How much does the fashion industry use forced labor? Tessa Maffucci on the human costs of a tangled supply chain. Under the Label How much forced labor went into making your clothes? Tessa Maffucci on the human costs of global fashion. Jan Doe Throughout New York Fashion Week, which just wrapped up on September 13, elite models showcased new designs from the most renowned clothing brands in the world. But for all the glamour on display, the reality of the industry behind it often involves the forced laborâor at its extreme, outright enslavementâof millions of people around the world. Each year, the 20 wealthiest countries import a total of around US$150 billion worth of clothing thatâs, according to the Global Slavery Index, âat riskâ of having been produced by forced labor. The language indicates a visibility problem: With forced labor in fashion ranging from wage theft and more ambiguous forms of exploitation in the West to sweatshops in Asiaâto the notorious slave-labor camps of Chinaâs Uyghur regionâsome of it is easier to see than others. The fashion industry meanwhile employs more than 60 million globally. So just how widespread is the problem? Tessa Maffucci is the assistant chair of the Fashion Design Department at the Pratt Institute in New York City. Forced labor, Maffucci says, runs through fashion supply chains on every continent. And itâs spread globally in recent decades, as these supply chains have expanded to multiple layers of subcontractorsâmaking it unclear even to some brands where their clothes are being manufactured. Itâs a complex question, then: Not only is fashionâs forced labor distributed in different forms all over the world, it can also be hidden from producers as well as their consumers. This article is part of a series in partnership with the [Human Rights Foundation](. Michael Bluhm: How extensive is the use of forced labor in the fashion industry? Tessa Maffucci: Tremendously extensive, unfortunately. Thereâs a big challenge in unpacking that answer, though, which is that the data is very muddy. So itâs difficult, if not impossible, to capture it in hard numbers. That said, tens of millions of people all over the planet work somewhere in the fashion supply chain. The scale of the industry is immense. And there are credible estimates that before any single garment reaches the retail floor, a hundred-odd people may have been involved in making it. Clothing is such a human-intensive product to create, compared to most other products we interact with. And forced labor is extremely pervasive in its productionâvery likely somewhere in the supply chain of any article of clothing you wear. It could be in producing the textiles; it could be in finishing the goods; it could be in the logistics and shipping of the goods; or it could be elsewhere. From top to bottom, thereâs serious human exploitation in fashion. But itâs very hard to quantifyâand the reason itâs very hard to quantify is the fractured nature of the industry. Bluhm: You say almost any garment we wear is somehow implicated. How true would you say this is through the range of clothing typesâsay, from relatively cheap fast fashion to high-priced luxury brands? Advertisement Maffucci: It ranges across all market tiers. Our first thought in associating forced labor with fashion might be of low-cost, fast-fashion goods put together in sweatshops or forced-labor camps, as in China. And that association is absolutely real: When you see a garment for sale for $5, itâs hard not to wonder how itâs possible to produce the fiber, then produce a textile, then produce a garment, and then ship it around the world, and then sell itâfor $5âand still make a profit. But forced labor isnât limited to low-price clothing. Itâs all up and down the value chain. That might not be intuitive, but the reason for it is that the entire global fashion-production system is fractured in this way, not just the fast-fashionâproduction system. Which means that a brand will come up with a concept and a design, but then they have layers and layers of subcontracting for producing that design. Some brands donât even know what factories produce their garments. Forced labor is everywhere in the fashion industry on account of this absence of transparency in production. Even for brands with the best intentions, it can be very tough to know the labor conditions of people who make clothes for them. Bluhm: How did forced labor become so pervasive in fashion? Maffucci: Regrettably, forced labor has almost always been part of the fashion industry. In American fashion history, for example, slaves in the American South were central to the production system. In fact, some research has shown how the connection between slavery among cotton growers in the South and capital among financiers in the North helped New York emerge as a financial capital. The origins of a lot of the problems we see in the fashion industry today, though, go back to the phenomenon of globally outsourcing labor, which really took off in the 1980s and â90s. Itâs true that there were precedents for that phenomenon in the movement of factories that began in the early-to-mid-20th century, when it became more profitable to shift production farther away from the places where clothes were designed. In the U.S., Manhattanâat the heart of New York Cityâwas the historical hub not just of garment design but of garment manufacturing by the end of the 19th century. But into the 20th, factories started moving to Brooklyn, then to the cityâs outer boroughs, then out of New York State to Pennsylvania, then down to the American Southâand then out of the country entirely. As production and design were pulled apart, there was less and less oversight of production, and it became easier and easier for labor abuses to emerge. Francois Le Nguyen More from Tessa Maffucci at The Signal: âItâs really everywhere. There are places where itâs worseâthe Uyghur region in China, notablyâand brands that choose to work in those places make that choice knowing theyâre likely benefiting from terrible exploitation. ⦠Today, China remains a major source of forced laborâparticularly in Xinjiang Province, as the Chinese government calls the Uyghur regionâbut itâs becoming gradually less interested in supplying fashion versus other industries. So the subcontracting of labor in the fashion supply chain is spreading out more into Southeast Asia, notably into Cambodia and Bangladesh, but also into Central and South America, particularly into Guatemala, Panama, and Mexicoâand even into parts of Europe, like Turkey and Portugal.â âMany instances are stark, as you might imagine them: People in need of work are put in coercive environments that theyâre unable to escape from. Practices like this have spread in recent decades under globalization and offshoring, but none of them are entirely new. The structure of factory production today in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Guatemala, for instance, creates many of the same challenges that garment workers faced in the U.S. early in the 20th century: People arenât allowed to have bathroom breaks; theyâre locked in during working hours so they wonât steal time by taking any breaks at all; and theyâre paid for what they produce, not by the hour. Across different regions of the world, there are documented instances of people, even children, being chained to sewing machines. And then there are entire forced-labor camps ultimately overseen by government authorities, as in Chinaâs Uyghur region. Itâs all horrifying.â âBut itâs important to understand that, as production might move away from these kinds of environments, they can move to others that are also troubling. For example, a big brand might arrange to produce clothing with a certain factory, but then the brand decides it no longer wants the goods the factory has producedâso it cancels the order and doesnât pay the factory. Thereâs a campaign going on right now directed at Nike for doing exactly this with a factory in Cambodia, where hundreds of workers were left penniless. And again, the full range of labor abuses extends around the world from cases like this to wage theft and other problems. So in fashion, there are many people in unambiguous kinds of forced labor, but there are also ambiguities in the relationship between forced labor and other kinds of exploited labor.â [Continue reading]( ⦠and become a memberâfor access to our full articles & archive and to support The Signal, as we develop a new approach to global current affairs. [Become a member now]( The Signal | 1717 N St. NW, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}](
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