A lengthy Washington Post article details the squalid and dangerous conditions in which overworked, underpaid laborers work to manufacture Ivanka Trump’s clothing line. From the article:
The Post used data drawn from U.S. customs logs and international shipping records to trace Trump-branded products from far-flung factories to ports around the United States. The Post also interviewed workers at three garment factories that have made Trump products who said their jobs often come with exhausting hours, subsistence pay and insults from supervisors if they don’t work fast enough.
“My monthly salary is not enough for everyday expenses, also not for the future,” said a 26-year-old sewing operator in Subang, Indonesia, who said she has helped make Trump dresses.
Abigail Klem is president of the Trump brand
Klem said she is confident that the company’s suppliers operate “at the highest standards,” adding, “Ivanka sought to partner with the best in the industry.”
Sounds good. But:
The company still has no immediate plans to follow the emerging industry trend of publishing the names and locations of factories that produce its goods. It declined to provide a list of the facilities.
and:
In recent years, hundreds of clothing lines and manufacturers have poured millions into financing safety improvements in garment factories through two major initiatives, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group made up of 29 North American retailers.
Neither Trump’s company nor G-III Apparel has contributed to those efforts, according to program officials.
This is appalling:
Trump’s brand, licenses some of its production from a large New York-based clothing distributor called G-III Apparel...
...“We have a team on the ground running around every factory in Asia and visiting these factories and drilling it into their head what these requirements mean,” Adam Ziedenweber, G-III’s vice president of global sourcing compliance, said in the March 2016 event at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School.
But Ziedenweber, who did not respond to questions from The Post, also noted the challenge of keeping prices low while making investments in factories.
“You know, the retailers, the consumers aren’t asking for it,” he said. “None of the consumers say, ‘Well, this was made in a building that was going to fall down.’ ”
It’s all about the Trump family and money, money, money, and they'll use whatever means at their disposal to get it.