Few weeks ago, we talked about China, particularly the Xinjiang region where the Uighurs, the Turkish-Muslims inhabitants, are involved in a dramatic cotton war. The Uighurs’ situation, unfortunately, is not the only one, because around the world there are other less known but still ghastly situations related to fashion and, consequently to us as consumers. Vietnam, Myanmar and India, are ‘theater’ of many recent dramatical situations.
Thanks to several journalistic researches and cutting-edge companies as Fashion Revolution, new ‘invisible’ realities around the world are come to light revealing how thousands of women in the textile industry are “slaves” of a “parallel and sick” system.
One of this realities is the founding in the city of Tangier in Morocco, located 14 kilometers away from the Spanish coast. This hosts hundreds illegal textile factories which make up most of the production for the Moroccan’s export.
Photo by Davide Lemmi
Every day, hidden underground, young women and middle-aged women work non-stop for a monthly wage of 200 euros, which is a half of the legal Moroccan salary. During the night of February 8th, a flood hit one of these factories in Tangier allowed the press to expose this reality. The terrible event was a nightmare: 28 people died, precisely 19 women and 9 “supervisors”. Like in a death trap, they drowned in a narrow and crowed space, which had no windows and emergence exits.
That episode reminds us of the event that we know celebrate as International Women’s Day. In fact, on March 8th 1991, a group of women employees worked in New York’s textile company was protesting for the unsustainable working conditions. Allegedly by mistake, they were closed in the factory which went up in flames. 134 women died. Therefore, we can argue that in 110 years little seems to have changed.
“The water entered like a tsunami and submerged everything in a few seconds”, said one of the survivors in an article taken from the Italian magazine “Internazionale”. “We could have died”, added. “Some of us had managed to escape, but the ambulances arrived too late.”
The ghost factories are not tracked by the Moroccan government. Some of them are completely illegal, others are signed for a part of the structures, because they often employ more people than they can legally do.
The original name of the factories is “hofra” and in Tanger there are many located everywhere. The structures are small, damp and dirty, not bigger than 40 square meters, containing dangerous machines that are often falling to pieces. Tangier’s women are imprisoned in that vicious circle, humiliated by a really low salary for a 24h job. Worried, tired and vulnerable, they go to work everyday without justice. and obviously nobody cares. At the moment, they don’t have other working options, and running away is a mere illusion.
Each activity creates a working source and represents the 60% of the Moroccan textile industry, that are at the service of the industries which work for the international fashion giants. Journalistic researches illustrated that among the eminent brands, which get their products from Tangier, there’s the Inditex group with labels such as Zara and Bershka, together also with the luxury brands. Like an assembly-line, the brands entrust the attire to the “true” tangier’s factories, that, consequently, discharge the work to the “hofra” to accelerate the process.
The problem is real and people are not interested because when the fashion brands entrust the production to Tangier, they don’t think about the “hofra” and they don’t monitorize the delocalized production, or, at least, they do it superficially. Superficiality is what generated the “hofra-system” where hundreds of women will continue to be exploited and humiliated until the various brands decide to resolve the situation.
For the first time, we are living in a “sustainable era”, but the brands should understand that this “sustainability” means not only a profound respect for the environment, but also for human rights.
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