HUMAN TRAFFICKING & FASHION
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The textile and apparel industries are two of the largest worldwide, employing over 60 million people in nearly every region in the world.
They are also two of the most problematic, with complicated and globalized supply chains that are highly competitive and immense downward pressure to continually deliver products more cheaply and quickly. Workers at every stage of garment production, from the harvesting of raw materials like cotton and silk, to the production and embellishment of final products, are highly vulnerable to the rapidly changing demands of the global market and predatory labor schemes such as debt bondage. A number of other factors further complicate the garment industry supply chain, including widespread use of migrant labor.
Understanding and combating human trafficking within the fashion industry thus requires a multi-pronged approach that takes into account the globalized nature of the industry as well as the local and country-specific settings that currently allow such abuses to occur.
Image source: Global Slavery Index
What is human trafficking in fashion?
While the fashion and apparel industry is replete with problematic labor conditions, the use of forced or bonded labor is particularly exploitative and considered a form of human trafficking. Human trafficking may also be called trafficking in persons or modern slavery.
The International Labor Organization estimates that 25 million people worldwide work in situations of forced labor. The Global Slavery Index found that, of the products imported into G20 countries, garments are the second most at risk category to have been produced by modern slavery, accounting for $127.7 billion worth of imports per year.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, defines forced labor as “work that is performed involuntarily and under the menace of penalty... [including] situations in which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as manipulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities.” In particular, the use of debt to draw workers into labor as a means of repayment, to only find that the debt grows and can never be paid off, is known as “debt bondage” or “bonded labor”.
The Palermo Protocol, ratified by the UN General Assembly in 2000, criminalizes forced and bonded labor as forms of human trafficking.
What does human trafficking look like in the fashion industry?
Human trafficking within the fashion industry can be particularly difficult to identify and combat.
The modern fashion and apparel industry is one of the most globalized sectors of the modern economy, in the sense that it connects resources, labor, and production across almost every country in the world, and must accommodate the demands for speed, flexibility, and low cost by clothing brands and consumers.
The fashion supply chain is long and complicated but with discrete elements that can be easily replaced or moved over borders into cheaper labor markets when conditions change. Due to a lack of oversight and the easily replaceable nature of much of the labor, complicated schemes of subcontracting and competitive outsourcing often develop which are based on informal relationships and middlemen.
The pressure to produce quickly and reduce costs is then passed down to workers, who end up in the worst of conditions for the least pay or suddenly with no work at all. These conditions make fashion workers particularly vulnerable to the exploitative schemes that result in forced and bonded labor.