Tim Worstall

The True Cost of Cheap Clothes

Wonderful piece in The Guardian by Rahila Gupta. What exactly is the cost of the cheap clothes flooding into Britain via stores like Primark?

Where does this downward pressure on prices lead us? In some cases
to places such as Bangladesh, where the cost of clothing production is
half that of China’s; and to textile factories where women earning just
£7 a month and often working 80-hour weeks make up more than 90% of the
workforce.

According to this report, women’s clothing prices have
fallen by a third in 10 years. The cheap end of the market has doubled
in size in just five years to notch up £6bn of sales in 2005. We now
buy 40% of our clothes at stores such as Primark and its competitors
with just 17% of our clothing budget.

Exactly! Hurrah, Hurrah! Enlightened self-interest benefits us all!

We get to clothe ourselves more cheaply, women in Bangladesh get to move from no pounds a month and 100 hour weeks hand weeding the rice paddies to 7 a month and 80 hour weeks. We’re all winners!

Pity that Gupta doesn’t understand this but then there we are, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. You can lead Guardian columnists to the evidence but you can’t make them think.

In

2 responses

  1. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Ah those were the days when I could read with mounting fascination civil service rationales (spin) for spending more taxpayers’ money in subsidies paid to the textile and clothing industries for strategic reasons and to maintain national security. Consider the dire national plight if we had no national source for making underwear in times of war . .
    In fact, by the 1980s and early 1990s most of the (diminishing) subsidies for clothing and textiles came by way of grants for employment creating/safeguarding projects in areas eligible for regional assistance. Because by chance I had witnessed as a spectator the start of a clothing project oop north I was able to see what happened downstream several years later after all the grants for the project had run out and the business losses started mount.
    The firm was proposing to shut down when along came another clothing firm offering to take the business on providing it was eligible for job safeguarding grants – which were duly offered because of the persisting high unemployment rates in the area. Meanwhile, the first firm went off to find and offer to buy another clothing business which was closing down in another part of the country eligible for regional assistance – providing, of course, there were grants for job safeguarding. Naturally, because high unemployment rates were endemic there too, grants were offered.
    It was instructive to watch all this from a desk in London. One clear insight was how the system of regional assistance – intended for the best of all possible motives to boost job creation in areas with persisting high unempolyment rates – in fact acted as an in-built mechanism for attracting and supporting declining industries in areas with high unemployment rates.

    Reply
  2. johnny bonk Avatar
    johnny bonk

    “women earning just £7 a month and often working 80-hour weeks make up more than 90% of the workforce” — I doubt those metrics.
    When I was younger I would have tried to enlighten the author, but nowadays I realise it really is only a matter of which side you are on.
    Power and violence are the only real currency – truth, reason, facts … ha ha.
    Which side are you on?

    Reply

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