Background

Our Inspiration 

We were inspired by the clean clothes campaign to continue raising awareness  of the living wage. We felt that being aware of the issue is not enough to create a change in people. Thinking about our own habits as consumers we often enter the shops, with our desire for new things and we forget about the lives behind our clothes. We wanted people during their shopping experience to have a visible reminder of the importance of the living wage, in an accessible way, however, one that would create a big impact. To fully understand why we did what we did we’ve included a short summary of the work done by Clean Clothes Campaign, H&M, and the #TurnaroundHM campaign. We’ve also included all the important facts and figures about the current situation in Bangladesh, one of the countries most in need of the Living wage and the focus of the #TurnaroundHM campaign. We hope through reading this page you can understand why we are so passionate about making a difference and feel motivated to get involved yourself!

The Clean Clothes Campaign

“Clean Clothes Campaign is dedicated to improving working conditions and supporting the empowerment of workers in the global garment and sportswear industries (CCC as cited Ethicalcorp,2013).” The CCC is made up of an alliance of organizations across 15 European Countries, with its members including NGOs and trade unions, which have collective interests in issues such as poverty reduction, women rights and consumer advocacy. They identify and local problems, developing and creating campaign strategies in order to achieve their goals as well as educating consumers and lobbying governments and companies to mobilize the fight for the better working conditions and the rights of workers (Ethicalcorp, 2013). With this in mind the CCC draw attention towards big fashion brands and their refusal to meet and pay the living wage for their workers, creating campaigns such as #TurnAroundHM to express H&Ms repeated refusal to meet these demands.

H&M

In 2013, it was promised by H&Ms “roadmap towards fair living wages” that by 2018 850,00 workers would receive a fair living wage, yet since then these promises have not been kept (CCC, 2018). Despite H&M being one of the worlds most successful and largest retailers, their failure to meet living wages regardless of their clear financial capacities persists, forcing workers ‘to work excessive hours in order to survive’ (Osborne, 2018). A recent CCC report where 62 garment workers were interviewed across four countries revealed that workers in India and Turkey earned around 1/3 of the living wage, Cambodian workers earned 1/2 and Bulgarian workers earned just 10% of the living wage (CCC,2018). Additionally it was revealed that their commitment towards meeting these demands were now not featured in their corporate communications as well as original documents from the roadmap towards fair living wages being now inaccessible and deleted from their website (CCC, 2018), clearly expressing their continuing refusal to fulfill their promises.

#TurnaroundHM Campaign and Bangladesh 

Bangladesh has a very large population, estimated to be 162 million in 2016, half of which were considered to be living “under the national poverty line”. The garment industry employs over 4 “million people” and constitutes over “85% of annual exports” in Bangladesh. (Anker et al 2016: 3-10). 

The Clean Clothes Campaign (2018:np) argue that “A Living Wage = A Human Right”.  They posit the garment industry is one of the largest in the world, employing millions of people. “With global brands making millions in profits every year, this booming industry has come to rely on, and exploit, the cheap labour of millions of garment workers whose wages fall far short of a living wage.

Clean Clothes Campaign (2013:np) stated “On November 21 2013 the Bangladeshi Government announced a rise in the minimum wage from 3,000 taka to 5,000 taka, even though this represents an increase of 71% it still falls a long short of the living wage”.  This is further illustrated by the diagram below, which shows the difference between the minimum and living wages in Bangladesh in Sterling Pounds.

In light of this, the Clean Clothes Campaign (2018:np) are “calling upon H&M to stop turning its back on the commitment the company made in 2013 to grant 850,000 workers a living wage by 2018”, a significant proportion of these workers are from Bangladesh.