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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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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.

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Have you ever wondered how are clothes made? People spend a lot of money on clothes alone because it helps them express their taste and style. There is a vast difference on the way clothes were made in the past and today. The clothes that were made in the early times were not really made of cloth. Instead, the earliest clothes were fabricated from the skin of animals. The main reason for this is it gives them protection from different elements.

The clothes people wear depend on the regions where they live. For places where people experience extreme cold, warm clothing are essential and they use skin of sheep and other animals.

But nowadays, people are no longer using clothes made from animal skin, there are innovative ways which enabled the production of clothes easier and in accordance to the current lifestyle of people. Further modification on clothes was constantly made and they need to be long lasting in order for people to use it for several times.

Most of the clothes that you can find today are made of cotton. The process starts by harvesting mature cottons. Then the mature balls are placed in machine which blows the ball away from the cotton and leaving only the fibers resembling puffy cotton balls. It is then placed in cotton gin to clean and remove the seeds from it. In the past, the cotton was spun on the spinning wheel that was operated using foot pedal. But in the recent years, the process is done using electrical power. It is important for the yarn to be carded before placing the cotton to the loom. It is where the cotton is stretched across the drum, brushing any impurities before laying flat on the loom.

Sothe cotton is being stretched out already, spun and then carded into thin yarn. The threads that run vertically across the loom are called warp and weaving through horizontally running threads called filling. Even though the looms used machines, it will still require an individual in order for the machine to keep running. If the cotton yarn is weaved into fabric, it will now be called grey goods and it is what manufacturers used to make clothes.

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Have you ever wondered how are clothes made? People spend a lot of money on clothes alone because it helps them express their taste and style. There is a vast difference on the way clothes were made in the past and today. The clothes that were made in the early times were not really made of cloth.

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With all my do-gooder intentions for muka kids I really needed to understand the complexities of the ethical clothing production chain. By ethical I mean a production chain where worker and environmental well-being sits at the heart of it. So we went to India. We went to learn how ethical clothing is created and other clothing is not. We went to talk with those involved, in this very long production chain, about their day to day reality, their joys and their despair. We followed the journey of fairtrade organic cotton from field to factory across that beautiful and chaotic continent. We fell in love with the beauty of rural India, and despaired of the poverty we saw there. We felt brought down by the knowledge that the production we were seeing represented less than 1% of the industry, yet uplifted by the promise of the better way it represented. It is not a perfect system, but it strives at it at least. Here is our tale of ethical clothing, we hope you will see the promise it is too.

Growing Cotton

It all starts in the green fields and rainy regions in central and west India. Organic cotton seed is planted, fed by rain and picked by hand when it comes to bloom.

Organic cotton uses no pesticides or chemical fertilizers. The farmers make rich compost, have huge writhing worm farms and remove pests by hand. It is hard work, requiring intensive labour, but they are no longer beholden to large international companies for chemical inputs and seed.

Certified fairtrade cotton commands a guaranteed price for the farmers at market (43 rupees per kg of raw seed cotton), and it is a price that ensures they can feed their families. The non fairtrade cotton price is, distressingly, often below the cost of production for farmers (when writing this it was 33 ruppees per kg). Fairtrade has made a measurable difference to cotton farmer's lives, and most importantly has enabled them to stay free of debt. Spiraling debt has lead to an extraordinarily high suicide rate in Indian cotton farmers. While fairtrade cotton is a literal life saver to these families, the market for fairtrade cotton is still small and subject to fluctuations in demand by clothing companies - this causes these families a great deal of anxiety.

These fluctuations in demand for fairtrade cotton, and the fact that rain fed organic cotton can only be grown for six months a year, means the women in the farming villages need supplementary sources of income. Currently, they migrate their families (their babies, their children) across the country, by train,to do menial labour for the other half of each year. Building small enterprises, while the ethical cotton markets grows, to keep them in their homes and their incomes steady, is a necessity for them.

Once the raw seed cotton has been picked by the men and women in these small farming villages, it is taken by truck to the local ginning factory, where it is cleaned and processed and pressed.

Using a series of huge machines the picked raw cotton, which still has the seed intact, is put though a series of blowers, filters, spinners and extractors to separate the fiber from the seed.

Nine hundred tonnes of raw organic fairtrade cotton is sucked up into the filters every season at this factory.

While the machinery looks pre-industrial , labour practices are not. As with the farming, at the ginning stage producers must adhere to an agreed set of labour standards (including no child labour) and are audited regularly to ensure compliance.

