Unethical Fashion

The mistreatment of employees is one of the largest arguments held against massive fast fashion corporations. The number one reason your favorite brands like Zara, Urban Outfitters and Forever 21 are able to have so many copies of the same items in such a massive inventory is due to the fact that their products are outsourced from sweatshop. A Sweatshop is a factory where workers are employed at very low wages for long hours, under poor working conditions and women are the direct target as they are the driving force behind them.

This concept is strongly explored in the health journal “The global environmental injustice of fast fashion” where it is mentioned that “[g]arment assembly, the next step in the global textile supply chain, employs 40 million workers around the world… The issues arise when occupational and safety aren’t often enforced due to poor political infrastructure and organizational managements” (Blick et al.). This supports the concept that these companies are treating the workers as well as the clothing as disposable, easy access items. With this large amount of money under these massive corporations belts, the very least they can do is contribute to better working environments to these workers yet they are expressing this “if you don’t like it quit” attitude as they can easily find workers who are more desperate to take the jobs. As an individual who is directly involved with garment making, I can attest to the fact that making clothing is a time consuming and tedious process, and forcing long, strenuous hours on these individuals isn’t ethical in the slightest. Sewing and assembling garments for hours on end with little compensation is a blatant human right violation.

To help you visualize the sheer effort it takes to construct a garment, I reached out to 4 friends of mine who are heavily involved in the garment making industry, and below is the chart of the average time it takes them to draft, cut , and sew a simple shirt.

As demonstrated in the chat with the least amount of time being a day and a half with a large amount of sewing experience, it takes longer that 24 hours on average to complete something as simple as a shirt. These women are producing multiple copies of the same garment in the same day as within unfavorable conditions within these sweatshops.

If these companies are large enough to treat their fellow humans like slaves and statistics, what makes you think that they are even considering the damage this is placing on our environment.