Fast Fashion’s ‘Cheap Labor’: Under the Pandemic, Global Garment Industry’s Women Workers Pay the Price

At the end of March, as Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 cases surpassed the 100 mark, garment workers at the Katunayake Free Trade Zone — the country’s largest such zone where the majority of workers are women — found themselves in a bind: The factories where they worked cutting and sewing apparel for brands like the GAP, Victoria’s Secret, and Tommy Hilfiger were instructed to close due to the global pandemic, leaving thousands of people stranded without food, wages, or even a safe return home.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, millions of garment workers around the world have been left to face an unknown future as economic uncertainty has rippled across the fashion business. As lockdowns shuttered retail stores across the West, big fashion brands scrambled to cancel or postpone orders, often refusing to pay for clothing already produced. These cancellations led to the shutdown of thousands of factories in major apparel-producing regions, from Bangladesh to Los Angeles, California.

For the past 40 years, since it was established as a special economic zone to attract foreign investment, Katunayake — about half an hour northeast of Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital — has been a migration point for young, unmarried, high school-educated women hailing from the country’s poorest provinces. These women work across the more than 80 factories that make up Katunayake, or are employed as sub-contractors at the many smaller factories that surround the zone. With few state- or factory-run boarding houses available, most workers live in overcrowded boarding houses akin to dormitories, or rent poorly-constructed rooms with shared bathrooms and little sanitation.

“These poor living conditions could easily lead to the spread of disease, including COVID-19,” said Jayani Fernando from Dabindu Collective, a Sri Lankan worker’s rights organization.

Following the shutdown at Katunayake, permanent workers — those who are paid monthly salaries — were slowly shuttled to their hometowns in government-provided buses, leaving behind some of Katunayake’s most vulnerable: families, often single mothers, older workers, and Sri Lanka’s “manpower workers.” Manpower workers, who are employed via agencies and work on temporary contracts, are paid either piece rates, daily wages, or weekly rates; are not entitled to sick leave or paid time off; and are largely ineligible for the country’s pandemic relief.

Irrespective of government assistance, however, it’s estimated that from March to May of this year, the country’s garment workers lost around 40 percent of normal wages. Prior to COVID-19, permanent workers earned around US$80 per month, above Sri Lanka’s minimum wage but still barely a living wage, and actively sought overtime to make ends meet. A recent report from the Clean Clothes Campaign estimates that from March to May, garment workers around the world are owed between USD$3.19 and $5.78 billion in wages.

Left behind in the boarding houses without wages, many manpower workers struggle to afford basic food supplies, sanitary pads, or even mobile recharge cards that would allow them to stay in touch with loved ones.

As informal workers — a trend that is rife in garment manufacturing around the world — these women were already in a precarious position, with low wages, few benefits, and tenuous employment. But amid the pandemic, as Fernando explained, their situation has only worsened.

Across Asia, the so-called garment factory of the world — which accounts for 60 percent of global exports of clothing, textiles, and footwear — workers have been especially impacted by the economic effects of the pandemic, in particular, the indifference of the global fast fashion industry.

Although around 19 global fashion brands, including Target, ASOS, and Nike, have committed to pay in full for orders completed and those in production, retail giants such as Kohl’s and Sears have made no such commitment. In fact, Kohl’s has cancelled more than a billion dollars of orders — most of which was already completed — in early March, and then proceeded to pay a $109 million dividend to shareholders a month later.

Meanwhile, governments across many of Asia’s garment manufacturing centers — such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Pakistan — have tried to bolster the industry and prevent further lay-offs through stimulus packages, such as reduced taxes for small- and medium-sized businesses. The Indian government has also provided cash transfers and distributed basic food supplies like rice and gas cooking cylinders to poor women and low-income families. But for many countries, such as Sri Lanka, where US$5 billion worth of orders was lost, the impact of cancellations has forced many suppliers to send workers home, often without pay.

