This is a story about clothing.

It's about the clothes we wear, the people who make these
clothes, and the impact that it's having on our world. It's a story about greed and fear, power
and poverty. It's complex, as it extends all the way around the world. But it's also simple,
revealing just how connected we are to the many hearts and hands behind our clothes. I
came into this story with no background in fashion at all, beginning with nothing more than
a few simple questions. What I've discovered has forever changed the way I think about the
things I wear, and my hope is that it might just do the same for you. Maybe just start and say
your name and talk about how this kind of began. My name is Lucy Siegle. I am a
journalist and broadcaster based in the UK and I have been obsessed, consumed with the
environmental and social impacts of the fashion industry for about a decade. woman Well, I
love everything about clothes. I love the poetry, I love the fabric, I love the colors, I love
the textures, I love the way that they make you feel. You know, they are our chosen skin.
Well, I had the classic massive closet, clothes everywhere bags constantly coming into my
house, you know, every day, every other day with some other item in, and never had
anything to wear. I could never put together a coherent outfit. We communicate who we
are to a certain extent through clothing. And this is, this is again, throughout history. You
know, you have the trends at court, and Marie Antoinette making these huge hats. It’s
always been our personal communication in many ways. That’s what interests me, that it is
fundamentally a part of what, um, we wish to communicate about ourselves. Siegle We
used to have a system, a fashion system where people would go to the, uh, shows, so they
would do spring, summer, autumn, winter, and those kind of ran like clockwork for very
many years. “Okay, rip that up, throw it out the window. “That has absolutely nothing to do
with the fashion industry today. It has been [Link] Castro The shift is moving
ruthlessly towards a way of producing
which only really looks after big business interest. Growing up, I never gave much thought
to anything other than the price of the clothes that I bought, usually making choices based
on the style or a good deal. Looking back, I learned that for a long time most of our clothing
was actually made right here in America. As recently as the 1960 s, we were still making
95 percent of our clothes. Today, we only make about 3 percent
and the other 97 percent is outsourced to developing countries around the world. man I've
been in the business for over nine years now. I n terms of scale, we've got 25000, people
just on garment manufacturing side. We produce one in six dress-shirts sold in the U.S. If
you actually go to a store and you benchmark the price of a garment over the last 20 years,
you will find that there's actually a deflation of the product, i.e., the price has gone down
over time. Now, has our cost gone down? Absolutely not. Okay? Our cost has gone up. The
more production we've outsourced, the cheaper prices have become on the clothing we buy,
making way for a whole new model, known as "Fast Fashion," almost overnight,
transforming the way clothing is bought and sold. woman The newest H&M store on th
Avenue in Manhattan is the company's largest ever and just one of many new stores it's
planning around the country. man It's all part of a high street revolution, Fast Fashion. And
instead of two seasons a year, we practically have seasons a year. So, we have something
new coming in every week. And Fast Fashion has created this, so that it can essentially shift
more products.
You can get this fringe metallic skirt39 $ at Joe Fresh,a brand-new store in [Link]
price tags that might look a little bit more appealing to shoppers.
man American consumers,they really have grasped the fashion part of H&M,and we know
that American consumers are very [Link] you match these two together, with
fashion and value,then you have a [Link] One Japanese clothing retailer is making
a fast and furious mark here in the [Link] price has [Link] way of making that
product has completely, completely [Link] you have to ask yourself at some
point,Where does it end?"The global marketplace is some placewhere we export work to
have happenin whatever conditions we want, and then the products come back to me,

cheap enough to throw away without thinking about it.

Globalized production basically means

that all of the making of goods

has been outsourced to low-cost economies,

particularly where wages are very low and kept low.

And what that means is that those at the top of the value chain,

they get to choose where the products are being made,

and they get to switch if, for example, one factory says,

"We can't make it that cheap anymore."

The brand will say, "We're not gonna come to you.

We're gonna switch to another place which is cheaper."

man In the West, they're using "everyday low price."

So, every day, they're hampering me,

and I'm hampering my workers, this is how it is.

They're competing. The stores are competing.

When the stores are coming to us for an order and negotiating,

they're telling, "Look,

that particular store is selling this shirt, like, for $ ,5

so I need to sell it at $ .4
So you better squeeze your price." So we are squeezing.

Then other store is coming and saying, "Hey, they're selling it at $4 ?

So the target price is 3. If you can make that ,

you're getting business, otherwise you are not getting."

Because we want that business so badly,

and we don't have other options, okay.

Every time we are trying to survive, actually.

Lee Ultimately, something's gonna give.

Either the price of the product has to go up,

or manufacturers have to shut down

or cut corners to make it work.

Cutting corners and disregarding safety measures

had become an accepted part of doing business in this new model,

until an early morning in April,

when an event just outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh

brought a hidden side of fashion to front page news.

State media in Bangladesh say

an eight-story building has collapsed near the capital of Dhaka,

killing more than 70 people. Rescue workers are racing against time,

searching through the rubble, trying to find

as many survivors as they can.

man Hundreds are dead,

hundreds more might still be buried alive, after officials in Bangladesh say
factory owners ignored an order to evacuate.

man Some 400 dead, hundreds still believed to be missing.

Garment workers in Bangladesh paying the price for cheap clothing.

woman A huge crowd has gathered near the building site,

many of them family members looking for loved ones,

and they say they can still hear people screaming

from underneath the rubble, crying out for help.

Many are simply losing hope.

From where I was working I mover to the stairs and my legs got stuck The side walls fell on
me I lost hope of getting out of that I couldn’t even cry and I have become disabled

Siegle Anybody who, like me,had written about problems in the supply chain,particularly
for Fast Fashion,and tried to articulatehow the risk was being carriedby those who are most
vulnerable and the worst [Link] try to articulate that, but you could never have
envisagedthat there would be such a catastrophic illustrationof what you were trying to say.

