How to make fashion better
An informal garment factory located on the outskirts of the center of Dhaka. Picture: Claudio Montesano Casillas.
This is an edited extract of Chapter 7 from War on Want’s seminal report Fashioning the Future: Fixing the Fashion Industry for Workers and Climate. For the full report, please visit War on Want.
Fashion activists and global citizens have to envision and enact new ways of interacting with the people and the land-based resources that make our clothes. The world is divided between accumulation and extinction, ownership and servitude, poverty and great wealth. These divides must be broken down and reworked into a fair and sustainable system.
In the sixth chapter of War on Want’s recent report, Fashioning the Future: Fixing the Fashion Industry for Workers and Climate, writer and activist Tansy Hoskins drew out options for a radically different fashion future, one that incorporated a truly democratised fashion system, with repair and recycling warehouses in every neighbourhood, decommodified public services, living wages established as a universal rights - and new jobs for big fashion CEOs and shareholders cleaning up the Atacame Desert, the Nairobi River, the Buriganga River, and the Ghanaian sewage system.
But beyond that compelling vision of CEOs scooping rubbish out of rivers lie concrete truths. From the recognising the need to care for and repair the clothes that are already in our possession, to embracing the idea that it is not just rips in jeans or holes in jumpers that need repairing – but a vast system of inequalities built upon colonialism and capitalist exploitation, the report’s final chapter explores the changes that could be made, here and now.
The right to repair
The first of these is repair, an essential part of any new fashion system. Eleanor Tull and Sarah Richards run Fast Fashion Therapy in East London, teaching people how to repair and alter their clothes to help them buy less and lengthen the lifespan of what they already own. As active proponents of repair, they say it is a gateway to sustainable fashion that is far cheaper and more accessible than other forms of sustainable clothing. “It can be done by almost anyone whether they have any experience of sewing or making before. It only requires basic equipment, like needle and thread, that are cheap to buy to get started,” Eleanor says. “Repairing clothing also gives people a chance to slow down, to stop and think about the problem you’re trying to solve, consider how you can fix it and be patient in completing your repair.”
Discussing his ideal fashion system, circularity expert Paul Foulkes-Arellano describes a world of ‘value-added repair’, whereby clothes are updated and made even better negating the need for constant new clothes. “You’d get your wardrobe renewed in the same way that you don’t buy a new house – you repaint it.” Paul calls the building of upcycling communities “eminently sensible,” seeing it as not only making environmental sense, but a way to develop the huge emotional value attached to the clothes we already own.
Repair does not simply mend clothes; it can address inequalities baked into current fashion systems by connecting people to the process of clothing production. “Repair can be a great way to appreciate the time that goes into every item of clothing,” says Tull. “Often, people think the reason you can buy a t-shirt for £2 is because a machine has made it, but that’s not possible. Every item of clothing is handmade and learning this by stitching and repairing your own clothes can create a different relationship with them, and a deeper attachment to the work that’s gone into them.”
“Repair can be a great way to appreciate the time that goes into every item of clothing.” Picture: Fast Fashion Therapy.
Using needle and thread repair as a means to recognise the hours of human labour that goes into each garment is an important way of thinking about what else we can apply the concept of repair to. It is a way of thinking about clothing production as having been purposefully broken in a way that harms millions of people, while benefiting a tiny minority. A fashion system that pays millions of women in Bangladesh US$75 a month, while a few billionaires have parties on super yachts is a broken one, but there are steps that can be taken towards fixing this.
Guaranteeing a living wage
Everyone working in the fashion industry should be paid a wage that they can live on. “Decent work is about the right to employment to begin with, and that employers should provide a living wage for the employee and the family. It should ensure workplace safety without discrimination and the right of employees to organise as trade unions.” Anton Marcus, Joint Secretary of FTZ&GSEU in Sri Lanka.
A living wage [1] must be guaranteed in law. This should include enforceable transparency measures that compel companies to guarantee and demonstrate labour costs as part of the pricing of products. It requires measures to control the pricing and ordering practices of big fashion, to ensure that costs are not unfairly passed down the supply chain, resulting in poverty pay for workers.
