Treehugger.com features PayUpFashion and our road map for change:
Last March, a catastrophe hit Asia’s garment-producing countries. Major fashion brands canceled orders worth more than $40 billion, citing COVID-induced store closures and a severely weakened retail market, but in the process destroying the livelihoods of millions of garment workers who already struggle to get by on poverty wages.
This very reasonable request [to get factories paid back] caused the campaign to go viral over the summer and, as of December 2020, it had pushed brands including Zara, GAP, and Next to pay at least $15 billion owed to garment factories. While these successes are worth celebrating, the job is far from over. The hashtag has since morphed into a more formal movement called PayUp Fashion, which hopes to maintain the pressure on major brands to revolutionize the fashion industry, once and for all. Cline, Barenblat, and a number of other experts, non-profits, and representatives from the garment industry are involved.
Read the full story here.
“What many people might not realize is garment worker poverty is a direct result of how little brands are paying their factories for the clothes we wear. In fact, the price that brands pay to factories has gone down year-over-year over the past 20 years and declined another 12% during the pandemic despite the fact that wages should be rising. This race to the bottom makes it so that things like unemployment insurance and severance and living wages don’t get paid. It’s got to change.”
Read the full story here.
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