Once separated from the seed the cotton, now known as lint, is bailed (or pressed) and ready to make the long journey by road across the subcontinent to the cotton mills.

Spinning and Knitting

The pressed organic fairtrade cotton lint arrives in southern India at the cotton spinning and knitting mills. It is kept separate from the conventional cotton through a series of color coded labels and storage rooms.

Once at the mill the cotton goes through a much more rigorous cleaning process. It is then carded and combed by machinery that roars in rooms that dwarf. The vast size of the machinery means the mills need to be located in rural areas. In fairtrade and certified ethical production there must be free of indentured labour. This is where girls and women live on site, work long hours for limited pay in dangerous conditions and are prevented from leaving until a specified time is completed (usually years). Indentured labour at conventional mills is easy to get away with due to the isolated rural locations.

Once the cotton has been transformed into the unbleached cotton knit fabric it is again put on a truck and taken to the dying factories. The dying factories are mostly based in the same area as the final garment factories they serve so the travel is reduced.

While the residual chemicals left on fabric from conventional dying processes are concerning, the biggest worry is the waste. Conventional dying is a very toxic process and as such the waste water produced is full of heavy metals and pollutants. This waste is either pumped into local waterways (dying factories are usually situated on rivers) or into surrounding land where they will eventually leach into waterways. In organic certified factories however, the dying is done with fewer and much less harmful chemicals (no heavy metals are used at all) and is undertaken in a closed loop system. A closed loop system means the waste waster is treated until it is inert and then reused in manufacture. In the town we visited there are 10 organic dying factories - of the 200 or so that operate.

Back at the garment factory the cloth undergoes it final transformation into clothing. When people talk ethical clothing production it is probably fair to say that they mostly consider only this final stage in the chain (construction of the clothes). Strangely though the vast bulk of processes and people involved in the production of our clothing are hidden from consumers' (and often makers') dialogue on the issue of ethical production. For ethical production this means the complexities in ensuring a sustainable and fair approach throughout the chain are often unrecognized and unremarked upon, we can improve this conversation.

The Cutting & Sewing of the Cloth.

So what differs in ethical clothing production during these final stages from conventional factories? Well to me as the uneducated observer these factories all looked like a pretty normal workplaces, and that is the key, fairtrade, and other ethical labour standards ensure that things are just that - normal, safe, fair & reasonable. No children, no long hours, safety around large machinery, lunch and tea breaks, reasonable pay. It is not perfect, gender equity pay still needs work in many of these ethical workplaces, and the wider social conditions have an impact here, but progress has been made. As the demand from customers (western clothing makers and the people who buy their products), for clothes made under these conditions increases, so more progress will be made.

The first stage in garment construction is checking the fabric for flaws.

Garments with patterns and designs then go to screen printing, which can be done by hand or by rotary screens.

Organic certified paints are used for the screen prints on fabrics for clothing that is organically certified. Separation from non organic paints is critical and as demand increases many producers will move to 100% organic production to reduce the complexities.

Following screen printing the cloth is cut into the specified pattern pieces, usually by a hand operated cutting machine. Most pattern pieces are arranged on the fabric in a way to minimize wastage of cut fabric. Fabric coverage of 85-86% is considered acceptable, though it is not always possible to achieve this. In factories with a commitment to sustainability fabric scraps are usually recycled. That means the scraps are pulped back into fibre and then used to make cardboard packaging and labels.

The construction of the garment is carried out in mind boggling series of operations that to the average observer look all a bit the same, but clearly are not! Depending on where in India factories are located you may only see men in the more skilled roles. The various states have made variable progress on women's rights and this is reflected in the workplace. Under fairtrade there must be active movements made to address this regardless of the position of women within a local community.

Finally the completed product is checked with the garment designers

Ironically, in many states in India the local labour laws are strongly in favour of workers rights (though often not women's). However, the nature of Indian bureaucracy, a lack of regulatory bodies and out and out corruption mean these laws are not adhered to. It is not just a local issue, what compounds this is the business practices of large multinational clothing companies who press for the lowest price for products, and will only contract for specified item/s of clothing per season, rather than formalizing long term partnerships with manufacturers. Such partnerships would allow factories to predict their income, formalize their workforce and apply better standards to their workplace, instead of driving for the lowest production cost. In the meantime fairtrade and other ethical standards have stepped into the breach to provide for a small but growing group of consumers who want to see these standards improve. Pressure on countries at the political level (via large manufacturers and economic trading partners) may have some impact, in the mean time consumers have a very strong hand to play through the almighty dollar.

