Garment factory

Yesterday after the tea auction, we visited a garment factory. This one seemed pretty nice--windows, fans, good lighting, etc. It's owned by a family who also owns a ship-breaking yard, a salt company and other large entities. Here is what they were making that day: large basketball shorts to be shipped to the USA:
It was pretty amazing to see the sheer volume of these they were making. Are there really that many fat men buying thousands and thousands of these in America? There were piles of these things everywhere and hundreds of workers each doing one step of the process. Everything down to attaching the price tag with the US dollar amount printed on it. These were Pony brand shorts and the price they were attaching was $28.00. More than these workers earn in a month--and these particular workers are well-paid.
It was interesting for me to see all the different types of sewing machines and how they inserted the pockets, decorative stripes, elastic, etc. There were some amazing and expensive industrial sewing machines in action....I was a little envious!
Here is the cutter in action: there was another table next to it with probably 15 people rolling out huge lengths of fabric and smoothing it out in big piles to prepare for cutting. The cutter uses a large jigsaw to saw through the many layers:
Directly after the cutter, there were people marking the right side of the fabric with sticky labels, I assume to make it easy for the sewers to quickly assemble the pieces. I think of all the jobs I witnessed, that would be the most mind-numbing of all. Peeling little stickers and sticking them to fabric over and over and over again all day long.....
Here is an image of the main sewing room. As you can see, it's HUGE and very busy. Each station is dedicate to one small step in the process.
Here is a closeup of some sewers. It was kind of weird to be walking through this place taking photos of these people's everyday lives, but despite these women's facial expressions, most everyone was very friendly and willing to share what they were doing.
There were many inspection points throughout the process to ensure correct sizing and proper sewing. Here is the final inspection stage:
The person who showed us around didn't speak much english but we do have a handful of Bangladeshis in our group of new faculty, so some of them were translating. It was very loud and we were walked through pretty quickly, so I didn't get to ask as many questions as I wanted, but they did say they will sew whatever the united states orders, so this isn't just a basketball shorts factory. One section was also sewing little boys' dress pants for WalMart. He also said all the workers were able to change jobs periodically to avoid boredom. It's difficult to gauge how representative this factory is compared to others, but nonetheless quite an interesting experience. Many of the basketball shorts were alsHUGE sizes--like XXXL and also short-wearing does not exist anywhere in the subcontinent, so I'm curious to know what goes through the heads of these people about who would fit into such a large piece of clothing and why you would wear something like that.....