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| Image: ©Whitehorse City Council 2017 (used with permission) |
My strong interest in clothing and its production brought me to attend a movie presentation at the Box Hill Community Arts Centre on Saturday, the 13th of May. A wall projector presented the small community hall with the North American documentary "The True Cost", as part of the City of Whitehorse's Fair Trade Fortnight. The documentary aims to raise awareness of the third-world labour conditions, and environmental consequences that are involved in supplying today's clothing in the Western world. After the presentation, I also had the opportunity to speak briefly with Amy Botta who is a business development officer and spokesperson for Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand.
The following is a narrative essay on today's fashion industry, supported by notes taken from "The True Cost" as well as my discussion with Amy Botta.
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| Image: ©The True Cost 2015 (used with permission) |
Grand store fronts, fashion catwalks and billboard models: the documentary presents a scene of familiar Western sights involved in the latter stages of the fashion chain: consumption. British journalist and author, Lucy Siegle, believes that clothing is a way to "communicate who we are" and express our individuality. This has increasingly become possible due to a rising trend called "fast-fashion". Rather than there being the two traditional retail seasons per year (Summer and Winter), shelves are continually restocked with new clothes and styles every week, creating numerous micro-seasons in the world of fashion. North American consumers purchase 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year; a figure that has increased fourfold within the past two decades. And this is primarily because more clothes are able to be produced offshore in larger volumes and for a fraction of the cost.
In the 1960s, North America was producing 95% of their clothing. But today that number is dwindling at 3%, with a substantial amount of clothing now being product in areas of China, Bangladesh and India. I believe that providing for product quality has also diminished because of the nature of fast-fashion: mass-productivity and affordability has created a sense of dispensability. Clothes are becoming cheap enough to "throw away without thinking about it". Siegle believes that fashion should never be viewed as disposable products, yet the average American produces 37 kilograms of textile waste every year; much of which will sit in landfill for centuries before it decomposes. We are paying less for clothes nowadays, yet our attitudes have changed. We readily throw away cheap clothing, only to consume new items more rapidly. To this effect, a humorous television clip within the documentary shows the a polyester suit jacket being used as if it were a paper towel, since their respective costs and dispensability barely differ.
Fashion is the most labour-dependent industry, which carries a singular vision of looking after big business interest. We are shown an unclean, bustling city street in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A garment factory owner describes the common bargaining process for acquiring Western business, where worker wages are lowered to ensure that the rock-bottom production costs will "secure" the West's desired costs. Without exploitation of human capital, the industry wouldn't be generating the profits it's currently generating. The documentary explores the story of Shima, a beautiful young woman dressed in red robes and an enormous amount of self-confidence. She's a factory worker in Dhaka, earning less than three dollars a day. Shima formed a union at her work, and presented a list to her managers, with requests for better working conditions. However this was met with a severe altercation where Shima and her other union members were kicked, punched and beaten with chairs by staff members.
Working in Dhaka, Shima couldn't afford to keep her young daughter Nadia, and she was forced to leave her in a small village, with Shima's parents. Although she can't visit Nadia more than twice a year, Shima's proud that she's been able to offer her a good education, and is determined that one day Nadia will get a good government job and marry a nice man. Shima, charismatic and driven, makes an emotional plea that no more clothes are "produced with our blood". Injuries and deaths are only too common in Dhaka's poor workplace conditions. We are shown footage of grieving, wailing mothers gathering at the "Rana Plaza" tragedy, where an eight-storey factory collapsed in April 2013, killing about one thousand workers and injuring many more. The most shocking part of the disaster? Only days earlier was the owner visited by government inspectors due to serious cracks in the factory walls, yet employees were "forced to return to work". Why is it so, that an industry worth three trillion dollars a year can't even provide basic human rights? Economist Richard Wolff believes that these benefits should be "shared globally," and people should be accountable for how this money is used.
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| A garment factory worker in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Image: ©Tareq Sakahuddin 2011 (used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic) |
In Bangladesh there is a very low minimum wage, with no trade union rights and no pensions or maternity benefits. Benjamin Powell of the Free Enterprise Institute indicates that the workers concerned have no choice but to work in these conditions, or else face job alternatives which are "much worse". The global Fair Trade movement strives to improve trading conditions in developing countries. We are told by Amy Botta that the initiative began with a coffee farmer in Mexico who had a water well built for him by his corporate customer. He said "Thanks, but I could have built it myself if I'd got paid properly for the coffee." Fair Trade now operates to audit the entire supply chain to ensure basic human rights, minimal environmental impact and that fair wages are provided. In Australia and New Zealand, only two of the 330 brands analysed could actually prove that their production chain was ethical and met Fair Trade standards.
Safia Minney, founder of the sustainable fashion label "People Tree" believes that Fair Trade is a "public response to correct social injustice". We can't just rely on big corporations to correct these injustices, because it's believed that consumers are also part of the problem. The industry's conditions appears to "undermine everything we believe in": the average citizen sees the value in donating to charities that assist third-world countries, but at the same time we are largely unaware that we are funding the operation of sweatshops, poor working conditions and cost-cutting activities that have a severe impact on the environment. English designer Stella McCartney, an activist in environment and fair trade, says that she finds excitement and challenges in looking at her industry and ways to improve it: even more excitement than designing the clothes that she sells.
