Living wages for women: The roots of unfair pay

By Grace Doyle, Research Assistant at Fashion Revolution

On 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed and killed 1,134 workers, and injured thousands more. The global garment industry, however, did not just bear witness to this tragedy; they were complicit. 

While production was outsourced to less developed economies during the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, power and profit have stayed firmly in the hands of retailers and corporations, which has been at the expense of women workers who comprise approximately 80% of the global garment workforce. Chasing ‘the cheap needle around the planet’, retailers have sought low wages, poor labour standards and lax environmental regulations in a bid to boost profit. While such conditions provide factories with a competitive advantage, this comes as a direct result of the socio-economic disadvantages faced by women workers. The informal nature of women’s work within the garment sector also means that work is defined by precarity, with a lack of social welfare provisions and below sustenance-level pay. 

Women are indispensable to the functioning of the global garment sector, yet their labour is both underpaid and undervalued. 

Women and informal employment

Women’s work in the garment industry is defined by flexibility and informalisation. Facing downward pressure from lead retailers, factories use subcontractors, homeworkers and temporary/casual workers to help them meet tight deadlines and remain competitive. These informal employment arrangements typically exclude women from standard labour legislation and benefits such as paid maternity leave, health insurance and pension schemes, all of which influence the emancipatory potential of paid employment for women. As a result, workers are outside the scope of many labour laws and have little recourse to justice when their rights are violated. 

Informal employment structures are favoured due to the vulnerability of the market. When demand falls, as it did at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lack of formal working arrangements meant workers were rapidly laid off with little recourse to unemployment benefits, as well as generally having less social protection to absorb economic shocks. Where workers were kept on, they were forced to work in unsafe conditions as countries headed into lockdown, such as in the UK where women working in garment factories were four times more likely to die from Covid-19 complications than the average woman worker. 

These structures also exclude women from benefits such as paid maternity leave, health insurance, pension schemes and living wages, all of which influence the emancipatory potential of paid employment for women as they allow them to combine both productive and reproductive work. Women who are informally employed are also more likely to be laid off as no formal obligation between employer and employee 

What’s more, informal employment is compounded by other factors such as abuse, harassment, exposure to toxic chemicals, poor hygiene, dangerous and long journeys home. Without the formal employment agreements and benefits of formal employment, there is less social protection to absorb economic shocks such as termination of contracts, or ill health caused by Covid-19. These risks are compounded by the fact that many garment workers are forced to operate in unsafe conditions and can be afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation in the form of termination or violence

Image: Wolf & Badger

Race to the bottom

Such exploitation is rife on the factory floor, with forced overtime, wage deductions and piece rates being leveraged as a means of forcing workers to produce as much as possible.  In addition to gender, ethnicity, class and immigration status interact to shape women’s experience of the informal labour market. According to Labour Behind the Label, roughly one-third of garment workers in Leicester were born outside the UK and a majority are from minority ethnic groups. Gender, race and class, therefore, intersect to negatively configure women’s employment experiences, with language barriers, a lack of legal documentation, and the threat of deportation being leveraged to force them into exploitative working conditions where they have little bargaining power.

The pressure from lead retailers to meet deadlines, squeeze profits and remain competitive is passed onto factories, who in turn employ temporary and casual workers, while also straining their own workforce to meet deadlines through forced overtime, homeworkers, wage deductions, and piece rates as a means of forcing workers to produce as much as possible. Complex subcontracting agreements with very little supply chain transparency also obscures responsibility; women’s labour is so often invisible. 

Together, these complex subcontracting agreements and informal employment structures allow exploitative working conditions to thrive while obscuring responsibility and accountability. With governments reluctant to raise wages in fear of losing business, and businesses using informal contracts as a way to cut costs, it is clear that living wage legislation is required to level the playing field and ensure that women’s socio-economic disadvantage is not a source of profit.

So how does this link to living wages? Put simply, with no obligation to contribute to employment benefits and minimum wage levels being kept low in a bid to attract business, informalisation ultimately makes for cheap labour. Legislation that requires due diligence on living wages across the supply chain could help put an end to this exploitation.

Image: Unsplash

The invisibility of unpaid labour

Due to the gendered division of labour, it is predominantly women who carry out unpaid care work. Unpaid care work involves the unpaid time spent on activities that sustain households and communities, such as caring for younger and elderly relatives through cooking, cleaning, and planning, to name a few. More broadly, unpaid care work falls within the bounds of social reproductive duties, which is the work involved in sustaining and reproducing current and future generations of productive workers. 

While informal employment models such as flexible and part-time working patterns, can be conducive to combining both work and care, they have been manipulated in such a way that actually disadvantages women workers. The framing of social reproduction as a non-market based activity, and therefore existing in isolation from the productive economy, provides benefits for employers in the form of unpaid labour. This is because the costs of social reproduction, such as the provision of maternity pay and childcare can be omitted from labour costs and justify the payment of low wages. If employers and suppliers do not provide these benefits to workers in their contracts, and producing countries do not have an adequate social welfare structure in place, women workers must stretch their wages to cover all costs. 

The retrenchment of social welfare services coincided with the rise of trade deregulation in the 1980s, and while this facilitated the feminisation of labour, exploitative conditions, low wages and poor social protection means it has coincided with the feminisation of poverty. Weak social welfare infrastructures reinforce the stereotypical male breadwinner model, as it is expected that women will assume these responsibilities. This partially explains why women’s wages are so low as they have typically been considered only supplementary to a household’s earnings. 

With poor social welfare structures intensifying unpaid care work, and women having a leading role in sustaining the global garment market, their work, both paid and unpaid, is intensifying. Living wages are necessary to alleviate the intensification of work, both paid and unpaid, on women. Despite both forms of work being indispensable to the functioning of the global garment industry, they remain undervalued and underpaid. 

Living wages are needed in the fashion supply chain to mitigate the dual intensification of women’s work, both paid and unpaid, in order to empower rather than exploit women workers.

Image: Vogue Business

How would living wages help women workers? 

In the fashion industry, pay is a gendered issue. It is women who will benefit most from legislation on living wages. Globally, women are among the lowest-paid groups in fashion supply chains. This is not by chance, but the result of an exploitative industry that profits from underpaying its most vulnerable workers.

Approximately 80% of garment workers are women. Most women workers are also responsible for unpaid work in their homes (such as cooking and caregiving) in addition to working long hours in the factory. As a result, they are not only money-poor but also time-poor. Earning a living wage ensures that women in the garment industry can provide for themselves and their families without having to work excessive overtime just to meet their basic needs. This also gives them more time to engage in social, cultural and political life outside of work. 

Take action on living wages for women workers

The vast majority of garment and textile workers around the world earn very low wages and many are trapped in poverty; this particularly impacts young women. In response to this unfair and exploitative system, Good Clothes, Fair Pay is campaigning for the EU to enforce due diligence on living wages for the people that make our clothes.

You can help us reach one million signatures from EU citizens to urge policymakers to enforce legislation on living wages in the fashion industry. To stay updated on the campaign, subscribe to the newsletter, and follow on Instagram.

Further reading

Fashion is Women's Work 
Women's Rights and the Environment
Is your Fashion Feminist?