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BOOK
REVIEW
Globalization ideologues have no
clothes
The Travels of a
T-shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist
Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World
Trade by Pietra Rivoli
Reviewed by Gary LaMoshi
Like most
economists, Georgetown University business
professor Pietra Rivoli believes in free trade.
But anti-globalization demonstrators on campus and
around the world led her to re-examine her view.
To move past strident rhetoric on both
flanks, Rivoli follows the path of a US$5.99
souvenir T-shirt scooped from a bin at a
Walgreen's drugstore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Rivoli combines
the threads of the T-shirt's journey through the
global supply chain to weave a rich tapestry of
globalization past and present that focuses on
real people to rip fabrications on all sides of
the debate. Beyond that, The Travels of a
T-shirt in the Global Economy is a great read.
The humble
T-shirt is a particularly good choice for Rivoli's
narrative. The story is timely, because this year
marks the end of US textile import quotas under
the 40-year-old Multifiber Agreement. It's
timeless, because cotton goods have been at the
center of global trade debates since the 17th
century.
England's wool industry won
protection against cotton-cloth imports in 1701.
That policy spurred growth of domestic cotton
milling and, through it, the industrial
revolution, creating demand beyond the means of
cotton farmers in China and India. This pattern
repeats throughout trade history: bottlenecks lead
to innovations, but only where social and
political systems embrace change; trade restraints
foster unintended consequences; and textile
production is less a "race to the bottom" than the
first rung on a climb up the industrialization
ladder.
The parrot design on Rivoli's
T-shirt was printed in Florida, but the shirt
carries a "made in China" label - Rivoli later
explains why that's not as common as you think -
and she tracks down the manufacturer. She meets
Shanghai Knitwear manager Patrick Xu during one of
his sales trips to the United States, and he
promises to show Rivoli the entire manufacturing
process in China, from spinning the thread to
sewing the sleeves. But, Rivoli asks, what about
the farm where the cotton is grown? Xu replies
that the cotton probably was raised far from
Shanghai, in "Teksa". "Where's that?" Rivoli
demands. Xu points on Rivoli's office globe to
Texas.
Since the 19th century, the US
south has dominated global cotton cultivation, and
since the 1930s, west Texas has been the leading
producer. A confluence of innovation,
entrepreneurship, and cooperation has transformed
the barren landscape around Lubbock into the
Silicon Valley of cotton farming. But in Texas, as
in China and other stops along the T-shirt's
journey, it's not Adam Smith's invisible hand that
determine winners in global trade, but the ability
of farmers, manufacturers and distributors to foil
market mechanisms.
In 1793, Eli Whitney's cotton gin solved the
problem of removing seeds from sticky cotton fiber
that dominate the US crop, but there's a
larger problem with cotton farming: labor. Delicate cotton
puffs must be harvested at specific but
unpredictable times, and every grower in an
area needs pickers at the same time. To break this
bottleneck, farmers needed a guaranteed supply of labor.
From slavery to sharecropping to Mexican guest
workers, public policy provided farm
labor on demand - until government-aided
technological advances allowed farmers such as
Nelson Reinsch of Smyer, Texas, to tend his 1,000
acres (about 400 hectares) virtually alone. Only
in recent decades have direct subsidies and import
restrictions - key poor-country complaints in
current global trade forums - supplanted more
subtle forms of government support to cotton
farmers.
Chinese textile manufacturers'
current competitive advantage, cheap labor, stems
in part from the hukou system, a communist
innovation that ties farm families to their
villages. Virtually every urban migrant worker is
in violation of hukou rules, rendering them
compliant and tolerant of sweatshop conditions.
But legal restrictions and shop-floor misery
didn't stop Jiang Lan from coming to Shanghai any
more than they kept earlier generations from
swarming into Manchester, England, and New
Hampshire.
Rivoli points out that for
workers, overwhelmingly women from rural areas,
the opportunity to be exploited in a factory beats
their future on a farm. Compared with picking
cotton or an arranged marriage at age 14, a
factory job is a great leap forward economically
and socially. Beyond sending money home to the
family, working in the city, even living in a
company dormitory or 19th-century rooming house
with restrictions to protect feminine morals,
grants independence and opportunities unimagined
in Carolina's foothills or China's dust bowl.
Westerners may be appalled at Shanghai No
36 Mill's 48-hour workweek amid deafening noise,
stifling heat and dust for $4 a day, but decades
of activism have significantly improved factory
conditions. Rivoli reviews reports of maimings and
deaths in English mills in 1843, then observes
that today's Shanghai Brightness Factory employees
retain all their limbs, have never heard of
brown-lung disease, and boast a longer life
expectancy than New Yorkers, as well as money in
their pockets and optimism about their futures.
Leaving the Chinese mill, Rivoli's T-shirt
confronts US import restrictions designed to
protect dwindling domestic textile manufacturers.
Volumes of arcane rules have proved most effective
at producing employment for lobbyists, rather than
saving textile jobs in the US south. Rivoli also
notes that China has lost far more textile jobs
than the US over the past decade as it gains new
technologies to boost efficiency and, like the US,
Japan and South Korea, progresses up the value
chain to computers and cars.
Lucky
T-shirts that vault US entry barriers often have
another journey ahead. American consumers cast off
more than 250,000 tons of clothing a year, much of
which finds it way from Salvation Army bins into
the global used-clothing market. For Rivoli the
economist, this voyage is the most fascinating
because, at long last, the T-shirt meets a global
free market.
At Trans-Americas Trading Co
on the waterfront of Brooklyn, New York, 80
employees pick through affluent Americans'
castoffs. It's a "snowflake" business: every item
is unique. Workers sort clothing into 400
categories, separating pieces suitable only for
industrial rags or upholstery stuffing from jeans
or Led Zeppelin T-shirts that can fetch hundreds
or even thousands of dollars at vintage-clothing
stores in Tribeca or Tokyo. (Vintage clothing is
like pornography: hard to define, but experts know
it when they see it.) Most of Trans-Americas'
harvest is exported to the poorest countries on
Earth. In Tanzania, a recovering East African
socialist basket case, mitumba (Swahili for
"used clothing") is the top US import.
Rivoli rejects the value judgments on both
sides of the Atlantic that label the trade in used
clothing as "shadowy" and accuse "middlemen" of
exacting "huge profits" on items that sell for
pennies. To the arguments that donated clothing
should simply be given to the world's poor, Rivoli
asks, how? Market forces make it more likely
consumers will get mitumba they want at
prices they'll pay. The alternative is an
underground business in which bureaucrats and
border guards pocket illegal profits.
As
for the argument that used clothing stifles
fledgling textile industries, Rivoli notes that
while Tanzania banned used (and most other)
clothing imports until economic reforms in 1985,
factories ran at 40% capacity. Mitumba
isn't holding Tanzania back from economic
development, according to Rivoli, it's one of the
few positive signs of it. Geofrey Mionge and
fellow mitumba dealers lining Morogoro Road
on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam not only
practice free-market disciplines, they provide
more jobs for sorters, washers, tailors and
hawkers than most textile mills.
Critics
charge that wearing the West's castoffs is
humiliating, but Tanzanians know the real
humiliation is having nothing to wear. In a
straightforward, entertaining fashion, Rivoli
demonstrates that ideologues on the both sides of
the globalization debate ignore the realities of
world trade. These hypocrites, like Tanzanians
under the mitumba ban, have no clothes.
The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global
Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power,
and Politics of World Trade, by Pietra Rivoli,
John Wiley & Sons, 2005, Hoboken, New Jersey.
ISBN: 0-471-64849-3. Price: US$29.95, 254 pages.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us for information
on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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