 Fast fashion is not the problem, right? It's the scapegoat. That doesn't mean that fast fashion isn't a problem. It's just not the problem. It's not the only problem. Fast fashion, you know what that is. It's that ever-changing need to have the latest beautiful things at a bargain price, that club-ready piece of clothing, the status symbol shoe, or that sparkly thingamajig you just found at the mall. But that cheap statement piece comes at a price. The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world after the oil and gas sector. It's also famously unfair to its workers, the majority of whom are women. While there has been a lot of talk about female empowerment, the reality is that most women who toil on the factory floor remain in poverty for most of their lives. There was a lot of attention on bad workplace conditions in Bangladesh and other locations in the global south after the tragic collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka. Ten years ago this month, 1,124 garment workers lost their lives. But garment factories also exist in the global north. Last week the US Department of Labor released a report on garment workers in Los Angeles and said that some were getting paid as little as $1.58 an hour. The report also said that 80% of factories had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act. The industry has a murderous disregard for human life. That's how today's guest Minha Pham puts it. She's an associate professor in media studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and author of Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Also joining us is Dina Siddiqui, an expert in labor in Bangladesh garment factories. Dina Siddiqui is an associate professor at New York University. They are here to discuss the anniversary of the tragic Rana Plaza collapse, how much has changed and how far we still have to go. Both of you, I'm really super honored that you both are here to take the time to speak with us and welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Dina, it's the 10th anniversary of the tragic disaster at Rana Plaza when five garment factories collapsed and killed 1,100 garment workers and injured 2,500 others. Can you give us a picture of who went to work there? Most of the people that day were primarily young women. Many married, supporting families, all supporting families with their wages, all part of what we might call the gendered racialized labor force in the global south at the very bottom of the global production change. Now the story of Rana Plaza, the story that we don't hear, we do hear that the upper floors of the building had been illegally constructed. Okay, the building itself had cracks. Cracks had developed the day before the collapse. It was a shopping complex more than anything else, right? So the bank and the stores, other stores immediately closed down. What is interesting is that the management of those five garment factories, several of whom were compliant by the way with existing corporate social audits, the garment factories insisted that their workers come in the day after the cracks were made visible. The question is why? The supervisors and the managers and the owners had global production deadlines that they could not afford to miss. So let me just ask you to slow down a tiny bit. So you're saying that it was very evident that there were cracks and the building was very dangerous. Yes. And the factory owners or the company, the managers of the garment factories asked their workers, regardless of these very obvious dangers to come into work. Absolutely. Everybody else in that building had told their workers not to come at all. Got it. So the garment factory owner felt he couldn't stop production or didn't want to stop production. Why did the workers go in? They knew that there were cracks. The workers clearly did not feel they had the right to say no. Because they were threatened with dismissal. They were owed wages already. Those are everyday conditions in the garment industry. Their choice was risk dismissal and possible starvation and eviction, whatever, or risk their lives. And this is the choice that we will see Bangladeshi garment workers face over and over in different iterations. Because it seems as though the problem is only a local governance problem. The government is corrupt and allowed for these three extra stories to be built, which it did. The factory owners are greedy, so they're making workers work despite all the risks. But there are other global considerations. Partly what you're talking about is like, who is to blame now? And where was the blame placed? There is no one person who can be blamed. But who was blamed depended on where you were in Bangladesh? The focus was on punishing the owner of the building who also owned the factories, Mr. Rana. And a lot of activists wanted him thrown in jail. In North America, where I was at the time, a lot of activists then began to think about the brands and put pressure on the brands. But because the government was blamed, there was a real discourse of the backwardness of a third world national space. So it's these Bangladeshi managers, the government needs to be told to not be so corrupt. And the owners need to fix their factories. The solution that was offered, which is often talked about as a game changer, this Bangladesh Accord on fire safety and building safety, really, it was a very narrow problematic thing. And it crowded out other things that other activists were doing on the ground in Bangladesh. So you were talking about an agreement or a one