Devising a New Social Contract for Fashion’s Garment Workers

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2021

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fashion has routinely failed the millions of people who make its clothes. What should the industry do to create systemic change?

Over the past year, the pandemic has laid bare — and worsened — the stark inequality, financial insecurity and poor working conditions endemic to the global garment industry. This has been driven by years of voluntary self-regulation, outsourced labour, and the pursuit of maximum profits by brands and retailers.

At the BoF Professional Summit: Closing Fashion’s Sustainability Gap, BoF London editor Sarah Kent was joined by Ayesha Barenblat, founder and chief executive of Remake; Ritu Sethi, founder-trustee, Craft Revival Trust and editor, Global InCH; and Anannya Bhattacharjee, international coordinator, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, to discuss how the global fashion industry is failing its garment makers, and what needs to change.

Many of the challenges facing the garment industry today are systemic. “The business model, whether luxury or mass market, is set to exploit people,” said Barenblat, also noting that it is mostly women of colour “who make our clothes and bring our fashion to life.”
Bhattacharjee said brands need to redress the “extreme imbalance of power” with their suppliers by paying the actual cost of production, producing goods in an environmentally sustainable way, and moving away from the industry’s reliance on overproduction and overconsumption. It is also crucial that brands make good on their commitments to support freedom of association in factories, she added.
While the global fashion industry benefits from widespread deregulation, mounting consumer engagement is proving a powerful force for increased accountability. “Consumerism is changing, and I think for the first time we actually have the right period where we can change the discourse from the consumer’s point of view,” said Sethi. Indeed, said Bhattacharjee, “this is a time of opportunity and radical change.”

Fashion’s Humanitarian Crisis

Racism and Inequality Are Stitched Into the Garments We Wear

Brands Say They Want to Keep Workers Safe. Not All Are Willing to Pay for It.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. This week marks the eighth anniversary of the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story garment factory housing thousands of workers, making clothes for some of the world's famous brands, which led to the death of more than 1,000
0:21.4	people. It seems like an appropriate moment to look back at our BOF Professional Summit, closing
0:26.3	fashion sustainability gap, where we had an in-depth conversation with a group of leading experts
0:31.4	to address issues around workers' rights in fashion supply chains. Ananya Batacharji is international
0:37.2	coordinator at the Asia Floor Wage
0:39.2	Alliance of trade unions and labor rights activists focused on addressing poverty wages and
0:44.5	gender discrimination, who joined us from Bangalore India. Based in Los Angeles, Aisha Barron
0:49.8	Blatt is another sustainability council member and founder and chief executive of Remake,
0:54.6	the advocacy group behind the Pay Up campaign, which highlighted brands that refused to pay for
0:59.6	completed orders when the pandemic hit. Enritusetti is an expert on South Asia's traditional
1:04.8	arts, crafts, and textiles based in New Delhi. She is the founder-trustee of the Craft Revival
1:10.3	Trust. These three leaders in the
1:12.3	space around workers' rights spoke to our London editor, Sarah Kent, at the BOF Professional Summit.
1:22.6	Before we dive into what the industry needs to do to tackle so many of these labor issues, I wanted to talk a
1:30.9	little bit about why we're still facing systemic problems of labor abuse. And Anna, I wanted if I could
1:39.7	start with you, you know, you spent your career advocating to try and fix these issues. Why is fashion
1:47.0	still failing to protect its workers? Well, fashion, fast fashion industry or one can say really
1:54.6	fashion industry as a whole, because even when they're not fast fashion, they're mimicking
1:59.6	the fast fashion business model.
2:02.3	The fashion industry business model is really at the heart of the problem.
2:08.2	And so till that business model changes, it's unlikely to, we are unlikely to see fundamental changes.
2:17.1	And this business model, as we know,
	...

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