Transparency about where our clothing is made won't improve the lives of garment factory workers

The way we produce many consumer goods is flawed. Completely, thoroughly, fundamentally flawed.

And sadly, no amount of "transparency" about the process is likely going to change that.

Last month, nearly four years to the day of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which killed more than 1,000 garment workers, Human Rights Watch issued a report called "Follow the Thread" urging greater supply chain transparency in the garment and footwear industries. The idea is that if consumers know where the products they buy are being made, workers in the industry will somehow benefit.

There are a number of problems with this assumption, however. For starters, it's important to note that many retailers don't typically own or operate factories. They rely on suppliers. A Canadian apparel company might source its garments from a factory located in Vietnam, owned by a Taiwanese companyand run by German managers, for example.

Such complex arrangements are common, in part, because they release retailers from the responsibility of maintaining a manufacturing workforce and the challenges that entails.

What challenges? Well, running a factory with workers selling their labour at bargain-basement rates is messy business. So, nearly all of Canada's well-known retailers have washed their hands of it, so to speak, handing the disciplining of labour over to companies unknown to most Canadians.

• Retailers pushed for more disclosure on supply chains

• Joe Fresh continuing garment business in Bangladesh in year after tragedy

• Bangladesh'sRanaPlaza factory collapse spurs change, finger-pointing

Such details are understood well by anthropologists, whose research exposes important labour issues in these factories. For example, it is often said that the main reason so many young women work in garment factories is that they have smaller, more nimble fingers. This is rubbish. Young women are actually preferable because managers assume such women will be more easily controlled.

The image revealed, moreover, when factory doors open is not always that of the infamous "sweat shop." The factories in Vietnam that I visited in the mid-2000s were properly ventilated and clean, and not especially unpleasant physical environments.

To be sure, plenty of factories across the globe are much worse, but the point I want to make pertains even to the better maintained work spaces; that is: in any conditions, the work is mindless, numbing, unfulfilling. Workers often undertake punishingly long shifts and have very few breaks or days off. Canadian consumers knowing the factory location won't change this.

When I saw footwear workers carry out their tasks in Vietnam, I did not fear for their safety. I feared for their souls, for their overall well being as persons. Given what they put up with, such workers deserve something akin to hazard pay. My job is rewarding, and yet I get paid many, many times what people making our clothing do. I feel guilty about this.

And if you ask me, that's what transparency is really about: consumer guilt, and company image, and shareholder peace of mind. We want to know that something is being done. "Follow the Thread" makes virtually no claim that its efforts will actually lead to improved working conditionsprobably because it can't. Greater transparency might assuage consumer guilt, but it won't likely change much on the ground in Bangladesh or Vietnam.

Readers might be looking for other solutions. I'm not optimistic. It is now well-known that Joe Fresh and other brands were being made at Rana Plaza, and the problems with the factory were evident well before the collapse.

The mostly female workforce was very likely sent back into the factory the day of the collapse by managers under pressure to meet deadlines imposed from retailers. And this pressure, in turn, came from a consumer culture defined by demands for so-called fast fashion and low-cost clothing.

Here in Canada, it is a perpetual, wasteful cycle: in with the new, and out with the old. If we continue this via an economic system whereby globalization and never-ending growth reign, we will do so on the backs of workers in low-income countries.

The system can't be fixed one tweak at a time. We have to be willing to (slowly, carefully) scrap it altogether. That probably won't ever happen, but it's not because we don't know how or where our impossibly cheap clothing is being made. It's because we love to shop for things we don't really need, and apparently regardless of what it means for people working in places like Rana Plaza.

This column is part ofCBC'sOpinion section.For more information about this section, please read thiseditor'sblogandourFAQ.