A report from the Pennsylvania State University’s Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights details how, in Bangladesh in particular, the pandemic has forced the fast fashion system into factory closures, unemployment for workers who already have meager savings, and a government with “such a low tax revenue that it has very limited ability to provide meaningful support to workers and the industry.”

While the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh — a horrific building collapse that killed more than 1,100 people — exposed the lack of concern for worker safety within the global garment supply chain, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the precarious space that workers occupy when they are largely regarded as cogs in the wheel of production. Seven years ago, it took devastation to expose the human toll of indifference within the supply chain. Now, the pandemic and the workers sacrificed as economic collateral have further revealed the ways in which fast fashion prioritizes profits over people.

“What this crisis is showing us is that suppliers typically have a very, very narrow margin with which they can work, and it’s being exacerbated by the crisis,” Penelope Kyritsis, assistant research director at Worker Rights Consortium, told Women Under Siege. “The power really lies at the top of the supply chain.”

A gendered impact

While the world’s 60 million garment workers have been impacted in some capacity, the industry’s reliance on women — who make up nearly three quarters of garment workers — means they are among the hardest hit.

In Indonesia, where there have been more than 140,000 cases of COVID-19 and at least 6,000 deaths as of early August, the garment industry employs around 16 million people and accounts for about 6.6 percent of the country’s GDP. While that figure seems slight, the industry is a particularly important source of formal employment for women, who make up around 60 percent of workers.

Despite these greater employment opportunities, the sector is rife with problems.

On the production floor where clothes are sewn and cut, workers are required to meet sets of “targets.” For example, workers may be required to produce 80 to 90 pieces every 23 minutes, explained Dina Septi, a researcher at the Sedane Labor Resource Center in Indonesia. Out of fear of missing their targets — and then working overtime without pay — workers will regularly avoid going to the bathroom, leading to high rates of urinary tract infections among female employees, said Septi.

Similar issues have arisen in factories in India and Bangladesh where, in addition to urinary tract infections, menstrual hygiene is also a problem for the industry’s majority female workers. A combination of period poverty — that is, a lack of access to sanitary products, bathroom facilities with clean water, and waste disposal, as well as limited work breaks — means that Bangladeshi women especially feel forced to either risk their health while menstruating or forgo work out of necessity. In India, an investigation from Thomson Reuters Foundation found that female factory workers were illegally given unmarked pills to help with period pain. The medication was similar to a drug such as Advil which, when used repeatedly over long periods of time, can lead to side effects such as depression, anxiety, uterine fibroid tumors, and even miscarriages.

Safety standards also vary between factories. A 2017 report found that around half of the factories surveyed did not comply with safety measures, such as fire alarms, accessible emergency exits, and proper storage of chemicals and hazardous substances. And, while unions exist, there are insufficient protections for workers who have been discriminated against, and employers have been known to avoid engaging in collective bargaining. This status quo has created a system in which the welfare of workers comes second to the production of clothing.

The intensity of the work and need to meet targets has also created a culture in which abuse, both verbal and physical, is commonplace. A 2017 study by Perempuan Mahardika, an Indonesian women’s rights organization, found that, among female garment workers at an industrial complex near the capital of Jakarta, 56.5 percent of those surveyed had been sexually harassed at work. What’s more, economic insecurity from mass layoffs and reduced wages has also given rise to increased reports of domestic violence across Indonesia, resulting in more and more women facing abuse both in the home and in the workplace.

In response, Better Work Indonesia — a collaboration between the International Labor Organization and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group — has conducted online mental health trainings for factories involved with the initiative. While Better Work Indonesia has previously addressed mental health stressors such as verbal harassment — with claims that workers from factories involved in the program have reported a reduction in verbal abuse — an online training seems an inadequate response to an entrenched problem that has become synonymous with the sector itself.

“There’s a saying that if you work in the garment sector and you don’t get sexually or verbally abused, you’re not working there,” Septi said. “It’s just the risk of working in the industry.”

