"Fixing Fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability", 19 February 2019

The way we make, use and throwaway our clothes is unsustainable...

Our biggest retailers have ‘chased the cheap needle around the planet’, commissioning production in countries with low pay, little trade union representation and weak environmental protection. In many countries, poverty pay and conditions are standard for garment workers, most of whom are women.

We are also concerned about the use of child labour, prison labour, forced labour and bonded labour in factories and the garment supply chain. Fast fashions’ overproduction and overconsumption of clothing is based on the globalisation of indifference towards these manual workers...

Forced labour is used to pick cotton in two of the world’s biggest cotton producing countries, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Labour exploitation is also taking place in the UK... we were told it is an open secret that some garment factories in places like Leicester are not paying the minimum wage...

We need a new economic model for fashion... The Government should change the law to require companies to perform due diligence checks across their supply chains...