Year in Review: How 2023 Became the Year of the Garment Worker Protest
2023 saw a groundswell of activism from the people who make the world’s clothes.
While protests from garment workers and their supporters, whether in the form of picket lines, social media activations, disruptive activity, hoaxes and stunts and even litigation aren’t new or uncommon, a confluence of the post-pandemic economic fallout, untethered spikes in the cost of living, building global uncertainty, the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse and an expansion of digital spaces has conspired to make them more visible than ever. To put it another way, workers are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.
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This was thrown into relief when violent demonstrations ignited across Bangladesh, where factory workers poured into the streets first to demand an increase in the long-stagnant minimum wage, then to object that the pay hike was nowhere near enough to sustain them. At least four people have died in the clashes, including three who were reportedly shot at by security forces, further inflaming tensions.
Abiramy Sivalogananthan, South Asia coordinator at the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), a workers’ rights group, noticed a bubbling up of desperation not long after Covid-19 reared its head, prompting scores of North American and European brands and retailers to leverage an emergency clause known as force majeure to suspend or outright cancel their orders at their Asian manufacturing hubs. Suppliers, many already operating on razor-thin margins because of the constant downward pressures they face from pinchpenny buyers, found themselves on the edge of insolvency, seemingly overnight. Their employees, too, forfeited whatever little financial security they had.
In the three years since, most of the world’s biggest names have bounced back. Many manufacturers, however, have not, and workers are arguably worse off than ever. According to an AFWA survey of more than 2,000 garment workers across six countries, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Pakistan, respondents lost on average of three months pay during 2020, leaving them unable to shell out for food or rent without racking up debt, as well as exacerbating the gender pay gap in an industry that leans heavily on toiling women.
There’s a sense of deep hypocrisy, Sivalogananthan said, of brands like Nike, which one campaigner has described as the “most unresponsive,” that talk a good game about women’s empowerment yet leave the ones who produce their goods hanging by a thread. Workers at 18 Nike contractors in South and Southeast Asia reported losing some $28 million due to wage losses in 2020, even as the Just Do It company raked in $37.4 billion in profits and paid its CEO, John Donahue, $53 million the same year.
At the end of February, the AFWA decided to “escalate” its engagement with Nike, partnering with the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum (GLJ-ILRF) and 20 garment-sector unions in those same countries to file an international labor complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Washington, D.C., to accuse the sportswear maker of violating the inter-governmental organization’s guidelines for responsible business conduct by multinational enterprises
The momentum only increased over the summer, when workers created a human chain in Bangladesh, demonstrated in the industrial zones of Pakistan and Sri Lanka and held placards emblazoned with “Apakah ini yang namanya kesetaraan?”—“Is this called equality?”—outside Nike outlets in Indonesia. In May, representatives from the AFWA rallied behind Illinois representative Jesús “Chuy” García on Capitol Hill when he reintroduced a bill that would stop companies from buying back their own shares, which he said artificially inflates stock prices and enrich executives “at the expense of workers, consumers and the U.S. economy.” The Swoosh has so far poured $18 billion into stock buybacks, money that would have compensated workers almost 640 times over.
“At this moment, workers are seeing a return to normal for business that was built on them being unpaid for months during the early days of the pandemic,” said Sahiba Gill, senior staff attorney at GLJ-ILRF. “In 2023, the inequality of who wins and loses in the global fashion industry is more glaring than ever—that’s what workers are responding to.”
There’s also deep concern from workers that they’re coming out of Covid only to plunge into national political and financial crises (as in the case of Pakistan and Sri Lanka) or succumb to rollbacks of hard-won progress in human and labor rights (such as in Indonesia and Myanmar). “These workers are fighting to feed themselves and their families and for the right to decent work and decent pay in a global economic system that has long been built on their exploitation,” Gill said.
Current circumstances have served as a tipping point, said Kalpona Akter, founder and executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity and a former child garment worker. “With the ongoing recession and rising inflation, the gap between the CEOs at the top of the supply chain and the workers at the base is wider than ever before,” she said. “Workers and activists are fed up with the excuses of corporations who can afford to pay their executives millions of dollars, while the workers who make their products live in poverty.”
