MGMT1035 Week 10 Transcript - Cotton & Textiles

SPEAKER 0 Hi and welcome to week 10 of management. 1035. As we rapidly approach the end of the course, this week, we're talking about cotton and textiles. Uh We're talking about fast fashion. Uh We're talking about really an industry that for most of its history has been quite exploitive. Uh And uh...

SPEAKER 0 Hi and welcome to week 10 of management. 1035. As we rapidly approach the end of the course, this week, we're talking about cotton and textiles. Uh We're talking about fast fashion. Uh We're talking about really an industry that for most of its history has been quite exploitive. Uh And uh we're gonna be looking at some of the issues that create uh for this for the video component of this week's uh uh lecture section. Uh I wanna look at the historical background a little bit more recent stuff, but mostly at the historical background, particularly of cotton. Uh because cotton is a product that changed the world, the rapid expansion of cotton t uh cotton cloth, uh the ability to manufacture cotton cloth in an industrial fashion in vast quantities, which made it very inexpensive. Uh made it a critical component of a lot of parts of the global economy. And so we'll look at that uh one phrase that I, I love to talk about uh as I think about cotton and as we work our way through stuff is that the cotton business chases cheap that they, they avoid regulation. They look for opportunities to reduce the cost of production of often by reducing the cost of labor. Uh And that has been a factor throughout the history of humanity's use of cotton as a textile. So let's jump into a little bit of that historical background. And ID like to frame a lot of this by, by thinking about t-shirts. Uh cotton t-shirts are something uh perhaps blended fabric now. But for the most part, over a lot of history, cotton t-shirts, uh they're universal. Uh almost everyone owns a t-shirt. At least one. I myself own several. Uh They are usually inexpensive and the ethics of their manufacture can be very controversial. Uh For example, I bought a t-shirt for, you know, I think at, at Old Navy. So, and, and it cost me like $6. So how does anybody make any money on a $6 T shirt might be an interesting question to try and get to the bottom of. So I, I like to go back in this case to our earliest experiences with cotton because I think that really helps you understand the arc of how we get to where we are now, where it's so pervasive. Uh and, and such an essential part of the global economy. If, if you know, we look at the archaeology of, of uh early human history, we see that cotton has been grown and used by people in South and Central America. Uh certainly uh in the Indus River Valley uh early Egypt uh where th those climates were good for the cotton uh plant. And people generally learn fairly quickly to use that resource to produce fabric, to produce clothing. Uh And as I say, the, the historical and archaeological record indicates that this has been going on literally for thousands and thousands of years. So that's the cotton plant there there. Uh You should uh remember what that looks like as we work our way through this little uh video component. Um So all those places I mentioned had cotton but Europe didn't really, the climate in Europe was not ideal for cotton. Uh In, in Europe, they used uh wo wool or leather uh for the most part, a little bit of uh uh linen, but again, that was somewhat restricted. Uh and they, but they weren't exposed to silk and they weren't exposed to cotton very much. Uh It makes its way into Europe, especially the southern Europe because of the Greeks. So this is Alexander, the great uh a military leader of either Greek or Macedonian. I don't want to get into that big argument. Uh But he led a massive army toward and into India uh on a, a sort of a campaign of conquest. Uh And when the, when Alexander, the great and his uh armies arrived there, they encountered this, as the historian described it, this amazing fabric, a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep. He said because they had no mental context of what cotton could possibly be. Uh So they did what conquering armies normally do. They looted things, they took things and a lot of what they took was caught because they liked it qu quite a bit. And when they got back to Europe, they made their way back to Europe with all of the, the benefits of conquest, that fabric, that trade suddenly became a factor for Southern Europe and then eventually for the rest of Europe as well. Uh We know that by the time we get into the middle ages, uh traders from uh uh what was called the silk road. As we saw earlier in the course, we're bringing uh cotton fabric into Europe, especially into Southern Europe. We know that uh Islamic conquest of uh parts of Spain and Sicily, uh they brought with them the technology to spin uh cotton and create cotton fabric there. Uh When they were pushed back out, those technologies stayed in Spain and Sicily, uh the, the knowledge of how to do that uh spreads around Europe. It's already existing in separately and independently uh in the western hemisphere. And, and when Columbus arrives there in the Bahamas, he sees if the natives have cotton clothing, he's impressed that they've also developed very bright colors that they have dyed this fabric. He amongst the thing, he's things he steals and loots and uh takes back to Spain is a bunch of this cloth like look, it's nice. It's mine. Um By 1500 the use of cotton is becoming