Global fashion industry openly exploits its workforce of more than 80 million workers worldwide. Garment workers’ wages are typically well below a living wage. Home based women and girls of marginalized Indian communities toll for only 15 cents an hour.
Some 85 percent of garment workers are women (in Pakistan only 26 percent). In some countries, garment workers work between 10 and 16 hours a day, six days a week, leaving them little time for their families. Most labour toil without employment contracts, fixed schedules, or benefit of labour law protections. Sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence are rampant in garment industry. Forced labour and child labour exist in the garment and textile industries of Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Nepal, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam (fortunately Pakistan is excluded).
Three of the four deadliest garment factory disasters in history happened in this decade: in 2012 (Baldia Karachi, Pakistan; Tazreen factory, Bangladesh) and 2013 (Rana Plaza collapse, Bangladesh). Garment industry production has doubled in the last 15 years, with many factories housed in repurposed buildings that may be unsafe due to faulty electrical wiring or structural weaknesses exacerbated by heavy machinery. In many countries, governments do not punish employers that illegally fire workers, threaten them or even kill them for joining a union and seeking to exercise their rights at work.
The global fashion supply chain extends to the cotton fields, where in Uzbekistan each year, at least 175,000 people, mostly education and public health workers, but also many students younger than age 18, are forced to harvest cotton for weeks as part of the largest government-run system of forced labour in the world.