Akter said that the public has been fed a “story” by fashion purveyors that they are doing everything possible to protect the workers in their supply chain for the past two decades, yet “this could not be further from the truth,” since it’s the purchasing practices of brands that drive worker exploitation in the first place.
Confronted with public remonstrations, brands typically respond in one of two ways: ignore and pray things eventually die down, or vehemently dispute the allegations by referring to their commitment to ethics and human rights that their codes of conduct enshrine. But naming and shaming can sometimes prove effective, even if the results can take months or years to manifest. In January, Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. agreed to distribute $1 million among the axed employees of Vald’or, a Haiti supplier that made clothing for its licensee Centric Brands, one year after the factory shuttered. Two months later, Target pushed a supplier in Guatemala to fork over tens of thousands of dollars in severance and back pay to seven former workers, albeit nearly two years after they were illegally fired.
Akter has been at the frontline of protests against Adidas over its alleged “refusal” to take responsibility for workers’ rights in its supply chain, including the $11.7 million activists say it owes victims of wage theft in Cambodia in 2021, even leading a delegation to the triple-stripe firm’s Portland, Ore. campus last December. The reception, it was noted, was a “cold” one. But until brands take responsibility for the “rights of workers in their supply chain, workers and activists will continue to organize protests and campaigns on brands,” she said.
This year, protests against Adidas, part of the broader #PayYourWorkers campaign endorsed by 260 trade unions and labor-rights organizations worldwide, have fired on every possible cylinder. There was the time in January, for instance, when the Clean Clothes Campaign and the merry pranksters known as The Yes Men tricked Berlin Fashion Week attendees with a faux-co-CEO and a “Derelicte”-style line of clothes “baked-in” with the literal blood, sweat and tears of Cambodian garment workers. U.K. organization Labour Behind the Label would pick up the baton in March by “hijacking” multiple advertising spaces at bus stops in Bristol and Manchester to call attention to what it said was Adidas’s “woke-washing” during International Women’s Day. A few weeks afterward, protestors in Oregon would “shut down” a breakfast event featuring Rupert Campbell, the sportswear giant’s head of North America, by crashing the swanky Sentinel Hotel in Portland. In May, they returned to the city to question Adidas at the Sustainable Fashion Forum, forcing the conference to wrap up before schedule.
The Yes Men would snooker members of the press and public once more in November, when a fake Adidas executive and an equally bogus DJ Marshmello appeared at Web Summit in Lisbon to announce that the company would be paying tens of thousands of workers in virtual dollars, allowing them to live it up in an “AdiVerse” in the cloud with luxuries they would otherwise be unable to afford in the physical realm. People went wild, the activist hoaxsters said, and “Marshmello” was even mobbed for autographs.
There’s an element of “shock and awe” in some of these strategies. Part of it, Christie Miedema, campaign and outreach coordinator at the Clean Clothes Campaign said with a laugh, is so Adidas, or whichever brand it’s targeting, can never be sure if there isn’t an activist behind them. But there’s also a more pragmatic reason for joining forces with other organizations and other trade unions: to demonstrate strength and show that none of this is going away. “We are this massive coalition all over the world,” she said “We’re everywhere.”
And if the disruptions are “awkward” for brand representatives, just think about how much worse it must feel for workers to always be on the brink of starvation or homelessness, Miedema said. The more public the remonstrance is, the more activists hope to encourage consumers to “raise their voices” as well, she said. And while the form of the protest may vary, the message is ultimately the same: brands are responsible for the welfare of workers, even if they don’t own the factories that employ them. Already, the German Supply Chain Act has gone further than the OECD by making the latter’s recommendation that businesses “avoid and address adverse impacts related to workers” mandatory for larger German-based enterprises. As early as next year, the European Union’s percolating corporate sustainability due diligence directive could do the same for the entire 27-country bloc.
Buyers should “stop avoiding responsibility,” said Athit Kong, president of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers’ Democratic Union, which is among a slew of organizations urging Adidas to enter into a binding agreement that includes paying into a severance guarantee fund so factory closures don’t leave workers in the lurch. “Factories are continuing to close down, so things are not getting better. A lot of workers worry.”
