The garment industry around the world has been notorious for its sweatshops, these factories that maintain a modern form of slavery in developing countries, characterized by low wages, excessive overtime and inhuman working conditions, especially endured by women, who make up most of the workforce.
Being opposed to the spreading of sweatshops all over the world, Ethical Fashion followers, who belong to the environmentalist movement, advocate for fairer labour, and a better-protected environment. Their coherent but limited programme proposes to help develop small communities through the preservation of traditional crafts and the use of natural  raw or recycled materials, as stated by Lionel Astruc in his book, “Voyages aux Sources de la Mode Ethique” (Paris, Eugen Ulmer Editions, 2009). For instance, the Indian NGO, Conserve India, helps fight poverty and pollution in New Delhi, by recycling plastic bags that are then transformed into trendy bags and purses sold in Europe. In Brazil, the sportswear brand, Veja, provides jobs to workers employed in collecting latex all the while protecting the Amazon rainforest. Other development initiatives include: weaving traditional silk in Cambodia and Alpaca wool in Bolivia, or jewellery made out of Zebu horn, in Madagascar.
Workers would improve their conditions if their trade were recognized – the Indian government considers recycling, so important to shantytowns, illegal, when Delhi’s fifteen million inhabitants produce eight thousand tones of garbage each day!  Furthermore, small producers like Cambodian silk weavers would gain international and legal recognition if they could only afford the $5000 monthly fee needed to obtain a label guaranteeing quality and authenticity. 
However, the Clean Clothes Campaign, present since 1989, aims to act at a different scale, with their 200 partner organizations worldwide and offices in 12 European countries.
The World Day for Decent Work, on October 7th, 2009, brought up the desperate conditions of workers in Asia, which accounts for 60% of global garment production and employs millions of people across the continent. Once more, giant retailers such as Carrefour, Tesco, Aldi, Lidl and Wal-Mart, the latter counting for 1/3 of all US retail apparel sales, are suspected of taking advantage of their huge buying power to unfairly push harder and harder on prices. The same goes for big clothing brands like Gap, Nike and H & M. All these companies have made sure that consumers become used to buying clothes at unrealistically low prices, thus encouraging unfair trade.
It’s clear that lower prices equal lower revenue for the countries that export their goods, which don’t benefit from reinvestment of profits in their local economy or workforces. Instead, profits are used to finance marketing and advertising efforts to expand the companies market share, to buy out competitors, to pay huge managerial salaries and bigger dividends to shareholders. This model relies on the false assumption that the Northern countries’ demand for garments will continue to increase exponentially. The fact is that “Southern” workers are making more and more goods destined to already saturated “Northern” markets.
The current financial and economic crisis has re-emphasized the issue of the unequal distribution of gains from global production. As George Wehrfritz argues, in Newsweek (26 January, 2009),  “Setting a minimum wage for Asia’s poorest workers could help speed the world out of recession” because “…in today’s global economy, one plagued by overcapacity and a shortfall in demand, Asia’s ultralow factory wages are a big part of the problem – labourers there simply can’t afford to buy much.”
This concept has been promoted and supported by the Clean Clothes Campaign that came up with a new proposal for an Asia Floor Wage (AFW). National unions (from India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Hong Kong) and NGO’s in Asia make up the Asia Floor Wage Alliance based on a common wage demand to protect themselves from the threat of relocation and competition between garment-exporting countries. Debt, malnutrition, health problems and disability are only a few of the consequences of poverty wages.  Minimum legal wages are unrealistic – they don’t take under account the rising cost of living. Furthermore, trade unions and collective bargaining rights are suppressed, undermined or restricted by governments of overpopulated countries that fear to lose what they still consider being their only advantage, on the harshly competitive international market. Gender discrimination also contributes to keeping wages low since women make up 80% of the workforce.
Taking all these factors under account, the AFW pleads for a standardised minimum living wage based on the income needed by a single adult to support a family of four (2 adults and 2 children) when working a legal maximum of up to 48 hours per week, excluding overtime and bonuses. This amount would also include a “food basket” adding up to 3000 calories on a daily basis, healthcare, housing, clothing, transportation, fuel and education. The so-called ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) has been set at 475 PPP$ per week by the Asia Floor Wage for 2009. 
As Ashim Roy, General Secretary of the New Trade Union Initiative, (India) put it: “The Asia Floor Wage is an industrial level collective bargaining strategy…” An active proposal that would ‘clean’ the unethical aspects of the clothing industry  while sparing us the charity-self-pity outlook on the ‘poor South’ !

 lkissa@neurope.eu
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