Fashion is human.
On dignity, humanity, and raids in the largest remaining garment hub in the US
“Ethical fashion is the recognition that there are humans behind the clothes that we wear.”
This was a post I shared on Instagram several years ago and it's been a thought on repeat in my mind this past week.
The use of the word “humans” was intentional then just as it is now.
Garment makers uphold a $1.8 trillion dollar industry, and that deserves respect — but first and foremost they are people. Human beings with inherent, inalienable dignity.
So while ethical fashion — and slow fashion if we consider it holistically — advocates for the rights of garment workers, this is not because of their work. It's because they are human — and exploitation often comes through labor, in both forced and voluntary work.
Today, hundreds of thousands of garment makers working in the world's textile supply chains are migrant workers or immigrants, according to the Clean Clothes Campaign. These workers are often among the most vulnerable in the fashion supply chain.
In the United States, more than 100,000 workers in the apparel and footwear industry are immigrants, with an estimated 30,000 being undocumented according to immigrant reform organization fwd.us, as reported by Vogue Business.
Last Friday, immigration raids in the US targeted these workers in Los Angeles — home to the largest garment manufacturing hub in the country.
As textile industry publication Sourcing Journal reported:
“More than a dozen men were arrested by ICE officers during Friday's raid of Ambiance Apparel, a manufacturer, importer, and wholesaler. Distraught family members gathered around to denounce what all of them described as kidnappings of their fathers, sons, brothers, and uncles.
‘I say kidnapped because they were taken by force without any warnings or permits, as well as being held without contact to the families or lawyers’ said Carlos Gonzalez, who watched as his brother, José Paulino was chained up like ‘he was some kind of dangerous animal.’”
When leaders spew rhetoric like “infestation”, “evil”, “flooding", “criminal aliens” and “bad genes”, it's no surprise we're left with a society that starts to rationalize and justify dehumanization.
So what will this mean for the future of worker rights in Los Angeles and beyond?
As the Director of the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles, Marissa Nuncio, shared in an interview published in In These Times:
“What we know to be commonplace in the garment industry is that when a worker complains about their rights, their immigration status is used against them. It is not uncommon for a boss to say, ’Keep it up, complain about your wages, or the breaks that you didn’t get, or these three weeks that are still due to you. I know where you live, and I can send ICE there.’
This is quite common, so it’s absolutely a leverage point that bosses have used in this industry to intimidate their workers. These are workers that are getting sub-minimum wages, they’re highly exploited, so it’s all very connected.
These moments will embolden unscrupulous employers to deny their labor rights to their employees even more.”
One has to wonder: where are these manufacturers and brands who have been profiting off of hiring and underpaying these workers for years now? Are the factory owners and CEO's who've built their businesses off of exploiting these workers protecting them or are they hiding in the shadows, quietly threatening the very people that “Made in LA” garments depend on?
What This Means for the Ethical Fashion Movement
Ethical fashion is call to advocate for labor rights in the fashion industry alongside garment workers — to amplify their demands to manufacturers and brands for livable wages, safe conditions, and other rights like freedom of association.
The word “ethical” can sometimes be interpreted differently depending on a person's worldview, but there are fundamentals both in moral philosophy and that stand true across religions, like the intrinsic worth of every human being.
Immanuel Kant — one of the most influential moral philosophers of all time — centered the study of human dignity in his moral philosophy.
In Kantian ethics, all humans have an equal intrinsic dignity that is not dependent on status, class, or rank.
Kant reasoned that because humans have rational autonomy, every human has dignity. In other words, a person's worth is unconditional.
In religion, human worth is often described as stemming from a divine source — humans are described as a manifestation or a creation of the divine in religious texts — which gives them inherent dignity.
Whether you approach it from reason or religion, ethics acknowledges incontrovertible human dignity.
And so it stands to reason that at the center of ethical fashion is the human dignity of every person involved in the fashion supply chain.
On a macro level, fashion is a global industry and is intricately tied to geopolitics — we can see that in the way multinational brands tend to move where labor is cheap and regulation is lax.
And on a more granular level, ever garment we wear passes through many human hands: cotton pickers, mill workers, sewers, pattern cutters, sample makers, finishers, packers, wholesale workers, and delivery drivers.
So while yes, fashion is political, but fashion is also human.
We simply can't have a slow, ethical fashion future without recognizing that the person behind every one of those roles has worth, is entitled to fundamental human rights, and deserves to be treated with humanity.
Take care,
Elizabeth
P.S. Interested in getting involved? The Garment Worker Center is a worker rights organization whose mission is to organize Los Angeles garment workers in the fight for social and economic justice.
P.P.S. Thanks for your patience on this newsletter coming out a day late. I believe in writing intentional content and it's been an emotionally-charged week! So I wanted to ensure I had the proper time to reflect, let these ideas simmer, and bring in a bit of a different angle from what I've been reading.