By Vince Caruana
Guiding principles for the improvement of working conditions can be found in conventions issued by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and international principles regarding fundamental rights in the workplace.
These principles include freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, no discrimination of any kind, no forced or slave labour, a minimum employment age of 15, safety and health measures, a working week of 48 hours maximum and voluntary overtime of 12 hours maximum, a right to a decent wage and establishment of the employment relationship.
These standards are the result of an international consultation process with little possibilities for misinterpretation. In spite of this, workers in the garment industry in most parts of the world are faced with decreasing wages, deteriorating health, and an increased risk of losing their job.
According to the Peace Through Interamerican Community Action website (http://www.pica.ws/cc/) roughly half of all clothes sold in stores in the US are made in sweatshops i.e. workplaces where young women and girls labour for poverty wages in conditions that are unsafe, degrading, and often abusive.
Consumer organisations throughout the world are demanding that retailers adopt the standards outlined in the Code of Labour Practices, implement these standards and create a system to continuously ensure that these standards are being upheld.
This does not mean that the clothes will become expensive. In an extreme scenario, if wages were to double and the cost was passed along to consumers, a pair of jeans that now costs Lm20 would then cost Lm21.
Of course, apart from wages, there have to be improvements on the workplace such as better lighting and ventilation.
A great vehicle to ensure that consumers do have a choice is fair trade - a whole system that looks at economic justice issues as they relate to trade.
A question often asked is: Why shouldn't we have fair trade jeans? The reality is that we have, although it is far from becoming widely available as in the case of, say, coffee.
A Dutch NGO, Solidaridad has been promoting fair trade jeans made from cotton bought from Brazilian and Peruvian farmers on fair trade terms. There are, of course, various difficulties.
Coffee is a relatively straightforward commodity. Applying similar principles of environmental and social justice to the whole process from cotton cultivation to spinning, from dying and weaving to cutting and stitching, to actually marketing in an incredibly competitive fashion business is highly complex.
However imperfect such an effort may be, it will eventually succeed because humanity cannot tolerate such situations as sweatshops for too long, nor can consumers accept organic cotton and alternative fibres to be out of reach indefinitely.