And Rana Plaza, to me, was like some horror story.

woman Two weeks after the catastrophe

and the death toll now stands at a staggering 931 ,

making it the worst garment-industry disaster in history.

I think one of the most profoundly impressing things

about the Rana Plaza disaster was that news

that the workers had already pointed out to the management

the cracks in the building.

They'd already pointed out

that the building was structurally unsafe,

and yet they'd been forced back in.

woman Survivors are asking

how they could've been forced to return to work

when management already was aware of the cracks in the building,

and workers' concerns on the very day of the collapse.

A lot of clothes in American stores are made in Bangladesh

by workers who earn about $2 a day.

Last month there, a garment factory collapsed,

killing more than 1000 , ,

and a few months before that, a factory fire killed more than 100 .

woman And as bodies are being pulled out of the rubble,

another factory in Bangladesh caught fire early this morning,

killing eight more people.

narrator As story after story of disasters kept filling the news,

it was now the case that three of the four worst tragedies...

...in the history of fashion had all happened in the last year.

As the death toll rose, so did the profits generated.

The year following the disaster at Rana Plaza was

the industry's most profitable of all time.

The global fashion industry is now

an almost3 $ trillion annual industry.

man Bangladesh is now the second largest

apparel exporter, after China.

How? Well, unlike some of its competitors,

Bangladeshi manufacturing remains dirt cheap,

and unions have limited power.

The country cornered the absolute bottom of the value chain.

Those 100 poor girls lost their lives

because everybody didn't bother, didn't give a damn shit.

They just wanted the cheap price and a good profit.

It shouldn't be like that.

Everybody should take the responsibility for those kids.

That's how it [Link] might be more [Link], but you know that it's not only the price
pressure, it is something Ignoring other people's lives.

It's not... It shouldn't... It's not right.

It's the 21 st century.

It's a global world we are living in,

and we just ignore other people's lives?

How come?

This enormous, rapacious industry

that is generating so much profit

for a handful of people,

why is it that it is unable

to support millions of its workers properly?

Why is it that it is not able to guarantee their safety?

We're talking about essential human rights.

Why is it unable to guarantee that

whilst generating these tremendous profits?

Is it because it doesn't work properly?

That is my question.

narrator Lucy's question sounds like the obvious one.

But instead of answering it, everywhere I looked, I found people

who were constantly justifying the cost

because of the economic benefits being generated.

So, this low-wage manufacturing, or so-called "sweatshops,"

they're not just the least bad option workers have today,

they're part of the very process that raises living standards

and leads to higher wages and better working conditions over time.

Your proximate causes of development are physical capital, technology

and human capital or skills of the workers.

When sweatshops come to these countries, they bring all three to these workers

and start getting that process going.

Is it possible that sweatshops are actually good?

Yes, horrible, awful sweatshops.

The word itself, "sweatshop,"+

it evokes terrible images of poor people and children

suffering in third world countries, slaving away in awful conditions

to make products for us selfish Americans.

And thank you. What?

Does it bother me that people are working in a factory,

making clothes for Americans

or for, you know, Europeans?

Or that they're... That's how they're spending their lives?

Is that what you're kind of asking me?

interviewer Um, yeah, sure.

No. I mean, you know, they're doing a job.

Uh, there are a lot worse things that they can be doing.

It is live television, and I will ask you

define sweatshops.
++++
We have to be clear what we're talking about from the outset.

So, we're talking about places with very poor working conditions

as us normal Americans would experience it,

very low wages by our standard, maybe children working places

that might not obey local labor laws,

but there are characteristics of the ones I want to talk to you about tonight,

and that's they're places where people choose to work,

admittedly from a bad set of other options.

Well, there's nothing intrinsically dangerous with sewing clothes.

chuckles So, we're kind of starting out

with, you know, a relatively safe industry.

It's not like coal mining, or natural gas mining,

or a lot of things that you could-- That are much more dangerous.

So, sweatshop jobs look like horrible working conditions and wages
to anybody in the West who's wealthy enough

to own a TV and watch your video.

But we have to keep in mind that the alternatives available

for these workers aren't our own alternatives,

they're much worse than our alternatives,

and they're usually much worse than the factory job that the worker has.

Low wages, unsafe conditions, and factory disasters

are all excused because of the needed jobs they create

for people with no alternatives.

This story has become the narrative,

used to explain the way the fashion industry now operates

all over the world.

But there are those who believe that there must be a better way

of making and selling clothing that does generate economic growth,

but without taking such an enormous toll.

woman So, we don't know yet, um,

how long this embroidery is taking.

Do you think you could ask Santo to just roughly...

How long that whole panel is taking?

I guess we'll see it in the FAB breakdown, but it would be great to know.

So, I'm Safia Minney, I'm founder and CEO of People Tree,

and, uh, People Tree is a Fair Trade fashion brand

that started over years ago in Japan.

I
You were worried we had too much navy.

What are you feeling now? Because we did put more black in to SS

and that has worked really, really well

with, um, Oral’s designer, um, collaboration.

Have we got enough black prints in the collection?

Uh, well, we've lost that abstract dust print, this one here,

in the black, but I think this pink, we really---

It's one of those prints that everyone's nervous of but actually will do well.

Minney I think most fashion brands start

with a concept of a collection or a look.

Um, they don't tend to think, uh, you know,

who is going to make the product?

And how can I ensure that producers

or suppliers, um, are going to eat?

So, what we're trying to do at People Tree is start with the skills that we have

at each producer group, and then design the collection up,

whilst also looking at the integrity of the collection in its aesthetic.

I worked originally with freelance designers

and went into Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, India, Nepal, the Philippines,

and bit by bit, we put together, you know, an amazing network

of like-minded Fair Trade organizations

that put women's development,

the workers' social development and environment

absolutely essential to everything they do.

woman One, two, three.

all Happy World Fair Trade Day!

cheering and whistling

speaking in Japanese

instrumental music playing over speakers

today’s the fifteenth anniversary of world fair trade organized in over sixty countries to
promote fair trade
with over 60 organizations from each country involved in it

Thank you.

