JUNE 12 — The Corn Exchange in Manchester was built in 1837, commanding a prime chunk of real estate next to the cathedral in one of the oldest parts of town.
Back then, the city was a significant hub for the rapidly unfolding Industrial Revolution, which changed the nature of civilisation forever and very quickly transformed Manchester from an obscure backwater into one of the biggest, richest and most influential metropolises in Europe.
The Corn & Produce Exchange, to use its full name, was an important centre for buying and selling the goods which were being churned out by hundreds of factories, providing a crucial meeting point for traders from all over the north of England and, after the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, from much farther afield.
Now, however, the attractive building serves a very different function: the Corn Exchange has nothing to do with trading any longer, instead housing 13 smart restaurants which proudly showcase food varieties from every corner of the globe.
Fancy some Indian street food? Mowgli is your place. Prefer Vietnamese? Try Pho. Maybe it’s time to sample a Brazilian barbeque at Cabana, or perhaps just play it safe with Italian pizza and pasta at Zizzi’s or Vapiano.
Whatever your tastes, they will be accommodated at the Corn Exchange’s eateries, which have rapidly become a favourite dining hotspot since opening last year — and understandably so, because it is an pleasant and welcoming environment with good food at competitive prices.
In this brief history of the Corn Exchange, we can see a snapshot of how life and society has changed in Manchester, Britain and indeed much of the developed world in the last couple of centuries.
When the building was founded, Europeans made things. We made more things than anywhere else in the world, in fact. Now, we barely make anything at all — we just consume.
Going through a mental checklist of my friends and acquaintances, I am struggling to think of many whose profession actually involves manufacturing anything.
A few work in the financial sector; others are in telecoms. I know teachers, doctors, writers and a variety of media professionals…but hardly anybody who manufactures — or even whose employer makes — a physical product.
Western Europeans just don’t do those jobs anymore, instead consuming products which have been made by other people, usually in far flung destinations, and working in service industries which are generally the by-product of that consumption.
A quick examination of the clothes I am wearing now provides more details: my sweater was made in Cambodia; the T-shirt in China; my jeans came off a production line somewhere in Bangladesh; the underwear label states “Made in Vietnam.”
Perhaps the clearest example of the Western world’s reliance upon imports comes from one of my few friends who is actually involved in making stuff, running a successful family business which produces frozen Indian food such as samosas and bhajis.
They have a factory in north-west London, but don’t use it for very much — it is cheaper and provides better quality to have everything manufactured and packaged in China, shipping over the final product in frozen containers to distribute onwards to British stores. Quite amazingly, even when Western businesses do actually make things, we generally prefer to get foreigners to make them for us.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing. In the modern connected world, where it’s just as easy to communicate with someone in another continent as the next town, it really doesn’t matter where the goods we consume actually come from.
What does matter, however, is the process by which our consumer society is fuelled. And in this respect, we haven’t got it right.
When the Manchester Corn Exchange was opened nearly two centuries ago, working conditions for the vast majority of factory staff were appalling — you only need to read a few pages of a Charles Dickens novel to find out how bad.
After conditions in Manchester’s workhouses were studied by government reformers, laws were gradually passed to improve the circumstances for workers: safer environments, fewer hours, more personal rights and, eventually, the elimination of child labour. Similar measures were taken in other industrialising nations.
It appears, however, that when these malpractices — and eventually the entire manufacturing industry — were banished from Europe, they weren’t banished entirely. They were simply shipped overseas, where they are applied, even now, in the factories and warehouses of Bangladesh, India and Cambodia.
To be honest, I don’t really want to know exactly how bad working conditions are for the people who made my T-shirt. I suspect they are very bad indeed, but a cowardly sense of guilt prevents me from finding out more — regular TV bulletins about factory fires and child labour suffice to paint the picture.
Perhaps this no excuse, but really it shouldn’t even be something that I have to think about. When I buy a product from a reputable and well-known organisation, I should be able to have confidence that it has been brought to market in an ethical manner.
But that is where free-market capitalism falls down. When left entirely at liberty to make their own decisions, business owners will quite reasonably attempt to make as much money as possible. If they didn’t, they would fail because their competitors would.
That is largely what happened in nineteenth century Manchester, and it is largely what still happens right now in sweatshops across large parts of Asia. True, there are some rules and regulations, along with initiatives such as Fair Trade, which attempt to prevent the abuse of workers.
But they are insufficient, and governments of the developed world should do more to ensure employers, however powerful they might be, treat people fairly.
It’s not 1837 and western Europe is no longer structured by the Industrial Revolution. That’s fine, but we should not subject foreign workers to the same conditions which we deemed inappropriate for our own.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
