It was a moment of truth that reverberated around the world, forcing fashion consumers to take a long hard look in the mirror – for a moment.
Just before 9 am, on a Wednesday morning in the manufacturing district of Savar, Bangladesh, a factory alive with the buzz and bustle of over 3500 workers collapsed.
The Rana Plaza factory was eight stories high, a monolith of gray concrete that poured in on itself in a scene that resembled the chaos and tragedy of an earthquake or a war zone.
Over 2500 of the factory workers were injured, and 1135 were killed.
80% of the workers caught inside Rana Plaza that day were women.
They were mostly young, 18 – 20 years old, and forced by poverty to work in the factory for around 22 cents an hour.
This picture is reflected in garment factories around the world that employ an exploitative economic model driven off the back of women’s underpaid labour. And yet, as the chilling story of the Rana Plaza disaster flooded the global news, this crucial point was all but forgotten.
Instead, the eyes of the Global North were drawn immediately to the clothing labels that lay in amongst the rubble.
The labels revealed the penurious Rana Plaza serviced a panoply of multi-billion dollar brands, among them, JC Penney, Benetton, Mango, and Primark. They were labels that brought the Rana Plaza disaster right here, into Australia and into our wardrobes.
News headlines called it a “wake-up call for the fashion industry” and demanded a “clean up of global sweatshops.”
We Australians were scandalised. The very beautiful logos we had welcomed into our lives with open-arms were frauds; they were sweatshops built on the ugliness of exploitation, poverty, and death.
It has been four years since the Rana Plaza disaster, and Bangladesh is now being hailed as the next Asian tiger. Shamefully, Australian outrage has proved fickle, and our shopping habits have seen little change.
The Australian fashion industry continues to rake in an estimated annual revenue of $19 billion.
The Australian taste for fast fashion is picking up speed, not slowing down.
Nor has much changed in the price women garment workers pay for making our clothes. Around the world, three-quarters of the estimated 60-75 million people working in the textile, clothing and footwear industries, are women and girls. Reports of garment worker deaths have continued to come in from around the globe and so too have stories of garment workers sacked or harassed for standing up and demanding their human rights.
Image via Trusted Clothes
Yet the plight of women garment workers has not seen the rise of a consumer movement with anything like the zeal of veganism or the plethora of products devoted to all things green.
A google search of feminist clothing does not pull up a discussion on women garment workers and their rights, but clothes branded with feminist slogans and little information as to how they were made.
It’s a story that has also echoed with alarming consistency throughout the vicissitudes of history. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York killed 146 women, many of them jumping from the flames to their deaths. They were mostly young Jewish and Italian women, migrant workers earning a paltry $15 a week.
What differed in 1911, was that the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was understood immediately as a feminist issue of immense moral urgency.
Speaking at the Metropolitan Opera House 8 days after the fire, Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish-American feminist and prominent labour union leader, channeled her grief into a momentous speech, excoriating a society that had allowed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to happen.
“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city,” she said. “Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed.”
The following year, Schneiderman would utter one of the most famous phrases in the history of Western women’s movements:
“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.”
With these 23 words, Schneiderman called for a solidarity that at once recognised and defied class lines.
Her audience was made to understand working-class women as deserving of not just the most basic labour rights, but conditions that allowed for dignity and a meaningful life, like time to give to loved ones and leisure – those roses women of privilege enjoy so freely. It was a statement that drew a straight line connecting the conditions – and the humanity – of the working class and the wealthy.
Hnin Nu Wai, a woman producer from MBoutik.
Though it may be tempting to consider ourselves beholden to the leviathan that is the global fashion industry, our dollars are its working parts, the breath, and the blood that keep it moving.
That means we have the power, and the responsibility, to shut down the abusive fast-fashion industry.
It also means we have the power to build a new system designed for women, by women.
This is the vision that prompted ActionAid to connect The Fabric Social – an Australian ethical fashion label with MBoutik, a collective of women in Myanmar producing fashion-forward and environmentally-friendly clothing.
The women of MBoutik live in Myanmar’s Dryzone, where the impacts of a damaged climate are hitting women and their communities hard, creating severe food and economic insecurity. Armed with their Flying Man sewing machines and entrepreneurial determination, the women of MBoutik are using fashion to create a better, more secure future for themselves, and their communities
The women of MBoutik include Maw Maw Lin, Nyo Nyo San, Yin Yin Ale, Moe Moe, Zar Zar, and Hnin Nu Wai.
They are skilled clothes producers, and they are also women who love motorbikes, singing, jewelry-making, sharing funny stories about their boyfriends and who dream of their children becoming doctors and community leaders. MBoutik offers each of these women a fair wage, dignified working conditions and the right to organise and voice their demands. This is what a feminist supply chain looks like, and this is what we should demand of every brand we buy from.
The ruthless exploitation of women garment workers, so often left faceless and nameless, is among the most disgraceful symptoms of globalised capitalism and it has continued, unchallenged, since the first days of industrialisation.
Women producers from social enterprise, MBoutik, Bagan, Myanmar. Photo: ActionAid Australia
It will take more than ethical consumption to bring about global equality.
But taking your dollars out of the pockets of the tyrannical fashion industry and investing them in a system that cares, that can tell you its employees names and their stories, that has human rights at its core, is an important contribution – and a moral imperative.
The innovative business partnership, coordinated by ActionAid Australia through funding from DFAT’s new Business Partnerships Platform, is supporting women in Myanmar to realise their economic independence and full human rights.
