Three, two, one, zero… The sales are now on.
Offers, discounts, % off… fill the shop windows of
the high streets and the shopping centres.  It is
the time to buy and to buy cheaply.  But… Is what
we’re buying really so cheap?  What is being
hidden behind the clothing and domestic
appliances?  Who are the winners and who are
losers from our shopping?  Often what seems to be
cheap can end up very expensive.

Mango, Zara, H&M, Bershka, Pull&Bear,
Stradivarius, Gap, Oysho… They talk about savings
and, more so in the sales, low prices.  What they
don’t tell us and what is hidden behind the label
‘made in China/Bangladesh/Morocco’ is how they
achieve such prices. Industrial relocation is the
response: manufacturing while paying the lowest
possible price for manual labour, and
consequently, violating human rights and basic
labour laws.  This is exhaustively explained and
documented in several reports by the Clean Clothes
campaign. Practices that are, of course, also
present in the big brands that sell products a bit
more expensively or at the top end. The logic is
the same.  Behind the “glamour” or the “luxury” is
hiding the sweat of badly paid workers.

The report, “Spanish Fashion in Tangiers: work and
survival of clothing manufacturers”  by the Clean
Clothes campaign of the Spanish organisation SETEM
is one of the many investigations that showing the
situation in black and while.  The report analyses
what the situation is for textile workers in
Tangiers working for important international
companies and it discovers the working conditions
in Moroccan factories: 12 hour working days, six
days a week, a salary no more than 200 euros a
month, and even on occasion under 100 euros a
month, arbitrariness in hiring and firing,
restrictions on union activity: a situation that
can be found in many other countries.  It’s no
accident that our clothes are produced in Asia,
Central America, Eastern Europe and Africa.

But it’s not only those working in factories
overseas who are losing out, also here the
employees in shopping centres and sales outlets
are subject to precarious, flexible working
conditions with difficulties for union
organisation… And the pressure to achieve the
lowest possible costs also falls on them.  Those
responsible for the unemployment and the
precarious situation in the north are not the
workers of the south, but rather a few economic
and business elites who are trading in our lives,
just as much here as on the other side of the planet.

So, Amancio Ortega, the owner of Inditex which
numbers among its portfolio of brands; Zara,
Bershka, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius, Oysho and
Massimo Dutti, was in 2011, according to Forbes,
the third richest man in the world, despite or
thanks to the economic crisis, depending on how
you see things.

And the same story is repeated in the production,
distribution and sales of home appliances,
technology and even food.  And it’s not just that
a few are taking advantage of precarious or
non-existent working conditions but also they take
advantage of extremely weak environmental
legislation.  So the current production system of
consumer goods is exploiting finite natural
resources, making employees or entire communities
ill and/or polluting where eyes don’t see.
Everything, evidently, at zero cost.

Then they tell us that we can buy cheaply.  And
the January Sales are the highest exponent of this
practice.  But is what we are buying so cheap?
The current production and consumption model
counts on a series of hidden costs that all of us
end up paying for.  Labour exploitation,
precarious conditions, miserable salaries, weak or
non-existent union rights… whether they be in the
south or in the north they generate poverty,
inequality, hunger and home evictions… and it’s
the State that has to respond to such situations
and conflicts with everything that implies in
terms of social and economic costs.

The same happens with businesses that pollute and
exploit without control or limits to natural
resources, generating climate change and
environmental destruction with their practices…
Who pays for the fragmented and delocalised
production and the petrol addicted transport
system that generates the green-house gases?  Who
pays for displaced communities, sick workers and
uninhabitable territory? Who bears the
consequences of an agricultural and food
production model that does away with agrodiversity
in farming and makes us addicted to junk food?  We
do.  For the company it’s free.  These are the
invisible costs of abusive practices which it is
supposed no one pays for.  Stubborn reality shows
us the opposite, it’s society who pays, and a lot.

And the most scandalous part is that to carry out
these practices, multinationals count on the
active support of those in those institutions that
design the economic, social, environmental and
employment policies… at the service of interests
of the former.  As has been repeated countless
times in the streets, our democracy has been
kidnapped.  And even though they tell us time and
again that “buying cheap everyone wins”, the
reality is otherwise: “buying cheap turns out
expensive”.  And in the end we, the majority, pay
the price.


*Article published in Público, 09/01/2013.
**Translated by Pressenza.com.

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