Just transition:
Another world is possible

From the embers of the Kantamanto Market, to the wildfires in L.A. and the floods in Bangladesh, our world is in crisis. And fashion is not helping. Big Fashion’s environmental damage and exploitation of workers are two sides of the same coin – they are both necessary for CEOs to keep piling on profits and sustain their harmful business model.

But it is a model we simply cannot afford. The fashion industry is responsible for up to 10% of global carbon emissions – that’s more than international aviation and shipping combined – and 20% of the world’s industrial water pollution. It is evident that to tackle the climate crisis, this needs to stop, but the need for a radical transformation of the sector goes far beyond just limiting its destructive impact on the environment.

A just transition starts with justice for garment workers.

We believe the people who make our clothes are best placed to advocate for themselves and to make change happen.

Garment workers come from communities that are being pushed to the brink by the climate crisis. The profits from their labour flow towards us in the global north, while the impacts of the industry hits their homes.

We must urgently find our voice and our power as citizens to ensure a fairer distribution of the wealth and the risks in this industry. Our job is to amplify the voices and demands of workers, and force brands to listen to their solutions.

It starts with wages

Campaigners and concerned citizens often talk of workers struggling to stitch together a living by doing 60, 70, even 80 hour working weeks. Imagine a world where it takes workers half that time to make a genuine living wage that allows them and their loved ones to live in safety and in dignity.

This is also a world where the workers produce half as many garments as they are no longer working overnight to meet unrealistic targets. A world where clothes are not put on a plane just to satisfy a 24-hour cycle for the next new trend.

A living wage for all workers across supply chains is the starting point and single most transformational intervention that will slow the industry down.

Not man-made, brand-made

Only those significantly invested in maintaining the status quo can continue to deny the very visible reality of climate change. And it is big business that bears the burden of responsibility. Yet our legislation lags behind in holding companies accountable.

Time and time again, brands have shown that voluntary initiatives are not enough to prevent violations of the most basic labour, trade union, and human rights of garment workers in their globalised supply chains. The same goes with the severe climate impact of their operations.

Garment workers and communities around the world are organising to improve their own working conditions, to hold the companies profiting from their exploitation to account, and to transform their industry – but this fight is deeply unequal. We need more tools to strengthen workers’ hand.

The transition is happening – but brands are leaving workers behind.

Gender and a just transition

Globally, the number of women garment workers is falling.

While the straightforward explanation is automation, the reality is both more complex, and even simpler – it’s about power.

With fewer jobs, women are pushed out of the market while the low pay and lack of well funded public services mean fewer opportunities for learning and skills development for them. Research shows that up to 89% of Bangladeshi garment workers migrate from other regions to join the workforce in garment factories. This points not only to the fact that garment workers are often the people who have already experienced some level of climate or economic disruption that has forced them to move, but also that they are separated from networks of care and kinship that allow women to prioritise routes to employment or upskilling more. 

The more women perceive the threat to their jobs as immediate, the less likely they are to speak out and organise against the significant exploitation, harassment and intimidation they suffer in factories.

Without proper pay, education and welfare, technology alone has not brought a just transition for women who are already seeing the industry in their countries shrinking.

Can’t recycle your way out of poverty

As 2030 looms ever nearer, researchers and experts worry about Fashion’s ability to meet its carbon targets.

Not only are ambitious plans for carbon reductions unlikely to be met because they’d actually cost companies money (see the bankruptcy of textile recycler Renewcell for lack of orders from Big Fashion) – workers’ wages and conditions are still seen as a separate ad-on to this conversation. Social justice is not a ‘nice to have’ to write vaguely about next to Fashion’s efficiency and optimisation targets.

While the technology to allow full circularity of energy and resources for garments may not yet exist, the ability to pay living wages *now* is absolutely within brands’ reach. In 2013 H&M pledged to be paying a living wage to all supply chain workers by 2018. To date, this remains a pipedream for those who make the fast fashion giant’s clothes. 

Limiting Fashion’s damaging impact on the world begins and ends with garment workers.