Earlier this week, a 50% tariff on Indian exports to the United States came into force. Structured to hit 66% of goods arriving into the US from the subcontinent, the Trump administration’s economic powerplay ramped up the existing 25% levy, hitting goods valued at roughly $86.5 billion USD.
Given India’s position as a textile manufacturing hub, massively reliant on exports, the move is certain to disrupt an already unstable garment industry, sending shockwaves well beyond the country and its main commercial enterprise.
Ajay Srivastava, founder of the New Delhi-based think tank Global Trade Research Initiative and a former Indian trade official, notes: “The new tariff regime is a strategic shock that threatens to wipe out India’s long-established presence in the US, causing unemployment in export-driven hubs and weakening its role in the industrial value chain.”
The tariff increase leaves Indian-based businesses with two choices: relocate or shut down entirely, continuing as things are is no longer a viable option. What, then, does this mean for a globally-recognised garment manufacturing capital?
While businesses are naturally the first to come to mind, with tariffs positioned as a matter of geopolitical business or economic politics, it’s more important now than ever to remember that the effects extend beyond the markets and into the lives of the people who keep those markets moving.
Much has also been made about European postal networks suspending the delivery of parcels to the US. A blow indeed to small-scale sellers and producers across the world, it’s also fair to say that the removal of the $800 de minimis may have interesting consequences for the fast fashion industry.
However, just under 8,000km away from India, in the South African country of Lesotho, a clear picture of the human toll is already forming.
Like India, Lesotho relies heavily on exports to the United States – particularly on textiles, including production for major brands such as Levi’s and Calvin Klein – reportedly adding up to $237 million USD in 2024. Reuters suggests that this number is more than a tenth of the country’s GDP, which in 2023 was $916 USD per capita according to the World Bank, making Lesotho one of the world’s poorest countries and therefore most vulnerable.
Known as Africa’s capital of denim, Maseru now bears the scars of an all-out economic war: where, only earlier this year, factories had once employed local women en masse and provided stability to an entire community.
With tariffs of 50% we now see those same women stranded at the gates of darkened factories, their Chinese and Taiwanese owners thousands of miles away and unforthcoming in terms of an explanation.
Regardless, the truth – that they are the collateral damage of an attempt to bring the manufacturing of ubiquitous “American” brands back to the United States – seems less than satisfactory when both livelihoods and lives are now in jeopardy.
Previously, a monthly wage of roughly 3,000 rand ($168 USD) paid to a single worker had not only supported that employee but had sent that same worker’s 12-year-old daughter to school while also paying for vital medication for an elderly relative.
This, of course, is just one of thousands of similar stories from garment workers in Lesotho who deserve better than to be fodder in Trump’s war on offshore manufacturing.
And, of course, the African country is far from the only casualty: Bangladesh, which exports close to $9 billion USD of apparel to the states each year, and Haiti, which sends 99% of its exported apparel to the US, have both been hit hard.
In almost all cases, it is female factory workers who are bearing the brunt of this damage.
The total wipeout of a once-thriving industry in Lesotho, then, should stand as a stark warning and portend for what is likely to happen elsewhere as a result of Trump’s swinging tariffs.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi this week relayed a message of necessary self-sufficiency to his country in the face of a catastrophic collapse in exports, but it’s hard to see how even the most successful project on that front could prop up an industry the scale of India’s garment network. A network, much like in Lesotho, held up almost entirely by the labour of women.
If manufacturing is sent into freefall across the less economically developed world, it’s vulnerable people – women above all – who will go tumbling with it, rather than those at the top. There must be a plan to stop this – or at least to break the fall.
“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.
Twelve years ago today, an eight-storey building in Bangladesh collapsed. The disaster occurred at 9am on 24 April 2013. About 2,500 people were pulled alive from the rubble. But 1,134 people—mostly young women—died.
These deaths weren’t caused by natural disaster. No earthquake triggered the collapse. The tragedy resulted from criminal neglect and callous greed. The building was home to five garment factories. Its collapse remains the deadliest disaster of its kind over a decade later.
Signs of structural failure were evident 24 hours earlier. Shops and banks on the lower floors closed immediately. The garment factories on upper floors stayed open. Some workers faced threats of withheld wages if they didn’t show up. Without proper rights advocacy, they felt they had no choice.
Appearances vs Reality
Twelve years later, much appears to have changed in Bangladesh. Major protests erupted after Rana Plaza. The Bangladesh Accord was established in 2013. Later came the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment and Textile Industry.
Look deeper, though. Too much remains the same.
“The garment industry in Bangladesh faces conditions alarmingly similar to those before Rana Plaza,” Rashedur Chowdhury, Professor of Business at the University of Essex tells Eco Age. “Working conditions remain extremely poor. Workers have very limited avenues for self-representation or collective wage bargaining. Wages continue to be abysmally low despite their immense labour.”
Chowdhury has spent considerable time in Bangladesh. He notes that worker exploitation extends beyond local issues. “Western brands remain reluctant to take direct responsibility for Bangladeshi workers’ welfare. They rely on local suppliers as intermediaries. This lets them exploit labour while avoiding accountability. If these brands assumed direct responsibility, both working conditions and wages could significantly improve.”
Survivors Taslima, Anjura and Nilufa at the Rana Plaza memorial in Savar, 2022.
