Building Sustainable Futures through Collective Action in the Fashion Industry

The current solutions to our growing environmental and global labour problems tend to favour economic growth as a means of enhancing social well-being and thus tend to cater to corporate interests without addressing the fundamental drivers of fossil fuel use and labour exploitation. Within the fashion industry, for instance, the so-called eco-friendly solutions have delivered new products that ultimately worsen the conditions of workers and fail to address the core issues relating to sustainable production. To this end, social and climate justice organisations are playing a crucial role in building alliances between labour and ecological movements and in developing systemic solutions to the current growth-centred economic and ecological models. This chapter examines the inconsistencies in the current policies for promoting sustainable development, and highlights the vital role that labour unions, civil campaigns, NGOs, and environmental groups are playing in unveiling the social injustices within the fashion industry and the unsustainable practices that drive its endless growth. These activist-led campaigns have made significant achievements in increasing the transparency of the supply chains and workplace practices of the textile, apparel, and footwear industries. However, further collective action is needed to force the industry to implement living wages, improve labour conditions, increase gender equality, and implement environmentally sustainable production processes. This is especially the case for women, who account for about 80% of the workforce in the garment, textile, and footwear sectors, are the most underpaid workers in the industry, and are likely to bear much of the brunt of the effects of climate change (ILO. Moving the needle: gender equality and decent work in Asia’s garment sector. International Labour Organization, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/%2D%2D-asia/%2D%2D-ro-bangkok/documents/publication/wcms_789822.pdf , 2021). Thus, women in these industries need to be supported as drivers of collective action and social change.