The true cost of your cheap clothes: slave wages for Bangladesh factory workers
Everyone loves a bargain but the true cost of that latest wardrobe addition is pitiful wages for Bangladesh's legion of factory workers, writes Simon Parry.
In a suite of offices lined with racks of clothes on the seventh floor of an industrial building in the back streets of Lai Chi Kok, the head of a trading company explains the economic reality that has transformed the global garment industry over the past decade.
"Ten years ago, you could only buy a T-shirt for US$5. Now you can buy a sweater for US$6, and for US$9 you can buy a jacket," says Mandarin Lui Wing-har, managing director of the low-profile but highly influential Top Grade International Enterprise. "Of course, at the high end of the market, people will still pay US$500 for a T-shirt. They don't care about the price, only the brand, and maybe only 50 T-shirts will be made in that style. But we are making maybe 50,000 T-shirts in each style - and that is why we can sell them for US$3 or US$4."
A decade ago, most of those T-shirts would have been made in Guangdong, a province once known as the "world's workshop". Today, the looms are turning faster than ever - but the work has moved nearly 2,500km from Dongguan to Dhaka. Soaring labour costs and China's gradual shift from low-end to high-end manufacturing have seen garment production find a new home in Bangladesh. But the doorway to the world's workshop remains in Hong Kong.
In the same way Kowloon-based companies would send mainland-made products around the world throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Top Grade last year handled orders for 30 million pieces of clothing made in Dhaka's factories for customers including European supermarket chain Lidl, and major chains in Brazil and Japan. Orders are placed with Top Grade and other companies, such as Li & Fung, and the payments pass through their Hong Kong offices, although the goods themselves are sent from Bangladesh directly to the customer.