stop solution that was created post this one disaster, although from what I understand from both of you, these are ongoing disasters every day. But there was this one agreement. Can I turn to you, Minha, to explain a little bit about what with the problem with this agreement was and maybe just very quickly, what what is the agreement that we're talking about? Yeah, so the Accord on fire and building safety in Bangladesh is a initiative that was designed and imagined and really considered from the perspective of international NGOs, from the perspective of corporations, from the perspective of brands, right? And as Dina is saying, it focused very narrowly on making sure that buildings are structurally sound. So that already begins to tell us what the problem is, not only kind of the narrow definition of safety, right? Which is just about, you know, the physical structural soundness of buildings. But really the problem with initiatives like this one and there are others is that safety is constructed and imagined from the brand or the factory owners or from this kind of corporate point of view rather than a worker's point of view. And this is why these kinds of initiatives are frustrating, but also why they're ineffective, right? Because safety is a much larger problem, right? Is a much more expansive, a much more complex problem than whether or not the building is going to collapse on you. You know, I'm not trying to make light of the fact that the buildings have to be safe. Yes, right. But what do we mean by safety? If you talk to workers, safety means having a workplace free of physical, sexual, verbal assault. Safety is getting paid on time. Safety is about making sure that when something, you know, like COVID or something else happens, that brands don't, quote unquote, cancel their orders. They didn't cancel orders. They actually stiffed workers of pay, right? There was a massive wage theft. These kinds of things having to take out debt in order to make up for the pay that you're not going to get or that you won't get for years. These create unsafe working conditions, not having the freedom of association, not having childcare, not having maternity leave, create unsafe conditions of labor that, you know, initiative like the Accord, the Bangladesh Accord, don't even begin to imagine. That Accord basically was like, as you're saying, it was very basically about structures, a structural thing that we're going to ensure at the very basic level that the building that you're going into will not collapse. Right. That seems like a very basic, basic thing. That's very basic. And if it could actually even do that, that would be, that would be something, right? That would be a step. But in fact, we found that it's quite ineffective because the signatories volunteer to sign up. And that's why you'll see on Instagram, for example, or TikTok, social media users, you know, trying to put pressure on certain brands to become signatories and they're shaming brands that are not signatories. But being a signatory simply means that you say, yes, we want safe factories. There's no oversight. There's no regulation. Dina's already mentioned this, right? That the Rana Plaza factory passed and audited just months before. You know, without oversight, without regulation, without third party oversight, these initiatives, they make brands that are signing on to these initiatives. They make these brands look good. Consumers feel good about these brands. Yeah. But there's no follow through. Yeah. I mean, I know I was like, oh, great. This thing is at least people are signing on to this. Dina, you wanted to add something to that. I just want to add one of the things that something like the Accord did not problematize the transnational aspects of production. What I was talking about, why managers feel that workers have to come to work. It just increased the powers of the brands over Bangladeshi factory owners. If Bangladeshi factory owners did not comply, quote unquote, with what was the rules in the Accord, brands threatened to leave. The Accord is fantastic for the brands. They don't even have to pay for all that the upkeeps, the remediations within factories. So a lot of very small factories just closed down. Workers, some Bangladeshi workers were afraid of the Accord because all it did was it was one more act from outside that closed down their factories. But it also allowed because of this so-called reputational damage to Bangladesh, brands in the last 10 years have paid Bangladesh to make the same products, a pair of trousers, for increasingly lower prices. OK, so brands are squeezing Bangladesh at the same time that they're telling Bangladeshi factory owners that they must be better to their workers. It's not simply about worker safety. And it's not that I'm supporting these garment factory owners, but I am looking at it transactionally. One of the things that you told me also that was really kind of really stuck with me is that the the price of each garment is actually gone down since Rana Plaza. It's so interesting to actually talk to workers inside Bangladesh, because what they say is that there's a basically speeding up of production. So now increasingly workers more and more have completely inhuman targets every day, but we do have to remember what happens if you just have an intervention in one place and don't look at things systematically. And I do realize how hard it is to look at things systematically. But I think we have to stop celebrating before. Minha, you mentioned while you talked about the pandemic and a lot of this