much more common in Europe. People like it for the same reasons we like it. Uh This is by the way, a cotton shirt, it's light, it's comfortable. Uh It stands up to, you know, repeated washing all the kind of things you want in a fabric. Uh So not surprisingly becomes quite popular and I, I see this with a little bit of hesitancy. But for the most part, it's inexpensive, it's beco gonna become a lot more inexpensive as time goes by. But even in the early introductory periods, it tended uh to be at least comparable to woolen stuff and maybe even a little less expensive than woolen goods uh in Europe. By the time we get into the 16 hundreds, cotton's being grown in Virginia. Uh And we're beginning to get to a period where the colonial power in this case, uh the British uh the English in particular, uh we're looking for inexpensive sources of, of cotton for one thing. Uh And also a foundation for an economy in this Virginia colony. Uh We can go back and look, they also introduced tobacco to Virginia. Uh The thing about tobacco and the thing about uh uh cotton though is that you require a large inexpensive workforce both to produce it and the early processing parts of pro cotton production. So that meant that the British in Virginia and eventually up and down the eastern seaboard introduced an extensive program of, of slavery to support this new economy. And in fact, the cotton economy, it, it quickly becomes evident, at least in the, in the eyes of southern USA residents that uh at the time that you cannot have a cotton economy without slavery. And that's gonna have some significant impacts as time goes on. Uh For the most part, most part though India remained uh the major source of supply of cotton, it had a uh fully developed cotton industry. They had a large supply of cotton, it grew well there. They also had uh a number of trade secrets of how to die it, how to process it. Uh They had a relatively advanced cotton business for a pre industrial cotton business uh and they supplied most of Europe with the with their cotton needs. Uh in return, they got gold um by the 17 hundreds, uh 95% of British cotton, for example, is coming from India. Now, as we will see in and you will see in your asynchronous readings this week. Uh The the actions of the uh East India company kind of changed that dynamic changed the nature of the cotton business in India in ways not very good for the Indians. Uh But again, another reflection of what uh mercantilist power in a colonial system can, can do to uh colonial economies. But cotton production in India and elsewhere is limited by a couple of things, a cost obviously costs always a limitation and everything. Uh But it's also limited by technology. And this is gonna be the thing that changes the thing that makes cotton pervasive in ways that uh in the early days, they could only perhaps imagined, uh we're gonna talk a lot about, uh, you're gonna read a lot about the East India company in cotton. So I won't linger too much on this point. But as time goes on because the East India Company uh is able to uh marshal the supply of cotton in India, send it to England where it's processed and they can then take it back to India and sell it for less than the domestic Indian eco uh producers could uh just uh astonishing development colonial cotton in America and the Caribbean. Uh there's lots and lots of cotton now suddenly being produced under colonial systems and the big beneficiary of that of course, is gonna be the British. So what restricts production? Well, number of things. Think back to I, I had you look at that uh slide that had uh uh the cotton plant. Um And that is the, the nature of the plant is itself one of one of the big restrictions here because if you were to take that cotton off the plant, you would see, yes, it's nice and white and fluffy, but it's flecked through with a bunch of little black things that are actually seeds cotton seeds and those cotton seeds are pretty oily. And the moment you take it off the plant, that oil starts to go rancid, it's, uh, it starts to go bad. And so if you don't get those seeds out really quickly, the cotton's useless, it's spoiled. So therefore you have to immediately comb the cotton. So for a long time, this is the bottleneck in cotton production because really the only way to do that is manually is to one at a time doing all that, that uh uh combing out of these seeds in order to get the finished product. Um And again, there, there's all sorts of stay, uh then you have to uh spin the this cotton fabric into a thread, then that thread is roomed into something into cotton fabric, into sheets of, of fabric. All of that relies on manual labor or in some cases very, very rudimentary technology. So that's a real uh restriction on the way in which cotton is gonna be developed and what's gonna change, that's gonna be industrialism as we'll see in this app. Um We'll see right now changes everything. This is a spinning Jenny. Um And I like this uh image because it shows you if I can use my thing here, see that that's a crank. So instead of in the old system where you had one person spinning, you know, cotton into thread, now you have this system in which one person turning that crank can do eight spindles at once. So now one person is doing what once required eight people and the technology is getting better and better. Uh You say that's an early one, the Hard Reeves Spinning Journey. Um Arkwright, another early developer, uh added water power like fast moving water to turn a wheel