Pandemic crushes global supply chains, workers at both ends
In her last weeks working the freight shift at the local J.C. Penney store, Alexandra Orozco took out her phone and hit record. The 22-yearold shot videos as she and her co-workers slid down a metal shoot (technically meant for empty boxes) in the store room, their heads falling back laughing, and posted them on TikTok. Another, uploaded on 13th October, shows the giant blackand-red “Everything Must go!” posters hanging from ceiling to floor, and an eerily half- empty basement section.
“Slowing losing my job,” she wrote in the caption, days before the store in Delano, California shut for good, just one of 156 J.C. Penneys across the United States to close since June this year.
Rising in the ranks
Orozco began working part-time at J.C. Penney when she was 18, and in nearly four years rose through the ranks from cashier to freight team associate, unloading trucks stuffed with new stock and doing inventory. Four days a week, she arrived at the store by four or five a.m. The early mornings suited her; she loved her job but crowds made her anxious. Now, since being laid off, she’s stressed. She’s applied for a couple of jobs — one counselling kids, the other delivering flowers — but has yet to hear back from either.
“It’s so sad,” she explains over the phone from her home, noise from a T.V. playing softly in the background. “I never thought this would happen. And Delano is a small place. There’s not that many stores. It’s hard to find jobs here.”
Ha lf way a cross the world, Matefo Litali expe
rienced upheaval, too. A skilled sewer, the 53-yearold has worked in garment factories for the past 14 years across Lesotho, a small mountainous country entirely surrounded by South Africa. Tzicc Clothing, which makes apparel for U. S-based giants J.C. Penney and Walmart, employed the seamstress for two months before nationwide lockdown measures forced all factories to temporarily close in March. On May 6, she returned to work. The next day, at the end of her shift, she says management told her not to come back. Tzicc confirmed her last day was May 7.
“I felt powerless,” she says. “The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘ Why me?’”
Neither woman has met, nor are they likely to meet. One woman lives in a remote agricultural town on the west coast of America, the other some 10,000 miles away in Southern Africa in one of the smallest countries
on earth. Now, both of their lives — and livelihoods — are linked by a global pandemic that has crushed one of the world’s supply chains and with it, economies, too. COVID-19 lockdowns have obliterated a retail sector already struggling to survive before the coronavirus hit, which has in turn contributed to the collapse of the global garment trade and wreaked havoc for millions of workers, the vast majority of them women like Orozco and Litali.
Lesotho
In Lesotho, which has a population of 2.1 million, the pandemic’s effects were felt fast. Over the past two decades, the country’s garment industry has boomed to become its largest employer, accounting for more than 20% of Lesotho’s gross domestic product. Much of this success is down to a trade deal called the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which was signed by then-Presi
dent Bill Clinton in 2000, allowing duty-free exports to the U. S. Today, Lesotho’s garment workers, 90% of whom are women, craft clothes for some of America’s most iconic brands: Levis Strauss, Wrangler, Macy’s and Walmart.
While Lesotho’s garment industry might be lesser known compared to the powerhouses of China and Bangladesh, it’s another example of an economy heavily reliant on U.S. demand. Outside of the African continent, America is the largest recipient of Lesotho’s exports — accounting for almost half — according to the most recently available World Trade Organization data from 2017. And if the country has escaped relatively unscathed from the coronavirus, with just 2,065 cases recorded since the start, the impact of America’s stringent lockdown measures have trickled through the industry in Lesotho down with equally devastating effect.