Why Can’t Fashion Fix Its Labour Exploitation Problem?

0:07Hello and welcome to The Debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we explore our most pressing industry stories with the correspondents who bring them to life. I'm senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. And I'm executive editor Brian Baskin. Today we're addressing a problem everyone in the industry says must be solved and yet never seems to get fixed, which is the poor treatment of so many of the workers in fashion's supply chain. BOF has published reports in recent weeks on child labor in India's cotton fields and modern day slavery in Taiwanese garment factories. And that's this year, 2025, 12 years after the Rana Plaza factory collapse and 30 years after Nike's sweatshop scandals.

0:49And I'll throw in about 200 years after Charles Dickens wrote about this. Joining us to break it all down and discuss the roadblocks to substantive and long-lasting change is BOF Sustainability Editor, Sarah Kent. Hi, Sarah. Welcome back to the Debrief Podcast. Hi, guys. Thanks so much for having me. I feel like I always bring the fun topics. That's a good way to put the fun topics. Well, they're very important topics for sure. So, Sarah, we're talking about two different but equally concerning reports since just the start of 2025. They're laying bare these persistent challenges in creating fair labor conditions and fashion supply chains.

1:25Now, this kind of thing, as Brian points out, keeps happening over and over and over again. Why is all this coming to a head right now? I don't even know that it is coming to a head right now. As Brian said, we've seen these incidents pop up consistently for decades now, for centuries even. And it's not clear to me that this time around is going to be any different in driving more change. What happened in the last few months is that there were a couple of investigations that came our way revealing some of these situations. So an NGO called Transparentum put a lot of work into demonstrating that these issues were happening.

2:04but the issues are systemic and pervasive and happening all the time. And they only get attention when individuals or organizations take the time to do the hard investigative work to bring them to light. And that's what's happening right now. And I think what's so surprising about the two instances that you wrote about this year is the first one, India, this was happening in so-called ethical cotton fields that children were basically being forced into working in these fields to supply what consumers, mainly in the West, see as ethical clothing. And that's a recurring thing here as well, right?

2:41Which is that even when there are watchdogs in place, there are systems in place to prevent exactly this sort of abuse. It just keeps happening. Right. The systems aren't really working. And that's partly because the way the systems have being set up is to protect the brands from liability rather than to protect the workers from exploitation. Can we talk a little bit about that report? I don't know that our listeners will all know some of the things that these reports have found. Like there are kids as young as six years old in some of these fields, but also they're inhaling like chemicals. Talk a little bit about those findings, Sarah.

3:15Right. So I think what's interesting is that you've got two very different situations in India and Taiwan. But the underlying issues are often very similar. So in India, Transparentum did a big investigation. They talked to dozens of workers on cotton fields and found that in many cases, in many of these fields, children were working, they were spraying pesticides that were toxic, they were falling sick. And these were fields that in some cases claimed to be organics. There shouldn't have been pesticides being sprayed at all. Or in other cases were part of suppliers who claimed to be operating responsibly.

3:55But really what was happening is, you know, in India, you have a really, really fragmented cotton supply chain. So often these are smallholder farmers, family farms. They'll bring on seasonal laborers to help sew the cotton, pick the cottons. It's not regularized in any way. Oftentimes, these farmhands are from very, very marginalized, poor communities within the state, and no one's really paying attention to how they're being treated. And often, it is normalized for families to come and work in the fields together. So you're not just dealing with an issue of exploitation that is coming from the industry, you're dealing with a culture that is ingrained in the way the community works.

4:47And that is a very difficult, complicated thing to try and manage. And something that comes up in your reports on these issues often is this arm's length relationship that brands have with suppliers and factories. Talk a little bit about that, because you could be a big brand in the States claiming to be using ethical cotton and have no line of sight into how that so-called ethical cotton is actually being produced or sent to another manufacturer. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, brands, for the most part, have no idea where that cotton comes from. And this is despite decades of advocacy for brands to get more transparency of their supply chain.

5:27And this isn't just negligence. The cotton supply chain is extremely complicated, and brands are very, very distant from their raw materials. So if you think of your average fashion brand, they directly contract with probably quite a large number of factories that make, that cut and sew and actually make the clothes that we then buy in the store. But they're not usually going out and buying the materials that go into those products. Instead, those manufacturers have their own suppliers who provide fabrics. And those fabric suppliers will have their own suppliers who spin yarn into the fabric themselves.

6:07And those spinners will again have their own suppliers who are probably traders, not actually farmers who are supplying them with cotton. The traders will have been getting the cotton from ginners who will have got raw cotton from, in the case of India, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of small family farms, aggregated it, ginned it, sold it onto a trader who then sells it up through the supply chain. So by the time it even gets to a spinning factory, placing it back to the farm where it came from is really, really difficult. I don't know how a brand could claim to be ethical when you've heard I've heard like 13 ,000 steps.

