IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, almost all clothing sold in the United States and Europe is sewn abroad, far from once-thriving garment districts in New York and Los Angeles, London and Paris. Encouraged by global trade agreements, garment manufacturers decamped from the industry’s historic centers and moved to countries where labor costs were low, unions weak, and laws protecting workers largely ignored. Kalpona Akter always asks audiences in the United States and Europe to check the labels on their shirts or jackets. The room buzzes as people read aloud. Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and, increasingly since 2014, Ethiopia.
Between 1994 and 2004, the US garment industry lost eight hundred thousand jobs, mostly as a result of an international trade pact called the Multi-Fiber Agreement that limited how much clothing any one country could export to the United States. Though the agreement was supposed to protect a declining US garment trade, the result was the opposite. Low-end stores and high-fashion brands alike began to source clothing from many different countries, creating a fragmented, truly global garment industry.
Global lenders—especially the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—fueled the spread of the garment trade, buying up the debts of poor countries or forgiving them in exchange for policies making it easier, cheaper, and more profitable for foreign companies to invest. In 2005, World Trade Organization negotiations brought an end to the Multi-Fiber Agreement. With quotas lifted, countries where labor was cheap, unions weak, and labor laws few quickly came to dominate the clothing trade.
China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia became engines of a “fast-fashion” revolution, eroding wages and working conditions in countries and regions that once had strong labor movements: the Philippines, Mexico, Central America, and the United States. Garment workers speak of “a global race to the bottom,” says Filipina organizer Asuncion Binos. “We in the Philippines have come a long way down.” By the 2010s, countries with decent wage and labor protections could only compete if they established export zones where strikes were banned and labor regulations suspended. Global lenders offered rewards for creating “special economic zones.”
The garment workers’ musical group the Messenger Band sings about the process as it unfolded in Cambodia. “Donors give aid loans but with conditions attached. The debt ties the hands of our government. This is not a destiny. Many countries have suffered. . . . The loans look good but they are chains around our necks. We must stand up for freedom.”1
One condition global lenders imposed was that countries privatize their healthcare, energy, education, and even water systems. The effects were harsh. In a song called “Suffer from Privatization,” Vun Em sings: “The private sector now controls everything. Services are expensive, so how can we survive? Hospitals, electricity, and roads. The government gave everything away. The prices increase constantly.” Private companies “pay our wages, determine our hours, and charge us for the places we sleep, the water we drink, and pollute the air we breathe.” In a music video to accompany that song, Vun Em wears a headband inscribed with the Khmer word for “freedom.” At concerts, audiences sometimes stand and sing: “We must stand up for freedom.”2
Garment workers in Cambodia, Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam understand that they are small pieces in a global game. The garment industry tripled in size and value between 2005 and 2015. Certain brands became visible markers of success, worn proudly by affluent women and men worldwide.
To meet rising demand, US, European, and Asian labels opened more and more factories, and garment manufacturers became the largest employers of Cambodian and Bangladeshi women and among the largest employers of women in Vietnam, China, Mexico, Honduras, Myanmar, and India. In 2000, there were twenty million workers worldwide making clothing. By 2016, there were between sixty and seventy-five million. The vast majority are women.
The twenty-first-century fashion revolution has caused environmental disaster. Bioengineered cotton seeds and pesticides have salted the earth, especially in Asia. Manufacturers use staggering amounts of water in a drought-racked world: 2,700 liters (more than 700 gallons) to produce a T-shirt; 9,982 (more than 2,600) for a pair of jeans. Textile and leather dyes have poisoned rivers. Discarded clothing has left mountains of waste. Fast fashion is the second-dirtiest industry on earth. Only oil is worse.3
For workers, it has been deadly. As manufacturers rush to establish factories, they set up shop in structurally unsound buildings without adequate ventilation, water, or fire exits. Three of the biggest disasters in the history of the garment industry have happened since 2010. More will likely happen before you read this book.4
The rapid proliferation of export-processing zones (EPZs) around the world has intensified the danger to workers and sped the loss in wages and labor power. Since 2000, 130 countries have created EPZs. That includes the United States. By 2015, there were 4,300 export zones worldwide, employing more than sixty-six million people. That’s nearly twice the population of Canada, more than half that of Mexico. In most of those zones, workers are forbidden to unionize or strike. Government inspectors ignore safety violations, forced overtime, beatings, and sexual violence.