Good job! It was so... Really, really great!

Yeah.

speaking in Japanese

speaks in Japanese

That's beautiful.

Fair Trade is a citizen's response

to correcting the social injustice

in an international trading system that is largely dysfunctional,

where, uh, workers and farmers

are not paid, um, a living wage,

and where the environment is not considered to make the products we buy.

speaks in foreign language

speaking in foreign language

Shima is one of about million garment-factory workers

in the world. She is thirteen years old and came to Dhaka when she was twelve

Almost four million of these workers are here in Bangladesh,

working in almost 5000 factories,

making clothing for major Western brands.

Over 85 percent of these workers are women.

And with a minimum .

of less than $ 3 a day,

they are among the lowest paid garment workers in the world.

When she first came she lived with her aunt and got paid 10 dollars a month . My daughter
Nadia is with me when I got to the factory and its terribly hot in there and there are harmful
chemicals as well . I cant take care of her.

interviewer

Akhter

man The workers must not have any kind of distrust

on their owners.

If they have,

there will not be any good working atmosphere in the factory.

They must respect, the owner is paying us as per rule.

If they do not have this kind of confidence,

you won't get the result.

Akhter speaking in foreign language

We formed a union at the facotyr and submitted some demands and the managers received it
and we had an altercation and after that they closed the doors and started beating us with
different objects

It's estimated that one in every six people alive

in the world today

work in some part of the global fashion industry,

making it the most labor-dependent industry on earth.

Most of this work is done by people, like Shima, who have no voice

in the larger supply chain.

But to fully understand the impact that fashion is having on our world,

we have to go back to where it all begins.

engine starts

woman My grandparents settled out here in the ' 20 s,

and so this is a part of my heritage.

People ask why I'm a cotton farmer, it's 'cause I don't know better.

My granddaddy was an old German farmer

that felt like we should respect the land, we're stewards of the land,

and respect the life that's in the land.

You are actually sitting in, uh, the high plains of Texas,

and there's 3.6. million acres of cotton growing in this region.

We're literally the biggest cotton patch in the world.

In just the past ten years, 80 percent of that is now GMO,

genetically modified cotton.

Most of it is, uh, Roundup Ready,

meaning that instead of the farmers spot-spraying weeds,

occasionally, in their field,

or hiring laborers to walk the field and eliminate the weeds,

now they're spraying whole fields.

Cotton produces the fiber

that's responsible for most of the clothing worn by the world today.

And as our appetite for fashion grows,

the cotton plant itself is being re-engineered to keep up.

There's been this big drive

towards the industrialization of agriculture,

the intensification of agriculture.

So, instead of the old forms of farming,

which were very much in-tune with nature,

they were linked to the cycles

of the natural year and the seasons,

what you see now is an intensification

where the land is almost reconsidered as if it was a factory.

man What you've created is this general practice

of "we treat millions of acres the same."

We put a dose of chemical on it all,

and that's when you get these big ecological effects

that nobody has a grasp of what's really happening.

Nature tends to heal itself in small pockets.

But when you get this big, broad approach,

we really don't know what's going on.

For us, it's not reducing the amount of pesticides

and chemicals going on the cotton, that's one of the big-- It reduces that.

Not in our area, where we are spraying

millions and millions of acres and dollars of Roundup

across the entire South Plains.

What kind of impact is that having on our soil,

with residuals that are left at the micro bacterial level?

What kind of impact is that having on the people in our communities?

Where is the cost on that?

man Monsanto is proud to be the leader

in agricultural innovation,

because of what these agricultural advancements can do to help you,

double yields for the future needs of the world.

We're dedicated to the future of agriculture

and providing farmers with innovations

that help them produce more and conserve more,

while improving the lives of people around the world.

Together, we can face the challenges

of the next generation

and beyond.

woman After the wars,

where all these redundant factories

that made war chemicals, explosives, uh, were lying around,

the Western countries thought that it would be a good idea

to market them to the third world .

After all, the same industry that makes explosives

makes nitrogen fertilizers.

And they started to push nitrogen fertilizers,

from the ' s onwards, after we became independent.

But the nitrogen fertilizers don't do very well with native crops.

There's a problem of lodging.

So, the whole system then organized itself

to redesign the plant

in order to take on more chemicals.

Bt Cotton is a cotton in which a gene has been added,

from a bacteria, to produce a toxin.

But the Bt Cotton,

which is supposed to control a pest,

has been offered because it's a way for companies to own the seed.

narrator By patenting these genetically modified plants,

Monsanto has become the largest seed and chemical corporation in history.

I wanted to speak with someone who'd worked with the company,

and I got word that a former managing director for India

was willing to talk.

man One of my close friends in the research division,

working on these modified crops,

he came to my hotel for a drink.

We are sitting having a drink, and after a few drinks he told me,

"Hey, Jag, they're going to change the type of business

you're doing in India."

I said, "What do you mean?"

"They're going to get into seeds business.

And they're going to make the seed business of all crops,

so that we have a monopoly on seeds,

and every farmer has to come to us to buy seeds every time."

That rang a bell in my mind.

If a poor farmer has to go to Monsanto to buy seeds every time,

and such expensive seeds,

at the time there's no idea of Bt at all for me.

Genetically modified seed, it's not in my mind.

Even seed monopoly is something very bad.

Shiva So farmers get into debt when they get the seed

because of the high cost, , percent more.

They get into deeper debt because it doesn't deliver on the promise

of controlling pests, so they have to buy more pesticides.

The tragedy with chemicals, whether it's fertilizers or pesticides,

is that they are what has been called ecological narcotics

the more you use them, the more you need to use them.

For a while, the yield of the single commodity climbs

and then it starts to decline

because you have contaminated the soil.

Most of India's cotton is grown in the Punjab region,

which has quickly become the largest user of pesticides in India.

