Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. - Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23.3

Nadia works in a factory supplying a well-known fashion brand in Morocco. She earns the minimum wage of 70p per hour, and distributes her £31 weekly earnings as follows: “First, I give some to my parents, who don’t work. Next come my sisters [two of whom are studying]. Then I keep whatever is left for myself.” At 35, Nadia still shares a 3-room house with nine members of her family. She would have liked to be an Arabic teacher, and would love to marry and have children of her own. But her obligations to her family, coupled with her low wage, mean that these aspirations will remain unfulfilled.

The wages I get are not enough to cover the cost of food, house rent and medicine,” says Mohua, a worker in a Bangladeshi factory supplying two supermarket fashion giants. Her colleague Humayun agrees. “With my earnings it is difficult to meet living costs.” Mohua and Humayun are amongst the better-paid sewing machine operators in their factory, earning in the region of £16 per month. Yet this is still well below any credible estimate of a living wage in Bangladesh, equivalent to just 5p an hour over the 80-hour week they regularly have to work.

Maria is a homeworker in Bulgaria, sewing shoes for another well-known UK retailer. She earns 120 leva a month, yet to support her family of four, homeworking organisations say she would need to earn 400 leva. Maria is paid piece rate – a fixed amount per garment produced, rather than per hour. If she wants to earn even the minimum wage, she has to work sixteen hours a day; to earn more, the whole family, including her children, has to help with the work. On top of this, Maria also has to cope with irregular payments and with knowing that she is being paid less than other homeworkers doing the same work in the nearby town. Maria sums up her situation like this: “nothing is secure. Life is much harder than it used to be. Instead of going forwards, we are going backwards”.

These are everyday examples of life for the people who make our clothes, the world over. Time and time again we see that poverty wages, long working hours and bad working conditions are the rule, not the exception, no matter which high street retailers we buy from. This is not news: the fashion industry has been criticised for these problems for more than a decade, with little change made and companies still unwilling to ensure that workers earn a decent wage.

Yet in an industry worth billions of pounds, they can afford to. Philip Green is the owner of Topshop, Bhs, and a host of other high street brand names. Two years ago, he claimed a £1.2 billion dividend, enough to double the salaries of Cambodia’s entire garment workforce for 8 years.² He paid Kate Moss a reported £3 million pounds to put her name to a Topshop line of clothing: a Mauritian worker in a factory that supplies Green’s Arcadia group would have to work for almost 4,000 years to earn that much.³
Coleen McLoughlin, fiancée of footballer Wayne Rooney, earned £1.5 million pounds as a spokesmodel for George at Asda,⁴ and it’s unlikely that she had to work 80-hour weeks like Bangladeshi workers producing for George regularly do. Coleen’s £3000 Hermes Birkin handbag⁵ costs more than a Bangladeshi garment worker would earn in 16 years. The lowest-paid models at London Fashion Week will pocket £125 for just one hour’s work,⁶ more than four months’ salary for a Vietnamese garment worker.⁷

Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco, was paid £4.6 million in salary and share bonuses in 2007 - enough to pay the annual wages of more than 25,000 Bangladeshi garment workers who supply Tesco.⁸ With his £2.3 million salary and bonuses in 2007, Stuart Rose, M&S' Chief Executive, could have doubled the annual wages of nearly 12,000 garment workers in Sri Lanka.⁹
The contrast between young women working at the bottom of the supply chain and the stars and chief executives at the other could not be starker: the industry fails to pay its poorest workers enough for them to cover their living costs or afford basic needs such as supporting a family, while paying vast sums to models and chief executives here in the UK.

When fashion companies speak about this issue in public, normal behaviour is complacency and misleading spin. If a brand makes a public commitment to a living wage, it must take that seriously, rather than implying that because it has endorsed the living wage standard, it is respected in its supply chain.

Only a couple of fashion brands will admit publicly that working conditions in their supply chains are significantly below what is desirable; the vast majority continue to hoodwink the public by telling them that everything is fine, and that examples cited in the media and by campaigners are just glitches. What makes this duplicity so breathtaking is that companies have ample evidence that poor working conditions are systematic throughout their supply chains: when people perpetuate the idea that most garment workers' rights are respected, that living wages are paid, that workers making their clothes have decent jobs, they are just plain wrong. Either they have been misled, or they must be doing the misleading themselves.

Part of the battle in researching Let’s Clean Up Fashion has been persuading companies to admit this truth, a rhetorical shift for which we have commended those that conceded. With a couple of notable exceptions, those that do admit the problems have very little to show on the issues we raise: they tend to agree that something must be done on a sector-wide level, but then sit back and wait for it to happen. Most disappointingly, some brands who have more recently engaged with ethical trading, from whom we had hoped for significant progress this year, seem not to have grasped the gulf between what most companies do on labour rights and what needs to be done to have a serious impact on working conditions.

Fashion brands have the money and power to do the right thing by the people who enable them to profit. How many more stories of exploitation will we have to hear before the industry takes responsibility and cleans up?