d our “blue jeans” today. In America, Levi Strauss, a German merchant living in San Francisco, sold jeans to California’s growing mining population of the 1850s. Jeans gained popularity and, in the 20th century, became a universal symbol of rebellion and casual cool.
Jeans are no longer worn for physical labor, but consumers still want their jeans to convey a used, rugged look. Distressing the fabric is outsourced to places like China, where cheap wages and lax environmental controls enable the rapid growth of a labor-intensive task soaked in toxic chemicals. Only a decade ago, this town was a loose amalgam of villages, duck ponds, and fields. Today, the region is a labyrinth of some 5,000 large and small garment factories the cover every aspect of the blue jeans production cycle, from weaving and dyeing to sewing and post-processing. The denim industry is so prevalent here that passengers convey their destinations to cab drivers not by street name, but by factory name.
The thousands of workers who toil inside these factories do so at a substantial risk to their health and well-being. Some cloth is woven, and then dyed, but denim is made the opposite way. Workers, often without protection against caustic fumes, load the yarn into machines with open baths of “sulfur black” and other dyes (the darker the jeans, the more chemicals in the dye) and then treat it in caustic soda and acid to improve color absorption.
After that, the denim is woven, cut to size, and ready to be sewn. Seamsters feed the heavy cloth through high-speed sewing machines for up to 18 hours a day. Their pay corresponds with output, on average reaching 150 euros a month, better than most workers in other industries. To meet the relentless production quotas, the seamsters risk repetitive stress injuries, eye problems, backaches, and industrial accidents.
Workers typically labor every day of the month, with a few hours pause on payday. In one factory, a banner stretching across the canteen reads: “If you don’t work hard at your job today, tomorrow you would work hard finding a job.” Factories cram up to eight people into small dormitory rooms of 20 square meters and deduct the cost of their beds, electricity, water, and food from their pay.
Conditions are just as dismal in the laundries. After jeans are sewn, they are treated with more chemicals at a laundry. Workers haul the jeans into giant washing machines, throwing bleach, enzymes, and a pumice stone into the tumbler to break down the indigo. At the end of the wash, workers pull out the wet load with bare hands and bring them to the drying area, where temperatures exceed 40 degrees Celsius. This constant change in temperature and humidity leads to arthritis and skin lesions. Laundry workers also suffer from the toxic fumes released by huge dryers. “You do this job for three or five years and leave the factory as a wreck,” says Li Hui, a 40-year-old laundry worker.
Most Chinese factories do not protect workers adequately, if at all, according to Verite, a U.S.-based organization that investigates workplace safety around the world. Chinese labor laws, born out of socialism, tend to treat workers favorably. But the country’s breakneck economic growth outpaces government monitoring. “Many factories have no people on staff or procedures to deal with health and safety emergencies,” says Dan Viederman, executive director of Verite. “It is an accident that there is no accident when health and safety are left to the whim of the machines.”
About 90 percent of Chinese factories do not pay workers adequately for overtime, says Viederman. Buyers, Western brands included, impose unrealistic deadlines and low fees on factories, which in turn protect profits by shorting employees. Both factory and brand representatives collude by lying to labor inspectors and rewarding workers who tell auditors they don’t work overtime. “The system at this point embraces cover-ups. The brands and the factories know they have problems but there are very few incentives for them to work together to resolve them,” Viederman says.
But the