factory town cloth conveyor belt cant build

There is a lot of elaborate worrying and planning if you really want to do something deep. Because you have to pay all your staff salaries and what do you want to do? A three-week audit? It’s not just all the days going to the factories, but it’s also going to the slums to meet the workers, writing the notes, coaching all the staff, you have to worry about retaliation both for the auditors and workers. 'We decided we want to control our own destiny,' Restrepo said.You have to ignore a whole bunch of things you can sense is a problem. The company has already opened 160 of its own stores across Latin America, and has plans for more. But as Colombia's economy has grown, Crystal has been transforming itself from a manufacturer of low-end clothes into a company that sells higher-end clothes under its own brands. The loss of Jockey will be a blow to Crystal. Jockey plans to move production to several other countries, where its cost per shirt will be 20 to 30 percent lower, according to Smith. 'Wages continue to go up, costs continue to go up,' Smith said. 'They've got great principles, they have great capabilities.' The companies are trying to negotiate some new kind of deal, he said.īut the growth of Colombia's economy means it's getting expensive to make simple products like T-shirts there. 'We both like each other a lot,' Smith said. He said they're true: He decided to put a stop to orders from Crystal. When I got back to the U.S., I asked Marion Smith, a senior vice president at Jockey, about the rumors. 'The people who worked on Jockey, of course.' 'Who are they gonna let go first?' a worker named Lina Maria Tascón said.

When I visited the factory in Colombia, there was a rumor going around that Jockey, one of Crystal's most important clients, was going to cut its ties with the company. 'You are one phone call away,' he told me. PLANET MONEY MAKES A T-SHIRT: The Lives Of The Workers Who Made Our Shirt That's good for the country as a whole, but it may wind up driving away the T-shirt industry. That makes the process much faster and easier for Jockey, the company that coordinated the production of our T-shirt.Ĭolombia's economy has been growing like crazy for the past decade, and wages have been rising. Crystal, the Colombian company that made the women's shirts, does everything - from spinning the cotton into yarn to knitting the yarn into cloth to stitching sleeves on a shirt. The cotton for the men's shirt was spun into yarn in Indonesia, then shipped to Bangladesh to be knit, cut and sewn. It's not just the sewing machine operators who are more efficient in Colombia. But the difference is striking nevertheless. The two lines aren't perfectly parallel - the Bangladeshi workers are completing a few more details of the shirt than the Colombians are. One sewing line in Colombia has eight people and can make about 140 T-shirts per hour. In Bangladesh, on one sewing line for our T-shirt, 32 people can make about 80 shirts per hour. With a long tradition of apparel manufacturing and better technology, the Colombians can make T-shirts much, much faster than the Bangladeshis can. So why the big difference in their wages? The workers in both places are doing essentially the same thing: sewing T-shirts together. PLANET MONEY MAKES A T-SHIRT: The world behind a simple shirt, in five chapters Noreli sends her daughter to day care Minu can't afford day care, so her daughter lives back in the village, with her parents. Shumi and Minu, Bangladeshi sisters who worked on our men's T-shirt, share a single room with Minu's husband. Noreli Morales, a Colombian worker who helped make our women's T-shirt, lives with her mom and her daughter in an apartment that has a kitchen and a bathroom. In our reporting, we saw that the workers in Colombia have a much higher standard of living than the workers in Bangladesh.

Workers in Colombia make more than four times what their counterparts make in Bangladesh. The wages in both places are remarkably low by U.S. The Planet Money women's T-shirt was made in Colombia, by workers who make roughly $13 a day, without overtime. The Planet Money men's T-shirt was made in Bangladesh, by workers who make about $3 a day, with overtime.

Noreli Morales (right) works on the Planet Money women's T-shirt at a factory in Medellin, Colombia.

Factory town cloth conveyor belt cant build