H&M, the Scand­inavian fast fash­ion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employ­ees of a knit­wear fact­ory in Bangladesh which is sub­con­trac­ted by H&M to make those cute stripy jump­ers, and that really use­ful little black cardy. 



My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say any­thing to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buy­ing any­thing here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try any­thing on (I think she might go back without me; and I will con­fess to her now I was wear­ing some­thing I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was per­suaded so well by her argu­ments against read­ing Banglade­shi work­ing women as cul­tural dopes, step­ping blindly into exploit­at­ive paid work whilst car­ry­ing the bur­den of house­work and facing down chal­lenges to their repu­ta­tions as good women. Kabeer’s incor­por­a­tion of how cul­ture is “woven into the con­tent of desire itself” (2000: 328) is per­suas­ive. Women chose paid work out­side the home and still coun­ted as good, they liked work­ing in a clean place for good wages far more than labour­ing in a field, and took pleas­ure in con­trib­ut­ing to meet­ing their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the gar­ment work­ers agency and voice. They are not an innately mal­le­able, grate­ful, reserve army of nimble fingered knit­ters; they are not vic­tims of a dis­or­gan­ized cap­it­al­ism where fem­in­ism and neo­lib­er­al­ism com­bine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elab­or­at­ing a new romance of female advance­ment and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the nor­m­al­isa­tion of the dual income fam­ily work­ing for low wages in insec­ure employ­ment marks a fail­ure of fem­in­ism, for (without real­ising it) priv­ileging choice no mat­ter what.

When War on Want describe sick­en­ing fact­ory con­di­tions and I read of these injur­ies and deaths, this is dam­age, and Fraser’s is the line that per­suades me. As I don’t want my con­sump­tion prac­tices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because polit­ical pres­sure on H&M makes them choose a new sub­con­tractor (one less fam­ous for its work­ing con­di­tions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleed­ing, lib­eral, west­ern heart. This is dam­age too. I’m not adding much to an unanswer­able debate other than eas­ing my own con­science by play­ing out the ten­sions: strong con­clu­sions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Fem­in­ism, Cap­it­al­ism and the Cun­ning of His­tory’. New Left Review 56.
  2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Banglade­shi Women and Labour Mar­ket Decisions in Lon­don and Dhaka. Lon­don: Verso.