First off, there are these huge looms that weave fabric. When I hear loom, I usually think old-school, what-we-learned-about-in-history-textbooks looms, but these suckers don't mess around. They're cold and efficient and produce fabrics like nobody's business. They're also crazy advanced - you can program into the machine the design you want on your fabric )like the ones you see in your towels or your striped shirts or your bath mats) and it'll just weave it in with lightning-quick speed. For example, all of the different products in the photo below were all woven by the same machine using the same materials. This particular factory at this particular time is making bath robes, like you would see in nice hotels. So after looking at the looms, we went upstairs to where people assemble the robes. This was the most interesting part of all.
I've been inside of chocolate factories and breweries (and had several thwarted attempts to visit a jellybean factory) but I've never seen anything quite like a textile factory. This tour is of particular significance to me because 1) this is my dad's industry and it's cool to see the inner workings of it, 2) you and I and everyone we know wears stuff that's made in Bangladesh, and 3) Bangladesh has been in the news recently because the international community (i.e. the U.S.) is finally cracking down on the ridiculously substandard conditions faced by factory workers, prompted by the collapse of a factory a few months ago that killed over a thousand people here.
I have to imagine that this is one of the factories with better conditions than most, which is kind of soul-crushing. Upstairs was a room of maybe 50 people who collectively cut fabrics, sewed them together, quality-checked the robes, and packaged them for selling. It was hot in there. Like really hot. But there were some fans, which I guess is a minor consolation. These factory workers have one job and one job alone for them to do. That could mean sewing on a pocket, for example, and that's what they would do, day-in and day-out, all day long potentially for years, if this factory kept getting the same orders. I couldn't imagine doing the same one things all day long for a week (maybe even a day), let alone for months or years. But what broke my heart the most was the age of these workers. Legally, you have to be 18 to work in Bangladesh. And when these women (girls) are hired, they might have documents showing as much, but the validity of those documents is questionable at best. BD has a very big culture of looking the other way and there's no better example than in the textile industry. I saw girls in this factory who looked like they could not have been more than 10 years old working full time. Want to take a guess at how much these girls and every other entry-level person in this factory makes? The clothes I'm wearing right now cost more than they would make in six months, roughly the equivalent of $1 USD/day.
Some of you may know that ethics is my jam. In fact, my concentration for my degree was the Ethical and Policy Implications of Biotechnology. The factory today brought up some interesting ethical questions, most importantly, is it ethical to hire underage workers? If you had asked me a few years ago, and maybe even a few days ago what I thought about the subject, my answer would have been an unequivocal "no." But at the heart of this question lies an even deeper question of "are ethics relative or absolute?" I.e., most people would agree that it's wrong to kill a person who is just standing in the street, but you'll find a greater debate about whether it's wrong to give a lethal injection to a serial killer on death row. Back to the factory, one thing that's struck me about Bangladesh is that there is poverty everywhere. A lot of these people have next to nothing. And if you're a woman, life for you is even harder. Education in this country is free up until... I think 8th grade for girls (it's actually free for more years if you're a girl than if you're a boy). After that, and before she's married, if her family really has no wealth to speak of then it's unclear what her alternatives are other than to go work. It's the reality of living in this country. Ideally, education is free for longer, or there's more wealth here to make it so that girls aren't forced to work so young but the conditions in this country are far from ideal, which is where these ethical dilemmas arise. In my mind, there's not a clear answer as to whether it's more ethical to a) allow these girls to work even though they're pretty young, or b) prevent them from working and giving them the opportunity to support their families. Caveat: there's no question that girls who are still young enough to be going to school for free should be going to school and not working. I think the real answer is that they need to be given access to education until they reach the age where they can work, which is closer to 18 than it is to 8. Of course, that's easy to say but would take a Herculean effort to accomplish, particularly in a country so strongly afflicted by political corruption.
In case you were wondering, it surprises me as much as anyone that this is where I came out on this issue but... man, this country is a very different place and it really causes you to question positions you once took as a given.
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