Last week several media outlets applauded H&M for committing to raise its purchasing prices to meet the increased legal minimum wage for the garment sector in Bangladesh. H&M is reportedly the first global brand to tell its Bangladeshi suppliers it will do so. While this may be true, the praise heaped upon H&M is unwarranted, and the fact the industry and media applaud it is indicative of a thoroughly broken system. […]
Blog
2024
2023
Former workers of Neo Trend remain empty-handed after 14-month-long engagement with Ethical Trading Initiative and member brand Next
Turkish garment factory Neo Trend Textile closed officially on 1 July 2021 due to a loss of orders in the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
Open letter to brands producing in Bangladesh
To H&M, Bestseller, Next, Primark, C&A, Uniqlo, M&S, Puma, VF Corp., PVH, Walmart and Zara, and all international brands producing clothes in Bangladesh: […]
Too poor? Shut up and work harder! How the BGMEA president tries to gloss over poverty wages
The flawed new minimum wage for ready-made garment workers in Bangladesh has led to a global outcry. 12,500 taka per month will keep the countries’ 4 to 4.5 million garment workers trapped in poverty. Instead of revising the disgraceful decision, Faruque Hassan, president of the business owners’ association BGMEA, felt compelled to publish a “clarification” note. However, the only thing the note clarifies is the dimension of disrespect of the employers’ president for the labour law and the lack of empathy for the dire situation of the workforce. […]
Is Your Brand Paying Its Share to Reduce Bangladesh Workers’ Wage Despair?
Garment worker protests, a brutal police crackdown, worker deaths, arrests, and worker repression, and finally an official minimum wage announcement that is far below living wage levels. […]
Cambodian garment workers: never paid enough to escape the debt
The new minimum wage for garment workers in Cambodia is set at 204 USD per month, despite trade unions’ demand for a much bigger increase. The new minimum wage is a huge disappointment for the 700,000 workers in the Cambodian garment and footwear sector, who are increasingly struggling to make ends meet. […]
Nike turns its back on Cambodian workers
Nike’s Annual General Meeting will be held on September 12. The brand will likely dazzle its shareholders with the results achieved since its June announcement of a 10 per cent annual revenue increase up to US$51.2bn. […]
It's time for global clothing brands to defend Sri Lankan workers
Sri Lanka’s yearlong economic and political crisis, which led to the president being toppled last year, is unsurprisingly hitting the country’s lowest-paid workers hardest. […]
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2022
Your Brand World Cup exploitation starts with the kits
The FIFA World Cup has been built on a decade of human rights violations: whichever way you look, it’s workers from the global South who are exploited. […]
Pakistan’s wage struggle shows the fragility of progress in the global garment industry
Major fashion brands stay silent as devastating wage theft continues in their supply chains. […]
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2021
A history of negligence: How Gap and other major brands failed to draw lessons from the That’s It Sportswear factory fire
The 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse shocked and captivated the world. But outside of Bangladesh, fewer remember the trail of mass-casualty factory disasters that preceded it. Eleven years ago today, 29 garment workers lost their lives when a fire broke out in the That's It Sportswear garment factory, where they made clothes for major American brands. On this day, our thoughts are with all families affected by this fire and our aim is to ensure that incidents like this can never happen again. […]
Nine years since deadly fire at major Walmart supplier, campaigners urge Walmart to stop hiding from real commitments to safety
Exactly nine years ago, a devastating factory fire in Bangladesh killed at least 113 workers and injured many more. Almost a decade later, major brands and retailers whose clothes were made in this factory, such as Walmart, Disney, and Dickies, continue to put their workers at risk. We spend this day commemorating the workers who died in this preventable fire. In addition, we are continuing to remind garment brands and retailers that they must finally draw lessons from this horrific catastrophe and urgently take critical steps to prevent future fires and deadly safety incidents so that no more families have to suffer such an awful loss. […]
Workers’ rights in the clothing industry and what consumers can do
The Covid-19 pandemic has been difficult for everyone, but its effects have been felt particularly acutely by workers in the garment sector. As the pandemic took hold across the globe and many countries entered national lockdowns, demand for shop-bought clothes decreased significantly, leading many major clothing brands to cancel orders, delay payments, and impose discounts on suppliers. […]
Cambodian garment workers are hit hardest in the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic
They going hungry with no food and no wage, Employers and Brands are turning their back! […]
What if mandatory human rights due diligence had existed before Rana Plaza?
