On International Workers’ Day, a Fashion Manifesto (Or Two)
- International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day, commemorates the historic push for the eight-hour workday in 1886, but today's fight for labor rights in the global fashion industry includes issues like climate change, automation, and geopolitical challenges.
International Workers’ Day. Labor Day. May Day. Whatever you call it, the annual May 1 celebration commemorates a pivotal moment in the struggle for labor rights : the push for the eight-hour workday, stoked by protests that culminated in Chicago’s deadly Haymarket Affair, which left seven police officers and at least four civilians dead on an otherwise ordinary day in 1886.
While workers secured “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what we will,” the fight for dignity, safety and fair wages rages on in today’s global supply chains—fashion included. It has also expanded beyond the need for rest to encompass climate change, automation and geopolitical gyrations.
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“Poor living standards. Rising global temperatures. Extractive tech. Escalating wars. The biggest challenges of our time are rooted in the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few,” the Clean Clothes Campaign, the garment industry’s largest consortium of trade unions and civil society groups, wrote Thursday. “It is easy to feel hopeless and directionless in the face of the issues of today.”
That’s why the organization, along with more than 230 allies and affiliates across 43 countries, published the nine-part “Fashioning a Just Transition Manifesto,” outlining a future where decent work is guaranteed; economic, social and gender justice are delivered; wealth is redistributed to workers; the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation are shared; workers can speak without fear; nature operates within planetary boundaries; and businesses are held accountable for the harms they cause.
The challenges besetting garment workers—lack of social security, poverty wages, inhumane production targets, union-busting , unsafe workplaces, gender-based violence and harassment —are the result, the manifesto said, of “decisions made by billionaire-run corporations and governments working within a rigged capitalist system.”
This has resulted in a persistent problem: Rich fashion companies continue to profit, while millions who toil on the production floor—many of them women—remain underpaid and overworked, yet dismissible on a dime when order volumes fall.
The Iran war, which has roiled shipping routes and driven up the cost of food, transportation and other basic necessities across garment-producing countries, has only exacerbated this disparity, according to the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, an Asia-centered coalition of advocacy groups, that has documented widespread cases of canceled and reduced orders and delayed payments as the “burden of this instability is pushed downward onto suppliers and workers.”
“Across Asia, the impacts of this crisis are already evident,” it wrote in its own May Day statement. “Rising fuel and energy costs are disrupting production across major garment hubs. Power shortages, increased freight costs and delays in raw material shipments are disrupting manufacturing cycles. These disruptions are increasing the risk of order cancellations and potential future job losses, while workers face rising food costs and growing anxiety about their livelihoods.”
Of the total number of factories AFWA surveyed in India, for example, one in three factories reported workforce contractions.
“What appears as policy change or market adjustment is, in reality, a direct restructuring of workers’ lives and livelihoods,” it said.
If Covid-19 escalated cases of GBVH due to economic and psychological stress, so too has the current conflict intensified what is “already systemic” across the garment supply chain, the organization added. Its specific asks for fashion brands and suppliers: sign enforceable agreements to eliminate GBVH; guarantee the right to freedom of association, including protection from retaliation; ensure safe and dignified working conditions; align pricing and sourcing practices with living wage standards; and deliver justice when workers experience harm.
“Movements are built by workers, especially women, whose labor, leadership and courage sustain them. There can be no liberation for one without liberation for all,” the statement added.
Workers whose livelihoods already hang by a thread are also bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, including floods, storms and heatwaves , CCC said. At the same time, it added that many corporate “climate solutions” treat workers’ rights as a separate issue or fail to address them at all .
Meanwhile, the unceasing churn of clothing, footwear and accessories depletes soils, poisons the water, pollutes the air, drives deforestation, accelerates biodiversity loss and generates runaway planet-warming emissions that undermine brands’ lofty environmental ambitions.
For the manifesto’s authors, a just fashion system enriches the lives of workers, their families and their communities, not the coffers of billionaire fashion tycoons. It rejects the linear take-make-waste convention that promotes worker exploitation and resource overextraction and measures success not by growth or profits but by worker and environmental well-being. It dismisses voluntary commitments in favor of binding agreements that hold companies legally and financially liable for any human rights or environmental violations in their downstream operations.
Most of all, it places workers at the center of discussions that impact them, allowing them greater agency over their workplaces and the way they are run. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh is one haunting reminder of what happens when their voices are silenced. Workers saw deep cracks in the building’s support pillars the day before the disaster, but their warnings went ignored. As a result, more than 1,130 people died and thousands more were maimed or injured.
Fashion at large, too, has visible fractures it can no longer neglect.
“We know we can’t repair an industry broken by design,” the manifesto said. “Instead, we’re building a new, just fashion system that centers the dignity of workers and the restoration of our planet. This shift won’t happen overnight. It will take a combination of short-term reforms and long-term systems transformation.”
