One retail chain approached my office seeking our help to identify a Fully Compliant Factory to manufacture Men’s Shirts. Quantity was manageable and payments terms were “Officially” 90 days.

Due to our relationship with the factory, the costings were shared with Brand, but the business was not placed for a simple reason; the quoted price was 15 cents higher than the target price.

Nothing wrong with the people in the trade. But perhaps, you all have missed the point. The glaring irony lies in the three conditions, 

1. Fully Compliance.
2. Payment after 3 months.
3. Target Price.

I will not go into the 3rd point as it is a topic by itself. But the first two points reflect the state of mind of the brands/retailers. One word which comes to mind is “Colonialism”.

Colonialism was fully witnessed during the Covid pandemic. 

“Sustainability” went out of the window.

All the fancy talk in Copenhagen and New York by the so-called Brand partners was not practiced by not paying for the orders, stocking up of food by Western World while garments workers went hungry.

As the retail store's shutters went down and online sales losses increased, brands scrambled to protect their bottom line. Unfortunately, it has been at the expense of their supply chain partners, refusing to take millions of dollars worth of goods for which suppliers have already fronted the material and labor costs.

It took just a handful of major fashion brands in Europe and the US to bring an entire Bangladesh to a grinding halt and sending thousands of workers into the streets to protest, risking infection because with unpaid salaries came a greater and deadlier devil: Starvation.

What happened was a human rights violation.

The Brands did not pay the factories. The goods were either not picked or orders were simply canceled. In some cases, brands demanded discounts resulting in the factory workers not getting the payments and are now struggling to lead their lives. This blatant breach of contract, wherein the workers are not being paid for their labor by the buyers, is a sheer violation of human rights. Factory workers are being treated inhumanely.

This level of vulnerability lays bare a major power imbalance: it is the foreign brands who ultimately make the rules. And when these companies look to developing nations simply as sources of cheap labor, workers valued only for the number of hours they clock in whilst creating more and more cheap clothes, oppression is never far away. If this is not modern-day colonization, what is?

After decades of profiting from the labor of garment workers, they have turned their backs on these black and brown women when they need them most, leaving millions without severance, medical care, or food security. 

Colonialism is a distant abstraction of the past

— yet we see colonial mentalities and practices continue to reign supreme in how fashion business operates today. Systems are often predicated on seeing the extraction and exploitation of resources, from raw materials to labor, as the means for infinite growth and success. And most of these resources are extracted precisely in nations destabilized from colonial violence. 

The colonizers today, much like the British Raj, are the brands themselves. American and major European brands who have refused to pay for the orders. Their business model has always been to head to the cheapest and poorest parts of the world to plunder. When China became too expensive as wages went up, they fled to places like Cambodia, Myanmar, and now Ethiopia — why is this? Not because of infrastructure or better factories. Simply because they are the cheapest frontiers left to exploit black and brown bodies.

If we look at the fashion trade routes, we will notice that the supply chain of garments for most of the major brands yet remains the same as it was some 150 years ago, that is during the height of European colonial exploitation.

And just as the colonial systems of the past relied on slave labor and other forms of labor exploitation, today’s multi-national fashion brands, and conglomerates continue to take advantage of and profit off, of a vulnerable workforce of mostly women of color in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, and Ethiopia. 

Let us try to understand how brands are real colonizers. And for this, we need to first understand how pricing and production schedules are set. The sourcing team holds all the power, squeezing the suppliers down to their last cents, thereby pushing razor-thin margins downward. At the same time demanding shorter and shorter deliveries.

On the other hand, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and social compliance teams within these brands warn factories about not paying wages properly when the very same brands hold invoices for up to 90 days minimum and squeeze the suppliers on prices all the time. What a sham!

These social compliance teams know that their garments are always made with excessive overtime, a constant violation of their own codes of conduct, that too because of their own demands to ship garments faster and faster.

The entire facade of auditing allows colonizing brands to absolve themselves of responsibility. Not so different from slave masters who held people in bondage with terms that made it impossible to ever buy your freedom. 

The industry’s power dynamics are structured in a way that allows brands to ultimately benefit from all the issues they cause from overproduction, poor forecasting, and planning, lowering of prices, and then pointing fingers at the suppliers and local governments for the health, safety, human rights violations, and environmental destruction.

In my long innings in the trade, I have never seen any sourcing or compliance executives spending much time with the workers, let alone much time talking to the makers of their clothes. Most will do a quick walkthrough look at makers like zoo animals and mind you they enjoy the power and thrill they get by doing so.

Then they sit like masters in air-conditioned rooms with bottled waters, while a few coached helpless workers are brought in front of them to ask a checklist of questions. 

One wonders why most brands do not find the most egregious conditions. It is not because the makers are coached, or that audits do not work — it is because it is of no benefit to colonizing brands to “find” any of these violations that directly benefit their bottom line. At the same time, present the factories with fat bills of doing the audit and squeezing the razor-thin margins further at the cost of the “Makers”.

Now as pandemic has rebooted the world, it is time to reset the fashion business. To break past these colonial power structures and hold brands truly accountable. 

Time to question, how can any of these brands go back to sitting on sustainability stages after what they have done to the factories. 

Colonialism is not a thing of the past; it is an economic reality.

There must be a total restructuring of who profits and garners wealth from the fashion industry.

The inequality could not be starker: top fashion CEOs earn what a garment worker earns in her / his entire lifetime in just four days.

A campaign must start demanding Brands to make the industry a fairer industry. 

RELATED TOPICS:#Apparel,Sanjay Lal