Kong said that brands have “superpowers.” Take the oft-debated subject of living wages. “They claim they’re supporting a living wage but actually they’re exploiting cheap labor. This is ridiculous, right?” he said. “Do you feel like any government doesn’t want to pay a living wage to the worker if [it] could? The thing is [governments are] afraid. They’re scared. They don’t trust the brand [not to leave if wages go up.] I don’t see brands saying, ‘I will [provide] Cambodia with a five-year commitment and I will pay a living wage and our suppliers will support it.’”
If H&M Group garnered bouquets for being the only company to explicitly tell suppliers that it would absorb Bangladesh’s minimum-wage hike in its pricing, it’s because the bar is so low for brands, Anne Bienias, living wage coordinator at the Clean Clothes Campaign, wrote in a pointed admonition on the organization’s website recently. “The fact the industry and media applaud it is indicative of a thoroughly broken system,” she said. “It should be self-evident to factor in the legal minimum wage when paying for a product primarily based on manual labor.…We should all be expecting much more than this.”
H&M itself was the subject of a quieter form of protest in May when representatives from IndustriALL Global Union questioned the Swedish retailer’s decision to continue sourcing from Myanmar at its annual shareholders’ meeting. The international union federation had purchased a share in the company a few weeks before it convened in Stockholm, allowing it a seat at the table next to silver-haired Nordic pensioners, and as it turned out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which had equally strong views about H&M’s use of animal-derived materials like down feathers but was willing to swap its buckets of ersatz blood for the opportunity to bring its concerns directly in front of decision-makers. IndustriALL was willing to give boardroom diplomacy a go, too.
“I focused my question on the issue of the money that the government sector brings into Myanmar and how their foreign exchange can be used by the regime to buy weapons, ammunition, fuel and components,” said campaigns director Walton Pantland. “And H&M gave a very general response. The gist of [it] is that they haven’t decided to stay. They’ve just not decided to leave yet.”
Pantland said he wasn’t sure at the time if his words had any effect, or if H&M would simply “double down” on its position. In August, however, the fast fashion chain announced it would “gradually phase out” its presence in Myanmar, where it works with 40 suppliers. IndustriALL, which had developed a framework for a responsible withdrawal, chalked it up as a win.
Deciding how to approach a brand isn’t a straightforward one by any means. Campaigners, Pantland said, have to consider what resources they have at their disposal. Another important thing to reflect upon is the company’s sources of power, along with their potential points of weakness.
“Some companies might be particularly susceptible to public opinion, in which case, a good tactic is public demonstrations outside flagship stores with leaflets,” he said. “Other companies might have invested a lot in their ESG profile, and if they feel that that has been questioned by investors, then they will feel the pressure. So it’s a bit complicated because it requires a lot of intelligence gathering but also quite a bit of trial and error.”
More often than not, however, protests are an emotional response. When Venetia La Manna, an online content creator, stormed a Boohoo panel with fellow activists in London in February, part of her vexation stemmed from the glacial progress of billion-dollar brands that tout their ethical practices while meting out poverty wages. The fact that the all-Boohoo session had no representation from garment workers was particularly outrageous and needed to be called out, she said.
“How dare Boohoo take this platform to speak about ‘ethics’ and ‘industry collaboration’ when their garment workers in Leicester are paid 3.50 pounds an hour,” La Manna had shouted as she sprang on stage, only to be wrestled off by security guards and frog-marched toward the exit. That April, she would join members of the Rana Plaza Solidarity Collective in a remembrance march along Oxford Street, London’s busiest retail thoroughfare, stopping only to enter the storefronts of Levi Strauss & Co. and others to demand that they sign the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, a successor to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.
La Manna, who is white, sees her public activism as a way of using her privilege. Most garment workers making clothing for “highly exploitative” brands are people of color, she said, and may not be able to protest legally or without repercussions for their employment. By connecting with like-minded people, it has also brought her a sense of community.
