Huffington Magazine Issue 49 | Page 31

JEFF HOLT/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES Voices to Turkey to Guatemala, they are routinely coached on how to answer questions posed by inspectors who arrive every so often, working for accounting firms at the behest of the brands. Bathrooms that are ordinarily foul and denied to many workers are suddenly pristine and stocked with the necessary accoutrements. Managers who routinely cheat workers of legally mandated overtime and meal breaks speak of the lawful policies in place. So it goes in Bangladesh, now the world’s second largest apparel maker, as my colleagues Dave Jamieson and Emran Hossain revealed in an eye-opening report PETER S. GOODMAN earlier this month. “What to say to the auditors always comes from the owners,” one worker in a factory in Bangladesh told them. “The owners in most cases would warn workers not to say negative things about the factories.” The global brands have built a system designed to inoculate themselves from liability to disaster, while effectively pushing the dirty work further into the crevices of the underground economy. They have built an apparatus that enables them to say that they inspect the factories that make their goods, while ensuring that dangers persist by dint of the stuff they do not talk about publicly: The prices they pay for their products. Prices that can only be met by someone HUFFINGTON 05.19.13 Workers sew plaid shirts on the production line of the Fashion Enterprise garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh.