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An average garment worker in Bangladesh who sews shirts for fast fashion brands might make 28 taka an hour, or around 33 U.S. cents, and struggle to pay bills even working 60 hours a week. In Cambodia, a garment worker might earn around 85 cents an hour. In India, someone might make 58 cents an hour. Globally, the majority of garment workers don't earn a living wage.

Able, a brand that makes clothing, bags, shoes, and jewelry, wants to convince the industry to make the numbers they pay their workers public. The company, a social enterprise designed to help women end intergenerational poverty, is starting with its own data, and publishing the lowest wages paid to workers at its Nashville factory. Stats on the other factories it works with globally will follow, and it hopes that other brands will follow as well.

"I think this movement has to happen through consumer demand," says Barrett Ward, founder and CEO of Able. "We want to be so authentic and transparent as to genuinely equip consumers to feel like they have the information they need in order to make a good choice. We want to do that at a snapshot level with the scorecard."

The scorecard, modeled after a nutrition label, shares the lowest wage paid in a factory. "That's important because it can't be an average wage and it can't be a general labor cost within a garment," says Ward. "It has to be the lowest wage to actually protect the people at the bottom." The scorecard then shows what percentage that number is of a living wage, or the minimum amount needed to meet basic needs.

The label also scores the factory on equality, safety, and wages and benefits, including everything from maternity leave to financial literacy training. All of this is based on a third-party audit from GoodOps, a company that does supply chain management audits. (In Nashville, though the company pays workers $14 an hour, more than the local living wage, it didn't get a perfect "wages" score because it had room for improvement on benefits.) The company is currently in the process of creating a nonprofit that can continue providing these audits for the industry in an unbiased way. Able plans to publish a scorecard for its factory in Ethiopia this fall, followed by the other factories it contracts with globally. As the factory information is published, it will be linked to individual products on the brand's website.

"When people come to our website and see that information, they'll be able to click through to see a very deep audit that's been done on our manufacturing that shows all the good and all the bad," Ward says. "Our effort here is not to make a presentation that we're perfect, but quite the opposite-it's to be perfectly transparent." In Nashville, he says, the audit helped the company identify safety issues to improve.

He's hoping that the practice will become standard, and that in the same way a nutrition label can change consumer behavior, it could begin to change the products that people choose. "For me, the thought that the products that we wear and enjoy on a daily basis were likely made by someone who could literally not even meet their basic needs is unacceptable," he says.

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Why this clothing company is making its factory wages public

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An average garment worker in Bangladesh who sews shirts for fast fashion brands might make 28 taka an hour, or around 33 U.S. cents, and struggle to pay bills even working 60 hours a week. In Cambodia, a garment worker might earn around 85 cents an hour.

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In the garment industry, stories about workers who barely eke out an existence on "starvation wages" are legion: Factory workers in New Delhi often describe living in makeshift hovels "barely fit for animals." A young woman from Myanmar might wrestle with the decision to feed her children or send them to school. In Bangladesh, sewing-machine operators frequently toil for 100 hours or more a week, only to run out of money before the end of the month.

Workers have demanded higher pay in all those countries, of course, sometimes precipitating violence between protesters and police. Companies in general, however, have preferred to sidestep the issue altogether. In fact, no multinational brand or retailer currently claims to pay its garment workers a wage they can subsist on.

To be fair, defining a "living wage" can be a tricky business, one that requires some complex mathematics. Even within the same country, the minimum income a worker requires to afford basic needs - food, shelter, clothing, medicine - can vary wildly from one locale to another.

Plus, as brands are wont to remind people, most of them don't own the factories that produce their clothes, meaning they neither pay for the garment workers' wages nor determine what those wages are.

So when H&M declared in November 2013 that it would deliver a "fair living wage" to more than 850,000 workers across 750 factories by the end of 2018, the announcement was nothing short of a bombshell.

As the world's second-largest apparel company - after Inditex, which owns Zara - H&M said it felt a sense of "shared responsibility" when it came to persistently low wages, an issue as endemic to the global garment industry as unrelenting hours, unsafe environments, and rampant verbal, physical, and sexual abuse.

H&M makes its famously cheap-chic apparel and footwear at about 1,900 independent suppliers around the world, often in the aforementioned low-cost countries.

"It has always been our vision that all textile workers should be able to live on their wage," it said in a statement then. "We believe that the wage development, driven by for example governments in some countries, is taking too long, so we want to take further action and encourage the whole industry to follow. With size comes responsibility, and we have the ability to contribute to change."

