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Illustration: John SpoonerBy MARTIN FEIL
The Sydney Morning Herald (blog)
The AFR Review (26 February 2010) contains a four page article titled Life is Sweat by Ken Silverstein from Harpers Magazine. It describes the working conditions and lives of 350,000 women working in the Cambodian clothing industry.
The author said that the average production employee generated about $ US 200,000 in annual retail sales and received $US750 in income. The factory price for a small quantity and without bargaining was $US1.87 for a garment (including door to door shipping). The garment retailed for $ US25. The women workers received 0.375 of one per cent of the retail price.
In our Age Opinion piece on 1 September 2008 John Spooner drew a portrait of Kevin Rudd in his flash $100 shirt and tore a piece of it for every finger in the retail pie. We estimated that the Customs duty protecting our own miniscule garment industry was worth about a fifth of a cent in the retail dollar. We estimated that the workers actually got fifty cents or 0.5 cent of the retail dollar. This is twice as much as the Cambodian women get.
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