By Rebecca Crockett
We live in an age of consumption. With countless choices about the food we eat, the technology we use and the clothes we wear.
As consumers’ expectations rise, areas like the fashion industry have begun to expand with shorter trend cycles and lower prices. But these possibilities are often provided at the expense of garment and factory workers, 80% of which are women.
Garment workers globally are subjected to low wages, long hours and dangerous conditions, all in the effort to cut corners on costs. Three of the largest garment exporters, Bangladesh, China and Vietnam, also have some of the biggest disparities between their minimum and Living wages.
According to the industry wage gap metric, China’s minimum wage is 67% lower than what is needed to provide a decent living. It also doesn’t help that when many fashion brands are asked about the wages they provide for their garment workers, most are aiming for the legal minimum wage. Which we already know is often not enough to support workers.
Labour Behind the Label is an advocacy group in Bristol that works directly with garment workers to campaign for their rights and concerns. Anna Bryhers, the Advocacy lead for the group, spoke about how understanding the different definitions of wages can help to tackle low salaries in the garment industry.
“When I say a living wage, what I mean is enough for a worker to earn it within a regular standard working week, and to be able to support a family of two children”, explained Bryant, “There are lots of other definitions for a living wage, which are a watered-down version of that, and which a lot of brands are now starting to adopt… what happens is that you then get a lower and lower figure of what a living wage looks like.”
Bryhers told Wempower, that one of the ways to address this problem is through research and study of the issue, “What we’re trying to do is create a net that is going to catch all workers so that wages are fair across the board, instead of an average, which might not be fair.”
This problem is not just in South-Asian countries. Labour Behind the Label found that Leicester garment workers could be owed £125m by Boohoo due to the underpayment of minimum wages.
Bryhers spoke about Labour Behind the Label’s work in this area saying “We’ve got now a member of staff in Leicester, who’s working alongside those communities, but it’s very difficult to break through into because a lot of them are non-English language speaking or English second language speaking, so they had really low language skills, which meant that they were really closed in terms of being able to understand about their rights. That kind of industry is able to exist under the radar, because it’s self-contained.”
With low wages comes longer hours as workers everywhere struggle to provide necessities for themselves and their families.
The Clean Clothes Campaign is a partner of Labour Behind the Label. It first began as a Dutch solidarity action for female Philippine workers in 1989, the group has now created a global network of labour activists in garment-producing countries. On their website, they provide testimonies from garment workers exposing the treatment they must endure in their workplaces.
Phan, a Thai factory worker, told them: “We work overtime every day. During peak season, we work until 2 or 3 am. Although we’re exhausted, we have no choice. We cannot refuse overtime: our basic wages are just too low.”
Bryhers identified this as a core issue, “If you’re on a wage that is not enough to feed your family, then you do end up taking, on top of a 12 hour day, an extra couple of hours in the evening. You’re then getting back at, you know, eight or nine at night because you need it to top up.”
This problem is heightened even more for female factory workers who must balance their work lives with their responsibilities at home. The clean clothes campaign described this on their website by saying, “Women, in particular, struggle with the demands of a stressful factory environment combined with the pressures of home life; many women garment workers are also often responsible for the household.”
On the surface, the labour movement and women’s rights issues may not intersect. But the two struggles have developed alongside each other for decades. Both influence each other in profound ways.
It is often cited that International Women’s Day originated in the Uprising of the 20,000. This was a strike mobilised by Clara Lemlich, a young Ukrainian immigrant, who was unhappy about low wages and poor working conditions found in New York’s shirtwaist factories.
This familiar story continues in countries that provide low-cost labour for profit-hungry fashion brands.
Bryhers told Wempower that the issue extends beyond just unfair working conditions, for many women working in the garment industry the treatment they receive is abusive, “There are these inbuilt hierarchies of male supervisors and female workers with workplace bullying as a norm, and workplace intimidation as a method to achieve higher target and productivity rates.”
In 2019 a survey was released by ActionAid UK which discovered that 8 in 10 garment workers in Bangladesh had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment and violence at work.
They also found that 1 in 10 women surveyed was being subjected to sexual harassment, molestation and assault in the workplace at the time of being questioned.
Sadly, this type of behaviour is widespread and the system to report it is almost non-existent. This is partly due to cultural values that prevent women from being open about their experiences. But it is also systematic.