Dr. Pritpal Singh has been studying the effects

of these chemicals on human health,

and his reports show dramatic rise in the number of birth defects,

cancers and mental illness here in the region.

boy whimpering

Companies that make the GM seeds and make the chemicals

are the same companies.

And they're also the same companies that make the medicines

which they are now patenting.

So you get cancer, there are more profits.

For them it's a win, win, win.

As for nature and people, it's a lose, lose, lose.

It's the day those agents of these companies

come to the farmer and say,

"You owe me this much. You haven't paid back.

Now your land is my land."

That day the farmer will go into his field,

drink a bottle of pesticide,

and end his life.

And every widow I've talked to said,

"And the neighbors came and said they found my husband lying in the field."

speaking indistinctly

In the last 16 years,25000

there have been more than ,

recorded farmer suicides in India.

That's about one farmer every 30 minutes.

And it's the largest recorded wave of suicides in history.

As it becomes clear just how much of an impact fashion is having,

there's an increasing amount of research

to suggest that it's also having a growing effect on us,

the people buying these clothes.

What we now know 20 years later, and hundreds of studies later,

is that the more the people are focused on those materialistic values,

the more that they say that money and image

and status and possessions are important to them,

the less happy they are ,

the more depressed they are, the more anxious they are.

We know that all of these kinds of psychological problems

tend to go up as materialistic values go up.

Now, that's really at odds with the thousands of messages

that we receive every day from, uh, advertisements

suggesting that materialism and the pursuit of possessions

and owning stuff is what's gonna make us happy.

It's important to understand that advertising is a species

or a category of propaganda.

You think of propaganda as a totalitarian thing, very grim,

loudspeakers, you know, chanting crowds and so on,

and we think of Hitler.

We always think of it as a foreign thing, okay,

but it's actually as American as apple pie.

Kasser Well, the reason that advertising works is because

the smart advertisers, at least,

are trying to tie the consumption of their product

to a message that suggests

that your needs will be satisfied

by consuming this thing.

It wants you to believe

that you'll look wonderful in that thing.

But then to put it on and feel like,

"Nah, you look kind of fat in it, you don't look that good in it,

you're sorry you bought it, but there's another one you can buy."

Kasser So think of all of the car commercials you see that show,

"Well, I've really made it now, I'm a competent person

because I'm driving this BMW or this Audi."

Or think of all the shampoo commercials you've seen,

where the person now has beautiful flowing hair

and is loved and appreciated by the people around them.

The basic message is the same

the way to solve the problems of your life,

we all have problems in our life,

the way to solve the problem in your life is through consumption.

Hey, you guys!

Today I am coming to you guys with a clothing haul!

I went shopping a couple days ago and literally went insane

and bought so many things.

My spam box, I don't know, where it's literally blown up,

by you guys saying you guys wanted a haul.

So, here it is.

Okey-dokey, so first off, I have some things that I got from H&M.

So, then I went to Forever .

It wasn't even a question, it was just fate. I had to get it.

Like, if it could levitate towards me, it would have levitated.

I got this skirt,

bright yellow, and it was $ . .

It's a jean button-up thing.

And I just loved this, I just loved it, loved it, loved it!

It's a gray knit sweater, and it has pink hearts all over it.

I loved... I love tie-dye things.

Like tie-dye things are literally the [Link].

It has a little yin yang sign on the front of it.

I just love these so much.

And it's just this really pretty, light blue sweater.

I don't know if I'm gonna wear this. I don't know if I like it that much.

I need to stop.

man I try to understand better

why people don't realize that they're becoming poorer and poorer.

And I ask myself, okay, but what has changed

in respect of when I was young?

And fashion is something that has dramatically changed.

I was able to buy one, two T-shirts,

four T-shirts, for example, a year.

Now, I mean, also my children, they used to buy,

every party, they buy a T-shirt.

And so I understood that Fast Fashion is something totally new.

If you have noticed, the price has decreased in the last years.

And it does follow the middle class disappearing.

So all the things that people really need are very costly,

like a home, like studies, like, uh, life insurance.

On the other side, there is a source of consolation,

um, part of their life.

They can, uh, buy a T-shirt,

two T-shirts a party, or eventually a day,

although I'm very poor and I've got lost--

I've lost all the things I really needed.

Today we purchase over billion pieces of new clothing

each year.

That's percent more than the amount we bought just two decades ago.

The way we buy clothes has changed so much, so fast

that few people have actually stepped back

to understand the origin of this new model or the consequence

of such an unprecedented increase in consumption.

Miller There's, um, an article in Printers' Ink,

which is the leading advertising trade journal of its day,

uh, by a very famous copywriter, named Earnest Elmo Calkins.

He was a grand old man of the art of writing advertising copy.

It was an article called "Consumptionism."

In that article, he says there are two kinds of products.

Okay, there are the kind that you use,

like washing machines, cars and so on,

things that you buy and use for a long time.

And then there are the things that you use up,

like chewing gum and cigarettes, other perishables.

He said, uh, consumptionism is all about getting people

to treat the things they use

as the things they use up.

woman With their innovative Buy , Get Free pricing,

a suit from Joseph A. Bank

is effectively cheaper than paper towels.

And now they come in these easy-to-use dispensers.

With four suits for the price of a modest dinner,

I can feel good about throwing them away when I'm done.

You just have to look at landfill and you can see in landfill

that the amount of clothes and textiles being chucked away

has been increasing steadily over the last ten years,

um, as the sort of dirty shadow of the Fast Fashion industry.

Siegle As we get sort of closer and closer

to species degradation,

to, uh, trashing our last remaining pristine wilderness,

we seem hell-bent on producing more and more disposable stuff.

It makes no sense.

Fashion should never and can never be thought of

as a disposable product.

Dean I think after any big change in any industry,

it takes a while to sort of feel and smell

the dirt that comes out of something, um, that is polluting.

So, I think now there is a change

because you can't deny

that the Fast Fashion industry

is having a massive impact in developing countries.

narrator The average American throws away 82 pounds

of textile waste each year.

