by Jodi L. Miller
Check out the label in the clothes you’re wearing. Chances are good that it was made outside the United States—probably at a very cheap price. The fast fashion industry makes clothes quickly and cheaply, passing those savings on to consumers. However, human rights violations, such as unsafe working conditions and low wages for garment workers, are abundant in the industry.
\What is fast fashion? The term dates back to the early 1990s when Zara, a Spanish apparel company, described its brand’s mission to The New York Times. The mission was to take a mere 15 days for one of its garments to go from the design phase to being sold in stores.
Today, fast fashion is a business model where mass-market retailers respond to the latest trends by rapidly producing inexpensive clothing. The industry brings in more than $150 billion per year and is on track to grow to more than $290 billion by 2032, according to Allied Market Research, a global market research firm. Zara remains a well-known fast fashion retailer, along with other notable brands from around the world such as H&M, a Swedish company; Shein, a popular Chinese brand; and Forever 21, an American fast fashion brand that filed for a second bankruptcy in 2025. All Forever 21 stores in the U.S. have closed; however, its stores outside of the country, in Canada, Europe, and Asia, are still open.
The high fashion industry, with brands such as Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton, has four seasons—Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter, Resort and Pre-Fall. As Professor Jacqueline Sadashige, who teaches a course titled Fashioning Gender at the University of Pennsylvania, explained in an interview for the university’s Environmental Innovations Initiative, fast fashion brands produce 52 “micro-seasons” a year or a new “collection” every week.
For example, a South African investigation into Shein revealed that the fast fashion giant added between 2,000 and 10,000 individual styles per day to its app over a six-month period in 2021. Some of those offerings cost as little as $3. The pressure to keep up with the demand of the fast fashion industry puts a strain on garment workers, who must work harder to keep up with quotas.
History of garment workers
According to the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, up until the early 19th century, the lower classes made their own clothes at home. If you were a person of means in the upper class, a tailor or seamstress made your clothes to order. It wasn’t until 1831 that the first ready-to-wear garment factory was established in New York City. Today, California and New York dominate garment manufacturing in the United States.
Since its inception, the garment industry has predominantly employed immigrant workers. Mark Anner, a professor and Dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, says that it has been “immigrants, and mostly immigrants of color” that have made the clothes worn by Americans “almost since the sewing machine was invented” in 1829.
“For more than150 years, most of the garments we wear are made by women of color in very precarious situations and poor working conditions,” says Professor Anner who has been researching and advocating for workers’ rights in the apparel manufacturing industry for more than 30 years. “These women are taken advantage of, and their poor treatment is largely driving the fast fashion industry.”
Violating human rights
How can fast fashion brands offer so many styles at such low prices? Ultimately, it comes down to the supply chain. A supply chain is a network of organizations that are involved in the production of a product. For example, at the top of the supply chain in the fast fashion industry are the retailers, such as Shein and Zara, that design and sell the clothes. Then, there are the manufacturing companies/factories that are contracted to manufacture the clothes. Finally, at the bottom of the chain are the garment workers who are employed by the manufacturers and actually make the clothes.
In 2016, the U.S. Labor Department investigated 77 local garment companies in California, finding labor violations in 85% of them. Retailers with ties to these companies included Ross Dress for Less, Forever 21, and TJ Maxx. The investigation revealed that the companies cheated garment workers out of $1.1 million, paying some as little as $4 an hour when California’s minimum wage, at the time, was $10 an hour. This is called wage theft and is common in the fast fashion industry.
“The retailers are setting the prices,” Ruben Rosalez, an administrator with the U.S. Labor Department, told The Los Angeles Times. “They’re saying, “Make this shirt for this amount,’ but it’s the workers at the end of the chain that are getting screwed.”
The California companies were ordered to pay the workers $1.3 million in lost wages and damages. According to Professor Anner, it is harder to hold companies accountable when retailers outsource the production of their clothes to foreign factories.
“In general, there are significant limitations on the ability through law to hold foreign companies liable,” Professor Anner says. “We’re living in a world with a very global economy, but we don’t have a global government.”
While there are limits to U.S. law overseas, Professor Anner says that in the area of forced labor there are U.S. laws on the books that offer protection, applying to factories in foreign countries.
“U.S. companies abroad found to be violating laws around forced labor could be held liable,” he says. “Those goods could be blocked from coming into the United States.”
Professor Anner also poses the question of joint or shared liability in the supply chain. For example, when a U.S. retailer, like Forever 21, or the Chinese-based Shein, outsources to a factory in Bangladesh or Taiwan, those companies push the factories to come down on the price they pay for the factory to make the garments.
“Retailers say, ‘Make the shirt for me for $2. No, make the shirt for me for a $1.90’ and then the factory turns around and squeezes labor, and then workers are exploited,” Professor Anner says. “Who’s to blame? Is it the factory that squeezed the workers? Okay, sure. But what about the brand or the retailer that set this unreasonably low price to produce the garment?”
