subject: The Right Price Of A Leather Jacket [print this page] A leather jacket for many is a must have item; in some parts of the west every wardrobe at least boasts of one leather wear, a few may have a collection of leather coats. An original leather jacket as compared to those that are synthetic is more expensive; people put aside a part of their monthly income to buy one.
Producing leather and leather products is hard work that is messy and requires semi skilled and skilled labor. The countries where there is a high demand for leather and its products do not produce leather locally, or at least do not produce as much leather as required, an enormous chunk of the demand for the products are met by foreign trade i.e. imports. A reason for not producing leather within the boundaries of the developed countries is that the cost of labor is very high as compared to the cost of labor in the Asian and African countries, plus keeping up or meeting the constitutional requirements and becoming environmental sensitive would become a task if leather was produced locally in USA, Canada, Australia or Britain; it is therefore simply convenient to delegate the toilsome task of producing leather and leather products to labor intensive, economies.
A country like Pakistan has a huge population that consumes beef and mutton everyday, besides that on festive occasions such as Eid, a large number of cattle including cows, goats, bulls, camels, and sheep are sacrificed, giving way to a bulk produce of unprocessed and unrefined animal skin. The skin is gifted away by many in good faith to the local mosques or animal hide collectors who then for a very meager amount sell it off to those who turn it into leather.
Leather industry in Pakistan is a small scale, labor intensive industry that contributes a notable percentage to the economy. People who may be underage, may not have attended school at all, and may not know how to read or write are hired during the initial stages of producing leather. The labor repeatedly works at the production areas, some of them spend their earliest days of their lives with their fathers on these production houses and with time become experienced and then experts at their job. The recognition to the hard work they put in, in terms of finances and job rating seems to be non existent. Besides, there is no governance implemented on working conditions, labor hours or extra compensation for working in hazardous conditions i.e. being exposed to chemicals for washing leather for long hours.
The international media propagation seems to have missed the working conditions of leather-producing-labor-intensive-industry in bringing about awareness to the individual buyers, and keep repeating the issues until buyers, world round are ready to pay the right prices for what they want to own.
A leather jacket is cut from the very leather produced; the jacket production factory could be based on a conveyor belt yet requires a lot of human interference. A fine leather-jacket, requires immaculate craftsmanship, the western importers have a quality control department that either selects or rejects the item based on its finishing, therefore no jacket racked up for sale in the retail outlets, lacks craftsmanship, however it seems, there is no check and balance to oversee if the labor employed to put together the novel garment is properly compensated.
