Every time I am in a store or browsing through a catalog and see a label on a sweater stating that it is handknit, I have a hard time beleive that grannies on the Isle of Aran ( or where ever ) are just cranking out 9,000 sweaters for the Gap or J. Crew.
What’s the story?
Really cheap labor in really poor countries.
Ever seen doilies for sale for a dollar or two? Each doily can take hours to make.
What I’ve heard is that women in China make a lot of these items. They do it after they get off work.
After a hard day of work, would you knit or crochet for hours to make an extra ten cents? They do.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get so negative. It just depresses me. Like the companies selling these products couldn’t pay the workers a little bit more…
Oddly enough, I used to work for a fashion house that did all their business importing Mongolian Cashmere sweaters (which were sold under various brands, including J Crew). The boss frequently went to Mongolia, where the shepherds live in stone-age conditions. They built a factory to knit the sweaters, and my boss visited there frequently.
Suffice to say, all the sweaters are made by hand, using machines. These aren’t made by little old Chinese ladies with knitting needles, they’re made by little old Chinese ladies with high-speed mechanical looms. Since the looms are operated by hand, the manufacturer believes it is legitimate to call them hand made. I suppose they are right to make this claim, a single operator can only make 5 or 10 sweaters a day. It’s not like they’re cranking out hundreds of sweaters a day on completely automated machines.
Ok, maybe it’s not as bad as I thought when it comes to sweaters. But there are no crochet machines. So if you see a crochet tablecloth, it was all done by hand. And if Wal Mart is selling the tablecloth for twenty dollars, you can guess the people making it aren’t getting paid very much.
My mother owns a yarn business on the Isle of Skye. She does indeed pay little old ladies to hand knit her designs, though I think she pays them quite well. However, what she charges for her finished product reflects this! Worth it, IMHO, but she’s my mom & I’m biased.
We used to “hand knit” school uniforms for the underprivileged girls in Kenya. We had knitting machines that made it at least ten times faster than knit-one purl-two with needles. That’s just the main blocks, of course. The seams were the same.
Carina42 - I’m sure your mother does pay a good wage to the women who knit with her. There are plenty of hand-made products that are priced to reflect the amount of work involved. My pet peeve is with companies that exploit desperate people.
lesa - I agree, but that’s a double edged sword. Many companies (Nike, Gap, GM) do go to third world countries for the very cheap labour, and to avoid paying worker benefits & having to deal with pesky federal regulations like OSHA. On the other hand, this does not necessarily mean that people are being exploited; I understand it can be a big economic boom for alot of places where previously people had NO income at all. I guess if I were Ms Nike, and I could get people making shoes for $2.00 a day (in a region where annual income may be $100 or so), I would do that. Seems like a win-win situation to me. I’m not talking child labour, or forcing people to work 18 hours straight with no protection against toxic glues or anything.
I am not really knowleagable about this, having only read editorial comment & listened to a little talk radio on the subject. And this is getting to be a whole 'nother thread.
Most of the women making my mom’s sweaters are elderly & accomplished knitters. They can watch TV or visit & knit in the evenings & make pretty decent money.
My sister works with a nonprofit foundation, they had an interesting project. She would occasionally go to places like Guatemala and try to organize the local women into weaving collectives with US and international funding to buy them looms and materials. It revived some of the native weaving techniques and the foreign buyers love them. The locals make a lot more money selling the weavings as a collective to international markets. They tried to avoid setting up sweatshops, and made the work as profitable to the weavers as possible without middlemen taking all the profits.
But the the biggest problem is attracting local women away from the highest paying local job, prostitution. In fact, in some areas the local collective also functions as the local whorehouse, the women sit around weaving until they have to go turn a trick. She bemoaned the problem of the local pimps still exploiting the women, now they are forced to labor at the looms between tricks, and the pimps still steal most of the women’s money. She said she tried without much success to organize the women to stand up to the pimps, they could subsist solely on the income from the collective. Oh well…
So my mental image of a bunch of gray haired grannies sitting around the fire cranking out sweaters has been destroyed by the evil that is JCrew and the Gap. I was right. But I’m still going to cling to the image of Carina’s mom making something just for me
Carina, your mom’s stuff looks incredible. If only the exchange rate were not so crappy, I would send over a …:::mumble::::Gap sweater ( that I purchased at a Garage Sale for $1.00, that I absolutely love and have worn it too death. It is on it’s last legs (or is that arms?) and want to duplicate it. Being that I can barely crochet potholders, I shant even attempt cloning this sweater.
[abstract thought] I wonder what the Mongolian sheepherders did with their wool prior to the huns ( jcrew, gap and other locusts) came along. [/end]