Audrey Millet
In 2015, Abdoul, a 32-year-old tailor from Côte d’Ivoire, leaves Abidjan for Ouagadougou. An acquaintance promises him a job that will finally enable him to buy his sewing machine and help his family eat. Full of hope and confident of his skills, he never imagined that his dream of a better life would plunge him into the abyss of textile globalization. Abdoul never paid smugglers, neither on African soil nor on the Mediterranean. He only promised to work in exchange for transport. His story, which I pieced together over two years of research and 150 interviews, reveals the sordid underbelly of an industry built on exploitation.
It all begins at the Akouédo dump, just outside Abidjan. Under a sky leaden by toxic fumes, Abdoul grows up amidst the waste of our consumer society. The mountains of second-hand clothes and synthetic fabrics heaped up there already foreshadowed his destiny, linked to the clothing industry.
Driven by poverty, he embarks on a nightmarish odyssey across Africa. But contrary to popular belief, Abdoul never wanted to go into exile in Europe. His dream was simply to open his own sewing workshop back home in Côte d’Ivoire. It was the deception of the smugglers and the spiral of trafficking that took him further and further from home.
The Ténéré desert became his hell, where unscrupulous traffickers stripped him of his identity, including his passport and telephone. In this windswept mineral landscape, the bodies of migrants form macabre constellations. Abdoul witnesses unspeakable horrors: rape, torture and beatings. Death prowls at every turn, mowing down his companions in misfortune. In Libya, he becomes a slave in a prayer rug factory. Finally tortured, he is thrown unconscious on the ground of Tripoli with his leg rotting.
Crossing the Mediterranean was just another stage in his journey to the abyss. Solidarity migrants put him on a boat. On a frail inflatable dinghy, Abdoul faces the vinous waves, haunted by the ghosts of thousands of shipwrecked men. This is the sea of the madness of the gods, but above all the madness of men.
Rescued by human traffickers he thought were members of an NGO, Abdoul is put on a flixbux, in the hands of the Camorra, bound for Prato, 20 km from Florence. He discovers the hidden face of “Made in Italy” and plunges back into a Dantean universe. In the clandestine workshops run by the Chinese mafia, he sews 14 hours a day for a pittance. Toxic dyes permeate the air, as does shame.
Clothing and accessories manufacturers turn a blind eye to these practices, preferring the opacity of cascading subcontracting: “it’s not my fault”. Their facade audits are no more than a modest veil thrown over a brutal reality. Meanwhile, textile waste piles up, forming new mountains like the one at Akouédo.
Abdoul’s journey illustrates the dark side of globalization. From Africa to Europe, I followed the trail of these new textile slaves. I wandered the alleys of Prato and Scandicci, where sweatshops rub shoulders with luxury.
How did a dressmaker come into contact with the Nigerian mafia, the Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta and the Chinese mafia, when all he wanted to do was work to buy a sewing machine? This investigation is a cry of alarm. Abdoul, a fashion lover, tells us the brutal reality behind the glamour of the catwalks of forced labor and environmental destruction. Every T-shirt is potentially the fruit of the labor of shattered lives and ravaged ecosystems.
Abdoul’s wisdom reminds us that this odyssey is that of thousands of anonymous people trapped in an industry dedicated to profit at all costs. It’s up to us to decide whether we want to continue to be complicit in this system.
See also our latest volume from the LUXCORE project and a chapter in English dealing with related subject:
Chapter 14
Labour Migration, Crime, and ‘Compliance Washing’: A Tailor’s Odyssey from an African Workshop to European Luxury Fashion Multinationals
Audrey Millet & Tereza Østbø Kuldova
Following a series of corporate scandals involving human rights abuses, forced labour, and unethical sourcing practices across supply chains of major corporations, we have seen a growth in voluntary, soft, as well as hard law and compliance-oriented regulations demanding supply chain and human rights due diligence (HRDD) and increased transparency of value chains on the part of multinational enterprises. This chapter seeks to peek behind the veil of ‘transparency’ and corporate disclosures and interrogate the current limits of these compliance-driven visions of social justice and the dynamics of compliance and defiance in corporate reporting by juxtaposing these with the realities of supply chains in the fashion and luxury industry. We argue that corporate disclosures, which tend to make us mistake carefully designed compliance maps for the actual territories of supply and value chains, could hide more than they reveal, resulting in new forms of opacity and practices of ‘compliance washing’, while further entrenching and enhancing the power of large market actors. To make our case, we delve deep into the complex entanglements of labour migration, organized crime, exploitation, and human suffering which are part and parcel of contemporary fashion supply chains, following the destinies of labour migrants from Africa to Made in Italy.
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