You will be made aware then that people are gossiping, but you will also be aware how few of those asking others about you have ever actually asked you how you are. Everyone will feel that they have expressed concern and wished you well, but the actual number of people who will do so is quite low. You may see, in other words, the evidence of community forming, but it will still take time for its benefits to be offered to you.
Try not to sob when this happens. The friend who finally mouths these words will believe she is the hundredth person to say, “What can we do? How can the people who care about you show it?” Do not mention that you don’t know if you believe in community anymore, or which exact community members have hurt you beyond repair. Do not test her faith in the power of people to gather in support as yours has been tested. Just answer her question.
8.Your European friends will make what seems to them to be very logical suggestions: request a paid leave from work, go to a health spa for a month, begin receiving disability compensation. Supplement your Western medical treatments with Chinese medicine. These treatments may not be affordable or in some cases available to you in any way. Your European friends will be baffled by the cruelty of the State. It will not make sense to them how a rich nation can so severely take advantage of its population. This is important: do not attempt to answer their follow-up questions, because a whole lifetime can be wasted describing the injustice you are currently experiencing. It does not need to be yours.
9.Even if you have been assured the most basic of care by federal policy—however minimal indeed for those whose diseases are little understood in the first place, and for whom there are therefore no effective treatments—you may suddenly find yourself in your doctor’s exam room, crying over the threat of its repeal. You doctor may face personal threats from the same administration: perhaps she was born in a country from which others have been denied entry to the US by surprise executive order, or fears annulment of the law that allowed him to enter a same-sex marriage with his partner of several decades. Certainly your doctor faces a potential job loss. Your doctor may also cry. However it is possible that your doctor could say, “I have a plan.” Then your doctor may detail the black market prescription dispensaries, back-alley lab testing facilities, and unsanctioned exam rooms around the city that will allow you to survive. You may wonder if this is a movie, or a trap. The sliver of hope, however, will buoy you. Let it.
10.You will learn to get by on very small kindnesses. These are often gifts so tiny they mean nothing to those who dole them out. A fruit basket sent by the secretary of a man you worked with once, whom you have never met in person. He is an acquaintance of a good friend that you never heard from, post-diagnosis. A heartfelt but single-line email from a colleague on the other side of the country; an extra warm hug from someone you respect but do not know very well; an angry email from someone in your same line of work, someone who rightly tells you to buck the fuck up when you have professed a desire to give up; someone who does not mind that you are sick, but cares enough to see past that, and spot that you are about to make an irreversible mistake. Over the course of a month, you may only experience one such event, or you may not experience any at all after several years. But if you do, and you thank these people later, they will not remember what they did. They will have no idea that they saved your sanity or your life, that collectively and without even trying, they have created a world you are desperate to stay in for just a little while longer, no matter how difficult.
11.I’m going to be honest with you. I have no reason not to be. I do not know you, and we may never meet, but I can say without a doubt that your doctors may not be telling you the truth and your friends certainly aren’t. Drugstore clerks honestly do only want your money. RNs have plenty of other patients set to take your place. Your company can do without you just fine. Your pets will even move on. (I am not saying that people do not love you. They do.) Yet this moment of horrible honesty is required, so here it is: there is a chance that you will not make it through this, whatever “this” is for you. You may die soon; you will certainly die eventually.
Peer at that statement. Ignore that it is sorrowful and unkind, even as you also admit that it is true. Take it as a reminder to care for what you love, and a plea to be courageous in defiance of unspeakable cruelty. If you do not make it through this—whether it is, this disease or this economy or this political regime or these very, very difficult days—let us remember you as someone who loved very deeply.
Do not let us forget how much you cared.
“My mom was a model and I was expected to follow in her footsteps,” Sarah Meier tells me over Skype from her home in Manila. At fourteen she did, living the NYC top-model lifestyle for twelve years before moving back home and accepting gigs on a radio show and as an MTV VJ. She was even set to host Philippines’ Top Model before the show was cancelled, when she took a gig editing the country’s premier fashion magazine, Metro. I feel compelled to mention that she’s got big green eyes, long straight hair, and glowing, flawless skin. She’s beautiful. It is, after all, an important part of her job.
What I’m impressed by, however, is Meier’s thoughtfulness. She spent over a decade attending up to ten castings per day, each filled with panels of critics offering professional and often conflicting opinions about what was physically wrong with her. It started to wear, she explains. After a few years, she noticed a creeping sense of self-doubt. It afflicted others, too.
“Really, really, really nice girls turned into horrible creatures,” she says. She’s referring to her endless string of model roommates. The agencies that administer model contracts also arrange for housing, but the expenses come out of employee paychecks, a standard fashion industry variation on the sharecroppers’ company store. The day a new roomie moved in was always great, Meier recalls. But, she adds, “Three months down the road, they’re putting Nair in each other’s shampoo bottles.”
