Around the world, garment factories hum for up to 20 hours a day. Workers, most of them women, are bent over machines, cutting patterns and folding clothes for long hours in dismal conditions, and paid a fraction of a living wage for their troubles. In Bangladesh, men and women work in garment factories for 80-100 hours a week for 5p an hour, not earning enough to cover their basic expenses, let alone send money to the families they left behind in villages around the country.
These scenes repeat themselves in country after country, in places like Bangladesh, Honduras, Morocco, India and China where jobs are scarce. Workers know that they could be replaced overnight, and so have little leverage to bargain for better pay and conditions.
The industry does not have to work this way. It is retailers like Asda, Tesco, Matalan, Mothercare and their competitors who drive down wages in developing countries when they insist on paying less for the goods they sell.
War on Want has been sounding the alarm on this issue for months, and we are fighting for the rights of garment workers around the world in two ways. First, we support organisations in Bangladesh and Honduras that fight for the rights of workers. The
National Garment Workers Federation (NGWF) in Bangladesh organises workers to secure their basic rights like the minimum wage and safe working conditions. In Honduras,
Colectiva de Mujeres Hondurenas (CODEMUH) exposes the abuses in garment factories and lobbies the Honduran government to enact legislation to protect workers.
In the UK, War on Want campaigns to raise awareness of the human cost of cheap clothes, and puts pressure on the government to force companies to respect the rights of workers all along their supply chain. For more information on these issues, see our two recent reports,
Let’s Clean Up Fashion (September 2007), which looks at the injustices of the fashion industry around the world, and
Fashion Victims (December 2006), which takes a close look at the industry in Bangladesh.
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