Via Sociological Images comes news of Ecko and their latest ad campaign – Hot Girls Make Great Clothes. The website is filled with images (photo and video) of barely dressed women “manufacturing” Ecko brand clothing. Yes, this campaign objectifies women and uses sex to sell clothes. What else is new?
More sickening than that is the ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ reference to places where really hot women and children work – sweatshops. Real women and real girls labor for meager, unsustainable wages in terrible conditions so that we can purchase and wear the latest…. hot styles.
A few facts about sweatshops:
Women make up to 90 percent of sweatshop labor. The poor working conditions they experience include being subject to sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape.
Sweatshops violate the most basic labor laws including child labor, minimum wage, overtime and fire safety laws.
Working conditions also include no benefits, non-payment of wages, forced overtime, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, corporal punishment, and illegal firings.
Sweatshops flourish where there are pools of exploitable workers in desperate
conditions. The poorer the country, the more exploitable the people are.
However, sweatshops are not only found in “other” countries; they are right here in the U.S. – often the workers are recent and/or undocumented workers – again, people who are very vulnerable.
Workers who don’t know their rights or who have no good choices are at the mercy of the managers of these shops and the corporations who own them. For instance, pregnant women are fired instead of being given any type of leave. Women who are of childbearing age may be forced to take birth control or abort their pregnancies.
The free market allows corporations to seek out areas where they can pay miserably poor wages, wages too poor to allow workers to support their families comfortably, and poor enough to ensure profits for the companies at the expense of these families.
Corporations also seek out countries with unstable governments in order to lessen the possibility of being monitored and charged with human rights violations.
Workers can be fired or blacklisted if they try to defend their rights.
Some defend sweatshops and their practices by pointing out that the payment workers may receive is higher than the average national wage for workers in a particular country. Yes, people do have a right to make a living and if the opportunity presents itself to make a higher wage, certainly they should be free to seek the opportunity. However, human rights violations do not need to be part and parcel of such an opportunity. People should not be exploited and brutalized because they happen to live in a poor country (or live in a rich country where the poor are marginalized and/or treated as if they are not human).
Nor should such dire situations be mocked.
This is precisely why I refuse to buy any clothing new. I find feminists go back and forth about whether or not their are internalizing the male gaze by the type of clothing that they are wearing while completely ignoring that their choices lead to the impoverishment of other women. One of the questions I constantly ask is how much is your vanity really worth. Though I know this post is about clothing I would also like to point out that chocolate, makeup, flowers, coffee , chocolate, anything made by del monte and dole are highly exploited materials. These area items that we can either do without or purchase in ways that do not lead to exploitation of another worker. Excellent post once again. I don’t know how it is that you manage to be continually mind blowingly (yeah I know its not a word) AWESOME
Thanks, Renee. You make an important point that I neglected to include – there are ways of addressing this and speaking to several issues at one time. I also have to admit that I am complicit in this system but working to continue to educate myself and think through the purchasing of items. It’s one thing to figure out and support socially responsible manufacturers and venders, but it’s also important to ask the question – how much do I/we need – can we do without or purchase used or what? And even when we do that we still need to ask the question how can I/we change the system.
Ecko aside, there are many who believe that the garment industry actually builds women’s rights in the developing world, including rockstar economists Jeffrey Sachs and NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
The arguments goes: Until garment factories, many women in developing countries didn’t have formal jobs. Having a job often leads to a lower birth rate (Bangladesh’s has dropped from 6 to 3), as women can’t afford to miss work or risk losing their jobs. Women are better with money. They are less likely than men to spend it on booze or gambling and more likely to spend it on educating their children and saving for their future.
I’m not saying that I agree with this argument. But the garment factory/ women’s rights issue is one that is far from black and white.
Kelsey – yes, far from black and white… agreed. The main points I’m making here, though, are the human rights violations. Must such violations be part and parcel of how garment factories operate? Even though they allow women to make money that they have not been able to make before, I don’t believe women, or any person for that matter, should be treated as less than human. When companies stand to make a larger profit because people’s rights are denied, this is wrong, plain and simple.
And I believe the Ecko campaign mocks this terrible reality by showing women prancing around in bikinis while they “make” clothes. It’s a many faceted issue, to be sure… but we can’t say because it does some good, we have to just suck up the bad (which I don’t hear you saying, by the way).
Thanks for the comment.
That ad is absolutely disgusting, and you did a great job unmasking it for the sick joke that it is. Have you seen the newest post or whatever they are calling it? It’s entitled “Unattractive Girl Sues Ecko” and it describes a woman as a farm animal. Bleck.
http://eckomfg.com/?c=53&i=c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b
[...] Speaking again of which, ladies and gentleman, I give you – another of my blog crushes: the fantastical [...]