According to Bryhers “It’s really rare that we get gender-based violence cases because, I hate to say this, but most unions are led by men. Actually, there are a lot of organisations that are representing women workers and are not capturing or providing mechanisms which allow women to safely report what’s happening.”
While it is disappointing that more women aren’t in leadership positions within unions to provide this support, it is not a surprise. Unions are barely surviving in garment-producing countries because many fashion brands employ people temporarily. They are then able to manage the size of their workforce with the level of demand.
Bryhers spoke about an example in Pakistan, where a factory that supplies Marks and Spencers, let go of some employees who were organising a union “There were some workers who had been in the early levels of trying to organise a union and they were all on temporary contracts. They were then all let go during the pandemic under the guise of like ‘oh, well, we’re scaling back.’ But it was the union workers who were let go and not the un-unionised workers.”
Sadly, instead of the coronavirus pandemic being used as an opportunity to help the most vulnerable in our society, the fashion industry has used it as a cover for the ill-treatment of their workers. The situation in Pakistan is not unique either. This type of dismissal has been used across south-Asian garment-producing countries, like Cambodia and Bangladesh, to stamp out unions.
But without unions holding clothing companies to account, what happens?
On the 23rd of April, 2013 large cracks were found in the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The shops and banks were evacuated immediately but warnings about the building’s safety were ignored by the garment factory owners on the site. The next day the Rana Plaza building collapsed, killing at least 1,134 people and injuring 2,500 more.
This was not the first or the last disaster that had occurred in a textile factory because of negligent managers and poor working conditions, but it is by far the worst.
Bryhers told Wempower about the day the news broke about the Rana Plaza disaster “I did this interview, it was a TV interview, and I had headphones and they firstly showed all these images of people in the rubble kind of pulling their loved ones out. And I just was crying. I cried on TV. And it was really awful. It was like the first time that I’d seen what was actually happening in the factory”.
Anna explained that the consequences for the victims of the disaster were immense. Many lost loved ones and the injured faced a loss of earnings and high medical bills. Bryant continued “I think it was a wakeup call for the industry in that everybody saw that there was a need for more supply chain collaboration, not just over safety”.
As a result of the disaster and the global outcry that ensued, this need for more supply chain collaboration was answered through the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. This created a legally binding agreement between brands and trade unions to ensure higher levels of safety in Bangladeshi garment factories.
Labour Behind the Label and The Clean Clothes Campaign were instrumental in getting UK and International retailers to sign up to its demands. Collaboration between players and activists within the garment industry seems to be paramount for real change to happen.
Yes Friends is a UK clothing brand that offers affordable and sustainable clothing that aims to increase wages for garment workers throughout their supply chain. The founder of Yes Friends, Sam Mabley, told Wempower that the reason his company strives to pay their workers fairly is simple: “I would say there is no excuse for not paying living wages and it can transform lives by doing it. So I think it is the morally responsible thing to do.”
Mabley highlighted the fact that while it may be a complicated issue, it is possible to achieve fair wages in the fashion industry “It is legitimately not the most simple thing to solve but big companies like H&M have solved far more complicated problems. Running their global supply chain is far more complicated in itself but there is consumer demand for that, so they do it. Paying a living wage is also not a super simple issue but they could do it if they wanted to.”
Mabley raises a fair point. Although the problems within the fashion industry are systematic and widespread, brand decisions are often made through calculated marketing data and consumer research. “There is probably a lack of willpower because consumers aren’t pushing brands enough to change and so brands are like well if consumers aren’t pushing us to change…we’re not going to.” Mabley said.
So, what can consumers do to help female garment workers? When given this question, Bryant put it simply, Buy less. “Our power isn’t to be people who buy because that’s what the system always wants us to do, to be consumers. Actually, our power is to be citizens that know, that actually, our money is just one of a sea of many, many more people who are buying. But our voices are louder. So, we need to be activists”.
However, no matter how much less we consume, our responsibility as consumers does not go away. Bryhers argued that “We have a responsibility towards a lot of those nations. Like 80% of Bangladesh’s export is garment… people’s jobs and livelihoods rely on it. And so, it’s our responsibility to make that stuff work, not to walk away from bad relationships. I think we need to invest and support workers’ rights in improving”.
The garment industry is a powerful, often immovable force, but so are the labour activists fighting to change it.
It is women like Clara Lemlich, companies like Yes Friends and movements like Labour Behind the Label that will give female garment workers the power to tell their stories.
This is the movement that cannot be bought.
