Here’s how paying living wages and ‘total ethics fashion’ can help solve the industry’s climate crisis
While investment into material innovation and renewable energy is important for the fashion industry’s environmental impact, when we ignore how sustainability and ethics intersect, we miss an opportunity for green change.
Could paying living wages to the people who make our clothes be a critical solution towards improving fashion’s planetary impact?
Written by Emma Hakansson and Bella Holgate
What is a living wage? Are fashion brands paying it?
Labour rights organisation Fair Wear defines a living wage as ‘a wage that meets the basic needs of workers and their families for a standard working week and provides some discretionary income (savings)’. Basic needs include food, water, housing, education, health care, utilities like electricity, transportation and other essentials. A living wage is a human right.
Unfortunately, the fashion industry is failing to pay living wages to the people who make our clothes. As little as 2% of all garment workers are paid a living wage for their work.
Minimum wage is not the same as a living wage, and often, legal minimum wages are far below living wages. This is often particularly true in poorer nations where many garments are made for the global market. This is important to understand, as often, brands will claim that they pay ‘fair wages’ in accordance with local laws. A ‘fair wage’ is not a legally defined term, so this can mean very little for the people making clothing, and the use of the term when a living wage is not paid is a form of ethics-washing. Anything less than a living wage is poverty pay.
Image: Garment workers protest and demand a living wage and a union to protect them
/ Action Aid Australia
So fashion needs to pay living wages in order to be ethical. What’s it got to do with the environment?
Sustainable fashion journalist Elizabeth Cline wrote a 2022 article for Forbes titled ‘Could Living Wages Help Solve Fashion’s Climate Crisis? New Research Says Yes’. In it, a book called ‘The Business of Less: The Role of Companies and Businesses on a Planet in Peril’ by Ronald Geyer and what it means for fashion is explored. Geyer is a Professor of Industrial Ecology at the University of California, and he argues that focussing on how products are made, rather than what they are made of, is the key to social and environmental sustainability. Essentially, his research shows that improving labour conditions is the best way to transform industries like the fashion, which continue to fall short of environmental action commitments and climate targets.
Through what he calls the ‘reverse rebound effect’ Geyer argues that raising the wages of the world's 35 million garment workers by just $100 a week would cut 65.3 million metric tons of CO2 out of the global economy. The effect works on the presumption that households have a fixed amount of disposable income which, rather than being spent on something harmful to the environment – like piles of even more, cheaper clothes – will be spent instead on a person’s time and skills, used making clothes. Of course, time has no environmental impact.
Seem confusing? Imagine that every brand paid a living wage to the people making their clothes. Clothes would become more expensive. This would mean we would buy less clothes, as at the moment, many people buy enormous amounts of unsustainable clothing, and are able to because they’re so cheap. People are paid properly, lifting them out of poverty. We likely get clothes of a higher quality, if people are not rushed to make clothes for a piece rate (paid per garment sewn rather than per hour), and planetary boundaries are not pushed so far.
“Every dollar spent on labour is an environmentally impact-free dollar. It’s a zero-carbon dollar. It’s a zero-biodiversity-impact dollar”
Fashion Rebellion protestors at New York Fashion Week // Alexander Coggin for the New York Times
Importantly, it’s not only about the money we spend as citizen consumers, but about the money corporations spend.
While people buying less clothing because they are buying more ethical clothing is likely to help the environment, it doesn’t stop there. If brands were made to pay living wages, they would internalise the true cost of clothing production, rather than outsourcing it to garment working people who currently pay the true cost of fashion through poverty. As a result, these companies would also have less money left over to cause environmental harm. This is how living wages and degrowth come together.
Degrowth in the fashion industry is about recognising that continuous growth of the fashion industry is not compatible with our living in a finite world. We only have so much land, water and resources on this planet, so to continue to grow businesses, the fashion industry and its output endlessly is an impossibility. Experts suggest the fashion industry must reduce its waste and use of resources by fourfold to exist within planetary boundaries — the limits to what we can take from the planet each year, before these resources cannot be replenished, resulting in degradation, pollution and ecological harm.
Fashion brands are only able to grow so enormously large by exploiting the people making their clothes. H&M produces as many as 3 billion garments each year, while ultra fast fashion brand SHEIN adds thousands of new styles to its website each day, all the while paying those making their clothes ‘pennies per garment’ for 18-hour working days. Fashion brands can be successfully profitable while paying the people who make their clothes (and in turn, their wealth), but this mammoth scale of production is incompatible with both fair labour practices and environmental sustainability.
How can fashion brands invest in environmentally friendly labour?
Making clothing more time and skill-intensive to produce – thereby improving their quality while slowing down and reversing the negative impacts of fast fashion – is one direction that brands can take towards sustainability. Another is by investing in labour-intensive industries such as repair and resale initiatives. Given millions of tonnes of clothes are dumped in the Global South by wealthier Global North nations each year, this is a worthy investment.
The move towards repairs and circularity through resale is growing in fashion. Even major fast fashion brands like Zara have introduced a pre-owned service, in a reported effort to cut their environmental impact. This is positive progress, though it must be paired with a strategy for degrowth and the payment of living wages, or else this is a band-aid solution which fails to address the root problem – as otherwise, more clothes than can find new homes will continue to be churned out, contributing to exploitation and destruction.
Beyond living wages for garment workers and towards a total ethics fashion system
Ensuring living wages for garment workers is crucial to transforming the social and environmental sustainability of fashion. But many more people than those who sew clothes are involved in the plethora of fashion supply chains that exist, and many individuals from other species are exploited in fashion, too. Farm workers, fabric-making people, wild and farmed animals all face serious harms in the fashion industry today. All of these issues must be addressed if we are to create a fashion industry which can rightfully be sustained.
We must work towards a ‘total ethics fashion system’, one which prioritises the life and wellbeing of all people, our fellow animals and the planet at once before profit. Total ethics fashion asks not only if the fashion industry can sustain its current mode of production, but if it is just and fair to.
A total ethics fashion system pays living wages to everyone across the entire supply chain of fashion – from farm to finished product. It also protects animals, viewing them as individuals rather than commodities, and values the planet in its natural form, not only as an extractable resource.
How to buy garments that pay workers a living wage, and that align with total ethics fashion
For starters, the best way to contribute to the creation of a total ethics fashion system is by buying less, and by caring for what we already have. If you’re looking for something new (that is'n’t pre-loved – which is another great option) it’s worth asking lots of questions first. Not only about if you’ll love your potential purchase for many years to come, but about how it was made. It’s also important to make sure you’re not being misled into buying something that doesn’t really align with your values.
Here are some resources from us to help you:
- Learn more about how to spot ethics-washing here
- Learn more about questions to ask before buying clothes
- Remember, consumption is not our only way of engaging with fashion. We can get involved with changing the industry without spending a dollar on clothing, too.
