BY GEORGINA DAVIES
In the cloyed back rooms of suburban homes across Australia, outworkers slave over their sewing machines to produce high-fashion garments for the likes of Billabong, Cherry Lane, Converse, Esprit, Fletcher Jones, Jay Jays, Johnny Dexter, Laura Ashley, Mambo, Marianna Hardwick, Mooks, Mossimo, Nike, Ojay, Rich, Stussy ... the list goes on, and on.
Many of the outworkers — predominantly migrant women whose home-country qualifications Australia refuses to recognise — like to position their machines next to a window to remind themselves that there is a world outside where people enjoy the feel of the sun and the wind and the recreational pleasures of a modern, advanced society.
For these women, there are no such pleasures. They work up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week. They are forced to meet the most uncompromising of deadlines, often with the help of their young children. They have no award protection.
Close to 80% suffer chronic injury. More than two-thirds have no access to WorkCover. They have no right to negotiate. Close to half are verbally abused by their "employer". An alarming proportion are also physically abused.
They are paid as little as $1 or $2 an hour. Many receive no payment at all.
Across Australia, there are 300,000 outworkers. Victoria is "home" to some 144,000 of them. None are deemed to be "employees".
Unions, community groups and the outworkers themselves have fought long and hard for some degree of justice and dignity. But time and again they have hit the brick wall of companies' greed and politicians' cowardice.
In the latest such case, Victoria's Labor premier, Steve Bracks, has buckled to employer pressure and reneged on an election promise to legislate a better deal for workers.
Power and exploitation
The appalling exploitation of garment industry workers was brought to public attention as early as 1964, when ABC-TV's Four Corners program reported that clothing factory workers were drawn mainly from the country's increasing population of migrant women: Greek, Italian and Turkish. Later, large numbers of Vietnamese women joined the mix.
Even then it was known that these women formed the cheapest of work forces in Australia. With poor English language skills and unaware of their rights, they were easily manipulated and forced to work well below award conditions.
In the three and half decades since, the situation has worsened dramatically. The closure of many garment factories has forced the workers into their homes. There, the power of the manufacturers and retailers to exploit the workers — individuals with no collective bargaining power who form a reserve pool of labour which competes amongst itself for available work, thereby holding labour costs down — has grown monstrous.
The issue hit the world political stage in a big way in June 1996 when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) adopted an international treaty on homeworkers which declared that they are employees. As employees, the treaty specified, they have the same rights as other workers to: work free of discrimination, equal pay, paid holiday and sick leave, occupational health and safety standards and collectively organise.
Australia's Labor federal government refused to sign the ILO treaty. However, a Senate Economics References Committee conducted an inquiry into the conditions of outworkers in the garment industry and, in December 1996, recommended that a voluntary code of practice be implemented.
As a result of negotiations between the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) and representatives of the retail and manufacturing sectors of the textile, clothing and footwear industries, a code of practice was drafted to regulate and monitor the production chain from the outworkers to the retailer. The code obliges retailers to provide a list of their suppliers to the TCFUA, require their suppliers to comply with award provisions and cease contracting suppliers which fail to comply with award provisions.
Further, retailers were not to sell products which have been produced by exploited labour and were to assist the TCFUA in the investigation of suspected breaches of the award. Retailers were also to carry a label on their garments which states that they have been ethically produced.
Under the code, manufacturers were to be accredited by a code of practice committee, which would verify that their outworkers were being paid the award rate and according to an agreed garment sewing time.
FairWear's campaign
Established in Melbourne in December 1996 as a coalition of churches, community organisations and unions, FairWear has been campaigning long and hard to eliminate the exploitation of outworkers. The group has conducted a creative campaign which has focused, in the main, on getting manufacturers and retailers to sign the code of practice.
Clothing manufacturers, claiming that they hold no responsibility for the conditions under which outworkers toil, have been resistant. The comments of one anonymous manufacturer, quoted in FairWear's November 1999 documentary, Twenty Pieces, are typical: "We don't have any relationship with the outworker. We don't employ them, we have no liability to them. It's just a question of us dealing with contractors who meet our needs in the same way that we meet the needs of the retailer in that total chain of events."
But, as Pamela Curr of FairWear notes, while the manufacturers have been reluctant, the retailers "have all had to be dragged kicking and screaming; they have not done it out of moral obligation". This is despite the retailing industry having been directly involved in drafting the code.
Since the launch of its "Shop of Shame" campaign in 1997, FairWear has managed to persuade just 130 clothing retailers to pledge commitment to the code of practice. Now that the time has come to implement the code, however, the Australian Retailing Association has very bluntly withdrawn its support.
Like the manufacturers, retailers claim that they do not employ the outworkers and are therefore not responsible for the conditions under which they work. However, Curr states, "It's a long contracting chain and the retailers are at the top of that chain". The retailers are, she argues, the core component within the chain of production; they set the prices and the profit margins.
Those further down the chain — the fashion houses, manufacturers, subcontractors and outworkers — all work to meet the requirements of the retailers.
Bracks reneges
Given the refusal of the retailing industry to actively support a voluntary code of practice, FairWear and the TCFUA's attention switched to legislative change to abolish the culture of exploitation.
At the time, state opposition leader Steve Bracks committed the ALP to "putting an end to the exploitation of outworkers in Victoria". He pledged that a Labor government would sign the Homeworkers Code of Practice and would enact laws "which will focus greater responsibility on companies at the top of the clothing production chain to ensure that garments that they supply are made in accordance with industrial relations standards".
Since being elected, however, Bracks' government has announced that it will support only limited changes, to deem outworkers as employees and give them the right to recover monies up the contracting chain beyond the person who gives them the work.
Labor has ruled out supporting legislative changes that would require retailers and manufacturers to register, maintain records and provide lists of where work is sent. It has also ruled out legislation that would commit the government to the development of occupational health and safety policies for outworkers or a community education strategy.
The chain of garment production is complex — garments go through at least six stages in the production process before they reach the consumer — so without the regulation of manufacturers and retailers, and without the maintenance of records and the scrutiny of those records, outworkers will be left just as vulnerable to exploitation as they are now.
The exploitation of women through home-based work occurs on a global scale. There are now more women working in homes than there are in factories.
Annie Delaney from TCFUA states, "Garment industries are probably the most globalised in the world. A whole lot of our clothes are made anywhere: they're designed in one country, they're made somewhere else, they're contracted somewhere else. It happens locally; it happens internationally."
When World Trade Organisation officials, the World Economic Forum's business magnates, Australia's prime minister or Victoria's premier tell us that "free" global trade will lift Third World countries out of poverty, we know they are lying. In particular, we know that they are certainly not talking about the women who produce the clothes on our backs.
Check out FairWear's web site at