Seeing how our clothes are made

Posted by Anura Samara, 23 October 2013

Today, I had the rare opportunity to visit a clothing factory and see what how the clothes we wear are actually made.

I was able to tag along on one of the normal visits by an Enterprise Assessor from Better Work. We received a generous welcome from the company’s finance and administration manager who discussed the history of the factory and the range of brands it is currently making garments for. He then gave us a guided tour of the factory during which basically no area was barred to us – we were free to look around, and he was happy to answer all of our questions.

We started in the area where samples are produced. This is an area where the design plans are produced and then samples are specially made to support the quotes the factory gives to its customers.

From there, we went to the warehouse where all of the fabric is received and stored until needed. Even getting supplies can be an ordeal, as shipping and customs issues can cause delays all along the process of receiving the fabric from the factories in China where it is made.

The first step in the production process is to allow the fabric to relax – after spending so long in rolls, it needs to be allowed to relax back to normal before being cut. We watched the gusy who cut the fabric into its various shapes. At this stage, the individual shapes are unrecognisable as an garment – there are also multiple sizes of each shape as well. The cutting is done using a large, reciprocating style blade with multiple layers of material (up to 75mm) cut in a single pass. It was particularly interesting to see how they deal with striped and patterned fabric, where there is a need to ensure they stripes or patterns line up on the final garmet. From there, some women are responsible for assigning a unique label to every single cut piece – this makes sure that each combination of fabric (colours can vary on a single roll), size and shape can be uniquely identified later on.

We then visited the sewing floors where there is a long line of individual stations working on different sections of the garment. For example, at the first station one person might simply overlock a particular piece – repeatedly and many times in an hour. That piece then moves on to the next station, where another person sews it to a second piece. The production line continues until labels are attached using heat or stamping, loose threads are snipped away and each garmet is checked for quality. It’s fascinating to see a finished, quality garment at the end of the line when you have seen the start of the process only a few metres away.

From there, the garments move to another floor for packing. Unfortunately, our visit coincided with their lunch break (half-hour lunches are taken in shifts) which meant we could see how they manage to fold and pack clothes so neatly. Interestingly, every single item is x-rayed for stray items (eg. fragments of needles) before being packed in a secure area – boxes are shipped directly from here so they need to ensure that nothing else enters the boxes using for shipping.

We were also allowed to have a quick look around the dormitories where the workers live – these aren’t in the factory but still within the same industrial zone. The workers are separately accommodated for male and female workers, with dining area and kitchens together with prayer rooms on the ground floor. Each floor has multiple rooms with 8 beds, although there are only 6 people in each room – the spare beds are used for extra storage space. The rooms are the workers own private space, so they are responsible for cleaning and can have whatever they want in there – we saw fridges, laptops and TVs.

Overall, the factory has 900 workers from multiple nationalities and produces a staggering 28,000 items every day. The workers work for 11 hours a day, for 6 days a week. As the manager says, they are there to make money not to do any sightseeing in Jordan.

Some of the thoughts I took away from the visit:

• the sheer industrialisation of processes – the way specific machines have been built to do one function and only one function, but very quickly and accurately,
• people work in highly specialised roles. Although there is scope for people to work across different parts of the production line and to even become supervisors, the reality for most people is that they perform a single, very small function continously without ever seeing the finished product,
• scheduling all of the elements that go into producing a finished garment must be a massive task. Everything from ordering fabric, maintenance of machines, hiring staff, design and production needs to be carefully coordinated to make sure that orders can be filled on time,
• people work long days at what looks to me like boring jobs. I guess it’s hard to comment really – it might be a lot better than they are used to in their own countries, with a stable job that pays well and provides all of their food and accommodation, and
• the factory is really like a small town, and the managers have to deal with four different nationalities with their own languages, foods, cultural and religious expectations.

Like everyone else in a western country, to a large extent my standard of living has been supported by the ability to produce high quality goods at a cheap price. It’s just that I’ve never been confronted with how that happens, and particularly it’s impact on real people. I’m not necessarily arguing for change but its challenging to see how my behavious as a consumer impacts on people half a world away.

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