Its detractors were skeptical, particularly when no benchmark figures were forthcoming, but there was no reason to believe that H&M wasn't in earnest. Even the acknowledgement that workers needed better wages, as one campaigner told me in 2013, was "a vital step."

By 2017, however, H&M's language regarding its living-wage strategy took a slight turn. The 2018 goal was to have "improved wage management systems in place" at suppliers representing 50 percent of its product volume.

Workers' rights groups found H&M's "less ambitious course," along with the continued lack of specific benchmarks as it approaches its self-imposed deadline, troubling. In addition, whatever scant updates H&M released only served to bolster the impression of the brand as "notoriously opaque."

"A number of elements in those updates seem to be generalist, not concrete enough, and to a certain extent, immaterial or irrelevant to the question: Well, as a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no?" says Ben Vanpeperstraete, lobby and advocacy coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, an alliance of labor unions and non-governmental organizations in Amsterdam. "And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

"As a result of this, are workers producing clothes for H&M getting a higher salary, yes or no? And that's the crux of the question. Everything else is relatively irrelevant fluff."

H&M certainly doesn't view itself that way. "We have always been clear on what our goal is; to set the foundation and mechanisms needed for fair living wages to be paid by suppliers," says Cecilia Tiblad Berntsson, the firm's social sustainability manager. "We have an ongoing dialogue with stakeholders and report annually both to stakeholders and media about the activities and actions within the fair living wage strategy."

2018, she adds, will mark the "first milestone" in an overarching strategy to address the issue. H&M's focus may be redirected to "where the local need is greatest and where there is a possibility to scale up effectively," but the scope of its ambition hasn't changed, Berntsson says.

To be sure, the retailer has placed itself in the crosshairs of a contentious issue. If the intricacies of a living wage weren't enough to grapple with, there is also the notion of the minimum wage - that is, the lowest wage that a country's local or federal government says employers are legally bound pay their workers.

Not only does a country's minimum wage rarely square up with the concept of a living wage, but it can also differ by orders of magnitude.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers interviewed by campaigners from Labour Behind the Labe l in 2016 said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families. The same group queried workers in India who were earning an average of 6,284 rupees ($92) per month. To make ends meet, those same workers said, they would need 13,000 rupees ($190), if not more.

In Sri Lanka, for instance, the basic pay averages 13,500 rupees ($197) per month, yet workers said they would require at least 33,000 rupees ($481) to support their families.

Brands can sometimes use this lack of agreement over calculations as a way to stall efforts at pursuing living wages, according to Dominique Muller, director of policy at Labour Behind the Label, a not-for-profit organization based in the United Kingdom.

Furthermore, it's in the interest of governments to keep the minimum wage low, in part because they don't want brands to abscond to other countries in pursuit of cheaper labor.

"There's a lot of pushing by brands to make sure that not only the government keeps wages low but also the supplier keeps wages low," Muller says. "And then the suppliers and the industry associations will say to the government, 'Look, you can't increase wages because then we wouldn't get the orders from the big brands.'"

Even within the same region, brands can play factories off each other, says Judy Gearhart, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum, a human-rights organization based in Washington, DC.

"If one factory owner agrees to produce jeans for $2, then another can't charge $2.50 or they'll lose business," she says. "In a sense, we are all fueling the race to the bottom, but it's the largest, most successful brands that are driving themselves and the competition the hardest."

Occasionally, workers will score a minor victory and minimum wages will creep up. But even an uptick of 77 percent - something that occured in Bangladesh a few years ago - is only a nominal one, Vanpeperstraete says.

Despite the appearance of progress, it's important to keep in mind that Bangladesh's wage increase was "also against an inflation of 12 percent a year, and the last revision was five years before that," he says. "Consumer inflation will just eat it up again, so there are no real gains."

To promote real change, a living-wage benchmark remains an indispensable tool, Gearhart says. "A living wage benchmark quantifies what workers need to live decently, so that they can support a family above the poverty line and still be able to have some discretionary spending and the ability to save," she says.

The power brands wield over their suppliers can be oppressive to the point of tyrannical. And even so-called "codes of conduct," those legalese-adjacent blocks of text that tout a company's dedication to ethical labor practices, are rarely the talisman against supply-chain impropriety that brands make them out to be.

