In April this year the Labour Inspectorate and the police closed a clandestine textile workshop in Camp de Turia, in the province of Valencia. Around twenty-five people were working there, most of them without papers, some of them on weeks of up to sixty hours. It is a few hours down the coast from where I live.
I want to be careful how I write about this, because there is a version of the story that uses those twenty-five people as scenery for a point about supply chains. They were sewing. That is a trade, and they were practising it in a building with no inspection, no contract and no way to complain about either. The wrongdoing belongs to whoever ran the workshop and to a purchasing chain that did not look past the first invoice.
The label is a customs fact, not a labour fact
Made in Spain records where the last substantial transformation of a garment took place. That is a customs determination. It carries no information about who performed the work, on what contract, in what building, or whether anyone ever went to see. European manufacture is on average better regulated than the alternatives, and that average is real. An average is not a guarantee about the batch in your hand.
The usual mechanism is not fraud, it is capacity. A licensed workshop takes an order it cannot deliver on the timeline agreed, and passes part of the run to somebody else, who may pass part of it on again. Each hop is invisible from above. The tier the buyer audited is genuinely the tier the buyer audited. It is simply not the tier that sewed the sleeves.
What verification actually looks like
Country of origin is a region. Verification is an address. The workable test is whether you can say, of one specific garment, this batch was cut and sewn in this building, in this week, by this legal entity, and here is the inspection record with a date on it. If the most precise answer available is the name of a country, nothing has been verified. You have been given geography and invited to infer the rest.
This is also why I am wary of the word local when it is used as a quality claim. Local is a distance. It correlates with better conditions often enough that people have stopped checking, and the moment an industry stops checking something is the moment it becomes worth checking.
Why we record the lot rather than the product
When we describe one of our garments we do not describe the model. We describe the production run it came out of. The record names the facility, the dates, the fabric lot that went in, the certificates that cover it and the day each of those certificates expires. Two blazers that look identical can come from different runs, and if the runs differ then the honest record differs too.
Where we have not verified something, we mark it as self-declared rather than quietly rounding it up. That is a less impressive sentence to put on a website. From September, under the EU consumer rules already on the books, it is also the only kind of sentence that will be lawful, which I think is a decent argument for having written it that way from the start.
What to ask before the next order
Ask your uniform supplier which facility produced your last delivery, and see whether the answer is a building or a country. Ask whether subcontracting is permitted under their contract and, if it is, whether subcontractors are declared in advance. Ask when someone from their company last physically visited the site. None of these are hostile questions. They are the questions a buyer would ask about anything else they were responsible for.
I am not arguing that Spanish manufacture is a problem. A good deal of our own production is European and I chose that on purpose, with my eyes open. I am arguing that proximity feels like knowledge and is not. That workshop was operating within driving distance of schools whose uniforms are described, accurately, as made in Spain.