Undergraduate Thesis
Don’t have time to read all 102 pages?! Here’s the Abstract & Chapter 3
Epilogue: Carcel appears to have gone out of business in December of 2022 with this deeply ironic last instagram post (please read @battle.hedgehog’s comment) and their website is now a Thai advertisement for online gambling…
Abstract:
The average American sends about 65.4 pounds of textiles to landfills every year. This is one of many signs of a seismic shift that has taken place in the fashion industry over the past 20 years. While western nations are preoccupied with “development” in the rest of the world, they rarely look at how their own corporations and consumers create the systems and incentives that motivate economic exploitation and labor abuse around the world.
In this thesis, I will examine how clothing retailers and consumers in the US and Europe responded to a number of different scandals involving the conditions of workers in the garment supply chain. I found that corporations shirked the demands of garment workers, unions and activists by framing the entire conversation around ethics in supply chains around the word “transparency” at the expense of considering what constitutes an ethical or an abusive job.
In the first chapter, I examine how fast fashion retailers like H&M, Zara, Old Navy and Uniqlo communicate with consumers about their brands and supply chains. I pay particularly close attention to the large British clothing retailer, Primark, which has been involved in seven major labor abuse scandals over the past ten years Most fast fashion retailers promote a culture of excess in line with their business model that is based on young, middle and upper-class consumers buying new, cheap clothing constantly.
In chapter two, I look at a few of the major scandals that Primark has been involved in and how the company, workers, and consumers responded. I also examine how peer companies that sourced from the same factories or factories with similar conditions and issues responded to their own scandals. Primark and other companies point to their commitment to “transparency,” by selectively sharing some auditing data, but consistently failed to make real changes in their supply chains.
In chapter three, I compare fast fashion brands to conspicuous production brands, studying to what extent these companies with better intentions are able to successfully ensure better conditions in their supply chains. Different companies often struggled with the same issues but were more likely to make meaningful changes and improve conditions.
In the fourth chapter, I list a few of the main demands put forward by labor activists and unions and offer some suggestions for how companies and consumers could better enact and support these demands.
The clothing and textile industry has always been intricately bound up in slavery, capitalism, and environmental destruction. The demands of pollution and dwindling natural resources will strengthen the incentives for companies to further exploit workers. However, the impending crisis of climate change also provides an opportunity for a new ethics of clothing consumption that better compensates workers around the world and in the US.