OUR cotton,

cheap, plentiful, flexible

the “rag” designers love to work with

and the White Gold we love to buy.

From the seed sellers and the farmers,

to the pickers and the pesticide hawkers,

to the ginners and the yarn spinners,

to the knit weavers and the warehousers,

to the middle men and the merchants and the traders

we are the King of Cotton,

the Number One exporter.

Who knew relying on a bloated

fifty-seven million-dollar subsidy

would damn suppliers internationally

and consign their communities to poverty?

Who knew it took 2/3 a pound of pesticides:

sold by Western chemists to Asian farmers, who every year

use 40 million pounds to keep the bollworms away;

where 20,000 lives have drained away

under pressure to meet the impatient demand of the West;

where only one drop absorbed through the skin

is enough to kill a fully grown human,

and makes these shirts you and I are wearing.

Cotton farmers are powerless, and they suffer death by cotton.

 

THEIR water,

depending upon the Season’s latest ‘It’ color,

runs a glaring red, purple and murky indigo blue,

sloshing through the factory pipes upstream

and down into a village near Dongguan,

nestled in a country three-thousand miles away,

where textile industries have rooted themselves into the lifeblood of its people

to feed the swollen hunger of Walmart, Nike, Gap and Rebok,

where ¼ of the drinking water is contaminated

for a population of one point three billion,

with pollution levels so high

The Capitalists themselves sent teams of inspectors

and cancelled contracts

due to bad publicity.

But the river is deadly and it was defiled by dye.

 

OUR buyers

“Generals at war,”

drilled by the management to ‘race to the bottom,’

demand nearly impossible order quotas

that allow just three weeks for shipment

due just in time for the newest trend to be showcased

behind a pristine wall of glass,

illuminated by carefully positioned studio lights

in a department window 3,000 miles away.

‘Doing the right thing’ comes at the cost of a buyer’s job:

“I saw things I shouldn’t have let go.

It was obvious that the facility wouldn’t be able to cope

with the order we were going to put through

and you know that to complete the order the factory owner is just going to

subcontract some hellhole that I haven’t checked out.

But we’re under pressure.

Who wants a buyer that can’t deliver?”

“CARDINAL ONE SIN of a Fashion Conglomerate:

 missing the window on a must-have garment or accessory.”

 

THEIR workers,

are astonishingly determined.

“I paid $50 to get my job at the factory”

$50 is a month’s wage, stuffed into the pocket of a recruiting agent

“It was worth it to get the job”

An endless supply of docile, uneducated rural labor

An equation for manufacturing success

They love the countryside but dream of the city,

moving to the Capital to find work.

“If they pay $45 for jeans it helps us.”

“If people don’t buy, I’m unhappy because I wouldn’t have a job”

Workers are migrants

A generation missing.

Eight-hundred thousand from Bangladesh

looking for jobs overseas

Passports confiscated on arrival

Forced to work

from eight am to one in the morning

seven days a week,

sleeping in cramped dormitories

or on the floors between shifts

and stripped of their passports, they are trapped in

involuntary servitude.

Though strong-willed, they are powerless.

 

OUR consumers,

squealing, “It was only $15!”

are walking global units.

Though influential, we are ignorant.