Reality may be crueler, even, than reality television, but the real-life travails of models don’t necessarily arise out of professional rivalry. “You could be looking at a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl, and you’re not in competition with her at all”—Meier has light brown skin and dark brown hair—“we’re not going to be up for the same jobs, ever. We’re not even sent to the same castings. But the way in which we view each other is competition. Like, ‘Do you have a better body?’ ‘How can you get away with eating that when I’m here suffering?’ The animosity begins to build. Not just animosity for other models. It becomes animosity for anybody that’s happy. Anybody that’s living a normal life.”
Close students of class politics will recognize Meier’s cutting flourish as a textbook description of proletarian alienation. Except, of course, few of us are inclined to think of models as workers. To judge by their portfolios, models spend an inordinate amount of time at swanky cocktail soirees, cavorting on Caribbean beaches, or drunkenly weaving down urban thoroughfares, laughing at passersby with their heels in their hands. Yet even models like Meier, at the top of the modeling food chain in New York, can find the stylized mimicry of the good life they perform for the camera an intolerable, degrading grind. And with vicious campaigns of interpersonal one-upsmanship as virtual conditions of employment, a spectator might consider looking beyond the images of la dolce vita studiously crafted by the industry to ponder just what kind of self is being assembled as an object of choice for ornamentation and adornment.
In other words, the toxicity inherent to the modeling caste is a feature, not a bug—it’s doled out to all comers, no minor flaw in an otherwise efficient system but a condition of the job. It is, in short, a labor issue.
The charge that models have a rough go of it, however, has not yet caught the popular imagination. After all, the posh surface of the industry gleams with overclass self-indulgence. Even the breed of feminist politically awakened by Beyoncé’s 2014 VMA performance can tick off the profession’s glaring ideological sins: its misogynist conflation of Woman, always, with sala
ble object; its role in lionizing impossible-to-maintain beauty standards; and its casual enactment of reflexive female consent in the realm of sexual power—the complex of predatory prerogatives we’ve come to name rape culture. As a result, labor activists and feminists alike suffer an understandable exasperation when confronting otherwise prosaic labor concerns. Fighting for fair wages or adequate child labor protections in an industry so steeped in—foundational to—the iconography of male privilege can seem like petitioning the Koch brothers to join Code Pink.
Then comes a sneaking suspicion that most models haven’t spent enough time in the real world to fully comprehend that unjust treatment may not be heaped upon them because of their job, but because of their gender. A cognitive dissonance arises when a seemingly pampered sector of the leisure class stumbles upon a millennia-old pattern of gender oppression as though its members were the first group to encounter it. Why should I care about pay equity in the modeling industry, in other words, when I suffer it daily as a journalist and college professor?
Modeling is, by any reasonable measure of working-class drudgery, a decidedly elite career. Even insiders, pointing out unfair labor practices, describe an “exclusive . . . hyper-wealthy country club-like industry” and complain that agencies take too high a percentage of presumably lavish salaries.1
Indeed, Meier prefers to characterize her taste of the lush life in positive terms: “I know what a really expensive car feels like to sit in. I know what it smells like,” she tells me. “I’ve tasted some really incredible food and seen some really beautiful places in the world.” But country clubs and expensive cars come staffed, a nuance some may overlook. Former cover girl Jennifer Sky, in a call for actors’ union SAG-AFTRA to grant models entry, casually mentioned that in her model apartment, “We didn’t pick up after ourselves or clean the floor.”2 It’s hard to work up much in the way of labor solidarity for people who seemingly don’t bother to, you know, labor.
As the rallying cry for models to organize has gained volume in recent years, the cause of solidarity with other labor sectors has lagged. What models do is sell, not construct or argue or plan, and any effort to stir them into militancy inevitably ends up navigating the narrow catwalk between cause marketing and genuine labor organizing. Visiting the website for the advocacy group Model Alliance in 2015, for example, opened a pop-up ad for a sexy lady calendar that temporarily blocked you from reading a draft of the Models’ Bill of Rights. The calendar “features twelve models who the Alliance feels represent female empowerment and diversity in the American modeling industry,” according to the site.3 Sure enough, the sexualized pouts of twelve women smizing through a variety of skin tones adorn each month of the year. The draft bill of rights, on the other hand, proposes concrete measures to end wage theft, ensure fiscal oversight of agencies, and minimize child labor—decidedly unsexy fare, especially when set against the calendar’s high-gloss array of seductive poses. The master’s tools may not dismantle the master’s house, but check out how great they look in action!
Yet when you peer beyond the pouts and cognitive dissonance, you gradually come to realize that the struggles facing the women paid to act out patriarchal notions of beauty, glamour, and worldliness are not so different from those that assail the figures with whom we’ve long associated the intersection of fashion and politics: underpaid and overworked garment factory employees. Neither, for that matter, are models’ demands much different from those we hear from any other woman involved in the global garment trade, at any phase of production or distribution.
My first peek inside a garment factory, in Cambodia in 2009, was a quick one. People who don’t work there are not usually allowed in, and certainly journalists are denied entry out of hand, so I lied to the guard in Khmer and faked a heedlessness common to Americans traveling in Southeast Asia. I breezed through the entryway, gaily commenting on the rumbling in my stomach as I headed toward a crowd of young women at a picnic table. The guard caught me after two steps. “It is not a restaurant,” he told me in gruff Cambodian syllables. “You must leave.”
