The revelations that fashion retailer Boohoo has been operating “dark” clothing factories in parts of the UK has shocked many. But it should come as no surprise. Photo: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/NurPhoto
Every day I walk past a street sculpture engraved with a quote from my fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde: “The truth is never pure and rarely simple.” I cannot see it without thinking of the fashion industry's eye-wateringly complex supply chains, and how our efforts to reform them are falling far too short.
The recent revelations that fashion retailer Boohoo has been operating “dark” clothing factories in the UK where workers at paid as little as £3.50 an hour has shocked many. It is truly abhorrent that people could be forced to work in unsafe conditions—in the middle of a global pandemic, no less— and that they are paid barely half of the minimum wage to do so. But to me, as someone who has worked in this area for years, such revelations are sadly unsurprising.
In 2011 I completed a masters degree exploring the psychological effects of the fast fashion industry on female consumers. I went on to work with the Environmental Justice Foundation on their organic cotton campaign and later with Redress, a sustainable fashion collective based in Dublin. I quickly realised that talking about sweatshops made people switch off. That word has lost its power to shock. I altered my approach and instead championed the idea of buying less, buying second hand, and buying local. At the same time, I understood that championing consumer choice as the best route to systemic change is an idea rooted in neoliberalism, an ideology that places individual choice at the core of our moral universe while minimizing attention to the broader power imbalances that prop up inequality. Understanding this contradiction can help us refocus our efforts to push for justice for garment workers.
In spite of my reservations, I do believe that individual choices matter. I’ve recently written a book about sustainable decluttering, looking at how we can change our attitudes to what we own, what we buy, and how we dispose of what we no longer need. It would be a pretty implausible backtrack to not encourage everyone to buy less and buy better if they have the means to do so. But if this behaviour is not accompanied by direct calls for systemic reform, it is often little more than virtue signalling (Virtue signalling, I might add, that I have participated in for years.)
But here’s the truth: brands want us to focus our campaigning on personal choice. It allows them to continue operating as usual: throwing out the occasional greenwashed “sustainable” collection while producing more products with utter disregard for people and the planet. Neoliberalism wants us to feel good when we buy ethically and stop there. This keeps the system of exploitation going.
Personal changes are a great place to start and the growth of the sustainable movement in recent years has been heartening to see, but too often the actions that would directly help garment workers—like bolstering labour rights—are sidelined. The global supply chain is barely comprehensible in its complexity, so it can feel safer to stay within our consumption-focused ideas about how to help. Human rights journalist Michael Hobbes observed in the Huffington Postthat “advocating for boring stuff like complaint mechanisms and formalized labor contracts is nowhere near as satisfying as buying a pair of Fair Trade sandals or whatever.” But, he continues “that’s how the hard work of development actually gets done: not by imploring people to buy better, but by giving them no other option.”
This autumn will mark ten years since I started learning about the global fashion supply chain. In that time, the sustainable fashion community has grown, but the situation for garments workers has barely improved. Small victories have been won, such as the 2013 Bangladesh Accord which was formed to avoid a repeat of the devastating Rana Plaza factory collapse in Dhaka. But the accord—which addresses factory safety standards—has nothing to do with fair pay, working hours, or the right to unionise. Boycotts alone will not help garment workers. Lockdown has proven this in the harshest way. When brands get into financial trouble, they simply pull the rug out from under the most vulnerable people in their supply chain.
In the recent surge of the Black Lives Matter Movement, we have all been asked to reassess whether we are actually anti-racist, whether our activism is genuine or performative. We have been asked to confront uncomfortable truths. For those in the west, it’s all too easy to adopt a white saviour attitude to the plight of garment workers. But these workers, located all across the world, know what they need and are fighting for it tooth and nail. We must listen to them, learn from them, and support them in their fight.
The fashion industry needs to be held accountable. We desperately need to refocus the fight on the brands themselves, instead of chastising those who cannot afford to shop off the high street (which reeks of classism). We don’t want any more greenwashed one-off lines of organic cotton dresses produced by brands that main abysmal human rights practises—then when they are found out, treat these practises as external problems that have little to do with them. We want the whole system slowed down. I’ve said for years that where you shop matters less than how you shop—less, slower and more mindfully. I see now that I—and we—have to refocus efforts to make garment workers central to this conversation. It makes people uncomfortable, but we can’t live with the cognitive dissonance anymore. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that international solidarity is crucial. A recent example of solidarity in action is the Irish Debenhams workers who, after their own jobs were lost, supported their suddenly unemployed colleagues in Bangladesh by raising €15,000 via a GoFundMe page.
Keep reducing your consumption but don’t let the garment workers be forgotten. Follow the Clean Clothes Campaign, Labour Behind the Label, the Workers Rights Consortium and the Asian Floor Wage Alliance. Email brands. Comment on their social media posts. Let them know that we see through them. The time to dismantle fast fashion once and for all is now.
