container ships going forward and backward needlessly.

Prices for clothes can be ridiculously low, especially in Britain, I've found. I'm sure retailers claim that their margins are low - a convenient way to assuage criticism - but how much is this down to a ridiculously inefficient way of running a business which can exploit people (and waste natural resources) for no other reason than to serve the completely artificial purpose of dangling shiny new stuff in front of consumers because self-serving "research" shows that this is what those consumers supposedly want?

Given the continual hunt for lower and lower cost producers, one can either say that bad habits postpone any need to change the way business is done, or that the business model is now sacred and must be obeyed at any cost. Certainly, if no-one were willing to work for such low wages, the impact on retailers would be significant.

Maybe bringing the purchaser and the worker together is the answer to this kind of problem, just as Fairtrade has sought to do with certain commodities. Wider access to technology and communications should undermine any excuses about fashions and trends and the need for intermediaries to set the pace and uphold the top-down "here's what you should like" herd mentality. The retail sector isn't the only problem, but if removed from the larger problem, at least it would remove all the usual consumer-targeted pop-culture excuses about change not being what people really want. And it would leave exploitative producers with fewer excuses about "meeting retail price points" when asked how much their workers get paid.

Paul Boddie - 24th July 2009 01:34 - #