He glanced at his weapon—an AK-47, the ubiquity of the guns a holdover from the Khmer Rouge era—so I exited the factory gates and joined a crew of mostly young women in the back of another Pol Pot holdover, a decommissioned Chinese military vehicle. My translator joined me to help ask them about their jobs. At first they didn’t respond, only shared with me their meager lunch. There is no freedom of press in Cambodia, and workers are explicitly warned not to speak to reporters. My translator told them not to worry; that I was just a tourist who likes clothes. This characterization of me as a guileless fashion fan cheered them, and they agreed, finally, to answer questions.
They were, in all senses, model employees: adorable, pleasant, and happy in their jobs. This last strained my credulity, as it was a blisteringly hot day—they all are, inside the factories—and the five girls and single boy in the back of the truck didn’t have enough food, but couldn’t afford more. In 2009, the monthly minimum wage was only $55. (It has since more than doubled, but the cost of living has risen, too, and the current monthly minimum earnings of garment factory workers in Cambodia, $128, still fall significantly below all monthly living wage estimates.) Statistically, we’d need another four girls to jam themselves in the back of the tiny truck to represent the current gender ratio of the Cambodian factory workforce, but there simply wasn’t room. (The number of employees in the sector has doubled since 2009, too.)
Some in this group packed jeans to ship to China and North America, although it’s rare for workers to know where wares end up. Under global Fordism, most only grasp what passes through their field of vision, and the fashion industry is notoriously decentralized. Nearly all that’s required to establish a garment’s provenance under international trade regulations is the momentary labor of sewing in a “Made In” label—the primary means by which globalization can be tracked by consumers, about to be done away with under new World Trade Organization regulations.
Still, the destination of most Southeast Asian-made garments is predictable: 70 percent of all apparel produced in Cambodia is imported to the United States. While Asian countries, particularly China, lead denim exports, the US still drives consumption of those too, accounting for nearly 40 percent of jeans purchases worldwide. Unlike most apparel, these jeans are made in a single factory—the sole male in the lunch bunch was a cutter from the very front of the line.
Yet his placement at the earliest stage of production didn’t offer a substantial difference in vantage point on the group’s complaints of labor abuses, many of which were reminiscent of the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The International Labour Organization (ILO)-backed monitoring agent Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) regularly documents the extent to which Asian garment work remains impervious to basic labor and safety regulations. During the 2008 inspections, monitors discovered that some factories weren’t meeting minimum wage pay standards, particularly for casual workers, whose ranks only increased after the global economic recession later that same year. Legally required maternity leave pay was granted to only three-quarters of the workers who requested it; only two-thirds of workers requesting sick pay received it. And even these discouraging numbers don’t track the vast group of workers who have not been informed of their rights to demand them. Half the companies in the ILO survey failed to meet basic health and safety requirements, and 92 percent were found to illegally mandate overtime work. Wage theft was frequent, commonly carried out through management flacks, who omitted or mischaracterized pay stub translations to employees who were unable to read. Health facilities, mandatory under Cambodian law, remained understaffed, when they were available at all.
When I asked the Cambodian workers about their future prospects in the industry, it became immediately clear how differently women and men view garment work as a career. The first difference between the male workers’ responses and their female counterparts’ emerged when I asked about their futures. I wa
nted to know if the female workers hoped to advance in the factory. They only smiled. My translator prodded them with greater eloquence, but this had no effect. Finally, I asked outright, “Would you like to be managers?”
The women broke into raucous laughter. “Oh, they would like,” my translator explained through their giggled uproar. “But, no time.” Time to study accounting, earn a high school degree, attend college, he continued, which would also take money. Most of their funds—only $55 per month in 2009, keep in mind—were sent back home to support family farms. That’s why young people in Cambodia get sent to the city to work in the first place. Approximately 20 percent of the country’s fifteen million residents survive on the incomes of nearly half a million workers working in today’s garment trade. The family tradition of shipping daughters off to work leaves Cambodia’s already weak bureaucratic state scrambling to document the ever widening epidemic of underage labor. Official documents are easy to fake and not always required, and a young person’s genuine interest in helping the family may mean she’s willing to lie about her age, even if she knows her real birth date, which several generations of Cambodians do not. So while underage workers throng the garment factories, reliable statistics on the problem of child labor are almost impossible to collect. Girls face other barriers to advancement, too: only 6 percent of the garment factory managers in the country are women, most of whom are owners’ relatives. For these women to advance in the factories, in other words, they would have to have been born into the business.
The young man stayed silent as his female coworkers described their fates. He knew that he would probably make manager if he wanted to, or get another job if he didn’t. His colleagues also lacked the simple sovereignty over their own persons that he could take for granted. A 2006 BFC study found that around 30 percent of the garment factory workforce experienced sexual harassment on the job. A more recent 2012 report from the ILO found that number had dropped to 20 percent—a decline almost certainly stemming from the increase in male factory employees during the industry’s expansion.
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