A 2022 United Kingdom Channel 4 documentary, Untold: Inside the Shein Machine, revealed garment workers putting in 18-hour days to make hundreds of items, filling quotas for the retailer. Workers were paid as little as $20 a day—less if they made mistakes. In addition, most workers were only allowed one day off a month.
In 2021, Public Eye, a Swiss watchdog group that focuses on human rights, released a report revealing that workers in Shein’s manufacturing companies were working in unsafe conditions with no safety protocols. They had no windows, and no emergency exits in the factory.
Garment workers in many foreign factories face poor working conditions. In April 2013, more than 1,100 garment workers were killed in Bangladesh when Rana Plaza, an eight-story building, which housed five garment factories, collapsed. After the tragedy, the Accord on Fire Building Safety was signed in May 2013. The Accord is an agreement between global brands, retailers and trade unions to build in safety protocols by creating an inspection and remediation program.
Protective measures in the U.S.
To protect U.S. garment workers, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York introduced federal legislation—the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change Act—also known as the FABRIC Act, in the U.S. Senate.
“For far too long, garment workers in the once-bustling American apparel manufacturing industry have been exploited and overlooked,” Senator Gillibrand said in a press statement when the legislation was first introduced in 2022. “The popularization of the fast fashion business model has perpetuated abuse of an already underpaid and overworked workforce, promoting profits over people, overconsumption, and rampant wage theft.”
Key provisions of the FABRIC Act, which would update the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, include establishing requirements that hold fashion brands and retailers alongside manufacturing partners jointly accountable for workplace violations and setting an hourly pay rate for the garment industry, eliminating the piece-rate pay system. The piece-rate system pays workers according to the number of units they turn out. Professor Anner says that getting rid of the piece-rate system is key to improving working conditions for garment workers.
“The piece-rate system is a big part of what’s driving these poor working conditions, and it’s linked to fast fashion—the faster the production process is, the quicker the turnaround to get it produced quickly before the fashion trend changes,” Professor Anner says.
Senator Gillibrand’s FABRIC Act is based on California’s Garment Worker Protection Act, which was first introduced in the Golden State in December 2020. The measure passed in California in September 2021 and went into effect in January 2022. In January 2024, a similar state effort—the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act—was introduced in the New York Senate. That measure is still under consideration.
While the federal FABRIC Act would only apply to retailers and manufacturers in the United States, Professor Anner believes if it were to be enacted it “would provide an important example for countries elsewhere in the world.”
Senator Gillibrand introduced the FABRIC Act again in 2023; however, the legislation has had no movement.
Discussion Questions
- In the article, Professor Anner makes the point that manufacturing companies and retailers are both to blame for exploiting garment workers. Do you agree or disagree? Is one more to blame? Explain your answer.
- After reading the article, how do you feel about the fast fashion industry? Explain your answer.
Glossary Words
legislation — laws made by a legislative body (i.e., Congress or a state legislature).
BONUS CONTENT: Environmental Concerns with Fast Fashion
It isn’t just garment workers that feel the strain of the rapid fast fashion industry. So does the planet.
According to a 2023 report, At What Cost: Unraveling the Harms of the Fast Fashion Industry, published by the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization, the fast fashion industry consumes “79 trillion liters of water per year” and produces “more than 92 million tons of solid waste per year.” In addition, the industry contributes up to an estimated 20% of global wastewater and 10% of CO2 emissions, which is more than the aviation and shipping industries combined, according to the report.
“The whole industry is driven by this idea that we just have to constantly up- upgrade and change the clothing we wear,” says Mark Anner, a professor and Dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. “It’s not good for the workers because of the pace of production that it puts them through, and it’s not good for the environment.”
Because fast fashion clothes are so inexpensive, they are easily discarded. Typically, a fast fashion garment is worn six or seven times before being thrown away, according to McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm that advises corporations and governments.
In an online interview with MakeGood.world, Elizabeth Cline, an expert in the field of sustainability and labor rights in the fashion industry, said that “75% of clothes made are never sold and are often destroyed or landfilled.”
Cline, who is the author of Overdressed—The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion and The Conscious Closet, said, “Of the 3.8 billion pounds of unwanted clothes that finds its way to charities and donation bins, a little less than half is reusable as clothes. Some of those clothes are sold in thrift stores in the U.S. but the majority is exported to other countries.”
While Cline acknowledged that there are companies working on ways to recycle unwanted clothing into something wearable, the technology is not there yet. The unusable half of unwanted clothes, she said, is “sold off to ‘downcyclers’ who churn it up and turn it into wiping rags, insulation, carpet padding, and a variety of other products.”—Jodi L. Miller
This article and sidebar originally appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Respect.