In a dusty volume at the national archives in Rabat is a long petition dated 1907 to the Lieutenant Governor and Chief Secretary General of Malta. The following is an extract from it: “It is a well-known fact here that these Indian merchants are notoriously cruel and a regular source of harassment to their servants, whose services they secure with great inducements and promises, which they honour more in breach than in fulfilment ... Can Your Honour imagine that a petty cook, who goes all the way from India to such a distant land, with a view to win his bread and who is entirely at the mercy of his employer, will have the audacity even to displease his masters?”
The letter tells the story of one Naturmal, a young man who was lured over from India to work for an Indian firm based in Malta. Conditions were dire and Naturmal soon found himself jobless, destitute, and unable to fork out the money for the trip back home. As a desperate last resort he petitioned government for help. Subsequent correspondence shows that the Governor was not convinced (he probably suspected that the firm was trying to get its employee a passage to India at the Crown’s expense).
It’s tempting to think of Naturmal as typical of times gone by when workers had no rights and were exploited at will. Only it turns out Leisure Clothing may have employed not one but up to 300 Naturmals at any one time.
The facts as reported are that the manufacturing firm employs hundreds of Chinese people at its factory in Bulebel. The promise of a salary of €600 a month lures them to Malta, and they are also asked to pay €6,000 for the privilege. None of them has that kind of money, so they are loaned it by their employers.
Once in Malta, their passports are taken ‘for security reasons’ and they are made to work long hours in questionable conditions. They are also told that most of their salary will go towards repaying the initial loan, and to pay for food and accommodation. That leaves them with a few tenners a week and even fewer options.
In the past days at least four of them tried to flee back to China and were stopped at the airport, which is how we got to know about this whole business at all.
Not that the news is earth-shattering. Clothing sweatshops have mushroomed in Europe since the 1970s. They are often run by immigrants and are premised on cheap and efficient methods of production. There are tens of thousands of Chinese-run workshops in Italy alone, with an annual turnover of billions of euros.
I have mixed feelings about these places and practices. On the one hand I don’t think we should get too sanctimonious about them, for two reasons. First, it is easy to lapse into xenophobic rants about dubious immigration procedures, the threat to Maltese workers, the submissiveness of the Chinese, and such.
Second, it is a fact that cheap labour has in some cases led to upward mobility as immigrants moved out of it and into entrepreneurship. For example, some of Naturmal’s kind eventually managed to start successful businesses in Malta. And already a few sub-Saharans have made the transition from low-paid construction work to small-scale enterprise.
I’m saying that self-exploitation can be and often is the only route to better things. Many of the Chinese who work in Europe come from impoverished rural backgrounds. Migrant labour, however menial, is often the only chance they have to lead half-decent lives. So why deny them it?
That said, there are at least three very nasty things about this story. First, the €6,000 loan means that the Chinese workers find themselves in an effective situation of debt bondage – in brief, a kind of loan which takes work as its security and which is often impossible to repay one’s way out of. Debt bondage is an exploitative and ruinous kind of financing which devastates swathes of vulnerable people in places like rural India, Bangladesh, and Bulebel.
Clothing sweatshops have mushroomed in Europe since the 1970s
The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize went to Muhammad Yunus for his pioneering work in microfinance, a system that can free people from debt bondage among other benefits. Malta Microfinance is a non-profit financial institution with offices if Valletta. I never imagined it would be relevant in Malta. Now I know how wrong I was.
Second, the passports business means that the Chinese workers are being systematically robbed of their right to go back home, and therefore of their freedom of movement. It is a vile and staple trick of human traffickers. We’ve read the stories about eastern European and Russian women lured to Malta with false promises of work and quickly consigned to the sex-slave trade. Now we know that cheap labour is better than sex.
Third, Malta is a country in which workers are guaranteed, on paper at least and very often in practice, decent wages and conditions. This is the result of decades of industrial action and political goodwill. All those people who work legally in Malta qualify, irrespective of their nationality. Now we know that some are less equal than others.
This dovetails with what I said earlier, in the sense that these three nasty things taken in conjunction make it highly unlikely that some of these workers might eventually become entrepreneurs in their own right. I wish I could describe this as a system by which people from poor backgrounds can take risks and self-exploit in the hope of a better future.
Instead, what I see is a well-honed system of exploitation (without the ‘self-) that imprisons workers in debt bondage and lack of freedom of movement in the long term. The only entrepreneurs are the people who are raking it in at their expense.
It also happens that, elsewhere in Europe the sweatshop trade often works hand in hand with organised crime. It’s there in Gomorrah, Garrone’s film about the Neapolitan camorra. I wouldn’t know about a Maltese equivalent. But given that Leisure Clothing are reported to have been at this game since 2007, there certainly seems to be enough omertà to keep a whole legion of mafiosi happy.
mafalzon@hotmail.com