"The proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

"The failure of codes of conduct to ensure workers' rights has been robustly documented, with several phenomenal catastrophes - the Ali Enterprises fire in Pakistan, the Tazreen Fashions fire, and Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh - occurring in factories that had been certified and/or inspected and approved for code compliance multiple times by multiple actors," Gearhart says. "Additionally, the proponents of codes of conduct have not gathered or published quantitative reports about their impact on workers' wages, hours, accidents, or ability to form unions."

At best, codes of conduct are a feint, Vanpeperstraete says. At worst, they're a figment of someone's fever dream.

"Lots of codes of conduct talk about a living wage and we have no evidence of factories paying a living wage; lots of codes of conduct talk about right of workers to join or form a union of their own choosing and that rarely happens," he says. "These codes of conduct are more about allaying the concerns of consumers than implementing these rights in the supply chains of brands."

In some cases, codes of conduct might be little more than offhand suggestions.

Just last month, Arcadia Group, the operator of Topshop, Miss Selfridge, and Dorothy Perkins, told its factories that it would pay them 2 percent less on all forthcoming orders because it was performing under par, which it blamed on a shifting retail landscape fueled by online upstarts like Missguided and Boohoo.

"The fact that a brand has the power essentially to say, 'Well, we've got these contracts agreed but we want you to provide it to us with this discount,' is quite significant," Muller says. "But it happens all the time: Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

"Brands on the one hand puff up their corporate social responsibility and on the other hand, when it suits them, do the opposite in terms of producing standards."

But brands have an imperative, Muller says, if not a moral one based on the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, then a legal one in terms of modern slavery laws.

Meanwhile, the yawning divide between the haves and the have-nots is only becoming wider.

Billionaire wealth has soared by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 - six times greater than the wages of regular workers, which have risen by a yearly average of only 2 percent, according to Oxfam International, which published its latest report ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

Of the 2,043 dollar billionaires worldwide, nine out of 10 are men, a fact worth mentioning because a vast proportion of garment workers - 80 percent - happen to be women.

"Economic rewards are increasingly concentrated at the top," Oxfam says. "It takes just over four days for a CEO from the top five companies in the garment sector to earn what an ordinary Bangladeshi woman garment worker earns in her whole lifetime."

As is the case with most businesses, it's the smaller, nimbler companies that have the drive and wherewithal to innovate when it comes to better wages for workers.

Some brands, like Fair Indigo and Raven + Lily, might choose to collaborate with worker-owned cooperatives.

"In this way the workers are really setting their price for the garments in the way that is economically sustainable for them," says Robert Behnke, co-founder and president of Fair Indigo.

Others might take advantage of nascent mechanisms such as Fair Trade U.S.A.'s apparel program in North America or the Fairtrade Foundation's Textile Standard in Europe.

Patagonia was one early adopter of the Fair Trade standard, beginning with the launch of 11 Fair Trade-certified women's products in 2014. Currently, the outdoor-apparel brand pays a premium on some 200-plus men's, women's, and children's products. The extra money goes directly to the workers who made the garments, and they form a committee that decides how to spend it.

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way and really that boils down to safer working conditions, improved livelihoods, and protections for the planet," says Maya Spaull, senior director of Apparel and Home Goods at Fair Trade U.S.A. "So that's what's really behind that seal you see on Fair Trade products."

"In essence, when you purchase a Fair Trade-certified product, it's a guarantee that it was traded in a more ethical way."

But even when given the opportunity to promote living wages, brands and retailers can sometimes be willfully obtuse.

When Continental Clothing, a London-based wholesaler of blank garments, launched a pilot line of certified-organic T-shirts and hoodies with a built-in price premium for workers in India, for instance, the concept failed to "take off like crazy," according to Mariusz Stochaj, the company's head of product and sustainability.

The premium, which is similar to the one found in the Fair Trade system, isn't much - about 10 pence (16 cents) for a T-shirt and 54 pence (79 cents) for a hoodie. But the idea is that this amount gets passed along the value chain, "from the factory through to the retailer without being marked up, ensuring that the small additional cost at the point of sale is returned to the workers in its entirety," says Stochaj.

Some of Continental Clothing's customers were welcoming of the idea, Stochaj says; others were wary of attracting unwelcome questions.

"It's the same with organic cotton or any other sustainable practices where people will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'" Stochaj says.

"People will say, 'Why haven't you done it before?' or 'If it's such a small premium to pay for such a big difference to those people, why don't you just absorb it within your own profit margins?'"

But paying a living wage can have immediate, tangible benefits, something Stochaj discovered in the two years the "Fair Share" project has been brewing. At the factory where the scheme is being piloted, absenteeism has plummeted. And recruiting new workers has never been easier.

