The compliance inspector tries to ensure that the factory is not going to embarrass the brand by ensuring that the factory is sticking to an agreement that would typically cover the length of the working day, the amount of compulsory overtime, wage rates, safety and health requirements, and fire regulations. But compliance inspection is a cat and mouse game. In China, as everyone in the business told me, ‘counter compliance’ has become a sophisticated art. Companies keep two sets of payrolls—one for inspection, another that records the real hours the workers put in and the real wages they are paid. Inspectors like Jane Trevor spend their days in the factory, photocopying documents to cross-check with production volumes, then hang around outside after dark to see if the workshop lights stay on beyond the admitted hours.

Trevor said that there was ‘massive falsification’ of factory documents and that people like her had to cope with too many factories, each with a high turnover of workers. ‘Everything was so bad in the beginning. There was no minimum wage, the conditions were unsafe. At that time we all felt a huge satisfaction. But making the next step is really hard. Everything is so much more cut-throat and carnivorous now. The brands are squeezing the last bit out of the factories. Consumers are paying no more for sports shirts than they were ten years ago. You can make a change in your tiny world but you are surrounded by appalling factories and unless you can change on a macro level, it’s no good. In Pinggu, outside Shanghai, factories regularly keep half the workers’ wages back until the end of the year. In Xinjiang we have a Korean factory that’s paying less than the minimum wage but he won’t change because it will upset the others.’

Wal-Mart employs one hundred auditors and inspects at least some of its suppliers. We know this because of a document known as a ‘cheat-sheet’ which in 2004 found its way to an NGO from a worker at a Wal-Mart supplier, the Heyi factory in Dongguan, in Guangdong Province. The factory had prepared the document in advance of an inspection that was scheduled to take place in February 2004. It showed that workers would be paid fifty yuan each if they memorized the answers to questions that the inspectors were likely to ask them. The correct answer, for instance, to the question ‘How long is the working week?’ was ‘Five days’. The correct number of days worked in a month was twenty-two; overtime was not forced and was paid at the correct rate; they were not obliged to give the factory a deposit when they started work there; wages were paid on time; there were enough toilet facilities in the dormitory and the dormitories themselves were spacious and clean. There were fire drills, and they were not made to pay for their own ID cards or uniforms. If all of this were true, what need would there have been for the workers to memorize the answers?

That is one reason that Jane, an employee of a large American multinational, has reached an unexpected conclusion. ‘It’s ridiculous for us to be trying to do this private investigation work. The only people who can really monitor compliance are the workers. They are there all the time. They know what’s going on.’

I asked if she was proposing to reinvent the trade union.

She laughed. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say it on the record, but yes.’

‘The most prominent feature of the trial has been the court’s complete lack of interest either in the facts or in issues of law’, he said in his speech to the Dongguan court. The defendants, he admitted, had taken part in ‘inappropriate action’ but they had already paid dearly for it with the loss of their jobs and the stigma of having been arrested. The cause of the riot was ‘the fact that our society today permits and encourages the most naked forms of social injustice, together with an unrestrained level of gross and inhuman exploitation of the workers that has reached truly reactionary proportions.’ The factory workers worked a six-day week, four of those days eleven hours long, for a wage that, he said, ‘cannot even support normal life.’

Gao continued, ‘The inequity of workers within our current system of labour relations is absolute. The channels for resolution of labour conflicts of all kinds in our society are either totally blocked or non-existent; and judicial protections for the rights and interests of the labourer are functionally absent… This is just like the [pre-1949] situation of cold-blooded and ruthless exploitation of the workers by the capitalists…the very same situation that caused the workers then to rise up in revolutionary rebellion! What distinguishes the present situation, however, is that in those days the Communist Party stood alongside the workers in their fight against capitalist exploitation, whereas today the Communist Party is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the cold-blooded capitalists in their struggle against the workers!’

[...] Three hundred million migrant workers have passed through the Pearl River Delta in the past twenty years and 30 million currently work there. For most of them, their factory lives are brief: after five years, factory owners are reluctant to employ someone who is judged, by then, to be worn out. Their remittances have helped to raise their distant villages out of poverty, but many have paid a terrible price for their willingness to labour. There are some sights in China I shall always remember: the young women from a battery factory, poisoned by cadmium, who pushed forward their thin haired, yellow faced little children for me to look at (they had passed on the contamination, unwittingly, to the next generation); the men who gasped for breath as they contemplated an early death from silicosis; the workers hideously mutilated by a factory fire for which they received no compensation. For the last two decades men and women like them have provided the labour that has given us cheap goods (on the shelves of Wal-Mart and elsewhere) and put fortunes into the pockets of local officials and factory owners.

