A Footloose Enterprise

THE QUIET GIANT AWAKENS

The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) was born on the pavement in front of the Dutch garment store C&A in Amsterdam, where on an autumn day in 1988 some 50 women protested against the fact that the clothes sold inside were made under sweatshop conditions. In the words of Ineke Zeldennrust, a pioneer 'clean clothes' activist:

The action fitted into the general political atmosphere of those days. Internationalism was the buzzword, whether you were involved in the squatters' movement, the anti-apartheid struggle, or feminism. Many organisations targeted multinationals. I thought – and still think – that every strategy that is blind to the exploitation of women would ultimately fail.

When the link between consumption in rich countries and production in poor countries dawned upon us, it became clear that solidarity with women worldwide meant that we should begin to put pressure on multinationals at home. The garment industry was and is possibly the most widespread example of a global commodity chain with western buyers in the driving seat. We decided to focus on C&A. It was Dutch, it was big, and we already had information about its use of sweatshop labour in the Netherlands and abroad. Targeting one company allowed us to focus our energy and use our resources efficiently.

In the Netherlands, mass production of garments in workshops and factories began in the second decade of the twentieth century, between the First and the Second World Wars. At the time, producers and retailers were not competing on skirt length or autumn colours – fashion in the modern sense did not yet exist. Most important was price. When the first machine operators, recruited from the large cities' poor, began to organise and demand better wages, production moved partly to the provinces – an early example of industrial mobility. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than 100,000 people worked in the Dutch garment industry, and C&A was one of the star players.

C&A stands for Clemens and August, the two German brothers Brenninkmeijer. In the first half of the nineteenth century they regularly crossed the German–Dutch border to mow grass and cast peat. It proved rewarding to smuggle shirts and haberdashery as well, so rewarding that in 1841 the brothers were able to open a linen warehouse in the northern Dutch city of Sneek, and, 20 years later, the first C&A store. It sold ready-made clothes in differing sizes, originally for the better-off classes and later for all the world and his wife – a huge success. In 1893 the company established itself in Amsterdam, and after that many Dutch cities became acquainted with the new clothes and the new way of buying them.

In 1911 the Brenninkmeijer family crossed the Dutch–German border again, in reverse this time, and carrying more weight than a few smuggled shirts, and opened their first German stores. In 1922 the first C&A was established in London's Oxford Street. After the Second World War, international expansion took off on a large scale. Between 1963 and 1995, eight more European countries were introduced to the red-and-blue logo and to C&A's concept of cheap clothes for the masses. In 1963 C&A crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish itself in America by buying Ohrbach, a chain of garment stores, and in 1976 it arrived in Brazil. In the early 1970s the company had a 15 per cent market share in the Netherlands and in Germany, and employed 34,000 people worldwide. It was and remains a limited partnership, and the only owners and directors are members of the Brenninkmeijer family, which grew at the same speed as the company.

C&A proved good at competing on price. Its large orders allowed it to put pressure on manufacturers, and business thrived. In the early 1980s, the return on investment in Germany (Germany being the only country where C&A was forced by law to publish its company books) was more than 50 per cent. With a worldwide turnover of equivalent to almost 7 billion euros (at 2002 values – and with an added 36-billion-euro turnover of investment companies owned by C&A), the Brenninkmeijers were shaping one of the biggest corporations in the Netherlands, and even in the world, on a par with Shell and Philips.

But while C&A was going at full speed, manufacturers were struggling. They had to find ways to cut prices. In this labour-intensive industry, an effective way to achieve this is employing cheap and flexible labour. When in the 1970s the Dutch government enacted a minimum wage, a youth minimum wage and equal pay for women and men, garment producers had a hard time meeting these obligations. With rising wages on the one hand, and the sharp buying practices of C&A and other large companies on the other, profit margins were reduced to the extent that manufacturers began to look around for cheaper labour.

Technological innovation in transport and communications had made the earth smaller; now it was possible to tap the reservoir of the Third World poor, and subsequently production was moved to low-wage countries like Tunisia, Taiwan and South Korea. Only design, packaging and quality control – the so-called 'head and tail' of production – stayed in the Netherlands. Between 1972 and 1974, Dutch employment in garment-production dropped by a clear 36 per cent. This was the first wave of the so-called 'runaway production'.

Turnover, in the meantime, increased. Fashion, that powerful engine of sales, was on the march. Branding and marketing began to define the success of companies, and advertising budgets soared. At the beginning of the 1980s, C&A was by far the biggest advertiser in Dutch newspapers. Management decided to diversify the clothes collection. No longer just a cheap store for the masses, C&A now positioned itself more upmarket, with separate labels for different ages and styles. In the late 1970s and 1980s, production was spread all over the world. Large lots of mass-produced 'ever-sellers', for which delivery schedules were not that tight, were ordered from distant Asia, where people worked one month for a Dutch daily wage. Fashion was produced closer to home – in Portugal, eastern Europe, Turkey and Tunisia. Production of the most fashion-sensitive clothes, which were on the racks for just a couple of months and needed a fast turnaround, was brought back home – not to the old factories in the provinces, but to sweatshops in the larger cities of Great Britain and the Netherlands, served by mostly immigrant workers. Following the 'runaway' production of the early 1970s, this was the so-called 're-runaway'...