"We have basically people on a waiting list waiting for vacancies, which we've never had before," he says.

Perhaps the larger question is whether consumers even care about workers receiving a living wage. And until they do, most brands and retailers won't.

"For most brands this is not a priority by itself," says Adheer Bahulkar, a partner in the retail practice of A.T. Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm. "Because while more than two-thirds of consumers say that they want better living conditions for the workers, less than half of the same consumers are actually willing to pay more for their purchases."

And therein lies the rub.

"Even with brands that have the best of intentions and want the triple bottom line of environmental, human, and economic well-being, economic well-being ends up trumping the need for environmental and human wellbeing," he says. "Consumers have basically reset what they expect to pay, and this is putting more pressure on brands to either find ways to lower prices - and hence pay lower wages - or lose market share."

But consumers wouldn't have to pay much more, if anything, for their togs, activists say. After all, a garment worker's wage is only 1 to 3 percent of the total cost of most clothing, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign.

Which is to say, if brands wanted to pay their workers a living wage today, they could. In December, Labour Behind the Label noted that it would cost H&M only 1.9 percent of the $2 billion it made in 2016 to pay all its Cambodian workers the additional $78 per month they would need to achieve a living wage.

To approach the problem from a different angle, H&M would only have to reallocate one year of its annual advertising budget to muster up living wages for its Cambodian workers for six and a half years, the group says.

One problem is that most businesses still operate in silos where the number crunchers and the do-gooders are entirely divorced, Vanpeperstraete says.

"In clothing, the people buying it, the buyers, are considered the people who actually determine the margin of that specific organization - they determine profitability," he says. "That results in an internal hierarchy of a company where the buyers are already more important than the CSR people because the buyers are making the money and the CSR people are spending the money. So who gets the last word?"

But what it all boils down to, he says, is the abundance of political will.

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so."

"Companies can be extremely efficient organizations when it comes to achieving specific goals, but only if they're set on doing so," says Vanpeperstraete. So many brands, he notes, laud their ability to deliver "ripped from the runway" looks at mass-market prices, with little turnaround time. "If they would have the same commitment to paying living wages, then that would probably happen, not necessarily overnight but in a very short time span," he adds.

H&M, with its pledge in place, yet nebulous results, exists in a liminal, in-between space. "H&M has at least had the audacity to say, four years ago, 'In five years time, workers will have a living wage,'" he concedes. "So they're sort of half there on the political will. But I think in implementation we don't necessarily feel yet or have enough evidence to believe that this is carried through in the way that the organization works."

Yet the retailer's atypical modus operandi might also be the key to its success. Unlike most of its high-street brethren, who flit from factory to factory while jostling for room on the production line with dozens of other brands, H&M maintains what it calls "strategic partnerships" with suppliers that provide 100 percent of its products for five years at a time.

In other words, it has leverage, which it can use to create - and sustain - meaningful improvements in a way that few brands can.

"H&M is in a crucial position to do stuff because it has those long-term relationships and those large buying volumes with a lot of factories," Vanpeperstraete says. "If H&M calls a factory owner, they'll listen. People pick up the phone for H&M."

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Why Is It So Hard for Clothing Manufacturers to Pay a Living Wage?

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H&M promised to make sure the people who make the company's clothes can live on their pay, but the benchmarks have shifted.

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Ellie Group 1

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Low wages, unsafe conditions and harassment: fashion must do more to protect female workers

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The garment sector is great at employing women. At the bottom. While approximately 80% of the world's garment workers are women, the number of women heading the 15 largest mass-market apparel companies on the Fortune 500 list is zero.

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In April 2013, 1,134 people died in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka. The ensuing Bangladesh Accord on safety notwithstanding, action on ethical issues endemic in fashion supply chains has since proved sluggish. Four years on and numerous sweatshop exposés later, fast fashion is making only slow progress.

Why?

Admittedly, the sector is a plus-size model. Businesses are global, supply chains complex. Expectations of transformation therefore need to be realistic, says Sass Brown, founding dean of DIDI (Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation). "Change is a process. We are trying to change the direction of an industry that is the third largest in the world. That requires a major culture shift and that takes time," she says.

True though that may be, time is not on the side of those suffering exploitation. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates there are 21 million victims of forced labour worldwide and 168 million in child labour, down from 246 million in 2000. In joint research by the Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability, and Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), 71 per cent of companies admitted the likelihood of modern slavery in their supply chains.