There are of course more stages to get the garment to you - packaging, freight, more packaging. Those committed to ethical clothing production work hard to reduce the packaging and carbon footprint of their clothes. Scale lends itself to the ability to make business practice more sustainable too, to use shipping instead of airfreight for example. These are all small but important activities in the complex chain that is ethical clothing production. Not all ethical & sustainable clothing makers have the scale or the size to commit to all ethical activities in this chain, but as consumers we can help them get there by growing their market and asking for it. If they do have scale then tough questions SHOULD be asked about their chain. A chain that involves many many people, all who matter and all who just want to live a life where choices are real & meaningful.
Jess Berentson-Shaw founded the social enterprise muka kids' to connect consumers, designers and garment workers across the world, and empower them to make the clothing industry a sustainable one. Muka kids has a marketplace to trade preloved organic, ethical & sustainable clothing. Through its partnerships with accredited brands it also helps make new sustainable clothing more affordable. Sales on the marketplace fund a micro finance scheme for women cotton farmers in India trying to pull themselves out of poverty.

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From Field to Factory - How Ethical Clothing is Made. A Photographic Journey. - organic fair trade clothes for kids

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With all my do-gooder intentions for muka kids I really needed to understand the complexities of the ethical clothing production chain. By ethical I mean a production chain where worker and environmental well-being sits at the heart of it. So we went to India.

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One day in April 2013, Shabana went to work in the garment factory where she was a seamstress, feeding cloth, hour after hour, day after day, through ravenous sewing machines in a room filled with hundreds of women doing just the same.

By the end of the day she lay trapped beneath the rubble of the eight-story building in the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh-a victim, albeit alive, of the deadliest garment factory accident in recent history. At least 1,134 other workers in the building died, and more than 2,000 were injured.

"Sometimes I just can't sleep without pills. I keep remembering how many people died that day," she said, years later, frail and hollowed. "Maybe I should have died too."

Shabana miraculously survived three days buried in the rubble of the Rana Plaza building, a disaster that shook the world and belied the lofty claims of big apparel brands that they were taking sufficient measures to protect the workers who toiled to create their products.

Labor advocates wanting to campaign for compensation for victims had to know which global apparel brands had ordered the clothing produced in the five factories that had been housed in the collapsed building. But at the time, no one knew. Labor rights activists and others scrambled to find company labels even as bodies of workers were being pried from the rubble, and traumatized survivors struggled to recall anything about the brands for which they had worked, and almost died.

***

As consumers we do not think much about the "Made in ..." labels sewn on our clothes or stamped onto the soles of shoes, if we notice it at all. But woven invisibly into the fabric of the clothes we wear are stories of individuals-often women-who cut, stitch, and glue the shoes, shirts, and pants that we pick from store shelves and hang in our closets.

Factory building collapses and fires are not the only problems in the apparel manufacturing world. In the US$2.4 trillion garment industry, which employs millions of workers worldwide, labor rights abuses are rife. In countries around the world, factory owners and managers often fire pregnant workers or deny maternity leave; retaliate against workers who join or form unions; force workers to do overtime work or risk losing their job; and turn a blind eye when male managers or workers sexually harass female workers.

Why should global apparel brands care? And what is their role?

The governments of producing countries worldwide are primarily responsible for working conditions and labor law compliance in factories. But according to international standards, though non-binding, global apparel and footwear companies or "brands" that order products manufactured in factories also have a responsibility to ensure that the rights of workers are respected throughout their supply chain. They must take measures to prevent and address human rights abuses.

For starters, they should make sure workers and the public know which factories are producing for which brands, and they should be transparent about their supply chains. Too often, though, brands side-step responsibility by failing to publish key information-such the names, addresses, and other important information about factories manufacturing their branded products.

This kind of disclosure is the foundation on which corporate responsibility is built. More and more apparel companies disclose this information to show where they are producing and the sites they are monitoring. By the end of 2016, these included adidas, C&A, Columbia Sportswear, Cotton On Group, Disney, Esprit, Forever New, Fruit of the Loom, Gap Inc., G-Star RAW, Hanesbrands, H&M Group, Hudson's Bay Company, Jeanswest, Levi Strauss, Lindex, Marks and Spencer, Mountain Equipment Co-op, New Balance, Nike, Pacific Brands, PAS Group, Patagonia, Puma, Specialty Fashion Group, Target USA, VF Corporation, Wesfarmers Group (Kmart and Target Australia, and Coles), and Woolworths.