But the constant disturbance to my father’s sleep cycle wore him down. For the two weeks of the day shift, he was morose. My brothers and I, and my mother, too, saw less of him than we had when he’d been working in the park. He’d get home from work around the same time as I got home from school, unless he could get overtime, which he always worked if there was any to be had. Workers weren’t considered cooperative if they turned it down and were marked for the sack. For a while in the 1960s, overtime was guaranteed.

The two weeks of night shift turned our cramped house into a place of dark and terrible quiet. No one dared speak above a whisper while he was in bed during the day. He’d get up in a foul mood that got worse as the time to clock-in drew closer. His face became darker and greyer. The light caught the copper stubble on his cheeks. He hardly spoke at all. My mother talked a lot, often about her work, and that maddened him, and this lack of communication was desperately frustrating for her. In the evening, when my father was doing overtime, she would knit pullovers for all of us and eat boiled sweets in front of the little box of a television, with its volume down low because the baby was sleeping. Sometimes I heard my mother crying in the night and I never knew what for.

n 1965, we moved to a new three-bedroom council house with a garden and a lot of green in front of it. My father still did his two weeks of days and two weeks of nights but he had learned to cope: this was now normal life, a human being can get used to almost anything. Then the factory managers came up with a plan to change to a three-shift system: one week days, one week afternoons, one week nights. ‘At least it’s only one week of night shift,’ my father said, but it was yet another disturbance to his sleep pattern. Sleep disruption, as torturers in prison camps know, produces disorientation and then compliance. At Hoover, productivity increased.

[...] This was in the late 1970s, before Thatcher, during the years of industrial unrest that preceded her election victory. We were talking about an imminent strike on the railways.

‘Your mother reckons the communists are behind it,’ he said. ‘But it’s not communists. You got to stand by the union. You got to know what kind of people ordinary workers are up against.’

My father and I hadn’t talked about anything other than football or the weather for years. He knew my politics. He wanted to connect with me in some way.

‘A while ago, right? We had this time-and-motion bloke come around,’ he said. Time-and-motion men are despised in the valleys, but my father had a guileless look on his face.

‘In front of the machine where I work,’ he said, ‘there was this big window… Looking out over the mountain. This bloke decided that if they changed the windows for frosted glass, we’d spend less time staring out at the grass and trees, right? It would probably increase productivity. So they put the frosted glass in. And they were right. Productivity did go up.’

I remember how my father shifted in his seat, a bit nervous, and then looked straight at me.

‘So what they did next, right? They decided that if productivity went up when they put the frosted glass in, it would go up even more if they bricked the windows up completely. Now I’ve got a blank wall to look at, haven’t I?’ ‘That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with,’ he said.

In the American Midwest of hte 1970s and 1980s, 'factory in ruins' was a stock phrase with all the force and familiarity of 'farm crisis' and 'long cold winter'. At least 2.5 million manufacturing jobs in the industrial heartland of the US were lost in just the period 1979 to 1983. [...] There was a sense, then, that even the rust might disappear before long.

The last time I performed in their theatre—the Jo Ro, opposite the factory—I played Abdullah, a street urchin in Tennessee Williams strange, static play, Camino Real. I was thirteen years old. As Abdullah, I was photographed by the Yorkshire Evening Press, and the accompanying caption came very near to praising my brief performance. I would read this caption over and over in the hope that unequivocal praise for my acting talent might somehow emerge from it.

I was fated to work in a factory. [...] My father managed to avoid working in the textile plants, but he couldn’t help being employed by ancillary businesses; there wasn’t anything else. When I was born he had been working for about five years in an iron foundry that made equipment for the plants. When the industry collapsed a few years later the foundry, like so many other local businesses, fell with it. We emigrated to the United States, where the initial promise of new and fulfilling employment soon gave way to uncertainty, then near-despair. Eventually my father was hired by yet another factory, which manufactured pipes and rods from a hard, resilient, slippery synthetic that for household applications is trademarked Teflon. He worked there until his retirement at the age of sixty-five. Immediately thereafter he began displaying symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, unprovably but almost certainly the result of twenty-seven years’ daily exposure to ambient powdered fluorocarbons. Dementia followed a decade later. His death at eighty came as a consequence of his refusing food and drink for a week, a mode of death known in nursing-home jargon as ‘Alzheimer’s suicide’.