which uh uh allowed him to uh expand beyond the eight spools into a much larger collection. This is sort of a model of, of, of what he was going to be doing. Um This phrase is something that uh people like Arkwright and uh other manufacturers in the interest in, in industry and it really summarizes what industrialism means. So it has applications far beyond cotton. But I, I think we need to understand it especially in this context and that's why I put it in bold on the slide. One person could do the work of many, which is great unless you're the many right. Suddenly all of those jobs, all of that, the employment that that was required to create cotton thread to create cotton fabric. Uh All of that is gone. It's replaced by machines and people are not oblivious to this. In 1768 an angry mob went into Arkwright's factory and smashed up all the machines. Uh But it's too late, sort of the phrase, the genie is out of the bottle that, that the change is so evident and spread so quickly, especially in England that it, that there's no going back. Industrialism has arrived for cotton production. This is uh they've begun to uh introduce steam power uh that allows them to have powerful looms. In addition to uh just every step of the way suddenly is able to operate on a much larger scale than it had ever been the case before. But you need more cotton and you still come back to that problem. You still come back to that moment that cotton leaves. The plant gotta get those seeds out the solution to this uh arrived at towards the end of the 17 hundreds in, in the Southern US is something called Eli Whitney's cotton gin. And then there you can see one of his early examples of uh uh the production. So what would happen is you would take this raw cotton, dump it into a bin at the top of the machine. You would initially in this model, you can, you can stop pointing to the I have two screens here. So I'm pointing at the wrong one. I you can turn this crank very, very quickly. They introduce more powered stuff, but whether by literal horsepower in which they have horses walking around in circles or then fairly quickly they introduce things like steam. Um But that this very quickly spins around and suddenly, uh you know, one person could do what took a, a whole barn full of people hours to do I in minutes. Uh And, and it just it dramatically increases the ability to produce cotton to put into that, that system, which is becoming more and more and more hungry for it. So, let's talk about industrial cotton a little bit. This uh I, I quite like this picture a lot because you could take a look at this picture. You can blow it up if you have a high enough quality in uh copy of it and you will see none or almost no people. Uh you will see all of those machines. Now, it's a little deceiving because you still need people occasionally to either clean the machines or to remove the are spinning. Uh great big rolls of fabric and once the roll reaches a certain size, you have to remove it and start another one. But just think each one of those belts going down is operating a machine. Uh So all across this like that's just one factory uh just an astonishingly uh productive system and it has enormous results. Uh as industrialism is introduced into into the English cotton uh industry, uh especially after steam is introduced into the English cotton economy. Uh production levels just skyrocket. In 1796 the English who remembered no cotton grows in England, right? Any cotton they are producing, they need to bring in from other places. 1796 there's about 21 million yards of cotton cloth that are produced in England. It's a lot. But if we go forward just you know, 35 years, then 347 million yards of cotton are produced. Uh just uh you know, the value of the industry is skyrocketing, the production of the industry is skyrocketing. The technology is, is sort of washing over into the production of cotton. Uh silk, silk is a, a little bit more delicate. So there's some complications uh but just massive amounts of money. So if we think about Manchester and Manchester is a city that uh perhaps now is known more for uh their football teams, then uh then it's known for what it was for a long time, which is the birthplace of industry in, in uh Britain. Uh But if you look at Manchester alone, uh in 7, 1790 there were two very successful cotton mills in Manchester. And then just like 30 years later, there are 66 all very successful, all producing massive amounts of cotton fabric, which makes Britain makes England the cat, uh the cotton capital of the world. And again, in a country that doesn't grow cotton, which I think uh tells us something about, about the, the power of colonialism as well. So I want to talk about workforce because again, go back to what I said at the beginning of this little video thing that uh one of the successes of cotton is achieved by keeping the workforce uh underpaid uh in England. Uh Children and women were the prime sources of labor. Uh initially when, when, as the factories first started and especially going back to when manual power was, was much more important, males tended to, to be the people working in these facilities. But as more and more technology made the physical strengths required much less. Uh the owners of the mills realized that they could hire women for much less than they had to pay men just because that's the way that the society worked and they could pay Children even less. And Children as young as 87 or eight years old would be working full time in