Putting policy into practice

Tackling matters head on, the UK government has taken a global lead on legislation, with the Modern Slavery Act 2015 imposing reporting requirements on organisations with at least £36-million turnover. Policy is one thing, though, practice another.

According to Carry Somers, founder and global operations director at Fashion Revolution, most brands do ban child labour within their supplier code of conduct, but many fail to police performance, leaving themselves and their consumers in the dark. "The majority of fashion brands have little or no supply chain transparency down to raw material level," she says. "Child labour is still rife in cotton fields, as well as in ginning and spinning, so how do consumers know they aren't supporting it with the next garment they buy?"

Fashion Revolution believes the first step towards transparency and transformation starts with one simple question, "Who made my clothes?" On April 24, every year, people are encouraged to wear garments inside out for Fashion Revolution Day, displaying brand and maker labels, to mark the Rana Plaza anniversary.

Maintaining you cannot tackle exploitation unless you can see it, Ms Somers considers transparency a prerequisite for improving conditions and collaborative action. Public scrutiny and consumer demand will then drive change. She contends: "We are seeing greater levels of disclosure mainly because citizens are holding brands to account - transparency is becoming obligatory. It is coming at companies, like it or not."

Collaboration is particularly important in tackling exploitation and child labour, says Safia Minney, founder of fair trade fashion pioneer People Tree, managing director of Po-Zu and author of a forthcoming book Slave to Fashion. "While there is progress in mills and factories to reduce child labour, there is a long way to go," she says. "Each country has different laws about the age and hours a child under 18 can work, but these are largely ignored. NGOs and trade unions are essential to social dialogue."

Ms Minney proposes an advocacy role for companies, suggesting they use their influence.

"Mainstream fashion brands have a responsibility to put pressure on governments of developing nations to promote workers' rights," she says.

We are seeing greater levels of disclosure mainly because citizens are holding brands to account - transparency is becoming obligatory

According to Lotte Schuurman, of the Fair Wear Foundation, it is this ability to leverage buying power that could prove transformative. She says: "The purchasing practices of Western garment brands have a huge influence, positive or negative, on the lives of garment workers in clothing factories. Garment companies can use their economic influence to make an actual change."

In principle, procurement decisions could have not only reputational consequences but real beneficial impact on people and communities. In practice, though, results are mixed, says David Noble, group chief executive at the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS). "Retailers confidently state their supply chains are free from malpractice. However, the sad fact is many still lack the basic procurement skills to even detect it, let alone prevent it," he says.

Performance might be patchy, but not for want of tools and training. The Ethical Trading Initiative was created as long ago as 1998 and its ETI base code, founded on ILO conventions, has become internationally recognised. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition launched the Higg Index in 2012, providing a suite of assessment tools, plus CIPS produced a guide to Ethical and Sustainable Procurement in 2013, with input from the Walk Free Foundation. In addition, 2017 should see publication of the long-awaited international standard for sustainable procurement, ISO 20400.
So, if the ethical call to action is getting louder and help available, why does progress remain slow?
Failure to turn good intentions into better practice is partly down simply to reluctance to allocate resources, argues chief executive of Segura Systems, Peter Needle. "Many retailers talk about ethical issues in supply chains and the need to address them, but when it comes to spending money to rectify problems, they are more reluctant," he says.

"The major problem for most is they have no control or visibility over what suppliers do on a day-to-day basis, so the system is still largely built on trust. The question is, 'If a factory is seen to be ethical on Monday, will it still be so on Friday?'"

One-off or periodic audit and mapping tools have been available for years. Moving from such point-in-time information on suppliers and factories to real-time actionable data is seen by Mr Needle as the investment game-changer. New technology solutions not only help monitor production live but also ensure approved sourcing.

As a provider of cloud-based supply chain technology, Segura already works with leading high street names. However, fashion is typically anything but fast when it comes to tech, which could ultimately prove critical, maybe even fatal. Mr Needle concludes. "Brands and retailers have been slow to adopt new technologies. If they remain so, there is a perfect storm brewing of consumer demand, NGO pressure, journalistic reporting and new agile, ethical competitors, that could see many of them go out of business, possibly much sooner than they think."

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Ethical issues remain in the fashion industry - Raconteur

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In April 2013, 1,134 people died in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka. The ensuing Bangladesh Accord on safety notwithstanding, action on ethical issues endemic in fashion supply chains has since proved sluggish. Four years on and numerous sweatshop exposés later, fast fashion is making only slow progress.

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How can the fashion industry become more sustainable?

