The True Cost - Andrew Morgan

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- Accidents : Rana Plaza (1,129 dead), Ali Enterprises (289 dead), Tazreen Fashion (112 dead),…

→ “garment workers in Bangladesh are paying the price for cheap clothing”

- Wages : $2 a day (Bangladesh)

- 2014 : most profitable year of all times for fashion industry → today nearly $3 trillion

- 40M factory workers worldwide in the clothing industry, 4M in Bangladesh working in 5,000 factories, over 85% are women, minimum wage of less than $3 a day (among lowest paid garment workers in the world) (Shima : started with $10/month salary)

- estimated 1/6 people alive today work in the world’s fashion industry (= most labor-dependent industry on Earth)

- 1.2M hectares of cotton growing in High Plains of Texas, biggest cotton patch in the world → 80% has become GMO in past 10 years

- Punjab region : largest user of pesticides in the world

- in the last 16 years : 250,000 farmer suicides in India (= 1 every 30 min), largest larger of suicide recorded in History

- average American throws away 37 kilos of textile waste each year + 11 tons of textile waste in the US alone

- only 10% of clothes we donate are actually sold in local thrift stores, rest shipped to developing countries in growing quantities as we have more and more clothes to dump → make the local textile industry disappear in those countries

- Kanpur (India) : capital of leather industry, every day 50M liters of toxic wastewater poured out of local tanneries into farming and drinking water (with heavy chemicals like chromium 6)

- fashion as 2nd most polluting industry on Earth after oil industry

- H&M : 2nd richest fashion brand, $18 billion annual revenue, largest producers in Bangladesh and Cambodia (NB : richest brand is Zara whose founder Amancio Ortega is one of the richest person in the world)

4. List all the drawbacks resulting from the fast fashion industry : social, environmental, financial, economical, ethical,… including for the buyer.

• Social : wages very low, awful and even dangerous working conditions (buildings collapse or catch fire, health pbs, in contact with chemicals), no unions to protect the rights of workers (limited power), no labour laws, impacts of donating to charities (shipped to other countries = polluting)

• Environmental : intensification of cotton agriculture creating damage on land and farmers’ health (spraying chemicals and pesticides), impact on soil (contaminated), communities,…, GMO cotton (BT cotton, patented, enables to own the farmers who have to buy the seeds), pesticides as ecological narcotics, growing diseases linked to use of pesticides (cancer, jaundice, mental illness, skin pbs), species endangered, textile waste non-biodegradable (200 years) releases harmful gases

• Financial : fast fashion only looks after big business interests, production prices keep being squeezed in order to enhance competition

• Economical : deflation product over last 20 years but with higher costs, clothes so cheap to buy that can be thrown away more easily for us to buy some more, advertisement as propaganda making us dependent on fashion product, gives us the impression we can possess more but by making us poorer, consumptionism = products we use are not considered as product we use up (disposable)

• Ethical : basic human rights not respected and not even taken into account, other people’s lives ignored, Monsanto’s seed monopoly creates damages but it refuses responsibility

5. What are the arguments used by the fast fashion brand owners to justify their policy?

- Logic : making more profits by “cutting corners” (= reducing the costs) but disregarding safety measures and the social situation resulting from how the clothes are produced

- Low costs, cost in human lives, justified by the economic benefits generated in these countries

→ Benjamin Powell, director of Free Market Institute : “least bad option workers have today”, “part of a process that raises living standards”, “lead to higher wages and better working conditions ”

→ sweatshops bring basic elements for development : physical capital, technology, human capital, worker skills

→ Kate Ball-Young, former sourcing manager at Joe Fresh : fashion industry just providing jobs to people, nothing dangerous about sewing clothes, safe industry originally

- places where people choose to work, no real other alternative

- voluntary Codes of Conduct from companies but no obligation to respect them → bill projects, laws and strict rules rejected as being against free trade

6. What are the issues the sustainable fashion brands now try to pay attention to?

- Make fashion and generate economic growth without all the negative outputs

• Safia Minney, founder and CEO of People Tree : need to care about who is going to make the product, producers and suppliers living conditions and fair wage, take into account the skills present in each producer group and then design the collection, look at the integrity of the collection, work with free-lance designers and like-minded fair trade organizations (FTOs) for the development of women, social development, environmental issues

→ “fair trade is a citizen’s response to correcting social injustice in an international trading system that is dysfunctional” : farmers and workers are not paid the living wage, environment not considered at all

- with the project Swallows : People Tree is helping an entire community (more than 3,000)

- stop considering fashion as a disposable product

• CEO of Patagonia : important for customers to recognize the impact of their consumption = part of the pb → need to question the way we consume, no real solution if no reduction of consumption = collective solution

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