Why is Fast Fashion a Feminist Issue?
By Beth Meadows
It’s important for us to understand the issues of the fast fashion industry from a feminist perspective. Globally, around 80% of workers in the garment industry are women and therefore it is a problem, like much of the climate emergency, that disproportionately impacts on them. This is not to erase the struggles of male garment workers of course, but to bring our attention to the most marginalised and often forgotten about groups – and in this case that is women.
Gender based violence is rife in the poor working conditions of garment factories, as they enable the power imbalance between men and women to thrive – becoming hotbeds for female workers to be verbally, physically or sexually assaulted by their often-male bosses. A 2019 study by Action Aid in Dhaka, Bangladesh found out that 80% of workers have seen or experienced sexual violence whilst at work for example. There is also a link between these acts of violence, and the ridiculous manufacturing targets set big brands that we know and love in this part of the world. A 2018 report by Global Labour Justice concluded that incidents of sexual assault against female garment workers (that had been reported) in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia in factories making clothes for H&M and Gap, were related to employers enforcing demands to meet these quick turn-around targets. Capitalism and sexism intersect therefore, and have dangerous consequences for female garment workers.
Although labour legislation and garment workers unions exist in countries in the Global South, especially since the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh brought the issue onto the international conscience, they are not accessible enough. For women of colour in the Global South, it is even harder to join or start a worker’s union, as patriarchal social stigma attached to women speaking out against injustice, enhanced by the threat of violence, often prevents them. Human Rights Watch uncovered many examples of factory interference with unions in their 2015 report, such as ‘physical assault; intimidation and threats, such as threats of sexual violence against women workers seeking to form unions; dismissal of union leaders; and false criminal complaints against workers.’
There is also the issue of social reproduction, meaning the domestic duties that traditionally fall on the shoulders of women like looking after children, cooking and cleaning the home. So garment workers are often doing two jobs at once: which when combined with abuses like problems accessing sick pay, holiday pay, working ridiculously long hours, waiting months for overtime pay and receiving less pay than their male counterparts - becomes a serious violation of their rights. And because of these constraining gender roles, life for women will always encounter additional burdens. This is captured well in a powerful film called Made in Bangladesh (2019), which documents the journey of factory worker Shimu trying to set up a union. She states: “We are women, screwed if we are married, screwed if we are not.”
At XRNL Fashion Action we understand that our activism must be nuanced, especially as we are speaking from a place of privilege. It is therefore necessary to recognise that employment in the fast fashion industry for women, in places like Bangladesh for example where it is its biggest export and accounts for more than 80% of its earnings, has brought relative financial and social independence, as the right to work outside of the home and earn money is a form of female empowerment. By the same token, we must recognise that their work is a lifeline – especially as wages are so low, around $95 per month in Dhaka for example, which is less than half of what is required to make ends meet. Therefore, as we are encouraging people to stop buying into the fast fashion industry on account of its human and ecological abuses, we need to also state that a just transition for workers whose jobs will be lost as big brands lose business is absolutely vital. In order to truly position ourselves in solidarity with female garment workers from the Global South, we must avoid pushing women and their families already living in poverty, and often facing the brunt of climate catastrophe, into destitution by unemployment. A just transition would include workers being treated with dignity and respect, informed ahead of time for the factory closure, provided financial compensation, and, ideally, re-deployed into a sustainable industry.
Our feminism, our climate activism, is not just for us or for people who look like us. It is an internationalist solidarity approach, considering the perspectives of people from all over the world, especially those who have less access to opportunities and rights than us. We equally understand that the fast fashion industry has deeply colonial roots, cotton being the key export of slavery after all, which makes the power play between big European brands squeezing Southern factories to make as much profit as possible even more appalling. It also begs the question of whether the industry is our feminist blind-spot, as we often see from the runway to Instagram clothes being adored and celebrated by the Western woman with no association to the woman of colour from the Global South who was exploited in order to make them – feminist slogan t-shirts being a prime example.
We ought to listen to garment workers voices more. Shopna, a garment worker from Bangladesh who took part in Action Aid’s research offers a powerful message to consumers of fast fashion: “It makes me happy that they are wearing something that I made. But I want to let them know that this is more than a piece of cloth. This piece of cloth is bathed in my blood, sweat and dignity. I’ve sacrificed all of that to be able to make a pair of pants that you will wear and feel comfortable.”
The unsustainable targets enforced upon garment workers are informed by our demands for quick, cheap and dispensable clothing. This is not to solely blame us as individual consumers, who are by in large kept in the dark about the reality of the industry, and often need to prioritise the convenience of high street or online shopping due to our own stressful lives. We are demanding accountability from governments and institutions that make these trade deals to safeguard worker’s rights throughout the production chain whilst protecting the planet, and that brands take responsibility to give more transparency about how their products are made. Overall, a critical mass reduction in the output of the industry is essential for it to be compatible with the climate emergency we are in, and we will advocate to ensure that female garment worker’s futures are enshrined within that change through a just transition. So, buy less, thrift more, and most importantly don’t lose sight of who made your clothes in the first place.
Sources:
Clean Clothes Campaign, https://cleanclothes.org/issues/gender
Cited in Guardian article, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/05/female-garment-workers-gap-hm-south-asia
Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/21/bangladesh-garment-workers-union-rights-bleak
IMDB, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8147262/
Solidarity Centre, https://www.solidaritycenter.org/bangladesh-garment-workers-new-blocks-to-form-unions/