Clothes, Gender, and the Climate

By Megan Light
July 2020

The fashion industry is the second most polluting in the world, accounting for around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is more than the aviation and shipping industries combined, and only falls
behind petroleum. The industry, in particular fast fashion, designs cheap clothes to be worn only a few times, and then thrown away at the end of the season. 80 to 100 billion new items of clothing are estimated to be
produced annually, whilst every second a lorry-load of clothes are sent to landfill or incinerated.

More than 60 percent of fabric fibres are synthetics, derived from fossil fuels, meaning they will not decay when they are taken to landfill (of which 85 percent of all clothes are). Microfibres, the tiny ones that shed every time you wash your clothes, do not decay either. They end up in the oceans and kill around 100,000 marine animals each year. The UK has the highest consumption of new clothing per head in Europe, while 235 million items of
clothing were sent to landfill in 2017.

Further, the fashion industry consumes 93 billion cubic metres of water annually - using as much as 7,500 litres to make a single pair of jeans. Cotton farming has triggered severe drought in the Central Asia, Australia, and between Mexico and the USA, as water has been diverted from lakes and rivers to farmland. If we are serious about reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, we must radically change fashion.

As with all environmental issues, it is of course not just the planet that suffers. Whilst export oriented economies, particularly the garment sector, have been praised for job creation and lifting people out of poverty (which in some cases is entirely true!), we must really examine the ways in which this has been done. Have women been empowered? Has income inequality been mitigated? Are working conditions good? Has this shifted the international power balance?

The short answer is no.

Working conditions

When the Rana Plaza garment complex collapsed in 2013, killing 1,134 factory workers and injuring a further 2,500, many thought it was time for change. The human cost of fast fashion was finally brought to light in the most atrocious of ways. Between 2000 and 2013, more than 2,200 garment workers in Bangladesh were killed and thousands more were injured. But Rana Plaza caught the media’s attention, and brands such Mango, Matalan, and Primark were publicly called out and citizens demanded change and compensation for survivors.

Yet, working conditions remain poor, unsanitary, and dangerous across Bangladesh. Their informality and lack of regulation or protection mechanisms make women even more vulnerable as they do not have a legitimate stream to file complaints, and there is strong fear of loosing their jobs or of retaliatory violence. In 2015, a report found that only 8 of the 3,425 factories inspected had remedied violations enough to pass a final inspection. The NYU Centre for Business and Human Rights (2018) also found that policies do not address the most pressing issues, and the high-risk factories are often left out of initiatives.

Income Inequality and Women’s Empowerment

Seven years on from the Rana Plaza collapse, wages paid to women manufacturers are still amongst the lowest in the world. While the 4 million garment workers in Bangladesh (80 percent of whom are women) generate exports worth over $30 billion, their average wage is just $95 a month. This figure was just $63 before new legislation in 2018, and the $95 is still less than half of the monthly wages demanded by workers.

And whilst income is a key stream to empowerment, empowerment by definition rests in structural change and a shift in power relations. And this structural change has been constrained by global power asymmetries that keep those at the bottom of the supply chain being exploited for their labour. This is true both structurally and individually, as a woman’s value is conditional upon her productive output, equating her worth with the economic income she creates. Sobhan (2012) argued that ‘burning to death is not an improvement over starving to death’; that whilst the economic benefits may improve livelihood situations, the working conditions maintain their status as disposable. The status of women is contingent upon their economic value, they are just mechanisms to ensure higher profit. This is not empowerment, but exploitation.

Employment opportunities have the potential to facilitate empowerment, but this is significantly restrained by the systemic constraints by policies that dehumanise and commodify women.

I’d highly recommend watching The True Cost to gain a greater insight into consumerism, the climate crisis, women’s empowerment, and working conditions in the garment supply chain.

Return to Human Rights and Wrongs.

References:
Barrett, Baumann-Pauly and Gu (2018) Five years after Rana Plaza. NYU Stern Centre for Business and Human Rights.
Bliss, D. (2019) The huge toll of 'fast fashion' on the planet – and why the answer could be circular. NatGeo.
Harribin, R. (2018) Fast fashion is harming the planet, MPs say. BBC.
Sobhan, Z (2012) Progress and Globalisation in Bangladesh: The Tazreen Fashions Garment Factory Fire. Vice.