There is no blueprint for transforming social injustice. The interaction between society, nature and psychology, and fashion and injustice is complex. Complexity doesn’t lend itself easily to straightforward change. Some suggests there are three dimensions of change, which are mutually reinforcing and equally necessary: holding actions, life sustaining systems and practices, and shifts in consciousness.
1. Holding actions are holding back or slowing down injustice or environmental harm - making things less bad. Holding actions can also be about caring for those that have been harmed, or safeguarding communities from injustice. This could take many forms, such as removing our support for behaviours or products we believe are the problem; or joining campaigns, legal proceedings or protests. It might take the form of laws such as the growing number of modern slavery acts, or the payment of compensation for Rana Plaza survivors. Or it might be about staging protests to draw attention to injustice regarding diversity and inclusion in the fashion industry. Holding actions are essential, but are not enough to stop injustice. This is because as one injustice is challenged, other people will be harmed elsewhere.
2. Life sustaining systems and practices are about creative, new ways of being and doing, so that life flourishes, rather than focusing on the prevention of social injustice. The call is to replace or transform the systems that cause harm. This might be new business models that create social relationships between people, such as the LEEDS Community Clothes Exchange that aims to develop community spirit through community clothes swapping events. Making for Change is another example. This project involves a fully equipped manufacturing unit inside HMP Downview. It offers a safe space for women prisoners to gain industry-recognised qualifications. It provides real work experience to utilise the women’s skills in the manufacturing environment by producing client orders.
3. Shifts in consciousness relates to new ways of thinking and seeing our relationship with ourselves, with nature and with other people, as the foundation for social and environmental justice. It is also about strengthening compassion and our sense of belonging, so that we are nourished and protected from burnout.In the past, changing the self and changing the world were often regarded as separate endeavours and viewed in either-or terms but they are in fact t mutually reinforcing and essential to one another.
another view is that of Duncan Green, in his book How Change Happens. He lays out four ways of thinking, feeling or working towards change:
- Curiosity - study the history; “learn to dance with the system”.
- Humility - embrace uncertainty/ambiguity.
- Reflexivity - be conscious of your own role, prejudices and power.
- Include multiple perspectives and unusual suspects - be open to different ways of seeing the world.
Values and behaviours
“Fashion and Social Justice are interwoven… Fashion is a statement. It is empowerment. It is agency” - Amanda Nguyen
What change is needed to address social injustice?
Values are the principles that help you to decide what is right and wrong, and how to act in various situations. They can underpin an action. They can be deemed to be positive - diversity, inclusion, equity. They can be seen as negative - misogyny, racism, transphobia.
Behaviours are the actions that play out as a result of the underpinning values. In the context of fashion and social justice, this might include collaboration with others, paying a living wage, access to trade unions for all employees, diverse and inclusive working practices. Or it could be allowing unsafe working environments, the polluting of a local river, contribution to the destruction of a local ecosystem, discrimination of employees based on gender, race or ethnicity.
Where does the power lie to challenge social injustice in fashion?
At times, the scale and intensity of social injustice in fashion can feel daunting, perhaps even disempowering. This is experienced by individuals and groups in many different ways according to how patriarchal, colonial, capitalist and homophobic relations have shaped experiences.
One way to gain power to challenge social injustice in fashion is by people working together to bring change for a common cause. We can gain power by joining with others, whether as workers, citizens, consumers, people in a shared community, survivors and more. This is about power with, rather than power over.
https://creaworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/All-About-Power.pdf
Workers have a specific type of collective activism in the form of trade unions. Workers may be vulnerable to being sacked or blacklisted if they stand up to employers by themselves. Therefore, trade unions are a way to give a collective voice to workers. Other forms of collective activism include campaigns and social movements, cooperative businesses, local geographic communities, online communities and organisations.
https://www.fashionrevolution.org/why-unions-matter-in-the-garment-industry/
Working with people can nourish and inspire. There is a chance to share the workload, vulnerability and emotional pressure. Ideas and responsibilities can be shared, and different skills can be contributed. Power increases when we join together and become less vulnerable. By acting with others, we have the power to create more change than we can achieve alone. Think back to earlier this week and our discussion about change dimensions. Working in this way is what we are aiming for when we are nurturing a shift in consciousness. It can be more about the process than about the outcome.