Adding up to more than 11 million tons of textile waste

from the U.S. alone.

Most of this waste is non-biodegradable.

Meaning it sits in landfills for 200 years or more,

while releasing harmful gases into the air.

de Castro The sheer amount of cheap clothing,

even though people feel, perhaps somehow,

um, that they're offsetting by giving to charity.

You know, the journey of a T-shirt donated to charity

is unpalatable in itself.

woman Pepe, um... It is a disease in Haiti.

Not only in Haiti, I think like in any third world country that you're visiting.

Like, you know... It's a problem, it's a huge problem.

Pepe, a bunch of clothes,

most of them came from the States.

People will go and buy a box full of clothes.

They don't even know what they're buying.

Those are clothes people donate to charity,

and charity cannot sell them on their thrift store or whatever.

They pack them, ship them to those third countries,

and most of them end up here.

It turns out that only about 10 percent of the clothes we donate

actually get sold in local thrift stores.

And as we're going through our clothing faster and faster,

now more of it is being dumped into developing countries, like Haiti.

As the amount of secondhand clothing coming into Haiti has increased,

the local clothing industry here has disappeared.

Once a proud, local tailoring sector,

Haiti now produces mostly cheap T-shirts

for export to America.

speaking in foreign language

Back in the days when someone used to come to learn how to sew and they would easily get
a job but now its not possible .

Charlot So I'll tell people, stop buying things that is not good,

that is costing, like dollars,

you going to go on a ball, you going out today.

You just go to a store and buy yourself a dress for dollars.

Because it cost dollars and I can throw it away.

And tomorrow you are going to do the same thing over and over and over again.

As awareness of fashion's impact on our world is growing,

there are key leaders in the industry who are beginning to question

the impacts of a model built on careless production

and endless consumption.

man At Patagonia, we hate the word "consumers."

chuckles

We've got to find a better word, we prefer, uh, "customers,"

and we prefer also customers who recognize

the impact of their consumption.

They recognize that, uh, as consumers, they're part of the problem.

Uh, we are hopeful that we can encourage our customers to join us

in really questioning consumption.

Because without a reduction in consumption,

we don't feel that we'll really collectively find a solution

to the problems we face, that are collectively, year by year, uh,

resulting in the continued decline of the, uh, health of our planet.

woman I mean, the fashion industry just needs to think.

It needs to just stop and sort of look at how it's been working

in a conventional way, and just sort of question it, challenge it.

That's for me, as a designer,

that's the most exciting thing that I do now.

More exciting than saying, "Oh, I love this color this season,"

or, "This is the silhouette or the hemline."

For me, a way bigger challenge

and excitement is actually looking at my industry

and saying, "I'm gonna do it in a way that is not as harmful to the planet."

Business through advertising has, uh, pulled society along

into this belief that, uh, happiness is based on stuff,

that, uh, true happiness can only be achieved

with, you know, an annual, seasonal, weekly, daily

increase in the amount of stuff you're bringing into your life.

That we want to encourage our customers

to think twice about those assumptions,

to understand where they came from.

And through that understanding, to know that, uh, we can all together,

we can change how this is done.

The customer has to know that they're in charge.

Without them, we don't have jobs.

And that is really important.

So you don't have to buy into it.

If you don't like it, you don't have to buy into it.

Minney I love the embroidery, Shantu.

The embroidery is really nice.

You think we should have the embroidery on both sides?

I think we should definitely add the embroidery here as well.

I think it looks a bit mean to have it just on the front,

so let's have it on the sides, too.

It won't add much cost,

it's not so dense, is it?

indistinct chatter

Swallows is a fair trade fashion business,

but it's also a development society.

So it helps more than people in this village.

I come here every four months.

We call them "production trips."

And, um, we're working with the producers,

trying to find out what are the barriers

to making a great product and to getting it to the market.

And we're also doing fair trade capacity building.

So, looking at, you know, what are the obstacles

to delivering more social benefit

or improving the environmental protection in these areas?

For me, this is about partnering.

This is about finding creative solutions, together with them, with the team here,

and listening to what their problems are and finding a way that works, together.

I want to invite the best employee here at Swallows,

I want to invite one female representative from Swallows

to come to London in autumn or next spring.

And I would like you to think

who would be that best representative.

But I want you to know who your customers are,

and I want you to really understand the marketplace

and come back and tell all your friends.

man speaking in foreign language

Minney With you.

women laugh

Either, if she does it single thread, single stitch,

then maybe she needs to do more densely?

-Okay. -More concentrated.

speaking in foreign language

So, um... If she continues for a bit,

we're gonna go up to the sample room now, for SS .

Can she come and show us the next one that she does?

Yeah.

Minney I hoped that People Tree wouldn't be necessary,

and I hoped that we would have a trading system that looked after

people's rights and the environment.

But the more and more involved I got in developing

and working closely with partners, the more,

you know, dirt and filth I discovered

about how trading practices undermine everything that we believe in

and everything I know most people believe and value.

Um...

I don't know, People Tree just grew organically.

It grew from, um, a really great collection of people

that feel passionately that there's a different way of...

Of working, of living, of consuming,

of, you know, interacting with people by a humane way.

Um...

And, uh, you know,

I didn't necessarily feel that there'd be a thousand shops

selling People Tree today, um,

and I see that there's so much more that we need to do.

So, I think it's not just about, you know, creating jobs

for the people that work for People Tree.

It's also about being a catalyst for change within the industry,

and showing, proving the model works.

Pepper When we first went organic,

there was only two or three of us at the time,

and we formed the Texas Organic Cotton Marketing Cooperative,

and the deal was they'd grow it and I'd sell it.

So, I started going to, like, Jacob Javits

and having this whole deal, cotton plants and everything,

and of, "Yeah, we've got organic cotton,"

and people would just look at us like we were absolutely crazy.

Many times consumers become aware

of organic milk, or they have an allergy.

