The great stitch-up
‘It’s like a little Puerto Rico – we’re basically run by the US,” said Allan, as we drove around San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras and the country’s largest manufacturing centre, one day. “Here there is more ‘freedom’,” he added, doing air quotes. Allan had spent most of his adult life working as a production manager for companies such as Gildan and Hanes, making socks and underwear for American bargain shoppers. All of this garment manufacture now takes place behind the gates of Honduras’s export processing zones (EPZs).
When EPZs proliferated in the 1980s and 90s, their supporters claimed that the employment opportunities inside them would lift up local economies. Allan’s story showed the holes in that argument. After all, he wasn’t just a low-paid garment worker: he was management. He had done everything right. And now, he said, he was moving to Canada.
Allan got a good start: privately educated, he graduated in industrial engineering and got his first job in 2010 at Gildan, as a process engineer. He made a manual of all the production processes, trained the workers and audited the production floor. After 10 months, he moved to product development. He went to work at Hanes, and for Kattan Group, a manufacturer for companies including Nike. Then he hit a pay ceiling when he was earning $700 a month.
When Allan spoke on the phone to his wife, who had gone ahead of him to Ontario to start her studies at a Canadian university, they compared grocery prices. Often, he said, items such as grapes cost less in Canada. That $700-a-month salary didn’t go far in Honduras, he said, where his family of three typically spent $70-$85 a week on groceries, “and that’s just for what you need”. He said it was difficult to imagine how the workers who he used to manage, managed. Workers were paid between $263 and $465 a month. Many have three to four kids. The only other job his college degree could get him in Honduras, Allan said, was in a call centre, but that paid $500 a month at most.
In scouring the globe for cheap labour, US clothing brands are not merely opportunistic, they are also sometimes actively parasitic. Honduras is a case study: one in which US corporations and the US state department have worked together for decades to bring