Second to oil, fashion and textiles is the most polluting industry in the world. Every stage in a garment's life threatens our planet and its resources. It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton, equivalent to a single t-shirt and pair of jeans. Up to 8,000 different chemicals are used to turn raw materials into clothes, including a range of dyeing and finishing processes. And what becomes of the clothing that doesn't sell, falls apart or goes out of style? More often than not, it is discarded in giant landfills. How can the fashion industry become more sustainable?

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How can the fashion industry become more sustainable?

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Second to oil, fashion and textiles is the most polluting industry in the world. Every stage in a garment's life threatens our planet and its resources. It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton, equivalent to a single t-shirt and pair of jeans.

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March 28, 2018 - Ethical

Despite the rise of ethical clothing brands, like Kitenge, there are unfortunately still many ethical issues in the fashion industry. In this blog we'll take a look at some of these key issues and also highlight how we can all help to support ethical fashion.

According to Fashion United and Clean Clothes, 80% of the 75 million people who make the world' s clothing are women, aged between 18 and 24. Many garment workers live in poverty and are often exploited, which negatively impacts their lives.

After the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed over a thousand people and injured hundreds of others the world woke up to the fact that change in the industry was so desperately needed.

Since Rana Plaza, many activists joined forces to create change by promoting ethical and sustainable fashion and campaigning to improve garment workers' rights.

This huge disaster certainly had an impact on our founder, Sian, who was working in the fashion industry in London at the time. After already witnessing several unethical practices whilst working in the industry she decided to quit her job.

Soon after she volunteered for a youth charity in Tanzania, East Africa, which is where she fell in love with the colourful African wax print fabrics. This was where her idea of starting an ethical clothing brand began.
Quick Lead-Times
The quick turnaround of fashion trends found in high street shops cause western buyers to place huge amounts of pressure on their suppliers, often based in Eastern Europe or the Far East, to make and deliver goods as fast as possible, at the cheapest price even with last minute changes.

The enforcement of quick lead-times by western buyers puts pressure on factory owners who then take short cuts. This can lead to the unfair treatment of garment workers' including:

Punishment

Intimidation

Threats

Child labour

Homeworking

Forced labour

Excessive overtime

Withholding salaries

Preventing time off

Limiting unions

Sub-contracting

Sub-Contracting
Sub-contracting is when a factory, who has received the original order, asks a different factory to complete the work without the buyer/customer knowing. This happens often and is one of the reasons why most high street retailers cannot be 100% sure where their clothing is made.
Unsafe Working Conditions
There are many health and safety risks that are found in factories such as blocked fire escapes, no access to clean drinking water, poor ventilation and sanitation facilities.

Cotton farmers and garment workers are at great risk of pesticides, dyes and chemicals exposure, which can lead to serious health complications including: sickness, headaches, respiratory problems, memory loss, depression, seizures and death.

Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of cotton farmers in India have committed suicide, which is believed to be due to the failure of GMO crops leading to increased debt and poverty. The high use of pesticides could be another cause.
Environmental Impacts
Pesticides used for modern, cotton farming drain into local rivers, which people use for washing and drinking water. The excess dyes used to colour fabrics and jeans can also pollute nearby rivers and streams.

When the rivers are contaminated local fish stocks die, which affects the amount of food available for people who rely on it to survive. A huge amount of pollution is created by the fashion industry, including shipping goods around the world often by airfreight, which is the quickest method.

Cotton farming consumes huge amounts of water. According to Fashion Revolution, it takes nearly 3,000 litres of water to make just one t-shirt! This is shocking as we usually drink this amount of water over a 3-year period.

Large amounts of fabric are also wasted after clothing production that eventually ends up in landfill. Kitenge is proud to recycle all of its offcuts by picking them up from our tailors' workshop floors and making them into smaller products such as hair accessories, bags and African beaded jewellery.
Low Wages
A garment worker should earn enough income to support themselves and their family's basic needs including food, shelter, clothing, education and healthcare. Many factories in developing countries do not pay their employees the minimum or living wage.
Child Labour
Child labour prevents children from getting an education and denies them their childhood. Often they work in very poor conditions with little rights or protection.

Attitudes and working cultures of buyers and management in the west need to change. The same goes to factory managers and owners to better respect garment workers' rights and provide decent jobs.

Governments should also be more responsible for better protecting garment workers and their human rights. However, the best way to bring about change starts with the consumer.