And so, interestingly enough, cotton, and what they put on their body,

even though the skin's the largest organ on your body,

isn't even on their radar screen

because they're not getting the connection of, "Oh, I eat this organic apple,

therefore I'm not directly ingesting

pesticides or chemicals, or whatever the case may be."

But they don't get that connection with clothing.

So, you have to start looking in that bigger community scope.

That it is about our air, it's about our world.

It's about our planet, it's about our people.

And so it is that awareness of--

You may not feel that you're having direct impact by buying this organic shirt.

But the impact you're having

is in the bigger picture in the world at large,

and especially in the community where the cotton's grown.

As the hard freeze comes,

as organic farmers, we wait for that freeze

because that literally defoliates, uh, takes the leaves off the plant,

so that when we harvest, the bolls open that are mature,

and it leaves the cotton here,

and you can see it kind of comes out in sections.

So, this, uh, machine that's coming is called a Cotton Stripper.

And it's called a Cotton Stripper because it comes along and strips,

uses kind of fingers, and it literally strips

all of the bolls off of this plant.

So, when you look over there, you can see

the harvester's been there and it's taken all the plants off.

I think one of the problems that we have in the current model

is it's all about the profit.

And it doesn't take into consideration "This cost at what cost?"

The cost of polluting the water, the cost of labor,

the cost of bars on the window

that people die when a fire breaks out in the factory,

the cost of farmers that don't have access

to education and health care.

And so we haven't really factored in what the true cost is.

man Kanpur is situated along river Ganga,

which is the holiest river.

And it's also very important for million Hindus,

and also it serves as the lifeline of North India.

So, this river is being polluted and killed

by the leather factories of Kanpur.

With growing demand for materials like cheap leather,

Kanpur is now the leather export capital of India.

Every day here, more than million liters of toxic wastewater

pour out of the local tanneries.

Heavy chemicals used to treat the leather like chromium-

flow into local farming and even drinking water.

In places like Kanpur, far from the eyes of the world,

major western brands are able to source cheap materials

while avoiding all accountability for the growing cost to human health

and the environment.

People in that area are in the tight grip of tannery pollution.

The local environment is contaminated, soil is contaminated.

The only drinking water source,

ground water, is contaminated with chromium.

Agricultural produce,

even vegetables and, uh, salad items,

are, uh, produced there.

People's health is affected.

People have different kinds of dermal problems

skin rashes, boils, pustules,

even numbness in the limbs.

People have stomach ailments, maybe they have cancers also.

People are suffering from jaundice because of chromium

speaking in foreign language

You can have the best of materials moving

into the high-end fashion market, in Milan or Paris or London.

But there has been so much work which has gone behind it,

and so much of chemicals has gone into it,

the effluents have been discharging to so many rivers.

But we are only looking at that point of time

into the finished product.

We need to step back and think about it.

Fashion today is the number two most polluting industry on earth,

second only to the oil industry.

The alarming thing is that not only is fashion using

a huge amount of natural resources

and creating staggering environmental impacts,

these natural resources and this impact is often not even measured.

Because they've been so abundant, these resources,

uh, it's been assumed that they're going to be there forever.

Uh, so, I think business has not accounted for them because, uh,

it's only since the s

that we've really had this industrial expansion

at such a rate that we started to see exponential growth

and exponential use of natural resources.

The first economy on which our lives rest is nature's economy.

Nature has an economy.

That economy is huge. It's not counted.

Then we have people's economy, women working, laborers working,

farmers growing.

And that was made invisible through this construct,

first in the Depression, and then during the war years,

of the number called the GDP, the Gross Domestic Product,

which measures only that which is traded,

and has become a commodity.

Schragger A lot of the resources

that we use to, uh, make our clothing are not accounted for

in the cost of producing those clothes.

Uh, so one has, uh, water that's used to produce clothing,

land that's used to grow the fiber, uh,

chemicals that, uh, are used to dye.

Those things, uh, all are inputs.

And as inputs, they cost something,

uh, and they also give outputs,

in some cases good outputs, the clothing themselves, jobs,

but in other cases bad outputs, like harmful chemicals,

or greenhouse gas emissions,

and those things have costs as well.

speaking in foreign language

interviewer

Akhter

Nadia speaks in foreign language

interviewer

Akhter

The same low wages that have made places like Bangladesh

so attractive for brands to do business

have left millions of workers here working incredibly long hours,

unable to afford to keep their children with them,

even in the cities' worst slums.

In order to give their children an education

and the chance of a better future than life in the factories,

many garment workers here, like Shima, are leaving their children

to be raised by family or friends in villages outside the city,

only getting to see them once or twice a year.

speaking in foreign language

all speaking in foreign language

speaking in foreign language

You know, we are actually profiting

from their, um, need to work, to use them as slaves.

And I'm not saying that we don't-- We need to give them work,

but they have to be treated with the same respect

that we treat our children, our friends.

They're not different from us.

Livia Firth has been calling for major change

in the fashion industry.

She made headlines by starting something called "The Green Carpet Challenge,"

urging celebrities and top designers

to take part in more mindful forms of fashion.

She runs a sustainability consulting firm called Eco Age

and had just been invited to speak on the future of fashion.

Firth If Fast Fashion didn't exist,

we wouldn't need to have a summit in Copenhagen

to try and clean the mess of environmental destruction,

social justice destruction, that has been caused

in the last to years of its existence.

Fast Fashion wants to produce fast,

so the garment worker has to produce faster and cheap.

So, the garment worker is the only point of the supply chain

where the margins are squeezed.

And you have these huge, you know, companies

going to the factory in Bangladesh, place an order for . million jeans

for, you know, cents each, cents each...

How can you make it ethical? I don't know.

But also, from the consumer point of view,

is it really democratic to buy a T-shirt for $

or pay $ for your jeans?

Or are they taking us for a ride?

Because they're making us believe that we are rich or wealthy

because we can buy a lot.

But in fact they are making us poorer.

