Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade

[RamboLiberal]

Heard the author Rachel Louise Snyder on Pittsburgh liberal talk show Lynn Cullen. Author's website: http://globalgrit.com/

Review from Amazon.com: From Publishers Weekly
Smart and ambitious, cosmopolite journalist Snyder maps the global garment industry, beginning in a New York loft where designers plot a line of ultra-pricy, socially responsible jeans that would ensure a fair wage for workers and not cause excessive environmental degradation. From there she visits cotton growers in Azerbaijan, denim specialists in Italy and factories in Cambodia and China. An excellent reporter, Snyder talks comfortably to both sophisticated designers and factory workers, conveying their very different motives as she paints a picture of an industry far more tangled than most consumers imagine. She notes that economic and employment shifts are felt globally, describing Italy mourning the loss of manufacturing to cheaper factories in Asia, where low-paying jobs represent unprecedented opportunity to many workers. If the prose occasionally verges on cuteness, it's preferable to the jargon of quotas and NGOs ubiquitous in most discussions of global trade. Snyder's investigation is an essential read for those curious about fashion or the globe-spanning business that produces their clothes. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Book Description
From Azerbaijan to New York City, a human-scale view of global trade.

In the business of making and selling clothes, "Made in" labels do precious little to convey the constellation of treaties, countries, and people at work in the assembly of a simple pair of jeans. In Fugitive Denim journalist Rachel Louise Snyder reports from the far reaches of this multi-billion-dollar industry in search of the real people who make your clothes. From a cotton picker in Azerbaijan to a Cambodian seamstress, a denim maker in Italy to a fashion designer in New York, Snyder captures the human, environmental, and political forces at work in a dizzyingly complex and often absurd world. In a disarming and humorous voice, she ponders questions of equity, sweatshops, and corporate social responsibility through narratives of individual people, making an often academic subject accessible and compelling. Neither polemic nor prescription, Fugitive Denim captures what it means to be at work in the world in the twenty-first century.

[Peace Patriot]

1. Boy, some of this blurb language is a red flag to me.

"If the prose occasionally verges on cuteness..."

"...the jargon of quotas and NGOs ubiquitous in most discussions of global trade"

"...an essential read for those curious about fashion..."

"In a disarming and humorous voice, she ponders questions of equity, sweatshops..."

"Neither polemic nor prescription...".

"...what it means to be at work in the world in the twenty-first century."

-----------------------------------

I don't know about Azerbaijan, but I know that Gap jeans originate in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, where cotton production has utterly poisoned the soil and the water tables, and has devastated the Aral Sea. The cotton is then put on big tankers, which pollute the oceans, and is transported to sweatshops where the cloth is spun, and is tanked again (more pollution) to the sweatshops in Saipan, or Cambodia, or wherever the labor is cheapest and most unprotected, with the final product ending up on our docks--for instance in San Francisco (the only place where the workers who handle these products receive a decent wage, due to the Longshoreman's Union)--and then the jeans are trucked (more pollution) around the U.S. to retail outlets that also underpay and oppress their workers. The sweatshops of Saipan--of which I have some knowledge--recruit young Asian women from the poorest far off lands, and indenture them for their passage. They work very long hours, get pittance wages, and have no protection at all, let alone legal protection, being so disconnected from their families and communities. Saipan was the particular playground of Tom Delay and pals, you may recall. A cutesy little thing Gap did was to put "Made in U.S.A." labels on the jeans, because they were sewn in a U.S. territory (Saipan)--although the territory is not subject to U.S. labor laws. (Global Exchange sued them for this.)

So you can imagine my nausea at reading about someone treating this subject "with a humorous voice" that may verge at times on "cuteness." The book may be worth reading. I really don't know. I haven't read it yet--just these blurbs. But if the book itself is as advertised here, then I think readers should ask some questions about whose interests are being served.

Corporate disinformation takes many subtle, and not subtle, forms. A phrase like, "...what it means to be at work in the world in the twenty-first century," can seem innocent--or seem to have a kind of rough and ready sense of reality--but it also contains a message of powerlessness, of fatefulness, of acceptance. 'This is how it is, peons--get used to it! And it does have its laughs, don't you know?'

And "neither polemic nor prescription" has an even more dangerous message: That taking a strong political stance against the grave abuses and planet-killing policies of global corporate predation is, inevitably...boring, preachy, strident, uninteresting, too factual, not impressionistic enough (like corporate P.R. departments prefer) and certainly not worth reading in today's busy world. And forget about solving it ("neither polemic nor prescription"). That's boring, too. Social justice is boring. Advocating for human rights is polemical. Have some laughs instead, with Rachel Louise Snyder, while your country and your planet go down for the count.

Again, I'm just reacting to the advertising. And maybe Snyder is very clever, and has couched the truth about the global slave labor trade, the concerted war on labor protections, and the death of planet Earth from corporatism and consumerism, in a way that more people can understand. I'm just saying, be wary. The global clothing trade has been designed by far rightwing multi-billionaires for their own ungodly profit, at the expense of everything we hold dear. Stay conscious while reading it, and ask yourself, Whose interests are being served? And, does it make you feel resigned to this situation--powerless, fatigued, emotionally distant, callous--or energized to fight for justice and for our planet's survival?