Larger holes in the safety net

While workers across Indonesia have been laid off or furloughed because of the effects of COVID-19 — in the Sukabumi region of West Java, a textile and apparel center, more than 6,500 garment workers were without work as of early April — others have continued to work, often with reduced hours and usually in unsafe conditions. Fast-moving production lines tied to the target system make social distancing difficult, and factories are ill-equipped to accommodate six-foot spaces between workers — especially when medium- and large-sized factories employ on average 260 workers per establishment. And, while masks have been provided once per week, they are difficult to wear when factories are hot, humid, and lack ventilation.

In Indonesia, those who have been laid off are only able to access government assistance — anywhere from US$40-70 for up to four months — after they have completed certain online training programs. Septi said the program works against those who are not technologically literate, and many — including garment workers — have struggled to simply upload their photo identification.

Because of this, laid-off workers and those receiving only half-wages have been struggling financially. While the pandemic has not been the wrongdoing of international brands, Septi said it is time for global brands to take responsibility, not in the form of charity or empty corporate social responsibility programs, but by paying for what has already been promised.

“It is the right time for them to give back — which is an understatement — to the workers who have been making them a profit for the past 30 years,” she said. “This concerns people’s lives, not just the benefit of their work.”

The other ‘work from home’

The city of Tiruppur, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is known as the “T-shirt factory of the world.” In Tiruppur, garment workers cut and sew T-shirts, sweatpants, and other apparel for some 200 brands, including Walmart, Levi’s, and Adidas. Among Tiruppur’s garment worker population are 40,000 home-based workers, the majority of whom are women. Their work — embroidering, screen-printing, stitching, and packaging T-shirts — is usually subcontracted by local factories who provide the fabric but require workers to pay for the thread, needles, scissors, and electricity needed to perform their tasks.

In Tiruppur, an at-home worker may earn US$0.01 for threading a tie and trimming the threads on a pair of sweatpants. If a worker completes 100 pairs of sweatpants a day, they will earn around US$1.43 for that work (the World Bank sets the global poverty line at $1.90 per day).

While much of the world has shifted to working from home, home-based workers have been bearing the brunt not only of the virus and lockdowns but a severed supply chain. Since January, work has dwindled for home-based garment workers due to a combination of cancelled orders and a shortage in raw materials, most of which are imported from China. In the months since, most home-based workers have neither had their regular orders renewed nor received any new work.

In Pakistan, where the majority of home-based workers are women, suppliers often prefer to contract work to home-based workers because they offer cheaper labor, said Khalid Mahmood, director of the Labor Education Foundation in Pakistan. Amid COVID-19, however, as contracts were canceled and orders withdrawn, even home-based workers have found themselves without a job.

“For these informal workers, the economic ravages of the COVID-19 crisis are compounded by the fact that they have less of a safety net than other vulnerable garment workers,” said Kyritsis. “And that disproportionately affects women workers.”

The fast fashion industry thrives on subcontracting, and much like Sri Lanka’s manpower workers, home-based workers fall within this labor supply chain.

“Home-based work is a form of disguised employment. In very few countries would these workers be defined as employees,” said Marlese von Broembsen, the law program director of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing. “All workers, including those at home, should be made visible.”

Across the sector, home-based workers have not been paid since February and most are expecting to be out of work for another six months without any financial assistance. As the world pivots to “work-from-home” policies in an effort to keep employees safe, it is a cruel irony that home-based workers within the garment industry are without work and, as Septi described, “in a very dire situation.”

As is the case around much of the world, local initiatives and mutual aid programs have emerged for home-based workers, also. In countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Cambodia, home-based workers have shifted to sewing masks to sell within their communities or through Facebook.

In Sri Lanka, Dabindu Collective has been engaged in mutual aid by distributing essential food items to workers across the country’s free trade zones. Meanwhile, in Tiruppur, Social Awareness and Voluntary Education (SAVE), an organization that works with marginalized communities, has been advocating for the legal recognition of home-based workers to ensure that all workers are eligible for government and employee benefits.

