Rana Plaza in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013, killed more than 1,100 garment workers. Bayazid Akter/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
The textile and garment industries have always been at the centre of the dark history of capitalism. The early origins of our clothes interweave with those of Britain’s ‘satanic mills’, colonial trade, and black slavery, as illustrated by Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton. The garment industry has hardly managed to get rid of this dark baggage, and its ‘modernisation’ has manufactured new forms of oppression.
Recent media coverage has focused on the collapse of Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh, that killed more than 1,100 garment workers in April 2013. Horrendous spectacles such as these attract global attention, however far more numerous are the smaller-scale instances of repression endured by garment workers worldwide. Last year, workers fighting for an increase in minimum wages were shot in the street of Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. In India, several garment units working for UK retailers were accused of employing migrant child labour and refugees. Others deployed the infamous Sumangali scheme, a recruitment practice bonding workers to employers in exchange for a final payment (made of withheld wages) that rarely materialises.