How You Can Support Ethical Fashion

When we decide to purchase an item of clothing we are voting with our wallets and are helping to drive trends, which encourages 'fast fashion'. There are several things that you can do as active consumers:

Research companies to see how 'ethical' they are before deciding to purchase from them or not.

Support companies who show transparency in their supply chains via their marketing efforts such as their blog or on social media.

Purchase clothing made using organic and natural fabrics instead of synthetics.

Shop at charity shops to help recycle the vast amounts of second hand clothing caused by 'fast fashion'.

Shop at vintage clothing shops to help re-use old clothing.

Shop locally so your money helps support small businesses in your community.

Attend clothes swop events with your friends; trade in your old clothes that you don't wear anymore for new items.

Buy less, choose well, make it last. Buy high quality clothing less often.

Repair, mend and customize old clothing items to make them brand new again. If you don't know how to sew, ask a friend, relative or use a local seamstress. Prevent garments from going to landfill!

Buy a reusable bag, such as our African print tote bag, to reduce the need for plastic carrier bags and unnecessary packaging.

Ask brands who made your clothes and support the Fashion Revolution campaign throughout the year.

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Ethical Issues Still A Problem in The Fashion Industry

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March 28, 2018 - Ethical Despite the rise of ethical clothing brands, like Kitenge, there are unfortunately still many ethical issues in the fashion industry. In this blog we'll take a look at some of these key issues and also highlight how we can all help to support ethical fashion.

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As the world is bombarded with an unending supply of dirt-cheap clothes, ethical fashion activists in Dubai and the Middle East, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States are voicing their concerns regarding the fashion industry's sustained exploitation of human, animal, and natural resources.

Following the Rana Plaza tragedy that rocked the glamorous world of fashion, international clothing brands were made to reconsider how their manufacturing processes affected their employees, the communities they inhabited, and the environment. Philanthropists, environmentalists, human and animal rights activists, and conscious individuals around the world began actively protesting unethical fashion.

Almost all fashion brands, from the haute couture houses, to the fast fashion giants, to the labels that dominate online shopping in UAE, are involved in unethical production practices. The following are the biggest ethical issues in fashion, particularly in the apparel manufacturing sector.

1. Child labour

In their pursuit of cheap production, major fashion brands often relocate their production facilities to underdeveloped parts of the world, mostly in the Second and Third World. Here, they employ anyone and everyone capable of working in a factory, including children.

Due to poverty and unawareness, the families of these underprivileged children know better than to question the quality in which their sons and daughters are being treated, or to demand for their rights as workers. Child fashion workers are not only made to work in critically substandard conditions all day long; they are also stripped of their fundamental right to education.

2. Low wages

The fashion industry argues that it generates employment opportunities in Second and Third World countries, and that because of this, their so-called sweatshops invariably benefit the lives of its workers, regardless of whether these employees are paid living wages or not.

However, employment generation holds little consequence when the annual wages of the average sweatshop worker are measured and the working conditions of his job are speculated. In most of these countries, the below minimum wages, paid to workers by contractors hired by the big fashion companies, do not even cover their basic needs, let alone allow them a budget for emergencies and incidentals.

3. Health and safety risks

On top of denying scores and scores of men, women, and children of their human basic rights, and of paying its workers with insufficient wages, the fashion industry poses fatal threats to the lives of its workers and employees as many these companies are known to build their Second and Third World apparel production units cheaply and shoddily.

Furthermore, most cotton farmers and sweatshop workers endure long-term exposure to pesticides, lead-based dyes, and poisoning from chemicals, and are found to suffer from:

Consistent vomiting, headaches, tremors

Lack of coordination

Loss of consciousness

Respiratory diseases

Impaired memory

Concentration disorientation

Extreme depression and palpitation

Seizures

Death

This sorry state of affairs results from the big fashion brands' focus on minimising cost of production in order to maximise profit. This fiendish drive to fortify the bottom line fuels these brands' lack of concern for the wellbeing of their workers, which then leads to their failure to apply fundamental workplace health and safety standards in their offshore production units.

4. Environmental degradation

In the past, textile manufacturers paid little heed to their impact on the environment, because the scale of production back then was not as massive as it is today. These destructive habits forged in the early days of apparel manufacture were passed on from generation to generation, however, leaving a nasty, indelible impact on the environment and our natural resources.

When gallons of toxic pesticides are washed into bodies of water during cotton farming, effluents are discharged into nearby streams from the dyeing process, and poison gases are gushing out of the chimneys of cloth manufacturing factories by the tonne, what do you expect to happen to the ozone layer if not leakage?

