Critical fashion workers’ rights issues

The Bangladesh Accord 

The Bangladesh Accord was set up in response to the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013, which killed over 1,000 garment workers.

The Accord is an independent agreement between brands and trade unions to make factories in Bangladesh safe. It has been unusually successful at improving safety because it is legally binding for the brands that sign up.

The thirteen brands which have signed up are listed in our Initiatives Table (see below).

The gains for workers have been dramatic, with deaths in Bangladesh’s garment sector falling from about 71 a year to 17 in the five years since the Accord was introduced. More than 90% of the safety hazards originally identified by Accord inspectors have been dealt with, and more than 2.5 million garment workers are now working in much safer factories.

However, some factory owners are eager to see the back of the international inspectors, arguing that they are being more heavily scrutinised than their low-cost competitors in China, Vietnam, and Ethiopia. After one owner had Accord approval removed, he sued the Accord, and the Bangladesh High Court issued a restraining order on the Accord’s operations.

International pressure has helped keep the Accord going so far and, in May 2019, a Memorandum of Understanding was agreed. This extended the Accord for another year before its work is supposedly handed over to a new monitoring safety compliance system called the RMG Sustainability Council.

There are serious concerns, however, about the new system.

Employers are being added as a new stakeholder, and NGO watchdogs are being excluded. It may also no longer be legally binding. And while it was previously agreed that a transition would only happen once a new body met agreed standards, there is now a transition date set regardless of readiness.

The Clean Clothes Campaign reported, in April 2019, that in the previous two months “at least 95 people have died in preventable fires in buildings that were within the monitoring purview of the government of Bangladesh.”

The International Labour Rights Forum believes that “the Accord brands retain sufficient leverage over their Bangladeshi suppliers to secure a decent outcome for the workers who sew their clothes” and calls on them to exert this power over the coming months.

However, brands are not helping matters by squeezing prices. According to a 2018 report from the Center for Global Workers’ Rights:

• Profit margins for supplier factories have decreased by 13% between 2011 and 2016
• Real wages have dropped by 6.47% since the wage increase of December 2013, and l violations of workers’ rights to form unions, bargain, and strike increased by 11.96% between 2012 and 2015.

The reduced lead times demanded by fast fashion have also increased forced overtime and work intensity, and workers protesting for higher wages have seen the worst repression in a decade.

#Garmentmetoo campaign 

In May 2019, a campaign was launched by Global Labor Justice (GLJ) and Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), demanding an end to gender-based violence in global garment supply chains.

A year before, GLJ and AFWA were part of a wider coalition which released factory level research reports documenting gender-based violence in the Asian garment supply chains of H&M, GAP and Walmart. They asked for immediate action from these companies, and a week later, H&M and Gap publicly declared support for a binding ILO (International Labour Organisation) Convention on workplace violence including gender-based violence in garment supply chains. 

Of course, violence is not restricted to women, or the garment supply chain, but women are concentrated in shortterm and low-wage positions in the sector, and are at daily risk of violence and harassment.

The rise of fast fashion and its accelerated and unpredictable production cycles has made the situation worse. Downward pressure on prices and irregular repeat orders push suppliers to employ a more flexible, low-wage work force, and managers drive workers ever harder.

As Bobbie Santa Maria of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre points out:

“Global brands are quick to use female empowerment when marketing their products. But when they exert relentless pressure to get more products for less money, it’s women workers who pay the price.”

One woman employed in an H&M supplier factory in Bangalore, India, testified that:

“On September 27, 2017, at 12:30 pm, my batch supervisor came up behind me as I was working on the sewing machine, yelling “you are not meeting your target production.”

He pulled me out of the chair and I fell on the floor. He hit me, including on my breasts. He pulled me up and then pushed me to the floor again. He kicked me.”

The supervisor was told to apologise, but the woman was also warned not to mention this further. 

In June 2019, it was reported that women workers were at the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) centennial conference in Geneva, inputting into the final stages of a strong convention to end gender-based violence in the world of work.

Fast fashion causes backsliding in workers' rights

All the improvements to workers’ rights and environmental impacts that have been fought for over the years are now being threatened by the sheer volume and speed at which clothes are being made, sold, and then thrown away. The number of times a garment is worn, for example, has decreased by 36% in the past 15 years.

Among European clothing companies, the average number of clothing collections more than doubled between 2000-2011, from two to about five a year. Clothes have also become cheaper. From 1995-2014, the price of clothing in many countries rose much slower than other consumer goods. In the UK, the cost of clothes actually fell over 50%.

The Pulse of the Fashion Industry report is an annual assessment of sustainability progress, published by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC).

Its 2019 update found that “the pace of sustainability progress in the fashion industry has slowed by a third in the past year”

Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives

With so many entrenched issues, the clothing industry probably wins the prize for having more problem-solving collective initiatives than any other sector. Because of this, we have compiled the Initiatives Table below to help show who has signed up to what. We explain some of these initiatives below and others are explained elsewhere on our website as indicated by the links that we've put in some column titles.

Some of these initiatives, such as the BCI, have come in for criticism as being ‘weak’ or even greenwash by civil society groups (see our guide to sustainable fabrics). Others are clearly civil-society driven (e.g. the Greenpeace toxics campaign). We have not, however, included any initiatives in this list which we think are a complete waste of space.

Scoring well in this table is a likely indicator that the company is at least directing resources into understanding the problems it is part of.

Who's in what multi-stakeholder initiative?