This is especially important because in the apparel sector, unauthorized subcontracting is a frequent problem. Some of the worst labor abuses occur in such unauthorized subcontracted sites, farthest from any kind of scrutiny or accountability.

Such disclosure not only demonstrates that a company is mapping its supply chain, it also helps to identify good and bad subcontractors, and focus additional monitoring efforts where they are most needed. Workers need this information too, as do those who may advocate on their behalf, including union representatives, local and international nongovernmental organizations, lawyers, journalists, and academics. The more supply chain data is publicly available, the more likely it is that abusive conditions will be reported-whether publicly or to the brands whose supply chains are implicated-and the more likely it becomes that problems can be solved.

Campaigning for Transparency

In 2016, Human Rights Watch joined eight international labor rights groups and global unions advocating for a basic level of transparency in the garment industry. The coalition developed a "Transparency Pledge," a uniform minimum standard for transparency, drawn from industry good practices. The pledge is a modest starting point for company disclosure. Companies can do far more than what the pledge seeks, for example by publishing information about where they source cotton and other materials from.

The coalition reached out to 72 brands-some leaders on transparency and others that lag behind- to urge them to align their practices with the Transparency Pledge. Seventeen leading global apparel and footwear companies have to date committed to publishing all of the information sought in the pledge.

Each company that does so commits to regularly publish on its website a list of all factories that manufacture its products. The list should specify the full name of all authorized production units and processing facilities; site addresses; parent company information for the production units; type of products made; and a rough indication of the number of workers at each site.

Among the leaders who previously already disclosed supplier factory information and fully committed to the pledge are adidas, C&A, Cotton On Group, Esprit, G-Star RAW, H&M Group, Hanesbrands, Levi's, Lindex, Nike, and Patagonia. Companies that were going transparent for the first time and committed to the pledge are: ASICS, ASOS, Clarks, New Look, Next, and Pentland Brands.

Another 17 companies, though falling short of pledge standards, shifted in a positive direction, and committed, for the first time, to publishing their supplier factory information. Disappointingly, however, many apparel companies simply rejected transparency altogether or did not respond to our repeated efforts to engage with them.

Transparency is not a silver bullet. But it is a powerful tool for focusing more on-the-ground eyes on labor abuses and factory dangers, and it provides workers and advocates critical information about where to turn with problems. Transparency also builds confidence among consumers who care about the ethical business practices of brands. And it allows workers to at least hope that brands profiting from their labor will hear of their struggles-and intervene.

Information Barriers

In 2016, I met a garment worker from a factory in Burma. The factory management gave workers time off to celebrate Thingyan, the annual Buddhist water festival-also a government holiday. When workers returned, the managers forced them to compensate for lost productivity by working consecutive Sundays, their only day off. Factory managers singled out workers who refused and denied them overtime work for two months, leaving these low-wage workers with even less take-home pay. The factory's actions were blatantly illegal under Burmese domestic laws.

Workers despaired: they wanted to report what was happening to the brands for which they produced, but they had no way of knowing what those were. They suffered silently.

In another case, an eight-month pregnant worker from Cambodia told me that a garment factory terminated her contract because she was pregnant. The factory refused to pay her legally required maternity benefits, and told her not to return. So she turned to a local nongovernmental organization, which wanted to help her alert the brand. The problem was, no one knew which brand placed orders with that factory. They were at a dead end.

Apparel companies know the challenges workers face if they try to collect brand information from their factories. These include a combination of poor literacy and language barriers; lack of awareness about the label parts that need to be collected; not being equipped with smartphones to photograph labels; and fear of retaliation.

Garment workers I've interviewed in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Burma have often said they were too afraid of retribution to risk photographing or collecting brand labels in factories, or that the factory did not attach the labels at all. Putting the onus on workers to sleuth around to figure out which brands they produce for is patently unfair and only adds to workers' problems.

Creeping Toward Transparency

In the past, consumers asserted their right to know where their products are made to bring about change in the garment industry. In late 1990s and early 2000s, the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) campaigned at many US universities, demanding that brands producing licensed apparel bearing their college logo must provide factory names and locations. This led companies like Nike and adidas to share the names and locations of factories where workers made their products-an important breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for transparency.

At the very heart of the guiding principles and corporate responsibility is the notion of 'knowing and showing.' If a company does not know and cannot show, or will not show, then it raises questions.... A company that respects human rights ... is in a sense shortchanging itself by not being transparent. If it believes its [human rights] practices are strong, they should be disclosing the sites they are monitoring and take credit for that.

