Fashion label manomama: "Here you are worth something"

Marianne Hoffmann sewed in the chord earlier

Half the life she was a number. For 35 years, Marianne Hoffmann, 55, worked in a textile company in the accord, in the blouse volume, number 194. The only ones who were interested in her, she says and stops briefly the rattling overlock sewing machine, were those with the stopwatch: Effectivators who stopped work processes. Where else can you knock out for a few seconds? Marianne has always participated. Two weeks before her 35th anniversary, the junior manager completed the entire site. In Romania, that's cheaper. Marianne Hoffmann stretches her fingers like a manicure. "They were mostly in the sewing machine for that?" For a boss who just kicks them out? Here, she says today and nods her head over her sewing machine in the factory hall with the more than 80 seamstresses, "here I am seen." She could come with any problem. And if she does not manage to do the stint, even the boss will join in and sew. "Sina has promised me that I can work here until retirement."

"We want to work, we can work"

Daughter Melanie works as a Umdreherin

Melanie Schenk always starts at the left edge. She moves her thumbs between the layers, tightens the fabric, turns her wrists outward and rolls the bag over a steel handle. Then down again, on the pile, done. It takes her less than six seconds to do that. And again from the beginning. Melanie Schenk, 31, blonde curls, is a turner at Manomama. She turns cotton shopping bags from left to right, 4000 pieces a day, for eight hours, five days a week, for ten euros an hour. She says, "I do not want to trade." Next to her was her mother, Monika Giersig, 53. She was there on the first day of work in the hall. At that time she had problems to get through the narrow corridors between the pallets, she was so thick. Terrible, she says, when she sees pictures of that time. Since then she has lost 20 pounds. "We want to work, we can work, and nobody else gives us a chance."

Marianne Hoffmann, the former chord seamstress, sits two rows farther on. She had written over a thousand applications, moved from Upper Franconia to the textile city of Augsburg, because she hoped for better chances here. The Office did not submit a single proposal for mediation. Basically she did not want to, said Marianne Hoffmann at the employment office. Otherwise she would have found something already. Depression, rehab, psychotropic drugs - for five years, "it was the hardest time of my life," she says. "No longer needed, that got me killed." Now she is sewing again. Her family doctor had told her about the small Augsburger textile company. "The best medicine" Marianne calls it. She feels at home in the factory, she says. "It's worth something here - though we can not do it that way anymore." Marianne wears slippers.

Monika Giersig was there from the first day

If this works, then that's the end of the excuses. Here, in a factory hall between shopping center and fast food restaurant, overlooking the parking lot, in the middle of Augsburg, in the "textile quarter", as it still stands on the signs of the city highway, although no one produced here long ago. First Hungary, then Romania. And now everything to Asia. As always, when it comes to simple activities that can be outsourced to low-wage countries. "If this works," says Sina Trinkwalder and spreads her arms, "if this works with the hand-intensive textile industry here, then in the future Bosch will also have to build its brake discs in Germany and Rowenta the irons and ..." It's 9.40 Watch, it's the voice of a lioness, Monika thundering through the factory floor: "Break!" She roars against the noise of 87 industrial sewing machines. Against the overlockers, who jostle the fabrics with nearly two meters of yarn per second and roar like leaf blowers; against the stepper for the hem, turned twice, the clattering like hedge trimmers; and even against the machine-gun raids of the Riegler, who fix the sewn-in handle band.

The lioness is Monika. "They would not stop otherwise," she says. It took them a month to get the first 20,000 bags. The production was not recorded, individual steps chaotic. It was Sina Trinkwalder's first big order, from dm. The drugstore chain wanted organic cotton shopping bags, sustainable and socially produced. Meanwhile, 15,000 bags per day go out. In the break in front of the factory hall: beer table sets, crowded ashtrays, a bite to eat. Melanie, who can laugh with her cheeks without forgetting the corners of her mouth, tells us about her job before Manomama.From cleaning in the hostel, as she ran after her money forever; from the snack service, during which she prepared snacks all night long, even at that time with her mother, until 6:30 o'clock the driver arrived. From her job as a dishwasher, where she was eventually promoted to cook, should be responsible.

Melanie shakes her head: "Career opportunities, that's not what I like." Monika, her mother, talks about temporary work agencies and Amazon. She emphasizes it on the back of the "o", like ozone. That was an insane rage there in the camp in Graben, south of Augsburg. No work there. Purple dust has got caught in Monika's hair, on her cardigan, even on her eyelashes. Purple bags are currently doing it. Every three months comes a new color and thus new dust. Monika was ill at the beginning of the year, a pneumonia, she smokes a lot. Not that she did not come back after a few days, she says. Not that she did not work. But she could not roar. Two weeks later, when she roared for the first time, applause came up. And many came and thanked each other: It's great that you're right again.

