girls clothes

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• The invisible women and girls who make your clothes - Thomson Reuters Foundation
• Settlement reached in lawsuit over girl’s bullying suicide - KFVS
• Big ’80s shoulders are back. Is it because they need to hold the weight of the world? - The Washington Post
• Trial continues for father accused of prostituting 7-year-old girl - KRQE News 13

The invisible women and girls who make your clothes - Thomson Reuters Foundation Posted: 14 Feb 2019 07:59 AM PST * Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation. For many of the children, garment work comes at the expense of an education Siddharth Kara is a leading expert on modern slavery and child labor with positions at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley.   They work in huts with mud floors, shacks with crumbling roofs, and if they are lucky, a semi-concrete structure that may survive this year's monsoon floods. They are the women and girls in India who toil at the bottom of global garment supply chains, earning between $0.13 and $0.15 per hour sewing, embroidering, and adding the finishing touches to the clothes we wear every day. For more than two decades, journalists and researchers have reported on the unsafe and low-wage working conditions in garment factories in South Asia, many of which involve varying degrees of forced labor and child labor.  These "Tier 1" factories in major cities like New Delhi and Dhaka fill orders for major Western apparel brands at cut-rate prices, allowing consumers to enjoy the cheapest wardrobes possible. Although major brands have become increasingly concerned with transparency in the formal portion of their supply chains, almost none of them have visibility into working conditions beneath these factories, down to the village level where home-based garment workers toil in heavily exploitative conditions. Two years ago, I set out to document the conditions for the homeworkers in India's garment industry as part of a broader mission to document the exploitative labor conditions that characterize the bottom of global supply chains – from electronics to seafood to garments and more. The results of this research were released in my report, "Tainted Garments", through the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. Based on the cases of 1,452 home-based garment workers in and around nine cities across India, we found that more than 99% of workers did not receive the anemic state-stipulated minimum wages (earning between 50% and 90% less than the minimum wage), more than 42% began garment work as children, almost two-thirds began the work under some form of duress, and more than a third suffered severe delays in their wage payments, sometimes up to several months. Home-based garment work is completely informal – not one worker had a written agreement for their work, not one worker belonged to a trade union, and only 0.1% of workers received any sort of medical care if they suffered an injury during their work. For many of the children, garment work comes at the expense of an education, ensuring that the cycle of poverty is passed from one generation to the next. "My parents could not afford to send me to school, so I do this work instead," a 13-year old girl near the city of Sikandrabad explained. India is the second largest exporter of apparel in the world, with 47% of exports bound for the United States and European Union. Approximately 12.9 million people work in the formal portion of the industry, and millions more in the informal, home-based portion. When Tier 1 factories receive a flush of orders during periods of seasonal demand, or when they endeavor to cut production costs, they outsource to home-based workers. Male subcontractors take materials to women and girls in villages, who typically perform work such as embroidery, tasseling, fringing, beadwork, and buttons. The subcontractors pick up the completed orders and return them to the factories, which export them to the West. The subcontractors are supposed to disburse wages, but the women and girls are always hustled out of any semblance of decent payment. They are penalized when they cannot meet excessive orders in time, or for making mistakes, or are simply unpaid for months at a time because there is not a thing they can do about it. "We are slaves to the contractors," a 30-year-old garment worker near New Delhi explained.  "They give us less wages, but we have no alternative." Gender, caste, and religion play important roles in the exploitation of these women and girls. More than 99% of the workers documented were either Muslim or a member of a subordinated caste group. Being a female and rural India additionally comes with a host of hostile and oppressive realities, including gender-based violence, physical and verbal abuse, and an acute lack of educational or income-generating opportunities. "I am living in hell," a 19-year old garment worker near the city of Bareilly explained, "I do not want to do this work." This young woman was sewing shirts for an apparel retailer than any consumer in the United States would recognize. I chose not to name the companies for which she and the other women and girls we documented were working because I see little merit in naming and shaming these brands. Rather, it is my hope that they will take the time to study the results of the research and work with their suppliers in India to undertake every effort to address the harsh conditions we documented.  In many cases, Indian suppliers do not disclose their subcontracting practices to Western brands, however, brands must also be proactive at ensuring full transparency all the way down their supply chains. They must ensure that livable wages are implemented and enforced for their home-based garment workers. They should also support independent, third-party inspections of home-based work, as well as the formalization of the sector to include contracts, unionization, safety equipment, healthcare, and educational support for the children of the women who sew our clothes. Those who prey on these women and girls should be aggressively prosecuted and punished. Above all, brands must begin to consider the workers at the bottom of their supply chains as employees of their companies, no matter how poor or uneducated they may be, no matter how many layers of a supply chain may separate them from headquarters, and no matter how many thousands of miles away they may live.  If brands are going to avail of cheap labor in India, they should ensure that all their workers –especially women – are treated with decency and respect. Doing so would be a powerful first step in promoting the fair and dignified treatment of all the individuals who toil in the informal underbelly of global supply chains…whose suffering, penury, and exploitation we eat, drink, and wear every day.

