Meet Joanne Goddard. As the name suggests, no, she is not a garment worker in Bangladesh nor is she a sex trafficker forced into the labor force in Cambodia. Goddard has lived in Barnsley, New England her whole life. In 2016, she took a job as an agency worker at English online retailer ASOS, which gave her a 3pm-11pm flexible working schedule that allowed her to still be able to care for her two children. It was easy money -- she would sit on her terrace and take phone calls while her children were playing at her foot.
This easy money soon became hard. Assigned to work at the warehouse now, Goddard faced immense stress and pressure to meet the target of scanning 160 items an hour. Workers are divided into two categories: the pickers and packers. Pickers run around the three floors of the warehouse, scavenging, scanning, and collecting items to be packed into an order. From here, the packers package the items to be delivered at your doorsteps in just 48 hours. For the past 3 months, Buzzfeed investigated ASOS’s warehouse conditions, revealing exploitative contracts, an intense security regime, and stressed workers. Upon entering the building, she is subject to security checks at any time during her shift. Employees are not allowed to have jewelry, cosmetics, electronic devices -- cell phones included -- on them until their shifts end. They wear wristbands that keep track of how many items they scan, and tell them where to go and find the specific orders among the tons (literally tons) of clothes in the warehouse. Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? To meet our insatiable demand for fast fashion, the warehouse runs 24/7. Day shift workers leave the building only to be replaced by a flood of nighttime workers. These are workers like Joanne who package the clothes, shoes, and accessories to be delivered to us in just two days, no matter where we are. As a result of this overwhelming pressure and high demand, Goddard recently lost her job to a panic attack. This is a pure case of the ugliness behind the frills and fancies. ASOS is among the most popular online shopping sites. However, behind the glamour and energy ASOS seems to portray on their websites with their smiling models and flashing “SALE” signs, look at what’s happening behind the scenes. The damages done by the fashion industry is not just in distant countries like India or Vietnam. The scars are hidden in less prevalent places, like at the heart of a retail store that could be where you bought that shirt on the floor of your room. Think twice -- fast fashion isn’t a distant issue that you can detach yourself from; it’s a persistent and uncomfortable presence looming over what we decide to be our chosen skin. http://www.vocativ.com/363935/asos-investigation-reveals-the-dark-future-of-online-retail/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=CK-VOC-TRF-000-FB-FBLP-FKW-ENG.W-MED-BO-15a-T07
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To reveal the world behind a simple shirt, Planet Money details its journey from its raw cotton component to its synthetic form we hold in our hands at the store. The five-episode film wisely tracks down every step of production of a t-shirt to show how complex the world behind the fabric we see really is.
Step 1 -- cotton. 90% of the world’s cotton is genetically modified today, inserted with bacteria genes to make extra resistant against pesticides. The U.S. is the crop’s leading exporter; on one cotton farm in Mississippi, 9 million shirts can be made -- 9 million. That’s enough shirts for every single person living in New York City. Step 2. From United States, the cotton travels to Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Colombia, where it is transformed into fabric with the help of lots and lots of machines. A majority of our blog posts reveal the deplorable social consequences of fast fashion, but keep in mind the devastating environmental impact of it as well. Textile factories come in a close second to the oil industry in the amount of pollution the machines create and the voluminous amounts of water they use. Step 3 -- the people. The fabric has finally come to the workers. There are 4 million garment workers in Bangladesh alone. But what is the driving force behind the increasing workforce in an industry that treats it so horribly? I can guarantee that every single one of these workers are there by force, not by choice; how can you complain about low wages when you face no wages and starvation by the day? Step 4. These shirts are tightly packed into boxes and shipped back to the motherland. From as far away as Colombia and Bangladesh, these shirts have come a long way, back to the shores of Miami, then onto trains and trucks up north, where they will be stored in Planet Money’s warehouse until sold to you. Step 5. And finally, after being handled by so many hands and so many regions, the shirt is in your possession. Treat it well; it’s been through a long journey and deserves all the love it can get. As you can see, there are so many faces behind that simple piece of fabric, from the plant breeder who cultivates the root of production, to the garment worker who takes care of the design, to the ship captain who transports the finished product. Behind the shirt, it’s another world. http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/title http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/one-company-is-turning-plastic-bottles-into-fabric_us_57f67cf0e4b00885f2c65323? <--- Click for video!