Many export-zone workers migrate from rural areas, forced off their lands by corporate developers or government leases to foreign mining and agribusiness companies. Migrants hope that the money they send home will keep their families afloat. Sometimes it does. In China alone, between 1996 and 2008, 130 million people moved to find work—many of them landing in export zones. Shenzhen, site of China’s first export-processing zone and of five other “special economic zones,” grew from a town of thirty thousand in 1980 to a city of twelve million by 2015—eighteen million if you count its vast suburbs. By 2012, Guangdong province had sixty thousand factories. It produced one-third of the world’s textiles, shoes, and toys.5
Opinion on these zones is sharply divided. The World Bank considers them essential to reducing global poverty. The International Labour Organization says they have eroded wage and safety standards globally, and limited workers’ ability to unionize.6
Governments that set up export zones understand that foreign investors are looking for cheap, compliant labor. The Bangladesh Export Processing Zone Authority advertises a “congenial investment climate free from cumbersome procedures.” It offers foreign companies tax abatements, marketing funds, and freedom from labor, safety, and environmental regulations.7
Since the late 1990s, garment manufacturers have flocked to these zones, using them to fill European and American stores with clothing that seems to drop in price every year. Besides Walmart, Gap, JC Penney, and Kohl’s, fast fashion has made new titans. The Spanish company Inditex (owners of Zara) became the world’s largest clothing retailer by pioneering fast-fashion production techniques. The Swedish company H&M became the world’s second-largest retail clothing chain and the largest producer of clothing in Bangladesh and Cambodia. And Gap, the world’s third-largest chain, drove its explosive growth by producing heavily in Asia.8
The flood of low-cost clothing from China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and elsewhere has generated incredible profits. In 2015, annual profits in global apparel and textile production were $1.2 trillion, the total net worth of the industry, $4.4 trillion. As oil prices dropped and global oil profits fell, the garment industry continued to boom. Like consumer electronics, which also employs millions of migrant women, fast fashion is one of the main drivers of the new global economy.9
That new economy relies heavily on forced labor. In 2015, unfree and child labor was found in garment factories in Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Ethiopia. Sexual violence is endemic in garment shops. So are beatings. In 2014, 90 percent of garment workers surveyed by the AFL-CIO said they had been physically punished for making errors or for not meeting quotas. In 2016, Bangladeshi workers told Human Rights Watch that foremen beat them with iron bars.
And rather than protect workers, governments that depend on garment exports to drive their economies have been quick to deploy troops and police to keep workers in line. Protesting Cambodian garment workers were shot in 2014. Hundreds of protesting Bangladeshi garment workers were arrested in 2017.10
Less violent, but perennially troubling to garment workers, are “run-away shops” an age-old problem in the rag trade. Always on the lookout for cheaper workers, garment manufacturers close up and move to other countries at the drop of a hat. Millions have been left jobless and homeless.
In boomtowns like Guangzhou, in southern China, where nearly 40 percent of the city’s population is migrant, citizens have grown accustomed to the site of stranded men and women dragging their belongings in garbage bags after their factories closed suddenly. They sleep in the city’s train stations and huddle around fires in squatter camps. Since few garment manufacturers pay employees when they shut down operations, workers are left with nothing, not even enough for a suitcase or a train ticket home. Chinese workers, who make 15 percent of the world’s clothing, have been particularly hard-hit. But migrant workers abandoned by mobile employers can be found from Cape Town to Sinaloa.11
Fast fashion may be a revolution that cannot be undone. It has transformed purchasing patterns across the affluent world. Hypnotized by ever-lower prices, shoppers are lured to buy, wear, discard, and buy again. We are now addicted to five-dollar shirts, ten-dollar skirts. Shopping has been a popular form of recreation since ready-to-wear appeared in large-city stores during the late nineteenth century. But in the twenty-first century, it became a habit-forming, dirt-cheap high. And, as with any addiction, the stakes have risen quickly. We always need something new, something more.
Garment production can barely keep pace with the frenzied purchasing. In the United Kingdom, clothing purchases rose nearly 40 percent from 2001 to 2005. Americans are the largest buyers of clothing in the world. In 2010, we purchased five times the amount of clothing we bought in 1980. Worldwide, clothing sales quadrupled from 1995 to 2015. Will this growth stop or even slow? Who knows? We stand with our feet in the water, as the river of fast fashion roars along.12