wage theft that happened during the pandemic. Can you describe what happened during lockdown? One of the things that I think make it difficult to talk about Covid's impact on garment factories is because we actually are completely misunderstanding the relationship between Covid. What happened with garment factory workers? Covid didn't change the situation for garment factory workers. What Covid did was it was used as an excuse, right, to, quote unquote, cancel orders. The reason that I, you know, cancel orders en masse, the reason that, and this is exactly what Dina's talking about, that we have to kind of have this kind of global perspective, right, or this more systematic perspective, that these contracts between quote unquote suppliers and buyers, which again, even that language is misleading, right? When brands call themselves buyers, what they're doing, they're saying that we are not responsible as employers of these workers, that we are clients, that we are buyers. But when brands cancel orders, what they're doing is they're exercising a contractual right that they have written into these contracts. So this kind of exploitation, the kind of what what's also known as the power of exit, that brands have the power of exit. They can take away orders even after the order. They can decide that they don't want an order even after the order has been created, after the order has been shipped, after the order has been delivered at any point. And these kinds of decisions contractually are the privilege of the entitlement of brands written into these contracts. And so when we're thinking about the thing like, how do we make, you know, the supply chain more equitable, which is such a huge problem. And almost on my worst days, it feels impossible, right? Because you have like, you have to get to the kind of the minutia of these contracts, which are super boring, right? This is not the sexy part of, you know, ethical fashion of the conversation about ethical fashion. But it's the contracts between buyers and suppliers. It's international labor laws. It's international trade laws, border policies, immigration policies. All of these things contribute to the kind of wage theft, the mass wage theft that we saw, particularly after COVID became an everyday, you know, experience for garment workers. Yeah, one of the things I really appreciated reading from both of you. And I think Dina, I read it in one of the pieces that you sent me, which is that we think about these things at these big moments. You know, this happened, Rana Plaza or the pandemic forced this large sort of spotlight on these areas. But actually these are, as Minha is saying, every day, this is every day. These contracts are in place every day. This could happen at any moment. And it sounds like does happen. Workers and factory owners and factory managers do not have power in these contracts. Just as the supply chain and it's kind of the way that it's so long and dense and convoluted is long, dense and convoluted by design so that brands can't be held responsible. It's just impossible. The supply chain is really, we think of it as a kind of a linear chain sometimes when people talk about it, like one thing, you know, one thing happens and another thing happens and another thing happens. But in fact, it's a much more convoluted network of actors, organizations, processes, practices that move a product from, you know, the sourcing of raw materials all the way to where meets the end user, the consumer, right? All of those processes and because garments and because, you know, shoes and handbags and everything are oftentimes made in piecemeal in very different places. This is not linear processes. This is a really complex web that we're talking about that, by the way, is not fixed. It changes. This, you know, the supply chain changes and gets reconfigured with every new product or every new collection when places started shutting down from COVID. I saw a lot of media reports, a lot of social media discourse shaming the brands for doing something illegal. And that's really frustrating because when we think about these things as illegal or as exceptional, then what we're missing is that these are the everyday conditions. This is the norm and that is actually the problem. Deena, I've heard you. You've said that a garment worker can can be seen as both essential at one moment and expendable at another. It is all related to the way in which work is organized in the supply chain. And that's where I think the essential and expendable part comes in. And you see one side very clearly during the pandemic, the way the system works. And this is also very legal, is Bangladesh factory owners actually borrow from banks by all of the supplies that they need. And it's only after they've shipped the goods and the goods have entered the docks, sometimes even the stores, that they will be paid by the brands until they are paid by the brands. They cannot pay their workers on the whole. And that is truer of smaller factories than larger factories. But that's the system that is the legal system. Bangladesh factory owners for about five minutes spoke up right in the New York Times, all of that about how they were going to, you know, renegotiate this relationship, but they couldn't. When did they speak up? When were you talking about at the beginning of? Oh, 2020, people were beginning to see the different notes of power in the supply chain and the uneven distribution of risk. So they were all very vocal for a while, but then they want their orders back. So they're all very quiet