these cotton factories. And you can see in this illustration which I, I love this illustration. So you can see down here, there's a little kid down under there with a couple of other kids here. Uh And you know, most of the work is being done by women. The men here tend to be uh just sort of standing around looking rich. Uh But that kid who's under the machine, very specific job because if you, well II, I like to talk about the fact that if you do the laundry, run it through the dryer, that lint trap because there's a lot of lint. And most of that lin is caught in a little bits of cotton and the same sort of thing would happen in these, in these factories and it would build up much as it would on your lint filter. Uh And eventually it would it would make the machine difficult or impossible to operate. So you have to get that lint out of there. It seemed to make sense that in order to do that, you stop the machine and go in and remove all that land. But if you stop the machine, then you're not making cotton. And if you're not making cotton, you're not making money. So why not get a little kid who can get under the machine and reach up into it and pull that lint out while the machines were operating. It sounds remarkably dangerous because it was remarkably dangerous. Uh The, I mean, the annals of the English cotton industry in this period are littered with example, after example of little kids who lose arms or hands or whatever, trying to clean these machines while they're still operating. Um And at the time, a lot of people kind of understood that maybe this is wrong. You should, should a seven year old be working a full time job. Uh They, as early as 1803, they had parliamentary inquires should. And parliamentarians asked the people that own these big factories, you know, is it really a good, is it appropriate to hire little kids to do this job? And their response is to a modern era, I think quite shocking, which is, well, what else are they gonna do? Uh at least this way they can help their, their family out a little bit. And if it wasn't for us, they'd just be hanging around on the streets. Nobody sort of said, well, why don't we educate them because they didn't want an educated population for the most part. Uh, and it really isn't until we get well into the 18 hundreds, like 18 eighties that the, that the English get very serious about enforcing child labor provisions. And even then with lots of openings and gaps in 1833 they make their first attempt to try and say, OK, we, so we kind of recognize this is probably wrong to use these little kids. So here's the rule uh from now on, in order to get a job at the cotton factory, you have to be at least nine years old. Then from the time you're nine until you're 13, you're limited to nine hours a day, 48 hours a week, which is a, a significant, they were working at least 12 and the adults were working 12 hour shifts and more uh in, in the mills before then. Uh by the time you're 14, you're considered an adult. And chances are they might be looking to replace you with somebody who is much younger. Uh And the thing about, about this is I wanna talk about regulation because when we uh you know, a lot of what you're gonna look at in, in, in the material and uh examples, we might consider the solution seems to be regulation, but regulations only work if you enforce those regulations. Uh And the problem with the 1833 Factory Act was they had some really good regulations and almost no one to enforce them. So they were, for the most part ignored. So if we're looking at England, I, and as I think we should because it is the foundation of this uh global industrialized uh cotton industry. Um It, and it was the thing that changed England into the first and the biggest industrial power. Uh It allowed them to mass produce cotton fabric, uh gave them global control of the commodity. They could uh you know, they were extracting huge amounts from the American South, from India and elsewhere. Uh It allowed them to dominate economies. They went into India and completely restructured the Indian economy under colonialism in order to facilitate a lot of what they wanted to do. Um And at home, it creates a very powerful industrial economy. It expanded significantly the, the English middle class, but it did so at the expense of horrible working conditions for women and Children, not to mention uh you know, sustaining a global slave economy uh for the production of the raw materials. So there's some problems there. Now, America got into this business too. I don't want to linger too long on this. But the, the, the British recognized that their advantage in industrial technology was a huge benefit to them and therefore they worked very hard to make sure that that technical knowledge that they had and the skilled workers that they had, that made it possible. Not the people running the machine on the factory floor, but the people that built the machine and modified it or repaired it uh gave them enormous benefits. So they wanted to keep that, they made it illegal to export any of the technology. They also made it illegal for any of the skilled workers who could run the machines, you know, set up the machines, all that sort of stuff for manufactured. They couldn't leave England either. Uh the Americans not happy with this. After the American revolution, various Americans go over to England uh and either by observation or by subterfuge or whatever, begin to, to take that to steal that technology basically and bring it back to America