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| A cotton plantation in North America. Image: Max Pixel (used in accordance with Creative Commons Zero - CC0) |
Most of our clothing is made from cotton fibres, to which its agriculture has also become industrialised. We are shown images of vast cotton plantations in Lubbock, Texas, where organic cotton farmer LaRhea Pepper works among 3.6 million acres of cotton in the region. While "organic" is a term normally associated with food products, organic cotton is grown in a similar way: without using synthetic chemicals or genetically-modified organisms. With the steady intensification of agriculture, Pepper questions the consequences of using harsh pesticides on the land. The depletion of nutrients in the soil has called for increasing use of chemical fertilisers in surrounding farms, which also has affected the quality of her organic crops. With a passion in sustainable textile production, she participated in a lawsuit with other farmers against agro-chemical "monopoly" Monsanto Ltd. to request protection against potential chemical contamination.
In the Punjab region of India where cotton-farming is abundant, pesticides are used in substantial, toxic amounts. These have a severe impact on bodily health, especially in children. Cancers, mental retardation and other handicaps are shown through footage of dusty floors under crooked, makeshift housing, where a boy with twisted limbs is being tended to by an older woman. Many parents are said to have "accepted the deaths of their children." Well-spoken activist Vandana Shiva discusses how it was the West who pushed the use of pesticides in India, although it harms native plants and doesn't deliver on the promise to control pests. Shiva compares pesticides to the use of narcotics, in the sense that the more is used, the more required, until the soil is destroyed. Sadly, the largest wave of suicides in recorded history has been attributed to 250,000 Indian farmers within the past 16 years. Shiva explains that farmers who are deep into debt, unable to grow anything in the saturated soils made sterile, often end up drinking the pesticides to kill themselves.
Within the city of Kanpur, India, harmful chemicals such as Chromium(IV) are commonly used in treating leather, which causes jaundice disease and severe skin conditions. We see stacks of animal skin being worked on in a dirty outdoor leather tanning workshop, and a wide concrete pipe releasing torrents of chemical waste into the Ganges, which provides for almost a billion people. To close a deadly cycle, it is learned that many people use all of their savings to treat their diseases from water contamination. Vandana Shiva says that "nature has an economy," and it does not share an infinite vision with that of capitalism and industry. The land and water to grow fibres, the chemicals to treat those fibres and the labour force exposed to them: all of these inputs have a cost. Fashion is the "second most polluting industry, second only to the oil industry."
Author and journalist Tansy Hopkins discusses how the fashion industry concerns a capitalist system of ongoing competition. In order for big brands to compete on costs, the go-to solution is to push labour further, and further down. Shown to us is a workers strike within the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where they are fighting for an increase in minimum wages. Barricades of shielded police shoot down groups of protesters, during riots that lasted for two days. The Cambodian government, alike other developing countries such as Bangladesh, "desperately" try to keep the business that transnational retailers bring. So they purposefully keep the minimum wage down, to prevent that business from moving to wherever labour is cheaper.
The final minutes of the documentary shows us scenes of polar-opposite contrast. From teenagers girls on YouTube showing off shopping bags full of cheap shirts and shoes, to robed women sitting solemnly at poorly-lit sewing stations. From a glowing, flawless fashion model slowly turning to face the camera, to a young girl hunched over spools and skeins of thread. From security-camera vision of people pushing through the doors of a department store on Black Friday, to a small, crowded bus full of dark and silent factory workers.
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| Flagship store of the "fast-fashion" retailer H&M in Bourke Street, Melbourne. Image: ©Benjamin Chiappa 2017 |
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| Flagship store of the "fast-fashion" retailer H&M in Bourke Street, Melbourne. Image: ©Benjamin Chiappa 2017 |
A documentary scene that resonated with me the most was the grand opening of a "fast-fashion" H&M store within a luxury shopping district in London, where an elegant storefront was unveiled to the cheers of gathered crowds. I wouldn't have thought twice of this scene before viewing "The True Cost" documentary, but I now understand that there is a dark side to this glorified scene, of which many of us are largely unaware.
So as a consumer, what can we do about it? The exploitation of labour and natural resources is in fact dependent on the choices we make as a consumer. After the documentary, I had the opportunity to discuss this further with Amy Botta from Fairtrade Australia and New Zealand, who believes that there are alternatives out there, and we should recognise that we "have power" in our choices.
"When you choose a product, when you buy a product, you're casting a vote. Don't forget that you actually have an impact. And when you choose to buy something ethical or sustainable, you are telling that company that it matters to you. And people pay attention to that. The more people who are making positive choices, the strong the movement is."She recommends a phone app called 'Good On You', which is able to give consumers insight on whether specific fashion brands are operating in an ethical way. Although the documentary focused on cheaper "fast-fashion clothes", Amy believes that high prices "aren't always indicative that organisations are doing the right thing", although buying higher quality garments and less of them would be positive. As a business development officer, Amy's role is to arrange consultations with organisations, and assist them in finding ways for their supply chain to operate more ethically and sustainably. This can include helping organisations choose factories that provide proper occupational health and safety, protection for workers, sustainable use of resources and ensuring fair wages are paid.
I was especially interested to learn that there is a mutual interest in Fairtrade, in how organisations often take their own initiative to approach Amy for assistance in making changes. Amy believes that the greatest difficulty for organisations is the apprehension and uncertainty involved with the changes to meet Fair Trade regulation, rather than the costs.
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