now. It's so interesting. Because the industry is huge, it's the largest foreign exchange earner. It's Bangladeshi garment workers are seen as, you know, prime symbols of the nation's march to modernity, all of that, which means that the government really cares about the industry. And the workers are very often caused as national heroines, you know, laboring for the nation. And during the pandemic, what happened is garment factories were kept open for whenever there could be orders. And these managers would just get on the phone, call the workers in, and then the workers would be seen as essential to the health of the nation, quite literally. As soon as the orders dried up, the workers would be told to go home. So they were essential, but also very expendable. And again, they had the same choice. Do I stay home, observe lockdown? Or do I go and starve? Or do I go into the workplace and risk getting COVID and perhaps die? We're talking about 2020. So it's the same choice. They have different situations. Right. And we saw this in Los Angeles, California too, right? The same kind of thing Dina reminded us, right, that this is not a Bangladeshi problem. This is an international, this is a, you know, this is a global industry problem. And it's easy to think of, you know, oh gosh, those people over there, right? They're, they don't care about humanity. They're, they don't care about safety. This happened in California, right? So the Garment Workers Center in Los Angeles, you know, their members are reporting exactly the same thing in 2020, also being kind of held up as heroes, because now of course factories shifted to making masks for a while when we were wearing cloth masks, right? But oftentimes coming in without, you know, obviously without health insurance, without safety protocols, oftentimes without masks, risking COVID in California for, you know, peace rate wages. I think one of the sort of, you know, the ethical fashion movement, one of the tenants of it I think is, you know, make clothing in North America. And, you know, the made in America kind of idea and what you're talking about as well, we are in America. And we still are having many of the same issues. We have the same issues, in fact. Yeah, there's, there are so many things that frustrate me about the quote unquote discourse, right? About ethical fashion. I, I tried to work out some of those frustrations in, in my latest book, but, you know, and, and one of the reasons that I love talking to Dina, we've been on a couple of panels together is because we share the same frustration, you know, but this idea that as long you make sure that your products are made in the United States, that somehow you're making an ethical consumer choice is frustrating in its kind of racism, right? So there's, you know, the underside of that made in the USA, made in Brooklyn, made in California is the underside of it is, there's a kind of nativist undercurrent to this, right? That somehow here is better than there and for garment workers in the United States, while the numbers are much less now post, you know, NAFTA, post deregulation, the deregulation of international trade and labor, what that does is it actually really ignores the fact that garment workers here are protesting and fighting these unsafe, unfair, exploitative conditions. We ignore that because we, you know, we're focused on, gosh, those poor Bangladeshi garment workers, those poor Pakistanis, those poor Vietnamese, and their poor backward corrupt governments and their poor, you know, but you know what? They're so happy to be able to make, you know, poverty wages. That's the best they can do. The truth is that garment workers everywhere in the world are making poverty wages, you know, predominantly, right? And so we don't pay attention to what's happening in our backyard. We don't pay attention. We're just not listening to workers, even those that are, you know, are here, that are local. Can we also talk, Minha, because I know that you write a lot about this, but we've seen these global calls from everyday people, but also large non-profit organizations to reform fast fashion. And there's the huge who major close campaign and other hashtag sort of campaigns that circulate on Twitter or on Instagram. I have to admit that as an outsider, these campaigns look good, you know? They seem to be making a difference, but what's your take on them? You know, I think that consumer driven initiatives to reform the global industry, which, you know, we can't just place the blame on fast fashion, right? There are so many luxury designers who have also been accused of having their clothes made in sweatshop conditions. This is not a new thing. There are no such thing as like fast fashion factories, right? And designer factories. Oftentimes, one factory is making clothes for just, you know, a wide range of brands across the price point spectrum. So already blaming fast fashion is already kind of part of the mythology of the ethical fashion discourse that doesn't really, it makes us feel better because I just won't buy H&M. I just won't buy Forever 21, right? But, you know, I'll buy a designer brand, I'll pay more money, and therefore, because I'm paying more money, I'm more ethical, right? But this kind of idea that consumerism or just the right consumerism will fix this problem is really dangerous. The who buys your clothing, that kind of attitude is, you know, again, it's part of that. It reflects that kind of consumer driven understanding of ethical fashion, which is as long as I can figure out which brands to buy, right? Then