Tag - garment worker

Certifications in the Fashion Industry: Fair Trade

When someone introduces you to a new ethical product, are you ever tempted to yell into the void, “What does ethical even mean?”   You’re not alone. Ethical is in, and with it slick branding and deceptively vague marketing that has the power to dress up conventional goods as wholesome and green without any change to formulation or strategy - or potentially worse, allows multinational corporations to employ the language of Corporate Social Responsibility without actually enforcing these standards. The problem...

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Power to the People: How to Raise Up the Rights of Garment Workers

She rises before dawn, puts on the well-worn clothes she laid out the night before, kisses her toddler goodbye, and hurries off into the already crowded streets. Walking up the steps to the 5 story building she has worked in since she was 16, she looks up at its shadowy form, wondering if this will be the day it comes tumbling down. The building manager has been warned a thousand times, it seems, but he insists he doesn’t have...

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The Journey of a T-Shirt

You may consider yourself an urban nomad, but, chances are, the t-shirt you’re wearing is better traveled than you. When you boil it down to its simplest form, a t-shirt is simply the fabricated version of cotton fiber that is cultivated across millions of acres of farmland in such disparate places as India, Brazil, Uzbekistan, and the USA. It is tended to by thousands of agricultural workers, harvested, then sent off to another country for processing and weaving before...

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