The eighth anniversary of the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse was a stark reminder of what can happen if workers’ rights are a matter of voluntary corporate commitments. […]
EU law to end deathtrap factories can't be just a box-ticking exercise
Women could see large cracks in the walls. They knew that returning to their sewing machines meant risking their lives, but factory owners were threatening to withhold their meagre salary that barely puts food on the table. […]
The garment industry is ignoring the plight of its workers
Apparel brands need to stop hiding behind a social protection initiative funded by public money and start paying workers’ wages. […]
A decade in denial
How the Sustainable Apparel Coalition is denying reality, while patting itself on the back. […]
Brands can be ‘agents of change’ in Bangladesh
The fast fashion business model of decreasing prices and reduced lead times contributes directly to the cycle of low wages, protest, and repression in Bangladesh. Something’s got to give. […]
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2020
Brands are weathering the pandemic. Garment workers are not
As researchers and advocates working to improve labor rights in the garment industry, we are used to heartbreaking stories. But what we are seeing during the pandemic is a new level of despair among workers, as widespread loss of jobs and income robs them of the ability to feed their families. […]
Marking Human Rights Day: How can legislation help protect the people who make our clothes
December 10th marks the celebration of Human Rights Day around the globe –a moment to recognise the impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on livelihoods and to affirm the importance of human rights everywhere. In the fashion industry, and during a moment when the global pandemic has upended business-as-usual, it’s more important than ever to fight for the rights of the people working in garment supply chains and demand an end to forced labour. […]
Philip Green is the Scrooge who haunts millions of garment workers
The collapse of Arcadia in the lead-up to Christmas, and with it the demise of Sir Philip Green’s controversial reign over the UK high street, has a Dickensian feel to it. […]
Big brands have mistreated their workers throughout the COVID-19 crisis
Stark figures from the Clean Clothes Campaign show that garment workers are owed between 2.42 and 4.38 billion GBP in unpaid wages from the first three months of the Covid-19 pandemic alone. […]
Global brands, global exploitation
A small Thai factory without a name, more of a room than anything else, few windows, a ceiling low enough that those inside could touch it, toilets too dirty to use, one door at the front, another at the back providing the only fresh air, and no electric fans to cool temperatures of up to 37 degrees Celsius (100F). […]
Talk of sustainability is hollow until fashion brands pay their workers
Sustainability is the fashion buzzword brands love to promote, yet many knowingly overlook a key element: there is nothing sustainable about wage injustice that forces garment workers to live in abject poverty. […]
The fashion industry echoes colonialism – and DfID's new scheme will subsidise it
Is the UK governed by parliamentary democracy or big businesses? […]
Garment workers cannot foot the bill for the pandemic
With shops closing and people staying at home, the pandemic has changed how we shop but also how garment workers live. […]
Rethinking MSIs: Binding Brands to Create Change
When the COVID19 pandemic hit, garment brands and retailers around the world cancelled their orders. What was to them a logical risk and cost reducing measure, meant destitution for millions of garment workers around the world. […]
Boohoo, Leicester’s factories exemplify the shady garment sector
Leicester is the UK’s garment hub, and 75% of city-wide production is for Boohoo, a brand valued at $4.3 billion. The brand has faced several allegations of workers’ rights violations over the years, with campaigners raising concerns that many of their cut-price clothes are produced under the conditions of modern slavery. […]
Leicester's coronavirus lockdown is no surprise to its garment factory workers
As the UK’s first local coronavirus lockdown was imposed in Leicester earlier this week, another shocking story joined it in the headlines. […]
The devastation of COVID-19 on UNIQLO’s former garment workers
COVID-19 is brutal, indiscriminate in who it touches, however we are not all facing the same risks.Money can buy some protection and it provides choices, even as the options narrow. Garment workers, the vast majority of whom are women, have very few choices in this crisis. […]
The fashion industry must learn from coronavirus
The new coronavirus (COVID-19) is said to have first emerged in China at the end of December 2019. Despite its far-reaching impact, COVID-19 is far from a great leveller. […]
Uniqlo and the Women Owed $5.5 Million
In the fashion game, brands always win and garment workers always lose. It’s a stacked deck, the winning hands held by those with the money. In the quest for ever-greater profits, garment workers are often treated as yet another commodity, to be swapped at will, as brands act with impunity and watch their profits rise. […]
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2019
I made clothes for Uniqlo but I didn’t get paid
Whether you buy a new wardrobe or not won’t change my situation, but knowing what happened to me might get you involved. My story is about Uniqlo, the Japanese brand that’s opening stores like mushrooms in Europe. […]
Failing workers by design: The fatal assurances of the social auditing industry
Rasul was working in the Multifabs garment factory on 3 July 2017 when he suddenly heard a loud noise and felt something hit his head. […]
When ‘business as usual’ costs lives: workers in Pakistan call for a binding safety agreement
The global garment industry meets in Pakistan this week, giving them a golden opportunity to accept the lessons of the Ali Enterprises fire and take the first steps toward negotiating a safety agreement with workers’ groups. […]
London Fashion Week’s #PositiveFashion must include #GarmentWorkersRights
Sustainability has become a buzz word in fashion, so much so that London Fashion Week 2019 is dedicating a whole exhibition area to #PositiveFashion, a space in which to “explore the most compelling stories around sustainability.” […]
Zara Promises Sustainability, But What About Its Garment Workers?
Last week, Zara publicly announced that all of its clothes will be made from 100% sustainable fabrics by 2025. […]
Six years after the Rana Plaza collapse – what happened to the goodwill of the garment industry giants?
Six years ago today, a building came crashing down, shattering the worlds of thousands of garment workers. In the wake of this tragedy, there was one world that remained unchanged in Bangladesh, that of the global garment industry. […]
Dhaka fire shows that Bangladesh must build better safety systems, rather than scrap the Accord
On the night of 20th February a fire broke out and rapidly spread through the densely packed Chawkbazar district in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At least 70 people died in the fire, which was exacerbated by illegally stored, highly combustible chemicals in the buildings. […]
We’ll tell you what we want, what we really, really want: freedom, safety and a living wage for garment workers
Women working for 35p (US$0.45) an hour, stringing up 16-hour shifts, chasing production targets of thousands of pieces per day, coping with verbal abuse and harassment from their supervisors: […]
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