Clothing production has human nearly special database doubl in the last 15 years. And according to the Global Slavery Index, fashion is one of the key industries implicat in modern. Slavery by advocacy organizations—and in 2018. G20 countries import $127.7 billion fashion garments identifi as at-risk products of modern slavery.
Yet, for decades well before Rana Plaza’s collapse in 2013, people both inside and outside the industry have been fighting for rights and safety of workers in garment factories, including through advocacy, lobbying, and social campaigns.
The reason we human haven’t made more progress?
That was the question that Sarah Kent, sustainability correspondent for BoF, pos to Sarah Ditty, the global policy director of Fashion Revolution in London.
“The industry is design [to] incentivize short-term thinking and really places profits above all else—and that means profits above people’s lives and the lives of our living planet,” said Ditty.
Ditty said that the roots of this disenfranchisement could be trac back to colonialism and the enslavement of people, such as cotton pickers in the American South.
The existing problems were only exacerbat
The 1980s and 1990s when globalization and liberalization of economies l to increasingly more complex and fragment supply chains. Translation? The manufacturing of clothing, which had once been done close to home, was mov offshore to cut costs.
Today, said Ditty, most big key metrics for customer retention strategy brands no longer. Own their factories and feel like they have little control over the factory’s working. Conditions—that is, if they even know what factories. Clothes are being produc in.
“Consumers don’t know where their clothes are being made, but brands don’t even know where their clothes are being made—let alone where the fabrics are be numbers coming from; where the components are coming from; where the fibers are being grown and process,” said Ditty.