This remains far from reality. “Western brands—through subcontracting—fail to recognise workers as primary stakeholders,” Chowdhury explains. “This approach helped them avoid legal accountability after Rana Plaza. They evaded paying adequate compensation by claiming indirect involvement.”
This indicts the fashion industry’s complacency and complicity. The status quo remains despite proving catastrophically unfit at great human cost.
“Despite benefiting from marginalised workers’ labour, Western brands avoid both direct and legal responsibilities,” Chowdhury adds. “Bangladeshi garment workers’ living and working conditions continue to deteriorate. Local suppliers justify poor wages by pointing to cost-cutting pressures from these brands.”
This sustains ongoing unrest. “Infrastructural improvements have been minimal. If another catastrophe like Rana Plaza occurred, Western brands would likely sidestep responsibility again.”
That we remain in a barely-changed system twelve years after such a disaster is unconscionable.
“The garment industry in Bangladesh is facing conditions alarmingly similar to those that led to the Rana Plaza collapse.” – Professor Rashedur Chowdhury
Bridging the Gap
The first step forward requires closing the gap between garment workers and buyers. People who buy clothes need to understand where they come from and how they’re made. Western brands have used cognitive dissonance to obscure their products’ origins. This shields them from scrutiny by the one group they might listen to: paying customers.
Activist Lavinia Muth holds strong opinions on this subject. She previously worked as a corporate social responsibility auditor before focusing on community-based justice work. Speaking to Eco Age she says: “Rana Plaza wasn’t a ‘wake-up call.’ It was a human disaster echoing the industry’s extractive logic. Black and brown lives remain disposable in fast fashion supply chains. Twelve years later, many families still await full reparations. Meanwhile, brands tout ‘ethical audits’ as alibis.”
According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, the international Accord “only inspects the final tier of garment production.” This creates dangerous loopholes. “Workers deeper in supply chains risk their lives in textile mills and dyeing facilities without the same safety measures.” Even legally-binding initiatives like this only achieve surface-level change, not systemic reform.
The CCC acknowledges some progress. The Accord—signed by 200 global brands—has prevented similar disasters since 2013. Improvements include “installing fire-fighting equipment, removing locks from doors, renovating unsafe buildings, providing worker training, and establishing complaint mechanisms.”
But as an option rather than a requirement, it doesn’t go far enough. This isn’t surprising. Corporations will only sign agreements like the Accord if their bottom line faces minimal disruption. Even with this watered-down approach, major players like Levi’s and VF Corporation refuse to participate. They self-monitor using their own metrics rather than accepting rigorous industry-wide standards.
The former site of the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh.
Opportunity for Change
Despite this, significant change remains possible. Muth believes 2025 offers a potential turning point—a chance to reshape the industry. She outlines three key changes Bangladesh’s interim government must make:
“Abolish poverty wages: Garment workers are experts, not ‘cheap labor.’ Their unions demand $350/month; brands must pay the true cost.”
2. “Divest from fossil fabrics: Polyester fuels climate chaos.
3. “Redirect subsidies to natural fibres and worker-owned cooperatives from Dhaka to Chittagong.”
From here, Muth suggests, “Bangladesh could lead a just transition—decarbonising mills, retrofitting factories with solar energy. But this requires Global North creditors to cancel its crushing debts. The same banks financing fast fashion’s pollution profit twice: from exploitation, then from climate loans.”
Industry Perspective
Abdullah Hil Rakib offers a different viewpoint to Eco Age. As Managing Director of Team Group and former Senior Vice President of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Export Association, he sees positive changes since Rana Plaza.
“One silver lining of the tragedy is that it transformed Bangladesh’s apparel industry into one of the world’s safest. All factories underwent inspection by national and international experts. With necessary remediation, we ensured structural, fire and electrical safety everywhere.”
“Rana Plaza was not a “wake-up call.” It was a human disaster, one that echoed the industry’s extractive logic, where Black and brown lives remain disposable to fast fashion’s supply chains.” – Lavinia Muth
Whether reality matches this optimistic assessment remains questionable. But some progress has clearly occurred over the past decade.
“Workers’ minimum wages have increased more than six times since 2010. As the industry grows, so do their wages. There’s been a 5% annual increment,” Rakib notes. “Bangladesh’s government has amended its Labour Act three times—in 2013, 2018 and 2023—to align with international standards. The requirement for worker participation in union registration dropped from 30% to 20% in 2018. Now it’s further reduced to 15% for factories employing over 3,000 workers.”
Lavinia Muth meets survivors of the Rana Plaza disaster.
These bureaucratic changes might seem minor compared to the emotional impact of Rana Plaza. But they matter. With stronger collective bargaining rights, workers might not have been forced into the building on that fateful day in 2013.
Chowdhury remains skeptical about these reforms: “While these mechanisms may have improved structures to a limited extent, they largely ignored workers’ everyday suffering. They overlooked smaller accidents, invisible cost-cutting, dehumanising practices, and infrastructural deficiencies. This includes corruption during audits, inadequate enforcement of labour standards, and lack of genuine unionisation opportunities. Essentially, the Accord and Alliance allowed Western brands to deflect direct responsibility—an outcome that remains deeply problematic.”
Dual Tragedies
Twelve years later, Rana Plaza represents two tragedies. The first: entirely preventable loss of human life on an enormous scale. The second, perhaps equally shameful: how little has been done to ensure it never happens again.
