By Justin Jin
In a southern Chinese boomtown, the neon glow of a busy warehouse scars the moonless sky. Workers attack the thousands of pairs of jeans piled on the floor with unweildy, motorised grinders hanging from the ceiling. The scrub shears layers off the denim to create a “vintage” look, and disperses a sticky blue dust that covers the workers’ skin and clogs their lungs. Laborers at this factory compete with the sunrise to scrub as many jeans as possible before morning pickup, when the garments will be packaged and shipped. Every scratch on the fabric is proscribed, the size, shape, and location imitating real-life abrasions.
For every pair of jeans they distress, workers earn one euro cent.
In another part of town, their boss Huang Yaohong shares a meal with fellow factory owners. The table is piled with half-eaten dishes of braised turtle, cold jellyfish, sizzling eel, grilled duck tongues, and salted prawns, among plainer dishes of chicken, fish, beef, and pork. When the waiter brings more bottles of 60-proof rice spirit and Red Bull, the bosses prepare for another toast.
Mr. Huang, a short man with steely eyes, hoists his glass. “To the millionaires!” he exclaims. His tablemates rise to their feet.
These bosses and their employees helped transform a sleepy backwater into a world-manufacturing hub, and made China the world’s biggest producer of jeans. They abandoned their impoverished villages in western China to seek a better living in the Pearl River Delta, a region in Guangdong province close to Hong Kong. They built an industry estimated to be worth tens of billions of euros annually, but at a bitter cost.
Italian sailors in 16th-century Genoa wore the first jeans, made of a sturdy cloth and dyed with indigo. They needed pants that could roll easily and wear wet or dry. The sailors were said to launder their jeans by dragging them in large mesh nets behind the ship, with sea water and sun bleaching them white. The Italians dubbed the pants blu di Genova, which became bleu de Gênes to the French, and 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