Who carries the weight of a global supply chain? Whose lives are bound in its fetters? There is a grotesque quality to the Guardian’s revelations of the conditions under which Bangladeshi women in the garment industry labour to make Western women feel charitable and empowered. The T-shirts made in Bangladesh will ultimately sell for £19.60, of which a little more than half, £11.60, will go to Comic Relief, to help champion equality for women. The celebrities who promote them, and whom the T-shirts in turn promote with their slogan “I wanna be a Spice Girl”, are well-paid; the women who make them are paid around 35p an hour and expected to sew up to 2,000 in the course of a working day, which is anything from eight to 16 hours long. To put it another way, a Bangladeshi seamstress would have to sew at least 7,000 T-shirts to afford the price charged for one in the west – and buying or wearing one is supposed to be a way of championing “equality and people power”.

No one suggests that the westerners involved are insincere. They genuinely want to improve the lives of women around the world, and Comic Relief has done really impressive work. The people who buy the shirts will be horrified by this story. They would happily pay for their empowering T-shirts to be produced in conditions that actually empowered the workers who made them, as well as contributing to the empowerment of others elsewhere. Why is this so difficult?

One answer lies in the vast gap between regulations and enforcement. The decent and generous impulses of people all around the world, and not just in the countries where the T-shirts are purchased, are expressed in political aspirations, and these in regulations and in laws. But those are completely worthless if they are not enforced, and in countries without democracy there’s no enforcement that goes against the interests of the powerful. Not even the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, when 1,134 people were killed in a factory collapse, has changed enough.

Democracy is not a matter of elections. The Bangladeshi government of Sheikh Hasina has just won an election with her party, the Awami League, claiming 96% of the vote. 600,000 troops and police were deployed to oversee it, but on election day 17 people died. Few believe the results represent popular sentiment. But democracy requires more than credible elections. It needs a robust civil society – free speech and powerful trade unions. Both are hard to find in Bangladesh today. Journalists and political dissidents have been ruthlessly persecuted; Islamists have murdered atheist bloggers. The factory where the exploitation has been exposed is owned by Shahriar Alam, a Bangladeshi foreign affairs minister, who told our reporter that he didn’t think it was “right from a journalistic point of view to add [his] name to this story”. Who can doubt his sincerity? He really doesn’t want his name in the paper.

Bangladesh is not alone in having a garment sector in which workers are ruthlessly exploited. An investigation before Christmas found a Chinese toy factory where women were paid on average 1p to make a doll which sells for £34.99 in the UK. So long as such factories are controlled by interests close to authoritarian governments, improvements can only be piecemeal and often cosmetic. In countries where the law means whatever the government wants, it can offer poor workers little real protection. But we are not powerless. The generous outrage of women in the rich world must be harnessed to help their sisters at the other end of the supply chain, where it weighs the heaviest.