Settlement reached in lawsuit over girl’s bullying suicide - KFVS Posted: 27 Feb 2019 01:05 PM PST [unable to retrieve full-text content]Settlement reached in lawsuit over girl's bullying suicide  KFVS A mother whose 13-year-old daughter committed suicide has reached a settlement with the Missouri school district the girl attended.

Big ’80s shoulders are back. Is it because they need to hold the weight of the world? - The Washington Post Posted: 28 Feb 2019 08:12 AM PST Saint Laurent fall-winter 2019 collection. (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) February 28 at 11:10 AM PARIS — There's a shoulder obsession happening on the runways here. As the fall 2019 collections unfold, more than a few designers have focused on beefing up the silhouette of jackets and coats, dresses and blouses. The clothes aren't oversize, although they tend to look that way if you're accustomed to staring at garments that hew closely to the actual shape of the body. These are linebacker shoulders. "Working Girl" shoulder pads. Straight from the 1980s without being toned down, these are shoulders that play tricks with your proportions and make a woman's hips look like they are the size of a 12-year-old boy's. These big shoulders have been lurking around for a while. At first, they didn't look all that big because everything in fashion was big. The sleeves hung down the knuckles. The trousers were twice the size they needed to be. It was all part of the comfort-first, athleisure, jolt-the-eye fashion movement. But things are shifting. Shoulders are bigger and everything else is smaller. (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) The shoulders at Saint Laurent are massive. Designer Anthony Vaccarello showed the house's fall 2019 collection earlier this week inside a tent constructed directly in front of the Eiffel Tower. The tower began to twinkle just as the show began and the evening was clear, and it was all beautiful and magical. And then the doors closed, enveloping the room in darkness and the first model walked out into a spotlight looking like some strange extraterrestrial version of Betty Catroux, one of the house's longtime muses — with her long sideswept hair and androgynous features — from way back when the brand's namesake was young and irreverent. The model was perched atop high platform shoes with spike heels. She was wearing slim, slightly cropped trousers and a long overcoat with massive, massive shoulders. How could she fit through a doorway with those shoulders? How annoying would she be on a crowded subway banging into people? This tall, thin, young woman looked big and fierce with her linebacker shoulders. She could carry the weight of the world on those shoulders, and these days, the world is groaning under a long list of burdens. At Saint Laurent, the shoulders were so big that you almost didn't notice that some of the women weren't wearing pants. They were wearing fancy bloomers. You were also briefly distracted from the fact that a lot of the clothes on the runway looked familiar — as if you possibly saw them last season or the season before that. Surely you saw something quite similar. (Jonas Gustavsson/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) At the end of the show, the models paraded out under black lights and their shoes and clothes took on an iridescent glow as though the entire runway had just turned into a rave. It was a fun exercise but looked a little gimmicky. Maybe ladies who'd spend a couple thousand dollars on a Saint Laurent dress are into day-glo trickery. (Stefan Knauer/MCV Photo for The Washington Post) But back to the giant shoulders. In the 1980s, women barreled into the workplace with their clothing-as-armor. The shoulder pads were meant to give them the kind of sharp, defined silhouette that men had with their fancy suits and power ties. The wide shoulders carried into the evening with the flashy cocktail dresses and pouffy party frocks and the enormous, teased-out hair. People were taking up space and showing off wealth. And the big shoulders went quite nicely with all that excess. This time around, the shoulders don't seem to be celebrating overabundance. They are a power stance. Women are ready to tackle the world. To take it down. Or shore it up. Women have a lot to deal with. So get out of their way. EARLIER IN PARIS FASHION WEEK: The Dior runway had thought-provoking feminist commentary again. But the clothes? Meh.

Trial continues for father accused of prostituting 7-year-old girl - KRQE News 13 Posted: 27 Feb 2019 06:01 PM PST ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) - James Stewart's daughter was back on the witness stand Wednesday, but this time the defense spent the morning questioning the 8-year-old girl about her dad and even questioned her credibility. Stewart's attorney, Stefanie Gulley, asked the 8-year-old if she told the truth while on the stand Tuesday as she was questioned by prosecutor Brittany DuChaussee about drugs, sexual matters and being forced to steal. "Do you feel like you have to give certain answers to Ms. Brittany?" Gulley said. "Yeah," the girl said. Prosecutors have repeatedly accused Stewart of prostituting his daughter in exchange for drugs and paraphernalia. Wednesday, the defense questioned if the 8-year-old was sure she knew what drugs were. "Is it possible that what you saw in those cigarettes was tobacco?" Gulley said. "I don't know," the girl said.  "Okay. But it could have been, right?" Gulley said. "Yeah," Stewart's daughter said.  When asked if she knew what a pipe, used to smoke drugs looked like, the girl drew a picture of what resembled one. The 8-year-old's former teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary school also testified, telling jurors the 8-year-old stood out because she consistently showed up to school hungry, tired and dirty "She was not just dirty she was soiled," Sandra Torres said. "And when I say soiled, I mean I wasn't able to tell the color of her clothing anymore. She was completely radically different than her peers." After Stewart's daughter testified Wednesday afternoon, there was talk of a mistrial. According to the defense, a witness broke the rules about what could be said in court.  Thursday, the judge will decide whether the trial will continue. Related Coverage:

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