Since 2005, Nike and adidas have been publishing their supplier factory information, and more brands followed. Some brands that closely guarded factory names as "competitive information" have now released this data. In 2013, the leading fashion group H&M-which according to a company representative used to keep its supplier factories list locked in a safe in Stockholm at one point-became the first fashion brand to publish the names and addresses of its supplier factories. Other companies followed suit in 2016, with big companies like C&A, Esprit, Marks and Spencer, and Gap Inc. also going transparent.

Apparel companies committed to ethical business practices will not shy away from their responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which says that businesses should "know and show" that they are respecting human rights in their supply chain, including by mapping their supplier factories. Industry leaders have set the standard for such "showing" by putting supplier factory information in the public domain. Reflecting on how critical it is for a company to publish its supply chain information to meaningfully apply the UN Guiding Principles, Prof. John Ruggie, former UN special representative for business and human rights, who drafted the principles, told Human Rights Watch:

At the very heart of the guiding principles and corporate responsibility is the notion of 'knowing and showing.' If a company does not know and cannot show, or will not show, then it raises questions.... A company that respects human rights ... is in a sense shortchanging itself by not being transparent. If it believes its [human rights] practices are strong, they should be disclosing the sites they are monitoring and take credit for that.

Transparency as Competitive Advantage

Some brands that reject transparency invoke the oft-repeated trope of competitive disadvantage. They argue that publishing the names and locations of the factories that produce for them will be detrimental to staying competitive. This thinking is misguided.

First, the notion that such a basic degree of transparency puts a company at a competitive disadvantage is contradicted by the fact that leading companies already disclose factory information and have not claimed to suffer any financial harm as a result.

Second, most brands already partially share this information on industry platforms such as Sedex and the Fair Factory Clearinghouse. Through these, they exchange information about supplier factories, including reports about working conditions.

Some of this supposedly "secret" information about factory names and locations is also accessible to competitors through databases, including Import Genius and Panjiva, which compile US customs data.

Publishing supplier factory information would allow brands sourcing from the same factory to exchange key information about working conditions and potentially collaborate to prevent labor abuses or dangerous conditions.

Some argue that their membership in initiatives like the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, a binding agreement between brands and global unions, forged after the Rana Plaza collapse, is proof of their commitment to transparency. The Bangladesh Accord publishes a list of all garment factories covered by the initiative, but does not publicly identify which factory produces for what brand, let alone globally. The initiative has had a positive impact on fire and building safety in Bangladesh, but is not a substitute for a company's own transparency practices governing its global supplier factories.

At least one company, Inditex (which owns Zara and other brands), has refused to publish any supplier factory information, arguing that it privately discloses the data to global unions with whom it has signed a global framework agreement, intended to improve working conditions throughout its supplier factories globally.

Publishing supplier factory information would only amplify the effectiveness of such a global framework agreement. Other brands like ASOS, H&M, and Tchibo, which have global framework agreements, also publish their supplier factory information. Their practices demonstrate that the two tools-framework agreements and transparency-can coexist.

Apparel Companies that Publish Supplier Information and Participate in Other Initiatives

Bangladesh Accord members include: adidas, ALDI North and ALDI South, Benetton, C&A, Cotton On, Esprit, G-Star RAW, Fast Retailing, H&M, Hugo Boss, John Lewis, Kmart Australia, LIDL, Lindex, Loblaw, Marks and Spencer, Next, New Look, Puma, PVH, Target Australia, Tchibo, Tesco, and Woolworths.

German Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (the Textil Bündnis) members that publish supplier factory information include: adidas, ALDI North and ALDI South, C&A, Esprit, H&M, Hugo Boss, LIDL, Puma, and Tchibo.

Incentivizing Transparency, Role of Investors

Multi-stakeholder initiatives-involving different stakeholders from the garment industry, such as brands and NGOs, including the Ethical Trading Initiative, the Fair Labor Association, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition-should play an important role in moving the industry toward basic transparency.

Such initiatives should make publishing supplier factory information a condition of membership and seek time-bound plans from existing apparel and footwear member-companies to move toward this goal. At the very least, they should require that brands in prominent leadership roles-such as boards of such initiatives-publish supplier factory information. Primark, for example, is on the board of the Ethical Trading Initiative, making its refusal to go transparent all the more reproachable. Walmart, one of the founders of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, has yet to publish its global supplier factory information.

Soon there won't be much to hide. People who are either inside or servicing the investment community will vacuum up everything that's out there. They are using everything from GPS to Google Earth to collect information. It's better for companies to provide this information themselves than have a data provider possibly misconstrue it and sell it as proprietary information to an investment or asset management company, and have it adversely impact the ratings. Companies will realize it's better to be transparent.