and especially to the New England area around Boston uh mass, the Massachusetts area, New Hampshire and the like where suddenly you begin to see uh people like Francis Cabot Law um who becomes a, a leading American industrialist. Uh He sets up his place in what became known as Lowell Massachusetts. He designed it as a model community built around textile manufacturing. Um Unlike the, unlike the English, he did not have a source of docile labor nearby the English working class people just had no options. So they were largely forced to do whatever the cotton factory people told them to. But in, in, in the States, what they found was workers who didn't like what was going on could leave. They could move west to get a farm. They could go almost anywhere and look in a growing economy, hope to enjoy some success elsewhere. So law recognized he had to treat his workers a little bit better. Uh He brings in, uh he recruits uh what were known as uh uh mill girls, factory girls, but they like to call operatives because they ran the machinery. Uh But for the most part, the these are, are young women who are recruited from farming families around New England and Lowell or as representatives would say, you know, your daughter can come and live at Lowell and live in a dormitory and there'll be chaperones and all that kind of stuff and she'll make some money and then she can come home, get married and, you know, start farming or whatever, a reasonably compelling argument for a lot of people. But it also gave those workers a bit more uh power than workers in, in England had had because they could just leave. Uh and because their families had some political power, but then things at Lowell and, and a bunch of the other parts of New England start to decline. Uh Not that they're not making lots and lots of cloth. And uh you know, the owners are still doing pretty well about this, but working conditions become a problem uh because cot cotton cloth because the Americans are producing so very much of it because now in Europe they're starting to produce some that English Stranglehold is largely still there, but they, they now have competitors and as good business students, you know that if you have a product and there's a whole bunch of it suddenly on the market, that price is gonna go down. And that's what happened to cotton in the 18 thirties. Um, th those young women in, in New England, they tried going on strike which was unheard of at the time. Uh the government of Massachusetts tried passing laws to restrict the what you could do. Uh you know, the conditions you could have in factories. But again, I go back to the fact you could have all sorts of regulation. But if you don't enforce them, then it's meaningless. Uh The what happens then is a wave of poor Irish immigrants in the face of the Irish famine uh who replace these young people and actually recreate in New England. The conditions in England, these waves of desperate people uh who need any kind of work at all to survive. And there it is, they can go and work in a, in a cotton factory. So we get to the middle of the 18 fifties in the United States. Cotton is as the phrase goes king cotton. It is at the heart of the American economy in a lot of different ways. More than 50% of all us exports in the 18 fifties are caught in a, a lot of that going to England. Uh that doesn't even count the cotton that's being shipped north into, into the uh New England cotton factories. It's just a massive amount of cotton being extracted from the Southern US and the technology, technological improvements and stuff like that means the cotton frontier is being approached further and further west into places like Texas and other Southern US states. Um And all those things mean more and more and more and more appetite for slaves. Sven Beckert, who's a economic historian wrote a book a couple of years ago called the Empire of Cotton. Uh And in it, he begins very early in the introduction with this uh I I think quite important sentence slavery stood at the center of the most dynamic and far reaching production complex in human history and almost impossible to argue that point. It was thought by most of the uh American South and by some people in the North uh that slavery was essential that you cannot have a cotton system, a cotton economy without slaves. It just is impossible in the North and increasingly in places like uh Britain and and other parts of Europe. There was a sense maybe that slavery was ethically problematic to say the least but also not necessarily economically stable or in the longer term advisable. And so there's two competing criticisms of the system, one based on, you know, this somewhat cold economic analysis, but then a very powerful one that says, no, this is wrong. We should not be doing this. Uh And of course, the upshot of that is the US civil war. I'm not gonna talk a lot about the war. Uh You know, the, there's, it's a fascinating conflict militarily. Uh some people call it the first industrial war because certainly in the north to a certain extent. So they had the capacity to create and use weapons of industrial complexity, which made it a very deadly war um lasted 1861 to 65. Uh and it created chaos in the global cotton market. Talk about how much of the world's cotton came out of the US. And now suddenly because of the uh trade uh restrictions imposed by the North, they literally blockaded the south to try and prevent cotton from being exported to give the South money. Uh They destroyed cotton