But arguably, workers employed in a nearly US$760 billion clothing and apparel market should be afforded greater protections — on a global scale — beyond both the efforts of local groups, and the bare minimum that international companies have committed to so far.

An unintended consequence of ‘social distancing’

Across South Asia, and within the garment sector in particular, Dalits — members of the lowest caste who are said to be “untouchable” — often occupy some of the poorest positions within the industry. In South India’s textile mills, where the air is thick with fibers and dust, young women from poor Dalit communities work on their feet for up to 12 hours a day, often experiencing respiratory problems and disruptions to their menstrual cycles.

The factories, much like the sleeping quarters, are overcrowded, and Dalit workers are usually designated separate hostels from workers of higher castes. Dalit workers are either paid per piece, per day, or in the case of some young women, are working in a form of bonded labor akin to modern day slavery.

“Dalits are a particularly high-risk group because they are neglected, under-resourced, and under-prioritized,” said Meena Varma, the executive director of the International Dalit Solidarity Network. “That’s why we need to ensure that health services and awareness-raising efforts are fully inclusive and accessible to all irrespective of caste.”

Dalits are also experiencing an unintended consequence of COVID-19: the reinforcement of “untouchability.” While the concept and phrasing of social or physical distancing has been a means of halting the spread of coronavirus around the world, these terms come with a particular set of connotations in communities that are divided along caste lines.

As a result, the idea of untouchability is being further normalized, especially within the South Asian context. While it is unlikely that the terminology will change at this point, the International Dalit Solidarity Network has adopted the phrase “safe distancing.”

“It’s our way of saying that using these terms is unacceptable,” Varma said.

A real call to action for the garment industry

Following the Rana Plaza disaster, global fashion brands signed onto the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh — the first legally-binding agreement set out to create a safer and healthier garment sector. Under the accord, brands like H&M and UNIQLO are legally responsible for ensuring that those who make their clothes do so in safe conditions.

According to the Worker Rights Consortium, around 100,000 safety violations have been uncovered across the more than 1,600 participating factories in Bangladesh, and about half of those violations have been addressed to date. Additionally, factory inspections led to the evacuation of 17 unsafe factories that were then closed until renovations could take place.

But the accord is not without its criticisms: an open letter from such signatories as the Clean Clothes Campaign and International Labor Rights Forum voiced concern that the independent and ongoing workplace monitoring set out by the accord was weakened when the agreement was renewed in 2018 (the initial accord lasted for a period of five years). In addition, the accord includes only a fraction of Bangladesh’s ready-made garment factories and overlooks some of the more serious safety measures.

While the building safety crisis and the current pandemic are vastly different, Kyritsis from the Worker Rights Consortium said that both crises have shone a light on the problems within the fashion supply chain.

In response to the unraveling industry, the International Labor Organization has developed a “Call to Action” for brands to publicly endorse a non-binding “COVID-19 Action Plan for the Garment Industry.” The plan includes recommendations for brands to pay for finished or partially-finished goods, maintain open lines of communication with suppliers, and, if possible, provide direct support to factories. So far, the Call to Action has been endorsed by Adidas Group, New Balance, and American Eagle Outfitters, among other international companies and nonprofit organizations. But as a non-legally binding document, the Call to Action is more a suggestion of what should occur, rather than a reflection of reality or an enforcement of ethical decisions.

Historically, these types of voluntary initiatives have proven to be little more than a pretense that reflects well upon signatories while requiring little to no actual change on their behalf. COVID-19 has revealed the garment industry’s reliance on layers of poverty, discrimination, and vulnerability, and the workers most at risk within that supply chain — contract workers, home-based workers, and low caste workers — are paying the price for a system built upon their “cheap labor.”

“Many people have said that COVID-19 is a great leveler, but it’s not at all,” Varma said. “You might be susceptible to the disease, but you're not going to be susceptible to the hunger and poverty that is the result of COVID-19 — the poorest communities are.”