The Problem

Hidden underneath many of our favorite brand labels is a garment worker’s death, injury, or abuse. Examples are plentiful: on April 24, 2013 Rana Plaza in Bangladesh collapsed killing 1,134 apparel workers who supplied for Walmart, Sears and other brands. Just the year before in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 112 workers died in the Tazreen factory fire. Over 500 workers died, with thousands of injuries, in Bangladesh garment factories prior to the Rana Plaza collapse, including the Spectrum Sweater factory collapse killing 62 workers in 2005. The problem is widespread: in 2012, more than 300 apparel workers in Karachi, Pakistan, died in a global brand-audited company.

After 30 years of labor rights advocacy and critical scholarship on the global garment industry, we know that producing clothes to meet our insatiable consumer and fast-fashion demands has made the job of garment worker a dangerously precarious one, particularly for female workers. Recent academic scholarship and advocacy research document the prevalence of poverty wages and safety hazards for workers. The pervasiveness of hardship wages defines workers’ struggles. According to the Clean Clothes Campaign and the Asia Floor Wage Alliance’s 2014 report, poverty wages persist across six of the largest garment producing countries, and the minimum wage declined by 28 percent between 1998 and 2013. The problem is widespread: workers in Eastern European countries producing for Western European markets have an even larger gap between the low minimum and needed living wage. In addition to the unchanged low wages two years after the Rana Plaza disaster, according to the International Labor Rights Forum, fear, violence, intimidation, and retaliation are also commonplace. The Worker Rights Consortium found that Haitian garment workers, already working in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, experience ubiquitous wage theft, causing dire consequences for families and communities.

Universities in the United States have emerged as key sites of social justice advocacy and policy action in response to the inadequate industry and government responses to garment factory deaths and extreme working conditions and wages. Student activists, in solidarity with garment workers’ global mobilization efforts, have joined with faculty and administrator allies to use their leverage as key licensors of university logo goods to support worker rights and promote structural change in the industry.