And the only person who is becoming richer

is the owner of the Fast Fashion brand.

So that makes me a little bit angry.

audience cheering and whistling

You spoke about a commitment

to try and promise a basic living wage.

What does that mean?

Uh, how do you define a fair living wage in Bangladesh?

You know, uh, what does that mean?

And to have a pilot project in three factories,

and by , percent of your factories are going to have that?

It's not good enough. It's not.

It's very clear for us that what a living wage is,

is something that the workers should say,

and that's incorporated in our way of working.

Firth How much is it?

And that's not for us to say a sum,

but we do an assessment all the time.

How much is it?

And to make sure that it covers the basic needs of the workers.

I can show you that later on.

H&M has mastered the model of Fast Fashion,

becoming the second largest clothing corporation in history.

With annual revenue of more than $ billion,

they are now one of the largest producers of clothing

in both Bangladesh and Cambodia.

Sadly, along with every other major retailer I asked,

they declined all interview requests for this film.

crowd cheering

man yelling in foreign language

In Cambodia, garment workers have had enough.

Recently taking to the streets

to demand a minimum wage increase in the country.

As protests continued, workers were met with violent crackdowns,

as police began to open fire with live rounds.

yelling in foreign language

wailing

crowd clamoring car horns honking

gunfire

man A woman has been killed and several people injured

in clashes between clothes factory workers

and riot police in Cambodia.

gunfire

crowd clamoring

speaking in foreign language

For two days, Cambodia was a battleground.

The city of Phnom Penh.

The police, the paratroopers were brought in

as if there were war on the streets of Phnom Penh.

Why? Because workers in the textile industry

continued to demand

a minimum wage of at least $ 160.

woman speaking in foreign language

man Today is the, uh, funeral of a factory worker.

He was beaten to death.

He had, uh, suffered a lot before his death this morning.

And he had done nothing wrong.

He, among his, uh, fellow workers,

wanted to have better living conditions.

chanting in foreign language

chanting continues

We will continue his fight

so that all Cambodian workers

will have decent living conditions.

interviewer Thank you, sir.

narrator The Cambodian government, like other developing countries

are desperate for the business that multinational retailers bring.

Because of the constant threat that these brands

will relocate production to other low-cost countries,

the government holds down wages,

routinely avoiding enforcement of local labor laws.

But because the major brands do not officially employ the workers,

or own any of the factories they produce in,

they're able to profit hugely,

all while remaining free of responsibility

for the effects of poverty wages, factory disasters,

and the ongoing violent treatment of workers.

The whole system begins to feel

like a perfectly engineered nightmare

for the workers trapped inside of it.

Mu You cannot fool us, and exploit our human resources,

exploit our workers.

The workers will continue to rise up.

I call on the international brands

to put that struggle into dollars,

into pounds, into Euros.

It translates into human capital.

It translates into social responsibility

of these big corporations.

It translates into economic justice.

When everything is concentrated on making profits

for the big corporations,

what you see is that human rights,

the environment, workers' rights get lost all together.

You see that workers are increasingly exploited

because the price of everything is pushed down and down and down,

just to satisfy this impulse to accumulate capital.

And that's profoundly problematic,

'cause it leads to the mass impoverishment

of hundreds of millions of people around the world.

woman If you write to these companies, they'll send you their code of conduct.

And it's beautiful, and it says, "Oh, yes, we take responsibility

for the conditions under which our product is made,

you know, the product that you buy.

All the factories where we produce,

we require them to respect the minimum-wage laws,

you know, all of the laws of the country,

to respect women, not to hire children,

uh, no forced labor,

um, no excessive overtime hours," all that stuff.

Um...

But when we submitted a bill in Congress a few years ago,

or worked with people to do that,

we called it "The Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act,"

the companies responded in one voice,

"Oh, no. That would be an impediment to free trade.

We can't have rules. We can't have that."

They want to keep it with voluntary codes of conduct.

You know, they've fought for and they've won laws

to protect their stuff and their interests,

but what about the workers?

The workers are left with voluntary codes of conduct.

And what we see, in case, after case, after case,

is that those voluntary codes of conduct

are not worth the paper that they're written on.

We need to acknowledge, particularly in the fashion industry,

that human capital is part of this miraculous formula.

Without human capital, without cheap labor,

cheap female labor,

it would not be generating the profits that it is.

That needs to be acknowledged, it needs to be dealt with,

and those people need to be rewarded instead of exploited.

Where is their piece of the pie?

That's what we constantly have to ask ourselves.

Are those buyers immoral? Or they just don't--? Or are they amoral?

The system they're working for and the system that allows companies

to do this is amoral.

The individuals concerned are simply products of that system

and having to drive it through to its logical conclusion.

What we need to do is change the way those companies operate.

Operating within a system that only measures profit,

companies have little incentive to do anything

other than to make this quarter better than the last.

No matter what damage is caused along the way.

As corporations that make up the global fashion industry,

major brands, as well as seed and chemical companies,

are growing today to reach unprecedented global size and power.

This mandate for profit at all cost is beginning to stand

in direct opposition to the values that we share.

Richard Wolff is an economist,

who after graduating from Harvard, Stanford and Yale,

became convinced that the real problem is within this system itself.

So, America became a peculiar country.

You could criticize the education system to make the schools better.

You could criticize the transportation system to make that work better.

But you couldn't criticize the economic system.

That got a free pass.

You couldn't criticize, just--

And if you don't criticize something for years,

it rots, it goes to seed.

