I have a love hate relationship with fast fashion. I love it because, well, it's cheap. I like buying a cute outfit for five dollars. As a consumer, all I see is the price tag. Where it came from, how it was made, honestly didn't concern me that much. It was only after I started getting interested in labor rights that my perspective on this started to change.
Fast Fashion pertains to brands such as Forever 21, H&M, Shein, etc. The term fast fashion is used because they swap styles every other day. New clothes are brought in every week and sold out, only to be replaced with another batch of trendy new styles. While for us consumers, this is fun and exciting and a cheap way to sharpen our wardrobe, this comes at the expense of millions of underpaid and abused workers.
Fast fashion workers are notoriously overworked and underpaid. In countries such as Bangladesh where labor is the main source of capital, workers work under severe conditions to produce a massive amount of clothes in a ridiculous short amount of time. Just look at the Dhaka garment factory collapse in 2013. Poor conditions are fatal.
Another big problem in the fast fashion industry is gender based violence against women. This article sums it up really well:
"GLJ’s reports followed existing legal definitions of gender-based violence as set by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 2016. According to these standards, gender-based violence can be categorized as violence directed towards women because they are women, violent acts that disproportionately impact women, or both.
Women make up the vast majority of garment workers in fast fashion supplier factories. For instance, eighty to ninety-five percent gender majority in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Further, management positions are male-dominated, while women typically work as machine operators and checkers. This results in a hierarchical power structure in which a male-majority management controls a female-majority workforce.
This means that disciplinary measures disproportionately inflict physical, mental, and sexual harm on women. And male-dominated management makes it more difficult for female workers to freely report on instances of abuse and to be taken seriously in the workplace."
Link: https://www.greenamerica.org/blog/factory-exploitation-and-fast-fashion-machine
However, I know it isn't right to tell a minimum wage working family to stop supporting fast fashion. I can't exactly tell them to buy a hundred dollar shirt when they are struggling to put food on the table. Additionally, I'm sure that no company or business, no matter how luxurious they are, can be completely exempt from workplace violations. The inequities are endless.
So what do you guys think? Do you think that we need to take a stand against fast fashion by boycotting the industry? is that feasible? Or do you suggest an alternative solution to the problem? Let me know!
Comments
Post a Comment