China Blue

Yesterday I bought a smart pair of Sportscraft trousers. As with almost anything you buy these days - from Armani to Target - the trousers were made in China. I was in Beijing a year ago and it's impossible not to be struck by the cheap clothes and handbags on sale there in stadium-sized malls that go on as far as the eye can see. It's a sad testament to prosperity that we need all this knock-off stuff and there's no doubt we are trashing the planet in our mad craving for $5 pashminas and $20 Vuitton bags. But last night, a documentary that screened on SBS called China Blue, brought it all home devastatingly. Directed by Micha Peled and filmed clandestinely, the documentary traces the lives of the young village girls - mostly teenagers and many as young as 14 - who are forced to leave their homes to live and work in the factories that produce everything from cheap jeans to luxury items for the big European and American labels.

While the cost of these expensive goods seem to be getting more and more expensive at the retail level in Paris and London, the cost of producing them is getting cheaper - and on the back of considerable human rights abuses. The girls are forced to live 12-to-a-room in dormitories and, homesick for their families, work punishing shifts, which can stretch to 48 hours at a time. (They are poked with sticks and their 8-cents an hour pay is docked radically if they fall asleep.) They rarely see the outside world, let alone have the opportunity to do the sort of thing normal teenage girls do. Workers are paid whenever the boss feels like it (sometimes they go for months without anything.) What's worse, the factories' clients - the American retail chains, the big European labels - only pay lip-service to the conditions of these workers. Time sheets and working conditions are falsified to satisfy the occasional enquiry from a western brand.

Next time you buy any fashions made in China, you might care to remember that the girlhood of hundreds of millions of teenagers has been sacrificed in the production of that trendy jacket you didn't really want anyway and will throw out next season. For God's sake, buy less stuff! And put pressure on the retail chains to only do business with factories that treat their workers in line with Western practises.