Big fashion must also be compelled to financially contribute to wage guarantees and severances for workers in supply chains. Global campaigns such as Wage Forward [2] and Pay Your Workers – Respect Labour Rights [3] have workable proposals that could protect workers in supply chain relationships here and now.
Enacting universal public services
Everyone has the right to a dignified life, yet many millions are denied clean and safe water, nutritious food, affordable housing, sanitation, access to energy, or adequate healthcare. For many garment workers, these conditions are a daily reality.
Universal services such as healthcare, education, housing, pensions, and social protection systems are crucial to protect people from the effects of climate injustice, prevent the spiral into poverty, and advance human rights, equality and justice. Yet they need to be funded from the public purse.
For too long, corporations and richer countries of the Global North have manipulated the rules of the global economy whilst countries of the Global South have been saddled with unfair debt and have lost out on crucial revenue through unfair tax policies and unethical corporate tax practices.
To repair this critically broken system, the rules of the global economy must shift towards fairness and justice, prioritising community need and protection of the planet, instead of profit. This means cancelling the high debt burdens including those of garment-producing countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
It also means overhauling tax policies and tightly stitching the loopholes that enable corporate tax dodging on a massive scale. The UK plays a major role in creating the environment for corporations to move and even hide profits to avoid paying fair tax [4]. Countries such as the UK have a responsibility to correct these wrongs by overhauling the unfair tax system that is allowing global corporations to extract profits that should be going into the public purse of the countries where they operate.
Reducing corporate power and control
Voluntary corporate social responsibility agreements have failed; it is time to repair the damage with legislation and binding agreements. Legislative actions that increase the responsibility of fashion companies are vital for accountability and justice. Effective legal frameworks can both encourage and enforce greater due diligence, investment in workplace improvements, protection for workers, and are the tool to hold corporations to account.
One example of an agreement that holds big fashion to account is the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry which evolved from the landmark Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, established after the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in April 2013 [5]. The Accord established a factory inspection programme that saved thousands of lives and made brands accountable for the factories they contract to. Ground-breaking at the time, many brands had to be cajoled into signing up to the Accord; as of 2023, many major brands including Levi’s and Walmart are still refusing to sign.
The landmark Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, established after the collapse of the Rana Plaza. Picture: source unknown.
A second example is the Dindigul Agreement [6] which was signed in April 2022 after a year-long campaign led by the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), a Dalit women’s union in India. The agreement seeks to end gender-based violence in factories after 20-year-old garment worker Jeyasre Kathiravel was murdered. It was signed by H&M, Gap and PVH Corp. and the Tamil Nadu-based supplier where Kathiravel worked – Eastman Exports. The other signatories to the agreement are the TTCU, the Asia Floor Wage Alliance [7] and the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum. The first year’s results from the agreement have been remarkable [8]. These beacons of hope in the garment industry show us that what was broken can be fixed, as long as workers’ voices are centred.
Allowing oganised labour
It is no surprise that, in an industry notorious for worker exploitation, bosses would resist the rights of workers to form trade unions. Unions have led the way in securing employment rights in many countries over the years, changing the nature of ‘work’ for the better and creating social progress such as winning rights for women. Unions enable workers to come together as a powerful, collective voice to communicate with management about their working terms and conditions, and to push for safe, fair, and decent work. From health and safety to higher wages, parental leave to holiday entitlement, a thriving trade union sector is key to the realisation of workers’ rights.
Big fashion, however, tries to distance itself from workers in the Global South where union busting is rife, ignoring their responsibilities whilst workers are targeted, sacked, and even killed for trade union involvement [9]. Here in the UK, we also have serious repair work to do. The scandal of poor conditions for workers in the supply chains of companies such as Boohoo have hit UK headline [10]. For many workers in garment factories, trade unions are a lifeline in protecting their rights, realising safer working conditions, and improving wages.
The importance of trade unions in empowering worker voices through ensuring freedom of association and collective bargaining not only brings change at factory and industry level, it empowers working people generally. This will be key to delivering a just transition truly shaped by workers.
We need to protect our planet
Scientists have identified nine essential environmental processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system, including regulation of the climate, land-systems change, freshwater use and biodiversity loss, Multiple studies show that disruption to any one of these is likely to cause widespread and irreversible environmental changes that threaten the ability of humanity and all other living species to survive. It is now clear that many years of unsustainable, unequal extraction of the Earth’s resources has led to at least six of these essential boundaries being breached, as of 2023 [11].
