Why Are People Willing to Fork Out a Fortune for Shoes That Cost Little to Make?

Shoes are fashion's version of drugs.

More than any other article of clothing, shoes alter the way we move, walk and feel. Shoes spur cravings, compulsions and crimes as no other clothing does. Some people can't have sex without seeing or touching shoes. (Know any hat or tube-sock fetishists?) The fashion industry knows this. It tells us that shoes can improve our health, skill, speed: that, in effect, shoes are medicine. The industry tells us shoes can render us irresistible. Thus it knows it can charge us anything.

It also knows we can't go DIY with shoes, the way we can with drawstring totebags and elastic-waisted skirts. When we buy shoes, we're paying for technology -- and design, transit, marketing, and manufacturing that (just as with real drugs) occurs far away under conditions we'd rather not envision as we buckle strappy sandals as seen on TV.

In 2005, the National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch reported that Chinese factory workers making New Balance shoes earned 40 cents an hour, which dropped to 32 cents after mandatory room-and-board deductions.

"I was unprepared for the heat," says Beth Rosenberg, a Tufts University assistant professor of public health and community medicine who toured Chinese shoe factories as part of a project funded by the International Labor Organization. "Air conditioning -- are you kidding? They don't even have fans."

Not permitted to sit, assembly-line laborers stood all day breathing solvent fumes amidst unguarded cutting machines in the factories Rosenberg toured, which produced shoes for Nike, Timberland, Clark, and other brands. The air outside the factories was palpably polluted. When Rosenberg asked workers what they'd like to change about their jobs, "they were so terrified that they would not answer the f------ question. Ask Americans that question, and they've all got opinions." Staring floorward, the Chinese workers wouldn't speak.

"Those factories are hellholes. Even the ones with corporate-responsibility programs, where the managers are trained not to scream in workers' faces or schedule seventeen-hour shifts, are hellholes."

Rising costs -- minimum wage in Beijing is soon set to reach $140 a month -- is driving factory production from China to cheaper locales such as Vietnam.

In the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, millions of shoes destined to be sold overseas are produced in private homes, as piecework, by entire families. By using men, women and children to stitch, glue and polish shoes at home, companies needn't invest in factories, machinery or managers.

As part of the hard-to-regulate "informal sector," home-based shoe assemblers are "invisible," says chemical engineer Pia Markkanen, a professor in the University of Massachusetts' Department of Work Environment. While researching her book Shoes, Glues, and Homework (Baywood, 2009), Markkanen visited many home-based shops such as this one in Thailand:

At the front door, stacks of shoeboxes were ready to be transported. … Two women sitting cross-legged on the floor were cleaning and polishing dozens of pairs of shoes. On the second floor, workers toiled surrounded by raw materials, boxes, tools, cooking equipment, glue cans, sewing machines, finished and unfinished shoes, and electrical wiring. Some of them ate a meal, drank a cup of coffee, or smoked cigarettes. … Toxic fumes emanated from open glue bowls and cleaning and polishing chemicals.

Home-based shoe production is widespread and "extraordinarily dangerous," she says.

"Chemical hazards make shoemaking particularly hazardous. Organic solvents -- used in glues, primers, and cleaning and polishing products -- are essentially petrochemicals. The storage of toxic and flammable chemicals constitutes not only a health hazard but a fire and explosion hazard."