production, they destroyed warehoused cotton. Um and lo lost access to that American cotton. Put a real shock through the the global cotton economy. The English look back to India, they had had said to India. Well, you know, we're getting all this American cotton now, don't worry so much about. Well, no, now, you know, tear up all the food you're growing and start making more cotton because we need cotton. Uh Similarly, in Egypt, the same sort of thing happens uh to feed that uh colonial appetite for raw cotton. The consequences in India are devastating uh in, you know, famine based upon the loss of food production to replace cot. Um the necessity for the, for this cotton. Uh the regret that there's access to it had been declined, led to some sympathy in England for the, for the American confederacy. Some people thought, oh, well, the English, they liked the confederacy because they, you know, were quite gallant and uh uh refined. Uh no, there's, they sell us cheap cotton. That's what we like. So there is a perception uh that a lot of people in England wouldn't have been disappointed if the South had won the civil war, it would have created problems for their big rival in uh um New England. It would have uh you know, created stability of supply for the English industry. And so a lot, sometimes in private, occasionally in public in England people would say, well, you know, it wouldn't be the worst thing ever if the South won this thing that creates a lot of friction between the North, between the American government and England. And by extension, Canada, because we are perceived as a, just a extension of the British government, a lot of friction that's gonna last for a while after the civil war and, and, and damage relations between the United States and Canada and the United States and England. But the war does come to an end, the South loses, thank goodness. Uh Slavery ends and it means that there has to be new ways to produce cotton. And I, I think, uh you know, this is better than slavery, but is it not that much better than slavery? Because the situation that develops in the American South is that at the end of the civil war, all of these freights, slaves were freed, but they really had nowhere to go. Some of them moved north and became part of an expanding industrial system in the, in the American North. But for a lot of them, they were on a plantation, they're now free, but they're still on the plantation. Uh The same guy owns the plantation that used to own them. So what are they gonna do? And the solution is a thing called share cropping to my way of thinking somewhat insidious in which that plantation owner says to his former slaves. And you know, OK, I'll let you ST you know, live on in this little shanty that you have here on my property. Uh And I will give you a section of my farm to raise cotton and then we will share the benefits of that crop, share crop. Uh Now, obviously, that relationship is tilted significantly in favor of the owner of the plantation. Uh But it is the only way for a lot of those poor black uh former slaves to survive. So they, in essence, their life has changed not tremendously by being free, although they still have the uh you know, they can leave if they want to expose. Um but it gets worse than that before the end of the civil war, uh picking cotton, uh that early sort of uh ginning of cotton and that sort of stuff very much slave labor, therefore, perceived as work for slaves, therefore work for black people. Now, there's no more slavery and so plantation owners can go to poor white people in the area and say I'll offer you the same deal. I'm offering my former slaves. You know, I'll let you have a little shanty to live in and chunk of land and you can grow cotton and we'll share the benefits of it and a lot of desperate people do precisely that. Uh And, and here's the insidious thing and the thing that I think has implications that last right up until now. Uh because then that plantation owner says to the new white uh workers, I'd love to pay you more. But you know, the, the, the black guys still work for a lot less money and I just, I, I can't afford to pay you anymore. And I say to the black people, look at it. Well, you're lucky you didn't even have a job. I could get way more white guys if I wanted to. So just shut up and take what we're giving you. And the insidious part about this is that they managed to convince both the poor white workers and the poor black workers, that the problem is each other rather than the plantation. And the implications of that, I would argue they're still dealing with the implications that across big chunks of the American South uh where the resentments don't go maybe in the direction that they should. So that's growing cotton. But I, I've talked about again, regulation and labor and those sort of ideas. One of the things that, and I, at the beginning I talked about my inexpensive t-shirt or my inexpensive nice shirt that I'm wearing today. Uh Why is it so inexpensive? And part of that is that you find people to manufacture those goods, those particles of clothing and pay them very little. You're gonna read some stuff about fast fashion and the way that that still happens today. Uh But there's a very famous event that happens in New York City uh in 1911, March 25th, 1911. Uh the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is on the top three floors of, of this building here. Uh And uh they are jammed with people six days a week sh uh sewing shirts or shirtwaists. They're