that everything is better. I'm improving. I'm helping out. I'm helping to make this global industry more ethical. But as we've been saying, this is not a brand problem, right? It isn't as though we can have a list of bad brands and a list of good brands. This is a structural problem. This is a systemic problem. This is a capitalism problem, yeah. Dina? As you were talking, I was thinking, of how also blaming everything on fast fashion is also, it's a very elitist kind of thing because who ultimately buys clothes from H&M and whatever. It's not the people who are also buying clothes from Louis Vuitton or whoever. You can see what I mean. We understand what you're saying. Yeah, right. Clearly not a consumer of luxury goods. But the point is that, and I have a colleague you probably know her, Jessamine Hatcher, who's written about how it's the immigrant Nepali nail salon worker who needs to dress well, right? Who is buying cheap clothes but needs to look fashionable. And she is being blamed for the condition of Bangladeshi or other garment workers. In the end, the only ethical consumer is the well-off ethical consumer in that system too. And there's something terribly wrong about that. I know. I have to admit, I did ask you to, Dina. I'm like, where? What? So should I be looking for made by union labor, tags? I always buy made in Bangladesh. I will not not buy made in Bangladesh because I have never met a garment worker in Bangladesh who says, I need to have this factory shut down right now. They may want improvements. They may hate their managers. There may be a lot of things but they want those orders to come in. As they say, I have to save the industry and that can be obviously co-opted in different ways. I'm not buying something that says made in Bangladesh simply because you know about horrible conditions. Certainly does not help the worker. Okay. Let's talk about some big picture if we could because it seems like we've talked about a lot of things that have happened since the collapse of the Rana Plaza factories and many of the solutions like the accord that you guys talked about, the individual or the nonprofit campaigns, they all seem problematic in a way. And so what really needs to happen? If we could start with you, Minhan, what do you think really needs to happen? So much of the work being done and the media work, the organizing work under the umbrella of ethical fashion is well intentioned, right? And so I don't want to suggest that these people aren't doing what they think is the best thing which you know fair enough. I want to say that straight off. I think what needs to be done is that we have to take this more seriously. If we want policy makers, legislators, if we want consumers, if we want brands to take this more seriously then we have to take this more seriously which is to say that we have to do our homework. We have to really understand what the supply chain looks like not just from the Western consumers perspective, right? We have to understand things like what I said, the boring stuff. We have to understand how export processing zones work and why they were even established. We have to understand international trade laws, how contracts between buyers and sellers work. This is what's creating the structural conditions. Hashtag campaigns can be useful because they do absolutely raise awareness but I want to make sure that we're raising awareness and you know we're putting attention to the actual pressure points, right? The places where things can happen. Understanding who makes your clothes. Who makes your clothes? The worker is exploited. That's who makes your clothes, right? It doesn't matter if it's in the global south or in the global north or wherever or the global south in the global north, right? Which there are many, you know? So the kind of pinpointing of bad brands etc. What that does and we have to recognize is it lets consumers off the hook because I am not buying there. I know who's making my clothes. You don't. The truth is brands often don't know. Who's making their clothes? Because again the supply chain in its density and its opaqueness and its, right? They don't want to know. Brands don't want to know. Brands don't know. Then we can't possibly know, right? Sometimes workers don't know, right? Who they're making clothes for. And so that kind of the transparency as it stands right now in this current system is a myth, right? The idea that we're trying to make more transparent supply chains is really a myth under this particular system. So that's where we have to start. We have to actually do our homework. We have to do the reading. We have to do the kind of nitty gritty research that people in fact have been doing for a long time and that workers can tell you about that late that organizers can tell us about. There's so many myths around ethical fashion whether it's what I call the fast fashion policy whether it's this idea that unions are going to save us or going to save workers. Some there are some unions that the local unions don't get recognized, right? The ones that have any kind of platform are internationally recognized unions but most workers are not part of those unions. And so again, it's the kind of willingness to really see the system rather than just kind of the parts that have been kind of fed to us, right? As what's important. I'm a professor, so I just do the homework. Yeah. Do your reading. When you're talking about the fast fashion fallacy you're talking about this idea that the blame lies in fast fashion. Fast fashion is not the problem, right? It's