{"id":1341157,"date":"2023-11-20T06:54:34","date_gmt":"2023-11-20T06:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=305550"},"modified":"2023-11-20T06:54:34","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T06:54:34","slug":"fast-fashion-is-antithetical-to-workers-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/11\/20\/fast-fashion-is-antithetical-to-workers-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast Fashion Is Antithetical to Workers\u2019 Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
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Photograph Source: Cezary p – CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\u2019Tis the season for holiday shopping, and as American consumers ready their spending dollars, few of us are likely to link our gift buying to the high cost of low prices on the other side of the planet. This is especially true for what has come to be known as \u201cfast fashion<\/a>,\u201d the clothing equivalent of a Big Mac: attractive, affordable, and throwaway. But the Bangladeshi women who toil as underpaid garment workers so we can wear disposable outfits, are making their voices heard loudly enough to reverberate across oceans and continents.\u00a0Mass protests<\/a>\u00a0for higher wages have roiled the nation, at least three workers have been killed, and there is no end in sight.<\/p>\n

Bangladesh is the\u00a0world\u2019s second-largest exporter<\/a>\u00a0of apparel in the world, after China. It is the South Asian nation\u2019s largest industry, employing more than four million workers, a majority of them women. The largest share of Bangladesh-made garments is bought and sold by United States retailers, which include\u00a0recognizable name brands<\/a>\u00a0such as H&M, Zara, Calvin Klein, American Eagle, and Tommy Hilfiger.<\/p>\n

Garment workers had been taking home a meager\u00a0pay of about $75 a month<\/a>, and have demanded a nearly threefold increase to about $205 a month. When the\u00a0Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association<\/a>\u00a0(BGMEA) initially set new wages at $90 a month, the mass protests began. When the BGMEA then responded by raising wages to $112 a month, the protests actually intensified. According to\u00a0Al Jazeera<\/a>, \u201cmore than 10,000 workers staged protests in factories and along highways to reject the panel\u2019s offer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Headlines touted the offer as a\u00a056 percent increase in wages<\/a>, while Bangladesh\u2019s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, long hailed as a\u00a0liberal leader<\/a>, patronizingly told workers to put up or shut up. She\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cThey have to work with whatever their salary is increased, they should continue their work.\u201d She roundly condemned workers\u2019 attacks on factories, saying she was worried that, \u201cif these factories are closed, if production is disrupted, where will their jobs be? They have to understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hasina\u2019s government has unleashed security forces that have intimidated and attacked union organizers. Police recently\u00a0fatally shot a 23-year-old mother<\/a>\u00a0and sewing machine operator named Anjuara Khatun after firing at protesters.<\/p>\n

To understand why protests intensified after wages were dramatically increased, it\u2019s worth examining the context of garment workers\u2019 livelihoods. By one estimate, the\u00a0cost of living<\/a>\u00a0for a single person in Bangladesh is about $360 a month, not including rent. Garment workers\u2019 wages have not risen since 2019 and since that time inflation has hit Bangladesh just as it has hit most of the world.<\/p>\n

Even the demand for $205 a month will not allow most to make ends meet. The factories\u2019 offer of about half that number was insultingly low. Abiramy Sivalogananthan, the South Asia coordinator for the Asia Floor Wage Alliance,\u00a0told Vogue<\/a>, \u201c[The] increase that unions are asking for is not even enough, technically speaking, [given] inflation and the crisis the country\u2019s going through.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the surface, U.S. brands, who purchase their inventories from Bangladesh\u2019s factories, appear to be on the right side of the fight. The American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), an industry trade group, wrote a\u00a0joint letter<\/a>\u00a0to Hasina\u2019s administration urging her to \u201craise the minimum wage to a level that corresponds with a wage level and benefits that are sufficient to cover workers\u2019 basic needs and some discretionary income and takes into account inflationary pressures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The AAFA even went as far as asking the government to avoid retaliating against unions and to respect \u201ccollective bargaining rights.\u201d The U.S. State Department issued a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0saying, \u201cWe commend the members of the private sector who have endorsed union proposals for a reasonable wage increase.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, global retailers are offering to eat into their profits by\u00a0increasing the price they pay factories<\/a>\u00a0to help them offset increased wages. Currently, the cost of the labor to produce garments is a mere 10-13 percent of a product\u2019s total manufacturing cost. The industry would have to increase that number by about 5-6 percent.<\/p>\n

But are companies really committed to raising garment workers’ wages? A spokesperson for the\u00a0Clean Clothes Campaign<\/a>, a rights group based in The Netherlands\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cThe living wage commitments of brands are nothing but empty promises as long as they refuse to explicitly support the workers\u2019 demand for a bare minimum, let alone a living wage.\u201d<\/p>\n

A\u00a0survey<\/a>\u00a0of about 1,000 factories in Bangladesh, published in early 2023, revealed that companies like Zara and H&M underpaid factories for garment purchases, making it harder for them to pay their workers. When the COVID-19 pandemic led to global shutdowns, large retailers canceled orders and delayed payments. One industry expert\u00a0told The Guardian<\/a>, \u201cOnly when suppliers are able to plan ahead, with confidence that they will earn as expected, can they deliver good working conditions for their workers.\u201d Rather than dip into their profits to compensate for the market slowdown in 2020, many global brands simply refused to keep their financial commitments to Bangladesh\u2019s factories, leading to downward pressure on wages.<\/p>\n

Given this context, fast fashion\u2019s stated support for a living wage increase and a commitment to swallow the resulting increased labor costs sound disingenuous.<\/p>\n

It has been more than 10 years since the deadly collapse of\u00a0Bangladesh\u2019s Rana Plaza<\/a>, the world\u2019s worst garment industry disaster. The eight-story compound of factories in Dhaka was filled with thousands of workers when it crumbled under the weight of government neglect and worker exploitation in April 2013. More than 1,100 workers, most of them women, were killed.<\/p>\n

The Rana Plaza disaster was a turning point for Bangladesh\u2019s garment industry as workers were seen as dispensable pawns by governments and industries alike. In the wake of the disaster, North American brands\u00a0refused to join other global companies<\/a>\u00a0in signing on to\u00a0the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh<\/a>. Citing high costs, they chose instead to form their own alliance for inspecting factories, one that applied lower safety standards. It was a stark indicator of where these companies\u2019 priorities lay, one that frames their current lip service to higher wages for garment workers.<\/p>\n

Fast fashion\u2019s outlook is rosy. The industry has been steadily growing and, thanks to the cooperation of government heads such as Sheikh Hasina\u2014who has been fixated on \u201cgrowth<\/a>\u201d at all costs\u2014it is\u00a0expected to more than double its market size<\/a>\u00a0over six years, growing from $91 billion in 2021 to a projected $185 billion by 2027. Meanwhile, the workers who fuel the profits behind that expansion are\u00a0facing starvation<\/a>. This holiday season, perhaps the best gift we can give is a commitment to\u00a0force the industry to pay up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The post Fast Fashion Is Antithetical to Workers\u2019 Rights<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2019Tis the season for holiday shopping, and as American consumers ready their spending dollars, few of us are likely to link our gift buying to the high cost of low prices on the other side of the planet. This is especially true for what has come to be known as \u201cfast fashion,\u201d the clothing equivalent More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Fast Fashion Is Antithetical to Workers\u2019 Rights<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":340,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1341157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1341158,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341157\/revisions\/1341158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1341157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1341157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1341157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}