Investors, including pension funds, can use their role as owners in companies to press for transparency. For instance, investors like APG and investor groups such as SHARE Canada and the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility regularly engage with companies on supply chain transparency.

It is not just a social imperative but can help reduce their financial risks by allowing for better preventative measures through collaboration with other brands. The Corporate Human Rights Benchmark-backed by investors including the London-based assessment management company Aviva Investors-also requires apparel companies to map and disclose at least the upper layer of their supply chain.

"Soon there won't be much to hide," said Professor Ruggie, highlighting the increasing weight that investors are giving to economic, social, and governance (ESG) indicators. "People who are either inside or servicing the investment community will vacuum up everything that's out there. They are using everything from GPS to Google Earth to collect information. It's better for companies to provide this information themselves than have a data provider possibly misconstrue it and sell it as proprietary information to an investment or asset management company, and have it adversely impact the ratings. Companies will realize it's better to be transparent."

A Call to Governments

Governments should compel transparency and other mandatory human rights processes in an apparel company's supply chain. Only they can impose penalties on noncompliant companies, and only they can set enforceable standards that truly level the playing field for businesses and workers.

Tragically, the combination of reluctance to regulate companies and overall government apathy has meant there have not been strong legislative efforts worldwide to address human rights concerns in the garment industry. Legislation that specifically requires apparel and footwear companies to publish supplier factory information would be an important step.

Nevertheless, the increasing attempts by some governments to legislate on company responsibilities towards human rights in their global supply chains may lead to some change. For example, the UK Modern Slavery Act-which among other things, requires companies to monitor for modern slavery in their supply chains, does not specifically require companies to publish supplier factory information.

But it has served as a catalyst for transparency: a number of UK apparel and footwear companies have published supplier factory information as part of their overall risk mitigation strategy on modern slavery in their supply chains. The French law on due diligence by companies is yet another piece of legislation that serves as a good example that can be built on.

In the post-Rana Plaza world, no apparel company should think twice about a basic level of transparency. Workers' rights and lives come first.

Shabana in Bangladesh still struggles to piece her life back together. Nightmares and depression hamper her life and ability to work. Setting foot inside a garment factory is unthinkable. "Workers should know about brands so they can tell their true stories," she said.

This essay carries information that is current as of December 15, 2017.

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World Report 2018: Rights Trends in "Soon There Won't Be Much to Hide"

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One day in April 2013, Shabana went to work in the garment factory where she was a seamstress, feeding cloth, hour after hour, day after day, through ravenous sewing machines in a room filled with hundreds of women doing just the same.

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Whether you pay attention to fashion trends or not, we all wear clothes on a daily basis. Fashion is a multibillion-dollar industry. With the growing demand for extremely cheap clothing prices in the Western world, the money for materials, labor, and shipping has to come from somewhere. It would be impossible to achieve the abundance of fashion available at our fingertips without running into some major issues.

10. Child Labor

In Cambodia, the legal working age is 15 years old, but without diligent enforcement of this law, many clothing factories employ girls as young as 12. These children drop out of school to get a job because their families live in poverty. Abandoning their education, the girls become part of a system that forces them into a cycle that is impossible to escape. Regardless of the worker's age, the average pay equates to roughly 50 cents per day.

According to UNICEF and the International Labor Organization, an estimated 170 million children are currently working in the clothing industry all over the world. Workers are also forced to work overtime without increased pay, which means that mothers are forced to either leave their children alone or bring them to the factory.

Many factories have a "day care," which in reality is just a section set aside for the children to simply exist. There is no stimulation and no teachers or staff to take care of them. In its own way, bringing children to the factories may lead to child labor as well. Without any other stimulation, helping their mothers work may be one of the only ways for the children to fight off boredom.

9. Not-So-Fake Fur

With the general public becoming more aware of cruelty to animals, clothing retailers are seeing a growing demand for faux fur. Animal rights advocates would be horrified to find out that many products advertised as containing fake fur actually contain real fur. In many cases, it is cheaper for clothing manufactures to use less expensive animal hides, like rabbit or raccoon, than it would be to manufacture synthetic fur. The New York Times reported on a scandal in 2013, in which Neiman Marcus stores in the United States was selling multiple items labeled "faux fur" that were actually real.