“Fashion and Social Justice are interwoven… Fashion is a statement. It is empowerment. It is agency” - Amanda Nguyen
What change is needed to address social injustice?
Values are the principles that help you to decide what is right and wrong, and how to act in various situations. They can underpin an action. They can be deemed to be positive - diversity, inclusion, equity. They can be seen as negative - misogyny, racism, transphobia.
Behaviours are the actions that play out as a result of the underpinning values. In the context of fashion and social justice, this might include collaboration with others, paying a living wage, access to trade unions for all employees, diverse and inclusive working practices. Or it could be allowing unsafe working environments, the polluting of a local river, contribution to the destruction of a local ecosystem, discrimination of employees based on gender, race or ethnicity.
Where does the power lie to challenge social injustice in fashion?
At times, the scale and intensity of social injustice in fashion can feel daunting, perhaps even disempowering. This is experienced by individuals and groups in many different ways according to how patriarchal, colonial, capitalist and homophobic relations have shaped experiences.
One way to gain power to challenge social injustice in fashion is by people working together to bring change for a common cause. We can gain power by joining with others, whether as workers, citizens, consumers, people in a shared community, survivors and more. This is about power with, rather than power over.
https://creaworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/All-About-Power.pdf
Workers have a specific type of collective activism in the form of trade unions. Workers may be vulnerable to being sacked or blacklisted if they stand up to employers by themselves. Therefore, trade unions are a way to give a collective voice to workers. Other forms of collective activism include campaigns and social movements, cooperative businesses, local geographic communities, online communities and organisations.
https://www.fashionrevolution.org/why-unions-matter-in-the-garment-industry/
Working with people can nourish and inspire. There is a chance to share the workload, vulnerability and emotional pressure. Ideas and responsibilities can be shared, and different skills can be contributed. Power increases when we join together and become less vulnerable. By acting with others, we have the power to create more change than we can achieve alone. Think back to earlier this week and our discussion about change dimensions. Working in this way is what we are aiming for when we are nurturing a shift in consciousness. It can be more about the process than about the outcome.
Governments & Fashion
Injustice in fashion can be challenged by calling on governments to prevent harm, for instance by challenging them to create new fashion practices that mitigate or avoid social injustice.
Government regulation and legislation
Governments can inhibit social justice and even perpetrate injustice, but they also have the power to nurture and create social justice.
Governments introduce legislation that can hold people and companies accountable in court for their behaviour. For example, some countries have anti-discrimination laws that make it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of certain characteristics such as disability, race or gender.
Workers’ rights legislation is far-reaching. Typically, garment producing countries have a range of laws relating to workers’ rights. However, these rights are frequently violated and trade union activists are often persecuted, as Kalpona discussed in her podcast earlier this week. Many countries have environmental justice legislation.
The challenge is in the implementation of these laws. They are often violated by brands and retailers that are focused on keeping labour costs low, and by countries focusing on attracting foreign investment. Another challenge is that it is difficult to hold a company accountable for its operations in other countries, though there are some examples of legislation such as the US law blocking imports from Xinjiang in China relating to forced labour.
