The leather-working industry in Bangladesh and India is a nightmare awash in toxic chemicals and rotting flesh, and yet, the photography in this article about the leather tanning trade is arresting.
Women pluck hair by hand from goat hides soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the fibers. This woman protects herself with gloves and a sheet of plastic wrapped around her sari as she works at a tannery outside Vaniyambad in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, India.
Read the whole thing, and then wonder where your shoes came from.
That is some beautiful (but unhappy-making) photography indeed. It’s reminiscent of Sebastiao Salgado’s photos of the mine workers.
These peoples’ lives are the “profit margins” achieved by driving down costs through globalizing access to cheap labor. “Everyone needs work,” I suppose the capitalists would say – but the driving down of costs is not just at the personal expense of the workers, its in terms of cutting corners on safety. Is the amount of chromium in the leather that comes out of that factory going to be consistent and safe for the consumer, who reclines on their couch that was soaked in the stuff? The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal didn’t happen very long ago, really – and that was an early round of “cost savings” by moving some processes away from where they were more highly regulated.
I was in Mexico City for a conference a few years ago, and got a life lesson in “cost cutting.” There was a work-crew removing the road surface of the street outside my (upscale) hotel: they had no safety gear, and no big hydraulic machines with claws and cutters – they had picks, shovels, pry-bars, and muscle. No ear muffs. No steel toed boots. No knee pads. No shock protecting gloves. When I got back to the hotel, the road surface for the entire block had been broken up, shovelled up, and wheelbarrowed away. When I hear capitalists talk about cost-savings, I hear “this is how hard your children will work for us.”
1. I have never been more glad that I don’t wear shoes and haven’t purchased a pair in more than 20 years
2. Keyword based advertising yields some ironical results, doesn’t it? I bet I’m not the only one who’s seen ads for leather products on this page. Yeesh. Littleton Colorado Leather? Your briefcases aren’t getting any positive business from anyone reading this…
But are your car seats covered with fine Corinthian leather?
Wait, no shoes? What you got on your feet?
It gives one an eerie feeling when taking the night train in India when in the middle of the night one pulls into a station and sees the name “Bhopal” on the platform. It doesn’t seem like the sort of place it should be reachable, but it’s on a major railway line. Just one of many places we’ve screwed.
Excellent, scary, well-researched article. Outstanding photography looks great on black background. Reading page-after-page of reverse (white) type on black is intimidating and fatiguing.
@PZ #3:
Not to pre-empt Crip Dyke’s response, but I would say “tyres”.
Well, that’s my visionary footwear plan for the decades following the zombie apocalypse, anyway.
I used to do “buckskinning” and re-enacting … all you have to do to remove hair from a hide is soak it in lightly salted water for a couple days, and the hair slips right off. Now the problem comes when you tan it … the chromium solution is toxic (where do you dump THAT?) and of course, a lot of the solution has soaked into the leather fibers to preserve it and prevent bacterial decomp. Have there ever been any studies on chrome-tanned leather toxicity?
Criminey! Now my shoes? I already stopped using Uber, and now I have to go barefoot? I cringe to think of the scale of the unseen human and environmental abuses that my life as a typical USA consumer has wrought. I have always been in favor of strong worker and environmental protections, backed by strong worldwide tariffs that are based solely on the degree of compliance to such protections by individual companies and by local and state laws (NOT by Trumpian ‘Murka-First nationalism).. But I spent a good part of my childhood dreaming that I could fly, too. As long as unregulated capitalism is held up as a shining beacon of perfection the profiteers and enough of the fools who are exploited into believing that, I might as well just keep dreaming.
Her sari matches her gloves and the tanning colors around her. An accidental tragic beauty.