In ‘Get Your Greens’, an ongoing series in line with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, British Vogue explores how the industry is advancing towards a greener future.

If you are struggling to concentrate at home, or feeling a little cooped up, spare a thought for the garment workers in Bangladesh. A country where 4.1 million rely on the garment industry for their livelihoods, the situation, according to one factory owner I spoke to this week, is fast becoming apocalyptic.

Some background: Bangladesh, the country that makes a high percentage of the clothes hanging in our wardrobes and prides itself on the trade links it has built up for decades, was already on a knife edge before the coronavirus hit. Most of the population don’t have enough money to buy more than a day’s food at a time, let alone stock up on groceries during this lockdown. They don’t have time for pandemics. If they don’t work, they starve.

Garment workers protest on 22 April to demand the payment of due wages during a nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the coronavirus, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. © MUNIR UZ ZAMAN

But the cancellation last month of at least $2.8 billion (£2.2 billion) worth of garment orders from many of the brands that populate our British high streets means the garment workers now face destitution and even starvation – and that’s before we get to the public health situation. According to the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), of the buyers who cancelled orders, about 72 per cent refused to cover the costs of raw materials the supplier had already purchased. Ninety-one per cent refused to pay the production costs.

Read more: The Garment Worker Crisis In Bangladesh Proves A ‘Buy Less, Buy Better’ Approach Is The Only Way Forward

If you read the excellent Garment Worker Diaries, a research project set up by Microfinance Opportunities in 2016 to record workers’ daily financial outgoings, you will learn first-hand the economic hardships dealt with every day. According to World Bank data, only 15 per cent of Bangladesh’s population makes more than 500 taka (£4.77) a day. That was before Covid-19 struck and the factories closed. Take a moment to think about this: Bangladesh’s entire public health system has 432 ICU beds and 550 ventilators. And that’s for a population of over 160 million.

For factory owner Shafiq Hassan, an already challenging situation has now become impossible. “We fund the entire process, from buying the yarn to buying the fabric. All the raw materials, all the accessories, we buy on behalf of these big boys who place orders with us,” he said. “We are the bankers to the rich, despite being the poorest. And then a calamity happens for everybody – we get it that shops are shut, people are not selling – but we are the weakest link in the supply chain.”

Hassan runs the UK-based Echo Sourcing, which supplies clothing made in Bangladesh to the UK and Europe. He also runs Echotex, a textile mill and garment facility in Bangladesh which was built with the safety and health of the workers in mind. It is the largest LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum-certified unit in the country, employing over 11,000 people.

Ninety Percent is a sustainable womenswear label where 90 per cent of profits from sales go to good causes.

Then there is Ninety Percent, a sustainable contemporary womenswear brand Hassan launched in 2018 as a new business model designed to rebalance an industry that he saw as exploitative, without giving much back. As the name suggests, 90 per cent of profits from sales are redistributed to a range of good causes as well as with the people who make the clothes.

Hassan shut the Echotex factory on 27 March and paid the workers in full for March and for April. But he has lost $570,000 (£459,000) worth of orders after the closure of Debenhams, which filed for bankruptcy on 6 April. Other brands are putting orders on hold or cancelling orders already in progress. He is concerned about how long he can continue to pay his workers while the factory is closed. Among those brands who have not cancelled anything are H&M, Inditex (which owns Zara and Massimo Dutti) and Mango. Primark advised this week that it has pledged to pay for all orders that are ready and would have been shipped by 18 April, accounting for $2m (£1.5m) that will be paid in 180 days. Other household-name retailers have frozen or cancelled orders to the tune of millions of pounds.

Hassan says his business runs on the tightest of margins, just 5 to 10 per cent, meaning he has no reserves. One silver lining is that sales from Ninety Percent’s own e-commerce site have doubled during coronavirus as they have managed to keep deliveries going with appropriate levels of safety at the warehouse. “Ninety Percent should do well,” he said. “We should be a business model that excels.”

But the problem lies with the brands who are shirking their responsibilities. When we spoke on 20 April, his anger at the system, and his fear for the workers, was tangible. We spoke for well over an hour, as Hassan explained the impossible situation for Bangladesh, the fashion factory of the world, as brands which have exploited it as a source of cheap labour are now abandoning their suppliers with more concern for their shareholders than those whose livelihoods are being dismantled overnight. “This is the hypocrisy of the situation and the hypocrisy of these people who have [previously] supported us. Bangladesh and its suppliers have been funding the business. The switch-off, without taking any due care or responsibility of the people who are now cancelling goods, is tragic. It’s hypocritical, it’s false, it’s a sham.”

“Ninety Percent should do well. We should be a business model that excels”

The publication of this week’s Fashion Transparency Index by Fashion Revolution, the campaign that asks #WhoMadeMyClothes, (for which I work as Special Projects Curator) could not be more timely. The campaign was launched after the 2013 Rana Plaza Factory disaster whose victims – over 1,100 of them – will be remembered seven years on, this Friday 24 April. Today, the coronavirus pandemic has pulled into sharp focus why brands need to change the way they pay, make their orders and do business with their suppliers. “This crisis has highlighted just how fragile the fashion system really is,” said Carry Somers, the campaign’s co-founder. “If major brands and retailers are publishing information about their purchasing practices and how they do business with their suppliers, then we can hold them to account in situations like this.”

Read more: Michael Halpern On Swapping Sequins For Surgical Gowns

Business must change post Covid-19, and that includes the way we treat and value the people who make our clothes. “We have seen decades of price reductions and factories operate on impossibly tight margins,” said Somers. “When I was last in Bangladesh, several factory owners told me brands paid three per cent to five per cent less for their clothes every year. Consequently, workers’ wages and workers’ rights have been squeezed. Now, millions of workers have no savings to fall back on, and have been laid off or furloughed without receiving the pay they are entitled to by law. Poverty and hunger could ultimately prove more of a threat to their lives than the virus.”

The system was already broken, but now it must be rebuilt from the bottom up – starting with a living wage and decent working conditions for the workers. “Most of these brands who are delaying and cancelling orders have made billions of dollars in profits every year,” said Somers. “It comes down to a question of priorities: the shareholders or the garment workers.”

Today, the need for citizens to use their voices to hold brands to account is more pressing than ever before. If you want to play your part, there is an email template on the Fashion Revolution website which will send an email directly to a brand. So far, 4,468 people have sent the email template since it was launched on 26 March, and we hope more will follow suit. It’s up to all of us to take our responsibility seriously. The future of the industry depends on us all.

More from British Vogue…