Clogging our oceans and filling our landfills, plastic causes $13 billion in damage to our environment. Once we mindlessly throw out our water bottles from our hands and from our sight, we don’t think about the harmful repercussions that follows; plastics consist of harmful chemicals that stay in the environment even long after they are discarded. With the ever worsening pollution but stagnant action on our part, the plastic problem has augmented to a new high. But one company is finally stepping up to make a change. Thread, leading company in responsible fiber and fabric production, now transforms soda and water bottles collected from Haiti and the Honduras into sustainable fabric. Founder and CEO Ian Rosenberger developed this idea with the belief that “there’s so much value in things we throw away.” Each Thread t-shirt recycles 2.25 plastic bottles and uses 50% less water than its cotton counterpart. There’s a whole new dimension of problems that Thread is tackling through its innovation. Not only is Thread addressing the plastic problem but also the issue of child labor in global supply chains. The company announced its Clinton Global Initiative commitment to improve the lives of 300 Haitians, 200 of whom are children. Programs funded by partnerships with Timberland and HP will provide educational and job opportunities for the Haitian communities. Thread’s efforts to improve the production of clothing is (in its cliche-est sense) killing two birds with one stone. It really proves how interwoven the garment industry is in all aspects of our lives. When we pay attention and change the corrupt and damaging methods of producing what we wear, we are creating not only a healthier environment but also an opportunity to better people’s lives. “It’s 2016 -- it’s ludicrous that we don’t demand to know where our clothes came from. We know where everything comes from in food now, why not in textiles?” It’s no longer enough to be okay with a shirt that’s $5 when we know it’s hurting someone. http://www.triplepundit.com/2016/10/new-multi-stakeholder-partnership-can-help-haitian-kids/ "We are like slaves -- we are not workers." Just last Thursday on September 29, Cambodia’s government and garment industry unions and representatives sealed a deal to raise the minimum wage for the country’s 700,000 workers by 9.2 percent by the beginning of next year.
“The minimum wage of garment factory workers for 2017 has been officially set at $153 per month,” Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor, Vocational and Training said. Although Cambodia is still the epitome of hazardous factory conditions and irresponsible pay and treatment of garment workers, the country has shown some hints of correcting the broken system. In 2014, garment workers protested against their $80 monthly wage for a raise to $160, the bare minimum to provide for their families. Police opened fire and ended up killing four people and injuring dozens of others. As a result of this incident, government raised the minimum wage up to $100 for the rest of the year. In 2015, Human Rights Watch joined in criticizing the horrid conditions and brutal treatment of workers in factories that produced for major international brands like Armani, Adidas, and H&M. The organization compiled testimonies from numerous women workers in the garment industry of abuse and sexual harassment. The wage raise of 2016 seems like we’re one step closer to providing animproved and humane environment for workers. Yet the confessions of workers and conditions in factories say otherwise. “The quota for us was 80 [pieces of clothing] per hour. But when the minimum wage was increased, they increased our quota to 90,” says N.V., a factory worker in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh. “We have to do overtime work. We cannot say no.” As owners look for other ways to cut cost with the rise in minimum wage, working conditions are actually worsening. Human Rights Watch’s report “Work Faster or Get Out: Labor Rights Abuses in Cambodia’s Garment Industry” detail many incidents that sprout from the pressure to meet production targets, preventing workers from “taking rest breaks, using the bathroom, drinking water, and eating lunch.” And ironically, several workers admit that this pressure increased after minimum wage increased. The numbers might point to a brighter future, but the aggravated voices of the garment workers sure don’t. Illegal “short-term” contracts still deprive workers of the rights they rightfully deserve. Government cannot simply sit back after instituting laws and reforms -- that’s only half the job. It must also continue to enforce and regulate them to protect those whose lives depend on the tangible enforcements of these decisions. “We are like slaves -- we are not workers,” N.V. remarks. Raising the minimum wage is only the beginning to alleviating the humans behind our clothes from the abuses they’ve lived with for too long. http://m.dw.com/en/cambodias-garment-workers-facing-new-problems-as-wages-rise/a-18309345 http://m.dw.com/en/cambodia-raises-minimum-wage-for-textile-workers/a-35926002 |
Our Goal:To inform on the ongoing crises that the clothing industry poses on our community and applaud any acts that rise over the conventional ways of consumption.
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