the scapegoat. That doesn't mean that fast fashion isn't a problem. It's just not the problem. It's not the only problem because consumers, media, et cetera have placed so much attention on fast fashion. In fact, fast fashion brands are often in compliance, right? Are more in compliance than the designer brands or the independent brands that really fly under all of our radars. And so there's a kind of moral consumerism that happens when we talk about boycott fast fashion. It's just not really where the problem is. It reflects a problem. It is not the problem. All right. Dina, I'm going to turn to you now for our last bit of this conversation. What do you think really needs to happen? Just a simple question to end things. All right, yeah. I would say you've got to inform yourself if you're a student, you really need to educate yourself. But as a consumer, I think you have to understand that there are no easy, simple, one-stop solutions. I love the idea of having a list of good companies versus bad companies because ideally that's what people would want. Give me the list so I can live my life, right? I think the problem is, especially in North America, it's not so much there in Europe, is this unwillingness to name capitalism as the problem. That's really there. It's so much easier to say it's one bad brand and then let's make them pay up. And as you say, it's a systemic thing and naming capitalism becomes really hard. I mean, I find that I am often invited to talk about this, but once I start talking about capitalism, I'm not invited back usually to the same place. It's interesting. I mean, some people want the reform line, the fast fashion, how to fix that line. I see in Bangladesh the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse has really allowed for people to bring back what has been forgotten, one way in which if people, students, activists, others are interested, they really also need to figure out who is actually struggling for workers' rights in places like Bangladesh. I've spoken to a mother whose daughter has disappeared. I mean, they're tending to those workers, at those people at the same time as they're trying to helping other workers organize. So there is a lot of stuff happening that you won't hear about. Perhaps they also want a little bit of visibility. Yes. Dina, you just said that sometimes people invite you and they want the reformist line, and I want to just be very clear about what that means. The reformist line is that it is the good brands and the bad brand list, which suggests that if we can just get rid of these bad brands, then everything else will be okay. If we can just get structurally sound building, everything else will be okay. If I just know who made my clothes, everything else will be okay. This is what's called a reformist reform, which is to say that basically the system is okay. It just needs to be tweaked. It needs to be tweaked of the bad brands. The fast fashion has to be gotten rid of. If we just do these little things, if you just shop better, if you just spend a little bit more money, then everything will be okay. And what that actually does besides making us feel good as consumers, because we feel like we're doing our part, what that does is it leaves the rest of the system intact. It suggests that, again, that Rana Plaza, that would happen after COVID, that these were exceptions rather than the rule. And so reformist reforms do harm, in fact, because they take the attention away from the structural problems and they make us feel like if we could just tweak the thing, then everything else will be okay. It actually legitimizes the system, because the system is basically okay, but for A, B, and C, things that we can fix. Thank you. Thank you both so much. That was such a really fascinating conversation and so left me with so much to think about. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Tina, always a pleasure. It was lovely. It was wonderful. You've got me thinking. We should do this more often. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. I don't know about you, but I found that conversation challenging. It personally challenged me to do better and think better and read more about fast fashion and about garment industries. If you want to get into this conversation with me on Twitter, reach out. I'm on Twitter at writevenita. That's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A. And please tag our producers at ConversationCA so they can join in too. Don't forget to use the hashtag, Don't Call Me Resilient. And if you'd like to read more about the episode content and some of the things that Dina and Minha talked about, you can go to theconversation.com. We have all kinds of information in our show notes with ideas and links to additional stories and research. And if you like what you heard today, please share this podcast with a friend or a family member and think about leaving us a review. Those ratings really help us out. Finally, if you have ideas about new stories that you would love to hear us cover, we'd especially love to hear from you. Email us at dcmr at theconversation.com. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab. The lab is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Veneto Srivastava. Bokeh Sai Si is our producer. Ali Nicholas is our assistant producer and student journalist. Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Our audio editor is Ramatula Sheikh. Atika Kaki is our audience development and visual innovation consultant. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.