“Why can’t you afford to shop with sustainable brands?” It’s an uncomfortable question, but one we need to start asking ourselves and others.
This isn’t about interrogating people over their income, budget, or spending habits, however. It’s about getting to grips with the myriad external factors that mean so many consumers in the Global North are so financially strained that they feel clothing priced to reflect socially and environmentally responsible practices is a luxury. “I know why it costs more; it’s what clothing should cost, but the pricing makes those brands quite exclusive,” says Jade*.
Naturally, consumers frame affordability within their own financial circumstances—money is a sensitive, personal subject—but when we start to think less personally and more systematically, it’s easier to see that our own struggles are more closely linked with garment workers’ than we might think.
Different context, same system
A consumer not being able to buy a £100 shirt from a sustainable brand and a garment worker not being able to afford enough food to consume their required daily caloriesare not comparable issues. People living in wealthy countries such as the UK and the US have entrenched layers of privilege that can make drawing any comparison between them and people in under-resourced countries in the Global South uncomfortable, and it’s important to make those distinctions.
Yet there are comparisons and, more importantly, lines of solidarity to be drawn between anyone in any country struggling to survive under today’s economic system. “The context might be different, but the power relationships are very similar,” says Alena Ivanova, campaigns and activism lead at Labour Behind the Label, a non-profit that campaigns for garment workers’ rights.
When I spoke to Taslima*, a garment worker from Bangladesh, as the world snapped back into action after Covid lockdowns, she told me she struggled to buy enough nutritious food for her children. She was working full time, as are many of the millions of parents across Europe and the US who rely on foodbanks.
Ashton is currently going through over 10 t-shirts a week as she breastfeeds and cares for her new baby. She wishes she could invest in sustainably made clothes. “A £60 t-shirt just isn’t attainable. There are some beautiful small companies who produce clothes I’d love to own and pass on, but it’s out of my budget, especially on maternity pay,” she says.
Compared to Amna*, a Bangladeshi garment worker with 14 years’ experience who was not paid her rightful maternity benefits by the owner of the factory she works at, Ashton is inarguably fortunate. But maternity pay rates in the UK are notoriously low compared to other wealthy nations and many thousands of women are either fired or discriminated against for having children. There is an overarching system that penalises mothers and undermines their earning power under which both a consumer in the UK and a garment worker on the other side of the world can suffer to different degrees.
Eroding solidarity
Despite the clear parallels to be drawn, an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mindset remains – and not by accident. The fashion industry has systematically and successfully alienated consumers from the source of the clothes they wear by closing domestic brand-owned factories and sub-contracting cheap labour overseas. The mass offshoring of production means it’s far less likely than just a few decades ago that the average consumer in the Global North will know someone who makes clothes for a living. Our understanding of details like the hours worked, the skill involved, and the level of pay has eroded. “The consumer is not able to see the real life of the garment worker, and that they are suffering,” says Taslima.
In turn, we’ve lost an inherent sense of solidarity. While a neighbour or family member being forced to work for below the minimum wage might have caused an outrage, a narrative has emerged that workers in production countries such as Bangladesh, India, or Vietnam are poor and desperate and, well, and some money is better than no money. This is not only a gross generalisation, but it also normalises poverty for certain citizens or workers, making the rest of the population less likely to expect anything different and less likely to relate to them. But there’s plenty to relate to.
Joining the dots
Garment workers’ rights are under constant threat from corporate interests. Threats of dismissal, violence, and even death are used to prevent workers from organising and unionising, making it difficult and often dangerous for them to collectively advocate for better pay and safer conditions. Anti-union sentiment isn’t isolated to garment making regions, however. Union-busting is on the rise in the US to try and silence growing calls for higher pay and fair contracts, and workers’ rights are in decline in Europe too, with increasing violations of workers’ rights to strike and organise. No matter the country, without a unified worker voice and fair representation in decision making, conditions remain unsafe, contracts remain unfair, and pay stays low. Hardly ideal conditions for consumers to invest in sustainable brands. “Every single worker needs a trade union movement,” says Taslima.
It’s not just anti-union sentiment reducing our spending power. With such strong corporate powers at play prioritising profit over people, companies are slashing jobs, driving cheap short term and zero hours contracts, and hiring ‘self-employed contractors’ to whom they owe no employee benefits such as sick pay or holiday pay. Wages are stagnating while the cost of living rises, and workers across the world are worse off than they were a few years ago. Meanwhile the rich are flourishing as wealth inequality grows.
What’s happening is an extraction of wealth from workers to people who already have more than enough, and it’s this same extractive model that powers the fashion industry. Brands often boast of ‘providing jobs’, but those jobs are not provided out of the good of any fashion CEO’s heart. They are the product of economic and political conditions that serve western interests, with brands, governments and global financial institutions flocking to regions they can tap for cheap and abundant labour as they did when Bangladesh (the world’s second biggest exporter of garments) established itself as a garment producing region in the 70s and 80s.
Though research shows garment manufacturing has lifted many in garment producing countries out of extreme poverty, fashion’s constant push to cut costs has meant that those same countries have been forced to keep minimum wages low to continue to appeal to international interests. Millions of workers remain trapped in poverty. In Nepal, the minimum wage for garment factory workers is 19,550 Nepalese Rupees while the living wage is 30,000 per month, says Krishna Bhusal from the Nepal Garment Workers Union. The government commitment to improving pay is just not at the required level, he says.
“You can look at the relationships that are established between the developed west and global majority regions through a lens of colonialism and extraction,” says Ivanova. “It’s easy to say countries should just raise the minimum wage for garment workers, but you’re talking about a huge cornerstone industry for that country, for that whole society. When brands threaten to pull out and move business elsewhere [where costs are lower], it’s an existential threat for that country.”
Lessons to be learned
Once you can spot the insidious tactics companies use to keep garment worker wages low, it’s easy to spot similar tactics at play elsewhere. “We need to communicate to brands, but also to our employers and the decision-makers in charge, that we deserve much better. And this is what unites us with garment workers. They are the ones showing us how you fight against systems that are stacked against you,” says Ivanova.
Despite the many forces conspiring against their efforts to organise, garment workers do it in their millions. Though there is a long way to go, they have won hard-fought rights along the way, from maternity rights and pay increases to life-saving safety measures.
Showing respect for, and joining in solidarity with, garment workers’ struggles can take many shapes. Bhusal wants to foster awareness for how garment workers suffer to prepare our wardrobes. As consumers, those of us who are able to can reassess what ‘affordable’ really means and support better practices. “I don’t have much disposable income, but I think it just requires a bit more planning – saving up or asking for a specific thing as a birthday or Christmas gift. I also think that’s how clothes shopping should be, it shouldn’t be something the price of a coffee that you can impulse buy without any thought,” says Wendy. Those who aren’t able to save can choose secondhand or swapping over brands who profit from exploitative practices.
But shopping differently isn’t the be all and end all. Collective thinking should inspire collective action, from prioritising international cooperation and acts of solidarity between unions, to shedding light on underrepresented fights for minimum wage increases in garment producing countries. If our struggles are linked, so too must our actions be.
Sophie Benson is a freelance journalist with a focus on sustainable fashion, the environment, workers’ rights. and consumerism. She is the author of Sustainable Wardrobe and writes for publications including Vogue Business, The Guardian, Atmos, Dazed, The Independent, and Raconteur.