Industries such as big fashion are iconic of the broader economic system that has driven to the breakdown of these vital ecological systems. As Global North countries seek to transition towards renewable energy in response to the climate crisis, industries cannot continue to behave as if the planet’s resources are infinite. The transition must instead take account of ecological limits and centre a wider bio-centric view of our ecosystems that prioritises creating the conditions for humanity and nature to thrive.
One key step to achieving this is ensuring that land rights are realised, for the small farmers and peasant communities who maintain agro-ecological approaches to crop production for clothing and other industries, and for the Indigenous communities who have acted to conserve critical elements of nature against the odds.
For the fashion industry, as for the economy at large, the transition to a more ecologically sound future cannot simply mean switching to renewable energy sources. It is vital that transition pathways from the current crisis must not employ the same logic of extraction to minerals and materials. Instead, transformation of the industry must be based on a holistic view of the whole production cycle; transforming its approach to land, water, chemical and synthetic materials usage to re-centre the sanctity of the lands and livelihoods of those that it has mercilessly exploited.
Climate vs Fashion. Picture: War on Want.
Climate reparations
It is no secret that globally, the richest 10% are responsible for the nearly 52% of the total emissions driving the climate crisis [12]. The US, UK, Canada, EU, and Russia alone are responsible for 55% of cumulative emissions [13]. Global North countries have used up more than their fair share of the carbon budget in what has been termed ‘carbon colonialism’. It has been calculated that this colonisation of the carbon budget would require climate reparations of US$192 trillion, with the UK and EU combined responsible for US$46 trillion and the US for US$80 trillion, due to vast historical emissions [14]. The countries least responsible for the climate crisis are also the countries with the biggest limitations on them to adequately respond to the scale of its impacts.
After hundreds of years of exploiting the Global South, governments of the countries that have caused the most damage must take responsibility. That must include doing their fair-share of the action required to limit temperatures well below 1.5oc by cutting their emissions to real zero by 2030. It must also include stopping the promotion of false solutions such as net zero, negative emissions technologies and the commodification of nature while providing new and additional grant-based climate finance based on need. Support for a global goal on adaptation is key, with the means of implementation including finance and technology to allow countries of the Global South to adapt to the climate crisis.
Banks that are funding the climate crisis must been regulated and the fossil fuel, agribusiness and fashion industries that are disproportionately responsible for emissions must be placed at the centre of paying for a radical just transition. This work must include reckoning with colonial pasts that stole land, labour and resources; giving frontline communities the freedom, resources and tools to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate, and related challenges in the present.
Finally, richer countries must prevent the breach of all planetary limits, including those of nature and our ecosystems using a fair shares approach to the equitable sharing of resources. In movements around the world, there is a growing demand for climate reparations – seeking recompense from those countries that caused and perpetuated harm. Forms of reparation have included apologies, financial compensation, commemorations, and measures to stop the harms and to ensure they are never repeated.
Countries on the frontlines have been demanding equity for decades, campaigning for those that have contributed most to the climate crisis to decarbonise first. The big fight ahead is to ensure that measures to address ‘loss and damage’ are implemented by those countries in the Global North that are most responsible. This must go hand in hand with ensuring that a global transition to renewable energy is equal and just, and that Global South countries are supported through international co-operation, including financial and technology transfers by rich Global North countries.
Towards a just future
We can and should learn to repair our clothes, but truly meaningful repair must mean a move away from our current extractive economic model, which exploits people and the natural world for profit. Only then can we build a just transition that transforms clothing production into a sustainable system we can all be proud of. The dogma of growthism – that all sectors of the economy must mindlessly grow all the time, no matter the consequences – is a starkly dangerous political ideology. We know it has led to workers’ rights abuses on a global scale, to a shaking planet, and to stark poverty and inequality.
