Cloth of the nation
ACCORDING to the Clean Clothes Campaign, an advocacy organisation that works with garment industry workers around the world, Pakistan’s garment and textile industry forms 60pc of the country’s annual exports. Together, this amounts to about 8pc of the country’s annual GDP, valued at over $140 million. About 40pc of the entire industrial workforce here is employed by some 5,000 garment and textile industries.

Based on these numbers, it can safely be said that clothes, and textiles specifically, make the country. Western retailers such as Kohl’s, Nike, Gap, Macy’s and Old Navy all have some of their retail garment merchandise manufactured in Pakistan. The US is in fact the top importer of Pakistani textiles and garments.

Unsurprisingly, the heft of these numbers has meant little to those who work in textile and garment factories around the nation. Three years since the Sept 11, 2012, fire killed more than 250 and ravaged a garment factory in Karachi, few measures have been taken to ensure that such a disaster does not occur again. Called the worst industrial disaster in Pakistan’s history, the Baldia fire spread fast, trapping hundreds of workers. The lack of exits was a key factor in the high death toll; many who knew that the factory was burning had no means to escape. The ones who survived faced onerous challenges of their own, their third-degree burns often leaving them unable to continue working. On Sunday, Sept 6, a few days before the anniversary, the survivors and heirs of the Baldia Town fire held a demonstration to highlight the fact that no progress had been made. In the words of one mother, “I am not here just to protest for the compensation money for my son, I want that no more mothers to go through what I have.”

Unfortunately, other mothers will likely have to go through the same hell. On the demand side, KiK, the German retailer whose clothes were being manufactured in the Baldia factory, had wrongly claimed that the survivors of the blaze received several million dollars from the Pakistan government and the owners of the factory. It has also abandoned negotiations on arriving at a compensation amount for the victims. A case brought by four victims is languishing in German courts; even if it is heard, it will only provide redress for the individual litigants, leaving all the others without recourse.

The safety side of the equation is just as dismal. The Clean Clothes Campaign report on Pakistan noted that one of the most significant dangers in garment factories here is the absence of fire extinguishers and emergency exits. Ensuring the presence of these items would of course increase the cost of production in a factory. In a competitive market, this would mean an inability to compete and perhaps the closure of the factory itself.

These cumulative realities point to the fact that unless the foreign buyers of these garments, international advocacy groups and the government of Pakistan come together to enforce safety regulations, the actual operators of the factories will continue to flout them. There are many loopholes; even while Pakistan has signed on to a number of international conventions that could provide respite and accountability, the optional protocols that would allow litigants to bring cases for non-compliance have not been signed.

There is, however, another way to deal with unsafe factories and exploited workers. Among the statistics on textile and garment production and consumption by the Clean Clothes Campaign is that Pakistan consumes about the same amount of cotton that it produces. This is, in fact, a huge number, since Pakistan is the third largest cotton producer and then the fourth largest cotton consumer in the world.

This equality in production and consumption means that the individual Pakistani consumer has a great deal of potential power in demanding better conditions from factories whose products they consume. In a country where piety is attached to everything from cooking shows to facial hair, perhaps some can also be attached to the issue of the consumption of garments and textiles.

When summer begins and the parade of lawn patterns is splashed across television screens and magazines, maybe some questions can be asked about the conditions under which the prettiness is produced. Similarly, the designers and boutique owners that swan around during Pakistan’s fast proliferating fashion weeks and fashion shows should similarly be questioned regarding the conditions in which the raw materials for their finery are produced. Public accountability regarding work conditions can be harnessed to push producers to behave ethically.

It is not just the power of the Western consumer that must be harnessed in order to create better conditions for the hapless worker in a country like Pakistan. Product boycotts and consumer accountability have long been tools via which new norms are established in a society. The Pakistani media can assist this process by illustrating how the consumer who purchases without asking questions is complicit in the crime of worker exploitation.

Those who wear the fabric or the T-shirt, rest their heads on the pillowcase or their bodies on the bed sheet are all tainted by the pain and haplessness of the workers who have little or no control over the exploitative conditions of their work. Pakistan’s fashion weeks, lawn sales and award shows can go beyond the parade of the beautiful and bountiful by invoking questions regarding how ethically the goods are produced

If these mechanisms are used to expose unsafe, unfair and exploitative practices within Pakistan’s own consumer market, then there could be some possibility of a better future for the millions that toil in the dark factories, spin and weave and stitch the cloth of the nation.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 7th , 2015