[...] 4. Sexualizing sweatshops makes for shitty ad campaign. [...]
Do you have a citation for that figure?
Daran – sure.. here are a couple. Note the sentence reads “make up to” – recognizing factories differ from shop to shop and country to country.
The Globetrotting Sneaker by Cynthia Enloe, published in Ms Magazine, September/October 1995 issue, reprinted in Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, Estelle Disch, ed, 4th edition, 2006.
Sweatshops in Sunset Park: A Variation of the Late Twentieth-Century Chinese Garment Shops in New York City, by Xiaolan Bao, from Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective, edited by Daniel E. Bender and Richard A. Greenwald, Routledge, 2003.
also these links
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/econ/schoolsweatshops.html
http://www.youthxchange.net/main/bangladeshwomen.asp
http://www.villanova.edu/artsci/womensstudies/resources/currentissues.htm
http://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c472.shtml
http://www.laborrights.org/files/TradeWomen.pdf
I misread it as “Women make up 90 percent of sweatshop labor.” I think that’s a particularly easy misreading, but no matter how it’s worded, I think readers will tend to parse it as 90%.
When I asked for a cite, I meant that I wanted to know where the figure came from, what it actually refers to, and how it was obtained. I didn’t mean just show me some other people saying the same thing. I can Google for that for myself and, with the internet being the echo chamber that it is, lots of people saying it doesn’t mean that it’s well-founded.
States the figure (note, no “up to”) without providing a source.
States the figure (again no “up to”, but at least it acknowledges that it is an estimate). Also it applies specifically to Bangladesh’s export garment factories. While I don’t doubt that every one is a sweatshop, there are other sweatshops both in out outside of
Bangladesh which make other things, and whose pattern of employment may differ. Still no source.
Again states the claim. The attribution to “Department of Labor” and http://www.feminist.org is too unspecific to follow up, and neither is likely to be a primary source.
States the claim. No source.
States that “The World Development Report estimates that women constitute 70-90% of workers in export processing zones (EPZs) worldwide.” The WDR is a periodical. the current edition makes no reference to EPZ’s. Rather than limit my search to editions prior to December 2002, I though I would search their site for ‘EPZ Women’. One of the results is this one, which gives a range of figures from 54% to 90%. 90% is an outlier and by no means typical. The range 70-90% is wrong, at least according to this source in its lower bound. The document also claims that the proportion of women is falling.
Even this document is not the primary source of these figures, attributing them to the ILO, Again the lack of specificity in the attribution. Since it is not clear to me that workers in EPZ’s are all sweatshop labourers (though undoubtedly many of them will be), so I will not pursue this particular line further.
I found you via JoanKelly’s blog. Just a quick note to say “Awesome post!” and I love the title of your blog!
Angel – thanks for stopping by and for the compliment. A friend of JoanKelly’s is a friend of mine. Welcome!
I applaud you for drawing more attention to this issue! I just visited the site 5 minutes ago and was not impressed. Having to deal with a majority of the male enthusiasm for this site and many others makes me very angry. I love my body and work hard for it to be in shape, but exploiting it for money, especially in that situation is not right. Sweatshops are nothing to joke about because they are real and unfortunately there are too many sad stories to get through them all.
i think ur over reacting
Despite being in 2008 there are still some who are put off and even, dare I say, surprised to see sex being used to sell things to men.
Why is this a big deal?
Men like women. Men like beautiful women. If you associate something a target demographic likes to your product then they are likely to buy it. Do you complain about Michael Jordan selling Ball Park Franks? Is this somehow unethical? Is being attracted to the opposite sex some kind of crime?
A quick visit to their website quickly conveys the understanding that the women featured are actual manufacturing employees. Are they lying about these women? I don’t know and neither do you. I have no reason to doubt those women work for Ecko. Are you making the silly assumption that the 20 or so women featured are the ONLY ones producing the jeans? Though the bulk of the work is likely done overseas by non-models, featuring a few attractive women who actually work for the company is a solid advertising strategy.
But somehow, despite being far away from Amish Country, people still think that sex is an inappropriate marketing tool. Doubt those women posed against their will. But I suppose what consenting adults choose to do with their lives is not up to them in these parts.
Funny.
SimmerDownNow: among other things, your post assumes that men are all heterosexual.
It’s patronizing and suggests that we should just ignore one more sexist ad campaign. Hell, everyone’s doing it, why complain about this one? We’re all adults, right?
I’m wondering if you read the original post. Do you think about where your purchases originated, the living conditions of folks that make them?