Enslaved by Demand: a fashion protest
Cramping shoulders, an aching knee, and eyes that feel like sandpaper: Nursing student Yasmeen Jones-Chollet is getting a taste of what it’s like to work a 16-hour day as a Bangladeshi garment worker, setting up in central Nelson.
She started on Saturday and is making cloth bags with her sewing machine, powered by a generator, at a table 6am-10pm every day this week to highlight exploitation in the fashion industry.
She is taking only three 10-minute breaks per day, eating rice-based meals, and during the course of the week will work 112 hours. Her Facebook event page, Enslaved by Demand, says her protest gives ‘‘a real-time, here and now, tactile example of how our chain store clothing is made’’.
Her goal is to make 20 bags a day, which is what she managed on her first day, but she says that will be a real challenge to reach each day as she is struggling both in terms of stamina and skill.
She said the target was ‘‘nowhere near’’ what a garment worker’s daily quota would be, estimating that in a real factory each bag could be made within 20 minutes.
During the protest she won’t be speaking to passers-by – instead letting her posters and chalk messages on the pavement tell the story – but on Sunday she told Stuff what it felt like after a dayand-a-half of the work.
‘‘Physically I am a wreck,’’ she said. ‘‘I had about an hour-anda-half’s sleep. It took me about two hours to make sense of how to make a bag this morning, so I’m not really sure how garment workers manage, day in, day out.’’
After the first day, she had been too cramped, stiff and whelmed to fall asleep.
‘‘It’s the cramping in the shoulders, it’s the leaning forward, and the ironing,’’ she said.
‘‘I spend a few hours cutting each day as well, so it’s really the shoulders. I didn’t know your knee could hurt so much on the inside, from pressing a pedal. My eyes as well, they feel like sandpaper from squinting so it’s really hard to get the thread through the hole.’’ over-
She was inspired to action after seeing documentary The True Cost. ‘‘I probably cried for about an hour after I watched that and I thought: I can’t rest; it’s not enough just to do what I do in terms of consumption, I have to do something else.’’
She hoped that by raising awareness, people would realise that buying ethically made clothes did not have to be expensive or complicated.
‘‘You don’t have to be amazing at sewing or have a lot of money to buy ethically,’’ she said, explaining that many of her clothes were second-hand or bought at the Nelson market.
At the least people could buy less. ‘‘Choose well, wash it properly, look after it, don’t treat it like a disposable thing because clothing isn’t disposable, it’s come at the expense of a lot of people and resources.’’