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.’