This is was not an isolated incident. The Federal Trade Commission includes fur on their website as one of the major issues found with retailers and explains to consumers how they can identify real versus fake fur. The Fur Act was originally created in the 1950s to protect buyers from purchasing furs labeled as "mink" that were actually much less valuable rabbit or muskrat furs. The same law applies to retailers who lie about fur being fake.

8. Lead Paint On Your Accessories

According to a study by The New York Times, many brightly colored fashion accessories that come into the US from overseas often contain lead-based paint and dyes. The exporting countries don't have the same regulations as the United States, and their products could be making people sick. Colorful purses, wallets, hair accessories, and plastic jewelry could all possibly contain the toxic material. Touching the products and then touching food, scratching eyes, etc. could cause lead contamination in the body. Even if someone is exposed to trace amounts of lead, it can cause nerve damage and kidney failure.

In 2010, a lawsuit was filed against multiple stores where lead was discovered in their accessories. Some of the stores involved in this lawsuit included Target, JC Penny, Kohls, Victoria's Secret, Macy's, Sears, and Saks Fifth Avenue. All of those retailers had accessories that contained lead. As of 2013, these same stores had their products tested again. They had become more diligent with checking the toxicity of the products they sell, as nothing contained lead.

However, many consumers may still have lead-containing products in their homes. Hundreds of other retailers that weren't included in the lawsuit could still possibly be selling such products. For example, Forever 21 wasn't included in the lawsuit, so they don't check the lead content of their products ahead of time before they try to sell it. They have agreed to recall anything that is brought to their attention.

7. Dangerous Working Conditions

In 2012, a garment factory called Tazreen Fashion caught fire in Bangladesh. Without the existence of fire safety laws, the company wasn't required to provide smoke alarms or fire exits or have its employees perform fire drills. When the factory caught fire, the 11 members of the management were able to escape, while 112 women employed as seamstresses were engulfed in flames. Shortly after that, over 1,100 workers died in the Rana Plaza garment factory when the building collapsed. Again, there were no standards of what condition a building must be in to be considered safe for employees.

It took all of these people dying before Bangladesh began creating standards for fire safety. Worker's unions are illegal there, and the people running the factories were never held accountable for how they treated their employees. Despite the recent attention that has been given to the issues, there still remain multiple companies who continue to place their workers in awful conditions, simply because they haven't been caught yet.

Walmart and The Gap, two companies known for their cheap clothing prices, manufacture their clothing in Bangladesh. Rather than taking any responsibility for demanding mass amounts of clothing from the Tazreen Fashion factory, Walmart issued a statement to The New York Times that their own US-run stores take fire safety very seriously and that they will attempt to give education to their factories in Bangladesh.

6. Made To Fall Apart

"Fast fashion" clothing retailers like H&M and Forever 21 are constantly pushing new inventory every single month, which means that they demand faster production times. They also demand that costs stay low, so the factories use the cheapest fabric and thread available. There is simply not enough time to ensure that a piece of clothing is going to last for years when it's being produced so quickly and with such low-quality material. Simon Collins, the dean of fashion at Parsons New School of Design, commented to NPR about fast fashion: "It's just garbage. [ . . . ] You're going to wear it on Saturday night to your party, and then it's literally going to fall apart."

Brands like L.L. Bean have always strived to sell products that can last a lifetime. They are so confident in the quality of their US-made clothing, in fact, that they will allow you to return any of their items back, regardless of how many years it has been since you purchased it.

However, buying brand-name clothing does not always mean it's a good product. You may think you're getting a good deal on high-end brands when you shop at outlet stores. In reality, the majority of clothing sold is actually cheap stuff manufactured specifically for the outlets. These clothes are usually on the same level as poorly made "fast fashion" clothes, so the brand name doesn't always mean that you're getting a better-quality product.

5. Dangerous Natural Fibers

According to the United States Department of Labor, employees who pick and manufacture cotton can be exposed to cotton dust, which floats in the air during processing. This dust contains bacteria, fungi, pesticides, and materials that can make someone very sick if they were to breathe it in. Some factories, especially overseas, do not have any safety regulations or mask-wearing requirements to prevent people from getting sick from breathing in cotton dust.

The fear of natural fibers goes beyond the health of the workers. Just like any other plant, cotton can contain pesticides, which many people fear could linger on their clothing while it hangs in the store. This has lead to the "organic clothing" movement. Target, H&M, Nike, and Victoria's Secret are just a few companies that came out with organically produced natural fibers like bamboo, soy, and hemp silk. However, just like produce in the grocery store, they charge higher prices for the organic clothing that promises your fibers will not contain any pesticides.