Everybody gets ten euros an hour, no matter what she does

Marianne, with the slippers, tells of her first call to Manomama. She should come right here, they said. "After five years of unemployment - come right over?" She was greeted with a laugh, led around: Let's try it. What do you want to do? "I joined in immediately." Every employee gets ten euros an hour, no matter what she does. "If there is no one turning around, the bag never gets finished, it's that simple," says the boss. Everyone has a minimum set of how many packets of bags he has to make, depending on the workspace. There is a bonus for more. Manomama does not want to be a nonprofit company. The company writes a black zero. Everything the company pays off is invested in new jobs.

Sina drinking forest

There is certainly a lot of defiance in the fact that Sina Trinkwalder, who has moved out of home very early ("because one can not choose a family"), could only briefly hide in her agency time. No coincidence that she has chosen the textile sector, the "filthy business", as she calls it. "The send the shirt to Romania, let it there for 60 cents to sew the piece, which cost me the handles for four bags." Sina Trinkwalder expects no margin, wants to put money into work, not profit. She talks fast and much and Swabian. It's about tackling, visions for a new society and the question of why we would prefer to drive two kilometers to the gas station shop on Sunday instead of asking the neighbors for a bag of milk. She raves about her jeans line, "Augschburgdenim", baby clothes and felt coats. Everything self-designed, an even smaller assortment, distributed via the Internet, often only produced to order, "sustainable".

The profit flows almost completely into new jobs

Above all, she talks about shopping bags. High quality, regional, ecological. Alone the material costs about 1.30 euros. The handles come from Schwarzach. The sewing thread from Ansbach. The organic cotton is woven here, dyed here. The residues sorted recycled. With every bag, just 0.4 cents of profit are left. Other textile companies calculate with 20 percent margin. "I just define profit differently, it's worth something for people to work again." There is a founding myth. Back then, she had not felt well with the advertising agency for quite some time: chatting things up to people, money as an end in itself, yes, yes - but it only took a homeless bottle collector to tip over. He sat in front of her office building, she says, turning a Christmas decoration in his fingers. She looked closer. He had folded it from the paper of a campaign she had been responsible for. That was the key moment for her. "Produce, work with our hands, we have to go there, we have to take the people with them, we can not all bawl around."

Of course, she has thrown people out too. Three young women who did not want to cut their fingernails, even though they were constantly hanging on to the fabric. Two others who had cheated on her. Of course, there are people who are not socially compatible, says Sina. "But it is much less than we think, much less than we are currently ruling out." The women who work for Manomama often have a long history of suffering. In retrospect, Sina Trinkwalder learned from a seamstress that she had eaten nothing but four egg biscuits for two weeks. Simple, because she had no money. "From long-term unemployment, only very few get out without damage." And then the quirks, the spleens. There is the woman who used to sew coffin cushions and now maneuvers the pallet truck through the aisles every day for an hour, completely without meaning. The then often grudging colleagues, whose things are in the way, she must now through. Another one gets sick regularly two days a week.

The company Manomama, founded in April 2010, is the only social business in the textile industry in Germany. The workers are paid by tariff, who creates a lot gets a bonus.

Sina Trinkwalder strokes her black hair back. She knows that she herself is her own - and she can be stubborn. She likes that. The eagle feather is a symbol of lightness and strength. For her company logo she took two feathers and crossed them like swords. Tomorrow at 4.15 clock will ring the alarm clock again with Melanie. As always. At 4:45, she will wake her ten-year-old son. "He wants it that way," says Melanie: family time. At 5:40 am, she will be sitting in the hall with her mother, turning up fabric bags, over steel hangers that look like hearts. The machines roar all around. "I'd rather start early," says Melanie, "then I'll have something of the day."

Now Melanie is sitting on the big sofa in her living room doing homework with Sean, her son. He should do an apprenticeship. "That's why he has to put up with more pressure now," says Melanie. Sean is in third grade, grows up without a father, good grades rewarded his mother with money. Melanie herself left the secondary school without a degree. "I did not get the oral exam." She presses her lips together, looks at the wall, the big showcase with 3-D puzzle works of the Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, centrally in between a desk-sized flat screen. Then Melanie's face relaxes, and laughter rises again in her cheeks: "Until now I have not needed her, the lesson."

The Company

Social entrepreneur Sina Trinkwalder wants in her company "Manomama" produce ecologically sound textiles under transparent and fair conditions where they are worn. The goal is sustainability: From the jeans that can become an heirloom (tear-resistant twine, double-stitched seams), to the program "The Last Shirt", in which Restmeter are sewn into individual pieces. Only ecological materials are processed and sold over the internet: www.manomama.de. Since banks do not believe in the concept and give her no credit, each new sewing machine but costs 1000-600 euros, Trinkwalder has sought on Twitter and Facebook Maschinenpaten. These days the new production hall will be opened.