One of the ways a healthy society worksis it subjects its component systems to criticism,
so that we can debate it, and hopefully fix it, or improve it or do better. Capitalism couldn't
be questioned. Capitalism is the reason the fashion industry looks as it does [Link]'s the
reason why workers in Bangladesh are paid so [Link] if you're operating in a
capitalist system the main thing you have to do is create profitand you have to create more
profit than your [Link] this is what drives companiesto push wages down and
down and [Link] companies don't go-- Like fashion retailersdon't go to places like
Bangladesh, for any other reason exceptthey can get the cheapest labor [Link]'s no
collective rights in Bangladesh,there's no trade union rights,there's a very, very low
minimum wage,there's no, like, maternity benefits, there's no pensions,that is why the
fashion industry is in Bangladeshbecause it can reap the biggest profits out of those
peoplethat are making the clothes for [Link] you can solve a problem, you have to
admit you got oneand before we're gonna fix an economic systemthat's working this way,
and producing such tensionsand inequalities and strains on our community,we have to face
the real scope of the problem we haveand that's with the system as a [Link] at the very
least,we have to open up a national debate about it,and at the most, I think we have to think
long and hardabout alternative systems that might work [Link] For the environment,
the great threat is that capitalmust continue to expand infinitely in order to [Link] can't
have any limits on its expansion and its [Link] natural world clearly does have
[Link] are very defined limits to how much the world can sustain in terms of
production, in terms of trade,in terms of transport and [Link] it's quite clear that
we've already oversteppeda lot of those limits, which is why you're seeing such stressin the
natural world at the [Link] The system we live in isn't one that most people want
to live in.I think it's a system that makes most people very unhappy,and I don't think people
want to live on a slowly dying planetor to be exploiting, um, you know, their [Link], I
think we need huge systemic [Link] If you don't change the system,you're leaving
intactthe decision-making of these enterprises,which means a small group of executives and
shareholdersare gonna be working in the same system,subject to the same pattern of rewards
and punishments,which will sooner or later make them reimpose,there or elsewhere,the very
conditions you're fighting [Link], stop this stuff about improving their conditions,deal
with the system, or else you're not [Link] Our economic system is one of consumer
capitalism,and that's why the government needs to have consumptionat very high levels,
um,and why, of course, the corporations do,and why at some level most people then buy
into it.I can't tell you the number of people I talked to who say, "Well,but if we became less
materialistic our economy would tank."Well, they're right in some level, because our
economy isbased on materialism, it's based on these kinds of [Link]'s what it needs in
order to [Link]'s part of the fuel that it [Link] problem is that comes at a really
high price.♪ Black Friday's here Can we go please? ♪♪ Go, go, go, go, go Shop, shop, shop,
shop ♪Black Friday shopping mania still playing out tonight at malls across America. In
some places across this country tonight, it’s as if someone announced we’re in danger of
running out of stuff, and those who need stuff had better go out and buy it now ‘cause it's
going away forever. Woman Walmart, doing more than million transactions in the first
four hours of the frenzy. Record , people at Macy's in New York City, shoppers hung
tough. Black Friday will be the single largest day of the retail year. Certainly in the case of
Macy's, we'll do more business on this day than on any other, uh, day of the year. Nation,
this orgy of Christmas shopping proves America is back! We are once again Oh, yes! We
are once again spending money we don't have on things we don't need to give to people we
don't like. Pepper I grew up on a farm, married a guy that grew up on a farm, and, uh, those
of us living on the farm live there. It needs to be safe for us, too. The new chemicals that are
coming out, and the intensity of the use, was just continuing to increase. Terry started
having some loss of fine motor skills, and this and that, and come to find out he had a
glioblastoma multiforme, Stage brain tumor, and, uh, at the prime age of years old. And,
uh, he died at the age of . They gave us six months, we had two-and-a-half years, and the
brain surgeon that worked on him-- Lubbock has got huge cancer clinics and a medical hub.
We didn't have to go someplace else to have a brain tumor surgery. We were able to stay
right here because he does so many of them. He said that these kinds of tumors are found in
men, aged - , that work in the agricultural industry or the oil field. And so while I don't
have a smoking gun and the blood tests that say the use of, uh, cotton chemicals,
agricultural chemicals, directly led to my husband's death, there's just too many linkages
with his father's death. Growing up on a chemically-intensive farm, we live in the middle of
. million acres of cotton that use a lot of chemicals. And so, at that point in time, organic
was no longer important to me, it was imperative. It's imperative that we change agriculture.
It's imperative, if we're talking about the long-term sustainability
and well-being of our lives on this planet and our children's lives on the planet, that we
have to change. Minney This is the beginning of a turning point not just for, you know, a
responsible way of doing fashion, but for a new way of doing capitalism, for a new way of
doing economics. I'm sure that we will see a significant change over the next ten years. Um,
whether it's in time or not is another question. Kasser Martin Luther King Jr., at a speech in
a Brooklyn church, he said that what America needed was a revolution of values. It needed
to stop treating people like things. It needed to stop treating people in ways that were just
about profit. But instead to treat people in a real and human way. Wolff My God, we can do
better than this. If what we want is to spread, as I would argue we do, spread industry
around the world, concentrated in one place. Let the benefits be shared globally Then let's
do that in an orderly, reasonable, careful way. Shiva We need to recognize that capital is
just money. Money is a means, and people should be accountable for how it's used. We need
to celebrate the creative power of human beings. And we need to talk of creative work, we
must stop talking about labor. We need to look at the land as not a commodity, to be
speculated on and traded, but as the very basis of our life, as Mother Earth. Siegle You
change all consumers into activists, all consumers asking ethical questions, all consumers
asking quite simple questions about where their clothes are from, all consumers saying, "I'm
sorry, it's not acceptable for someone to die in the course of a working day." We can't just
roll over and say, "Yes, have it. Do what you like." It's too important, it's too significant an
industry. It has too much impact and effect on millions of people worldwide and common
resources. narrator Will we continue to search for happiness in the consumption of things?
Will we be satisfied with a system that makes us feel rich, while leaving our world so
desperately poor? Will we continue to turn a blind eye to the lives of those behind our
clothes? Or will this be a turning point, a new chapter in our story, when together, we begin
to make a real change, as we remember that everything we wear was touched by human
hands? In the midst of all the challenges facing us today, for all the problems that feel
bigger than us and beyond our control, maybe we could start here with clothing.