The fashion industry has an unmistakably hefty carbon footprint, formed as a result of excessive pollution in all areas of operations within the fashion production and retail supply chain.

5. Animal cruelty

Animal abuse within the fashion industry comes in two parts: one part tortures the animal directly by objectifying it for its fur, its skin, or its hide, while the other part harms animals by polluting their habitat and disrupting their food chains. In both circumstances, the processes involved in fashion production make it impossible for these animals to live wild and free.

Many animals are bred in captivity and grown to a ripe age, only to have workers shave off their fur. Live animals are often mutilated once their fur has been shaved. Some animals, such as snakes and crocodiles for example, are bred specifically so that manufacturers can put them down and extract their skin as raw materials for items like shoes, handbags, and other accessories.

What's more, the pesticides from cotton farming and dyes from textile processing that wash into rivers pollute entire food chains with hazardous residues. Huge amounts of fish die every year, for instance, because of such water pollution.

Ethical fashion starts with you

It isn't hard to see that the mainstream fashion industry is desperately in need of an overhaul. Thankfully, various concerned organisations, influencers, and companies have started acknowledging and taking action toward spreading awareness on these matters, and to holding the perpetrators accountable for their harmful and often criminal industry practices.

Ethical fashion is well on the rise as more fashion brands, both new and existing, are either born with or transitioning to sustainable, ecological, and ethical clothing supply chains and production methods.

Leading this fashion revolution are consumers and individuals who have woken up to the evils and injustices that mainstream and fast fashion companies inflict on millions of lives, both human and non-human, around the world. Let's all take a stand and spread the message that no living soul should have to suffer or die in the name of fashion.
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To learn more about how the fast fashion industry has impacted people and planet, we also recommend you grab the book Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went From Sunday Best to Fast Fashion.

**If you enjoyed, learned from, or felt empowered after reading this piece, we've love for you to support us by donating to our Patreon or giving a once-off PayPal payment via the donate button below.**

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Ethical Fashion 101: The Top 5 Ethical Issues in the Fashion Industry - Eco Warrior Princess

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As the world is bombarded with an unending supply of dirt-cheap clothes, ethical fashion activists in Dubai and the Middle East, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States are voicing their concerns regarding the fashion industry's sustained exploitation of human, animal, and natural resources.

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https://fashionunited.uk/news/business/6-sustainable-textile-innovations-that-will-change-the-fashion-industry/2017100926194

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The fashion industry is "incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment." That is the message that designer Stella McCartney, and an increasing number of other brands, have taken to addressing. Given its focus on fast, cheap, and trend-specific fashion that is essentially meant to be disposable, fashion industry often - and rightfully - gets a bad rap for it the damage it does to the environment. From growing cotton to manufacturing textiles, water is an essential component. We take a look at the relationship between fashion manufacturing and H20 ...

20 percent - The average amount of global industrial water pollution that can be tied to garment manufacturing. ( World Resources Institute).

25 - The number of recycled plastic bottles (reclaimed from the ocean) that activewear brand Girlfriend Collective uses to make each pair of its leggings. ( TFL).

85 percent - The percentage of water used in textile processing that goes into dying the fabrics, which, in many cases, leads to run off, thereby polluting nearby water sources. (Cotton, Inc.).

715 gallons - How much water it takes to produce the cotton needed for one t-shirt - that is almost three years' worth of drinking water. ( WWF).

1,468 gallons - The average amount of water that Reformation saves per pair of its eco-friendly denim. ( TFL).

1,800 gallons - The gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair jeans. ( Tree Hugger).

1,900 - The number of individual fibers that can be rinsed off a single synthetic garment (namely, one made from polyester) and end up in our oceans. ( The Guardian).

100,000 - The number of pairs of jeans that Levi recently manufactured with one of its Chinese suppliers using 100 percent recycled water. ( Levis).

1 million - The number of pairs of sneakers made from reclaimed ocean plastic that adidas sold in 2017. Each pair of shoes reuses 11 plastic bottles. ( CNBC)

25 billion gallons -The water required for one year's worth of global textile production (including cotton farming). ( Elle MacArthur Foundation).

1.3 trillion gallons - The amount of water used each year for fabric dyeing alone. ( World Resources Institute).

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How Many Gallons of Water Does it Take to Make a Single Pair of Jeans?

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The fashion industry is "incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment." That is the message that designer Stella McCartney, and an increasing number of other brands, have taken to addressing. Given its focus on fast, cheap, and trend-specific fashion that is essentially meant to