Most garment-producing countries have some limits on basic freedoms and rights, civil society and protest. Some states actively repress critical opposition, while others passively fail to enforce existing laws. This includes censorship, intimidation and detention of activists and the suppression of protest. In 2021, The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) reported that the garment manufacturing hubs of Bangladesh, Brazil, Honduras, Myanmar, the Philippines and Turkey were among the top ten worst countries for workers. The ITUC also found incidents of harassment, violence and repression, as well as failure to enforce human rights laws and guarantee human and worker rights, across garment-producing countries.
https://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/article/green-legislation-fashion
Intergovernmental organisations
Intergovernmental organisations have the power to introduce guidelines and affect social norms regarding the behaviour of both companies and governments. The International Labour Organization is a United Nations body that brings together employers, workers and governments to set Conventions on labour rights. Many governments have ratified these Conventions, which means they commit to introduce them into their own laws.
One influential set of guidelines relating to workers’ rights are the United Nation’s 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights which set out the duty of governments to protect human rights, the responsibility of states to respect human rights and the state responsibility to give those affected access to remedy. The guidelines influenced the development of work around mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence (mHREDD), which is generally understood as a process with which companies can efficiently identify, prevent, mitigate and account for the negative impacts of their activities or those of their subsidiaries, subcontractors, and suppliers. Some aspects of mHREDD have already been incorporated into some countries’ legal frameworks, notably the French Duty of Vigilance Law. However, there is a long way to go to make this mandatory across all countries.
The challenge for intergovernmental organisations is that they rarely have the ability to hold individuals or companies accountable in courts for injustices.
https://www.voguebusiness.com/sustainability/californias-garment-labour-law-the-global-implications
Calling for change and social justice
Networks and organisations that are using legislation or calling for governments to act to address social justice include, but are not limited to:
International Labour Organization
African Coalition for Corporate Accountability
European Coalition for Corporate Justice
https://corporatejustice.org/priorities/
Fashion companies are directly implicated in social injustice.
Just a small number of companies, mostly owned by a small number of white men, are directly implicated in fashion injustice. Many of those experiencing social injustice through fashion are young women and communities of colour. This is a form of power over.
It may feel that companies are the ones with the power to make meaningful change. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the general name given to company activities to address social and environmental issues. This takes many forms.
Many fashion companies engage in fashion diversity initiatives. These might relate to their employees, such as setting diversity-related hiring and retention goals, training, mentoring and outreach. Some fashion companies have also taken steps to address diversity regarding ideals of beauty or aesthetics and for the health of models. Other fashion companies address diversity from the perspective of product design.
Some companies have workers’ rights CSR programmes that often involve social audits and transparent supply chains in efforts to address workers’ rights violations. However, the Clean Clothes Campaign presents evidence in its 2019 Fig Leaf for Fashion report to show how the “social audit industry has failed spectacularly in its proffered mission of protecting workers’ safety and improving working conditions. Instead, it has protected the image and reputation of brands and their business models, while standing in the way of more effective models that include mandatory transparency and binding commitments to remediation”.
Other companies use CSR teams and strategies to focus on addressing their links to environmental injustices through supply chain transparency or collaboration with suppliers and third-party NGOs.
The challenge with CSR initiatives is that they are voluntary, and not state enforced. This means that it is up to the company to determine the resources they invest in these activities. Companies can also use CSR to give the impression they are addressing more social justice issues than they really are. This practice is known as clean-washing.
Small- and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs, are businesses that typically have fewer than 250 employees. The businesses listed below implement various CSR initiatives, seeking to address social justice through their business activities:
- Top Manta: Fashion cooperative and brand for social justice launched by Barcelona’s street vendors.
- Yala: Jewellery brand working directly with Kenyan artisans to create small-batch collections.
- Adish: Fashion brand with mission to bridge the cultural gap between Israel and Palestine, inspiring positive change in the process.
- Tamay and Me: Brand making designs in partnership with communities in north Vietnam. Their aim is to help women to earn a sustainable living and to maintain their textile heritage.
- I was a Sari: Indian social enterprise selling upcycled products such as contemporary ready-to-wear and accessories made from saris.
- People Tree: Fair trade fashion brand specialising in the use of organic materials.
- A range of further examples can be found on the Fostering Sustainable Practices Hub.
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