4. Work Faster Or Get Out

According to Human Rights Watch, the demand for nonstop production of clothing pushes workers to the limits. In one case, a woman had to leave work for a nosebleed that wouldn't stop. Rather than getting blood on the fabric, she went straight to a doctor. Even though she provided her manager with a doctor's note, she was fired immediately because her medical issue disrupted the speed of production.

Despite the fact that the majority of people working in these factories are women, getting pregnant also means that a woman will become demoted to less pay and may lose her job. Overtime without increased pay is standard, pushing people to stay all hours of the night if they must meet a deadline for clothing companies. This also forces parents to stay in the factory longer, without being able to go home to see their family.

A Norwegian documentary TV series called Sweatshop: Dead Cheap Fashion brought a group of young fashion bloggers to work alongside garment factory workers in Cambodia, so they could understand exactly where their clothing comes from. Many of them started out by brushing off the seriousness of the plight of the garment workers. However, even the most self-absorbed of these teens eventually ended up in tears, barely able to handle the injustice that the workers face.

3. Political Consequences

Cambodia exports billions of dollars of products every year. The top five products they export are all different types of clothing. Knit sweaters alone make up for 14 percent of the country's entire economy. The United States consumes the largest amount of their exports, at 22 percent, but much of Cambodia's clothing is distributed to other parts of the world. The other exports that Cambodia has to offer make such little money that the country would not be able to survive if their ability to make garments was taken away.

While "fast fashion" and garment manufacturing in Cambodia is contributing to waste, poor labor practices, and corruption, the country still depends on clothing being sold to richer countries. Workers' attempts to improve their situation have been shot down. Whenever someone has attempted to create a union to improve workers' rights, they have been killed or injured.

Clearly, those in power do not want unions to cut work hours, force them to pay for better working environments, or anything else because it would raise the production cost for the clothing. Cutting into the main source of income in Cambodia's economy would cause even more political unrest. There seems to be no easy solution to the issue.

2. Mountains Of Waste

According to the Council for Textile Recycling, the United States alone produces 25 billion pounds of clothing waste every single year. A mere 15 percent gets donated to thrift shops and charities. The other 85 percent ends up in landfills. The vast majority of Americans who cannot afford or simply do not care about name-brand fashion shop for low-quality clothing from places like H&M, Walmart, and Forever 21. Once a cheap garment has fallen apart, people feel that they do not even have the option to donate their clothing to a thrift store, and it ends up in the garbage. Clothing waste increased by 40 percent between 1999 and 2009 and continues to grow every year.

Even the clothing that is donated amounts to well over three billion pounds, while the entire US population is only 319 million people. In short, if companies stopped receiving shipments of new clothing from third world countries and sold their current stock for a year straight, clothing donations to thrift stores could very literally dress the entire country.

As you can imagine, organizations like Goodwill get more donations than people can consume. Clothing is shipped to rag companies and also gets shrink-wrapped in huge cubes, or "bales," and is sent to third world countries. Despite all of these ways to reuse clothing, literal tons are still being put into landfills.

1. Human Trafficking

In 2015, Patagonia, a clothing company known for their outdoor jackets and hiking equipment, decided to look deeply into the lives of the people who were making their clothing overseas. What they discovered was shocking. Despite the fact that garment workers in Taiwan make very little money, labor brokers will promise migrant workers that they can help them find a job-so long as they are indebted $7,000 in exchange for their employment. It takes two years of work for someone to make enough money to pay back the broker, but their term of employment only lasts for three years. So, if these people want a job again, they have to go through the process of paying the broker yet again, meaning that they only get to keep the salary of one out of every three years of work.

Without any other options to turn to, many of these people fall into this endless cycle of human trafficking. Patagonia stepped in, and as of June 1, 2015, they forced the brokers to repay the debts of their workers and tried to restructure the standards of how their factories are run to the best of their ability. They are open to sharing their experiences, detailing their process of restructuring their overseas factory.

It's clear that thousands, if not millions, of people working for garment factories are victims of human trafficking, and the issue continues today. While Patagonia writes on their website that they are ready and willing to provide help to any other clothing company that is willing to go through their own investigations into human trafficking, it is clear that many corporations will choose to keep their profits, rather than spend valuable resources on human rights.

This feature originally appeared in Listverse.

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10 Truly Oppressive Working Conditions Of The Clothing Industry

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Whether you pay attention to fashion trends or not, we all wear clothes on a daily basis. Fashion is a multibillion-dollar industry. With the growing demand for extremely cheap clothing prices in the Western world, the money for materials, labor, and shipping has to come from somewhere.