blood, sweat, t-shirts, and spoiled westerners
This week the Discovery Company’s PlanetGreen channel premiered the BBC series Blood, Sweat & T-shirts. The premise is that six young, fashion-savvy Brits go off to India for a month to see what it takes to put cheap clothes on the racks of their favorite stores.
As you can imagine, this “reality-like” show’s stars are primarily pampered middle-class westerners who quickly breakdown–even after just a few hours in a high-end textile factory. The six live with local workers, spend up to a week working just as the Indians do and immediately see how good they have it back home.
While the drama leaves a bit to be desired, in our opinion, the message that this series is attempting to highlight is important. One of the Londoners, Georgina says early on, “I just love the fact that you can buy something really, really cheap wear it once and chuck it away.” As a matter of comparison, clothing uses less of our income now than it ever did. In order for the West to have “disposable” garments, the people who grow, weave, and make our clothes live and work in often unbearable conditions.
The 4,000 workers in the first factory the show visits make little more than $2.00 a day. And that’s for the coveted spot on the sewing floor. The team is trained and tested to see if they can make the grade to sew shirts, and it turns out the work is not so easy. Three of them find out that they can’t even keep up with the quotas for ironing and buttoning. While the Brits are at this factory, they earn only as much as the Indians do. When they collect their paychecks, of a few hundred rupees, and go shopping, they quickly discover that a tube of deodorant costs more than a day’s wages. Not exactly what they’re used to back home.
From the factory that pumps out 10,000 garments each day, the six journey to a family owned operation where there are only a handful of employees and produce discount clothing destined for Western stores. Here they are asked to each make six garments from start to finish each day–well beyond their sewing and productivity skill level. To top it off, they get paid by the piece and sleep with the rest of the workers under the sewing tables. We think you can guess how well this went over with the group.
As we watch the group in the premier they are certainly getting a sense of the human costs of cheap textiles. But we have a feeling things are going to get much worse. In future episodes the six Brits will pick cotton, accompany a labor inspector searching for kids working in factories, and follow the entire supply textile supply chain.
We wonder if they’ll make it to the dye factories that pump out millions of gallons of toxic water or if they’ll be exposed to the massive amounts of pesticides used on the cotton crops?
Even as we watch these spoiled “kids” cry, giggle, and whine their way through the harsh realities of India’s textile industry, perhaps we should all take the core message to heart: the textile industry takes a toll on the people, water, and land involved in putting giving us those $5.00 tees.