“Covid confirmed my suspicions even further about how the fashion industry wasn’t changing enough,” she said. “I’ve also seen the rising profits of these brands. To see their profits being the highest they’ve ever been, whilst garment makers are still being denied their rights for a fair living wage adds to the frustration.”
La Manna heard that Boohoo’s stock price fell after the disruption. She isn’t sure it happened but said that was it great if it did. While she isn’t sure her efforts have changed much, she’s happy to contribute to what she sees as a changing zeitgeist, including posting “recipe” videos on Instagram—think Lululemon poppyseed muffins, Adidas pancakes and Nike nachos—that drop “truth bombs” about the companies’ behind-the-scenes actions.
“It feels as though the narrative around fast fashion has shifted over the past couple of years,” La Manna said. “And that partly could be due to the fact that people might have seen a protest take place on social media and learned about a brand that’s exploiting their workers or overproducing or whatever it is they didn’t know about before.”
Social media has become a crucial means of targeting a demographic that fashion companies increasingly prize: Gen Z, which is “coming into customer power,” as Ayesha Barenblat, founder and CEO of Remake, described it. But nothing beats hitting the pavement, as the advocacy group did alongside Workers United in New York’s Times Square this past April to urge Levi’s to sign the Pakistan extension of the Accord. When the 501 anniversary celebration took place in May, the organization redoubled its efforts online, mobilizing community members to inundate the denim giant’s Instagram with more than 1,400 comments in support of garment workers. During that “week of action” alone, Remake estimates that it reached 16 million unique users, resulting in nearly 237,000 campaign post engagements.
“We are very much boots on the ground,” she said of Remake’s campaigns. “We take our marching orders from our labor and union partners. The online action is complementary to all the in-person action that has happened.”
Indeed, activism is “very much” a collaborative effort, Barenblat said. “One of the things that annoys me is when companies talk about it just being a social media ploy, because first of all, social media is a tool, right? But what has unified [everything] is that you have our Gen Z youth ambassadors engaging on the streets, they‘ve been in stores, they‘ve been on social media, but it is the workers themselves that are reporting what’s needed. And we’re also calling on, beyond social media, [for] executive engagement.”
Remake’s petition to the heads of the “Dirty Dozen”—12 brands that have yet to sign the Pakistan Accord, including Amazon, Levi’s and Target—has amassed tens of thousands of signatures, which Barenblat says should indicate a “critical mass” for companies to rethink their lack of engagement.
“Frankly, they haven’t taken us up on a direct conversation with unions, with labor leaders—we’ve just been getting stark responses from the PR teams, you know, ‘our program works fine,’” she said of the companies she has reached out to. “It seems as though it‘s treated more as a communications headache right now, rather than trying to understand what are the legitimate safety concerns of the people making your product who have barely survived a pandemic. We’re up against shrinking wages, inflationary pressures, very difficult economic and political pictures and now, more than ever, what we need is dialogue that really centers workers’ voices.”
The thing that Nazma Akter, founder and executive director of Awaj Foundation, a Bangladeshi workers’ rights group, wants companies to understand is that workers are campaigning for basic human rights, such as food, housing, clothing, education, social security, freedom of association and dignified workplaces without sexual harassment and abuse. None of this should be contentious.
“The dollar price is increasing in my country,” said Akter, who has been banging the drum from Brussels to Manchester to Washington, D.C., for binding agreements such as the Accord, including alongside Remake. “Everything is so expensive. People cannot buy anything. People cannot eat proper food. People are so badly treated. That’s why we are screaming and shouting to hold American and European countries accountable. We need to fight because without protests, nothing happens.”
If Akter often sounds like she’s calling for a revolution, that’s because she is. And not just for garment workers but those who labor in retail, hospitality, logistics—anyone who feels ground down by the dark sides of “capitalism and neoliberalism.” Their fight is the same one, she said. All anyone wants is fair pay and safe and humane conditions.
“American workers, Bangladeshi workers, Indian workers, Dominican Republic workers, Guatemalan workers, German workers, all the workers—if one day we strike, everything will collapse,” she said. “No production, no cars running, no hospitals, nothing. Then the corporations will listen. That is why we need strong solidarity.”