But, as War on Want hopes to have illustrated, amid the injustice is a place of great possibility. The moment we choose not to have our clothes and creativity be an excuse to bolster the economic interests of the Global North, we can change everything. The moment we take back our power and reject the singular drive to profit, we can end the system that expects the Global South to service the Global North; that threatens the very ecosystems on which humanity relies on, to finally recognise that we are part of nature. The challenge is to ensure that in changing the fashion industry, the voices of those on the frontline of this industry – the workers, homeworkers, farmers, spinners, and weavers – are at the forefront of directing change. As Kalpona Akter clearly says: “We want to have our space at the discussion table and to make sure we are not losing anything. Until then, don’t talk to us about green economies [15]. Only collectively, through listening and intense action, can we work towards a world where Bangladesh’s productive capacity is not organised around a single damaging export, but rather has been channelled into climate leadership and protection.
The evidence is clear: ultimately, we must fundamentally change the way our economies and societies are structured, including shifting the core value set that shapes our economic system towards one that centres care and well-being and allows everyone to live with dignity. Both people and nature, must heal. We need to repair our relationship with the Earth and move towards an understanding of ourselves as just one part of the Earth’s ecosystems – to ensure that the natural world and all of our fellow species are provided with a right to thrive. This requires us to re=centre the rights of indigenous peoples, challenge the systems of racial and patriarchal oppression, and decolonise the world by ending unsustainable consumption and extraction of Earth’s natural resources.
To achieve truly transformational change, we must rebuild our imaginations, to allow ourselves to create a bold vision of where we must go. In her seminal book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall-Kimmerer writes about students in her ecology class being unable to imagine a beneficial relationship between humans, animals, and the planet, and she asks: “How can we begin to move towards ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like.” Wall-Kimmerer therefore writes for the need for restoration with “re-story-ation.”
This is just as true for the fashion industry [16]. The hope is that in placing the systems that make our clothes under the microscope, Fashioning the Future: Fixing the Fashion Industry for Workers and Climate has set out a bold starting point for opportunity, imagination and action for a just transition of the fashion industry. When we remember that everything we will ever wear is the product of two interconnected things – human labour and land – we must place the well-being of both at the heart of our economies to realise a truly sustainable future for us all.
References
A living wage differs from country to country but should ensure that working people can earn enough to meet all of their daily needs and expenses and have discretionary income left over to ensure well-being and invest in their own or their children’s future.
https://wageforward.org/
https://www.payyourworkers.org/coalition
Chapman B. UK by far the biggest enabler of global corporate tax dodging, groundbreaking research finds. The Independent. 28 May 2019. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/business/news/uk-corporate-tax-avoidance-havens- justice-network-dodging-a8933661.html
International Accord. https://internationalaccord.org
Fact Sheet: The Dindigul Agreement to End Gender- Based Violence and Harassment. Global Labor Justice- International Labor Rights Forum. 10 May 2022. https://laborrights.org/publications/fact-sheet-dindigul- agreement-end-gender-based-violence-and-harassment
Asia Floor Wage Alliance. https://asia.floorwage.org
Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum. https://laborrights.org
Paton E. Union Garment Workers Fear “an Opportunity to Get Rid of Us.” The New York Times. 8 May 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/fashion/ coronavirus-garment-workers-asia-unions.html
Butler S. Activists to question Boohoo on living wage for Leicester garment workers. the Guardian. 17 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/17/ activists-to-question-boohoo-on-living-wage-for-leicester- garment-workers
Information drawn from Planetary Boundaries research conducted by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Stockholm University available at https://www.stockholmresilience.org/ research/planetary-boundaries.html
World’s Richest 10% Produce Half of Carbon Emissions While Poorest 3.5 Billion Account for Just a Tenth. Oxfam International. 2 December 2015. https://www.oxfam.org/en/ press-releases/worlds-richest-10-produce-half-carbon- emissions-while-poorest-35-billion-account
Ritchie H. Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions? Our World in Data. 1 October 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
Fanning A. L. and Hickel J. Compensation for atmospheric appropriation. Nature Sustainability. 5 June 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01130-8 The research calculates compensation from Global North countries overshooting the carbon budget from 1960 to 2019, and to achieve net zero from 2020 to 2050, owed to undershooting Global South countries.
Kalpona Akter interview with Tansy Hoskins 19th Jan 2023
Kimmerer RW. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweed Editions
Hickel J. Dorninger C. Wieland H. Suwandi I. Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange1990–2015. Global Environmental Change vol 73. 1 March 2022. https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