called, they're largely a garment for, for women and they rows and rows of people sitting at the relatively recent invention of sewing machines, uh and sewing these shirt ways. And it's piecework, you are paid for each one that you, you create. It's work that's largely performed by women, uh almost exclusively performed by women. Uh overwhelmingly by immigrant women, uh, and, uh, is compensated very poorly and the working conditions are dreadful. So, on that March the 25th, it's a Saturday. Uh, they're shutting down for, for, they, they close early on Saturday at four, when suddenly a fire breaks out and the fire caused the death of 100 and 46 garment workers, including 23 men, but 100 and 23 women, they died from the fire. They died from smoke inhalation. Uh, desperate people jumped out of the windows to try and save themselves. But they're on the ninth, 10th floor. Uh, they died, uh, crashing onto the sidewalk. It's, uh, um, a, an absolutely horrific event. Uh, in 1911, there is enough, um, media to, to really be impacted by this. You know, uh, the two guys who owned the factory as it turns out, uh, they were afraid of women taking unauthorized breaks or stealing fabric to take home with them. So when the women went into work, they would padlock all the doors, including the fire escapes, uh, to keep them in. So they wouldn't be able to sneak out. So when the fire hit, uh, the people with the keys, the ownership fled, they got out. They're all fine but the doors didn't work. Uh, just one thing after one example, after another of the exploitive nature of what happened, uh, to these women, the two owners were charged, uh, with a bunch of different things, they were acquitted by a jury, uh later in a civil thing, a civil suit, uh they agreed to pay, uh uh as to the people who had died, the families of those who had died, uh meager pittance of, of compensation. Um One thing that it did do though is increase political focus on this, on this and uh sort of nudge New York City and New York State towards regulation. And so they start to be more rules about you can't lock the doors. Uh There have to be fire extinguishers that work. There have to be limits on how long people are working and all that sort of stuff. Uh But again, as I say, you know, cotton chase is cheap and those sort of things, although not wildly expensive are not cheap. So they simply moved across the river to New Jersey. And then when New Jersey starts to regulate, they move further into the American South and when regulation eventually starts to catch up with them, they go to Mexico and then eventually to Asia seeking jurisdictions where they will be allowed to have low wage, highly exploit, exploitative working conditions, just the nature of the business. And so we get to a situation in 2013 in Bangladesh, uh the collapse of the building called uh called Rana Plaza. Um investigation into that building indicates that it had faulty construction. Uh that in fact, extra floors had been added to the building which weren't part of the design that the structure of the building could not support those extra uh floors amongst other things. Um And again, this is uh this is a clothing factory. And so again, the workforce, largely women uh poorly paid for the most part, bad working conditions. So they're in this and like back at Triangle Shirtwaist factory, the the factory part is higher up in the, in the uh the structure, they're at work and they see cracks forming in the wall and they can hear things, they, they hear noises which frighten them and they assume they're gonna be, you know, that this is bad. Uh The building might collapse. So they all run out and the owners of the factory come out and say anybody who's not back at work right away, it is fired, get back in there. And so they go back in and the building collapses. So 1134 people are killed in that event, you can see how that might happen simply by the scale of, of, of uh that disaster there in the, in the photo. Um And the implications of that are uh significant. I would argue uh it launches a debate in the western world, a great deal about how much responsibility do Western companies and Western consumers. I don't wanna let them consumers like me off the hook on this. How much responsibility do we have as it turns out? I'm standing in Toronto when I'm talking to you on the, the video, uh the, the uh Joe Fresh Band brand, which is part of Galen Weston's Big law bla Empire. Um They were one of the companies that got product out of the, out of the Rana Plaza Factory. Uh And he got asked a lot of very tough questions about this. You know, how is this possible? Did you realize how exploited this was? Uh did you, didn't you have a duty? Like he talked about having a, a policy of not doing exploitive stuff, but they again enforcement, they never really checked. And he said, yeah, that's wrong. We should have been doing that and, and apparently they have done more of trying to enforce those sort of things. But what happens in those situations as you'll see in some of the stuff you're looking at is that if you regulate too much, then the companies just move away. Uh And that remains a significant problem anyway. So you are going to in the asynchronous material for this week. You're gonna see some of that sort of stuff. Uh The ways in which the industry itself is, is diversifying. Uh for the tutorial, the group presentations are gonna talk about fast fashion and a little bit about uh what some of the implications of that are. Uh So enjoy that.