Fashion Victims
The sweatshop has moved out of the factory and into the home, where hundreds of Canadian women are doing piecework sewing in appalling conditions for next to no money
BY Kevin Spurgaitis
Illustration by Rob Elliott/Swizzle
Think you’re supporting fair labour practices when you buy clothes made in Canada? Think again. Sweatshops are alive and well here. Not the Dickensian factories you might imagine in a developing nation—here, at home, new immigrants do piecework in their own houses in appalling conditions, for sub-par wages.
Part of the problem is the mismatch between the recruitment of new immigrants and the availability of jobs in their field, says Roxana Ng, a professor at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. “What you are seeing is a changing demographic. Highly qualified immigrants are coming into the country [and] cannot get into their chosen profession.” So, when they become desperate for income, they’re easy targets for apparel companies. And until people start paying more attention and pushing for change, it’s a practice that will continue.
Canada’s garment industry is a major employer of immigrant women, who represent 50 percent of all home-based cutters and sewers. Labour groups estimate there are more than 8,000 homeworkers in Toronto alone. Predominantly Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, they work on industrial sewing machines for as long as nine hours a day, six days a week. Their basement floors are littered with lye, zippers and fabric scraps. And they make as little as $2 per skirt and $4 per dress, which can fetch at least $200 retail. There are no overtime disbursements, statutory holiday or vacation pay and no employment insurance.
According to the Toronto-based Homeworkers Association (HWA), a 250-member outreach and human rights advocacy group now partnered with the Chinese Canadian National Council, shoddy ergonomics, poor ventilation and long hours on the job cause physical and psychological problems and are in direct contravention of Canada’s occupational health and safety regulations.
“I didn’t quite know why, but I knew it was not a right thing,” says Judy Hill, a new immigrant and former HWA coordinator. “[Homeworkers] may not even recognize the dangers in all this, because of the competitive nature of the garment industry. They can’t afford to.” Homeworkers know they’re underpaid, but there is little they can do, she says. If they don’t do the work, someone else will.
Because of the disparate nature of the work, experts say change will have to come from outside the industry. In her report “Homeworking: Home Office or Home Sweatshop,” Ng says provincial governments need to conduct proactive audits of employers, ensuring they don’t violate already-sagging labour standards. She also implores them to protect vulnerable workers through better joint-liability legislation that holds contractors, manufacturers and retailers responsible for work conditions.
Ng also suggests unionizing homeworkers, but Alexandra Dagg, the Canadian director of UNITE HERE Canada, formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, says because they are an invisible demographic, they are hard to reach and whistleblowers are hard to come by. “They are so vulnerable. They feel like there is no option [and they] fear reprisals,” she says.
Ng agrees that’s part of the problem of better protecting the rights of homeworkers but says governments, industry and labour groups must do a better job of reaching out to them. “[These women] want good, reasonable jobs,” says Ng. “There have to be reasonable wages and working conditions so that these women have a real choice between working at home and in the factory.”