6:50So many steps. Well, that's a great question, though, which is how are these brands able to claim they're ethical when it sounds like every time one of these things happens, they say, well, we have no way of knowing what's going on. And then you say, well, then how did you know you were ethical then if you didn't actually know where any of this was coming from? Well, and this is where certifications come in, because what brands will do is they'll say, OK, look, it's very hard to figure out where exactly our cotton came from. So we'll go to an external certifier and we'll buy organic cotton or Better Cotton Initiative cotton.

7:22And that will allow us to claim in some way that the cotton we're buying was produced ethically. But often these cotton certification schemes themselves have the same problem because monitoring everything is extremely difficult. Really doing it would be very expensive. And so you rely a lot on self-disclosure and that doesn't work. I want to talk about Taiwan a little bit, too. One of the things that really struck me in your reporting was this idea of pay for play and that people that are employed at some of these Taiwanese factories or textile factories are paying for their jobs or paying to be employed.

7:56Walk us through some of that and how that happens and why that's legal. Well, so Taiwan is a big manufacturing hub. It's not like one of the places that might immediately spring to mind like China or Bangladesh, because again, Taiwan primarily makes fabrics. So it's not the first tier of suppliers that brands contract with. They're the people who are supplying the materials to manufacturers. So it's a little bit further down the supply chain than some of the countries that you might initially think of as fashion suppliers. Taiwan also suffers from big labor shortage issues. It's got a small population, but it's a big manufacturing country, not just for fabrics, but for electronics and other products.

8:41And so, it relies heavily on migrant labor. And in order to recruit migrants into the industry, many, many factories rely on recruitment agents in the fashion industry's case, countries like Vietnam and Thailand and the Philippines, who will bring over large numbers of workers to fill the needs of the factories. But these agencies will charge workers who want to come over to Thailand large amounts of money, up to$6 ,000, to be able to come across and get these contracts. And they can do that because the opportunity to earn higher wages in Taiwan is very tempting to migrant workers. That$6 ,000 is like a fraction of what you actually earn.

9:27In some cases, it's like months of their salary. It's months of salary, but the earning potential, workers still believe, makes it worth it. This operates in the shadows, and I really have to give credit to the work of Transparentum, who's done an incredible job in digging into this and not only shining a light on the issue, but also connecting what was happening in Taiwan to large global brands. to demonstrate why it should matter to consumers in the West and not just people in Taiwan. So who needs to act here? Who does Transparentum, for example, think needs to do something to solve this problem?

10:06I know that some fashion industry organizations have signed some documents advocating for the, I guess, the Taiwanese government maybe to improve treatment. So I think the interesting thing in both the Indian and Taiwan case, but let's talk about Taiwan, is in looking at these issues as systemic. It's not laying the blame on one individual actor. It's looking for ways to get all of the actors involved to move together. So in Taiwan, very interesting part of this story is that, you know, this issue of recruitment fees is one that, for instance, Patagonia has been talking about for a decade now.

10:45It came out in 2015 with this pretty punchy statement acknowledging that it had found this issue in its supply chain, publicizing that recruitment fees were a problem, and then talking about all the things it was trying to do to fix it. Fast forward 10 years on, those efforts had resulted in some progress in the factories Patagonia works with. But nonetheless, Transparent have still found the same issues in Patagonia's supply chains and more broadly throughout Taiwan. So without other brands operating in Taiwan coming together and trying to do the same thing, the industry as a whole isn't going to move.

11:23And really, manufacturers without regulatory shifts don't have much reason or incentive to change the way they operate to remove the burden of recruitment freeze from workers. Because if workers aren't paying them, then the manufacturers have to pay them. And where are the governments of these countries on this? So Taiwan's government has made some moves over the last decade to provide some more support for migrant workers. But there aren't many protections, really. But I think the Taiwanese government needs to have people advocating for it to change the way it operates, or it's not going to change the way it operates.

12:03And we shouldn't single out the Taiwanese or the Indian governments here. I'm sure all sorts of abuse is happening in U.S. garment factories. And as you've alluded to here, the real problem is the migrant crisis happening globally that has many causes and many actors, many of which have nothing to do with fashion. So I guess maybe the question is, should fashion be aiming to solve this? Or is it really just mitigating damage and mitigating harm? What a great question. I mean, in some ways, these are problems without nice, neat solutions. There isn't a silver bullet here. But definitely steps can be taken to mitigate harm and to move towards a world where these kinds of abuses do not happen as commonly, or at least when they do, it really is because of bad actors who managed to slip through the cracks rather than just a normalized way of operating because we all want like cheap stuff.

13:02We'll be back with more of The Debrief right after this.

13:10it's interesting we we've barely or not at all talked about the role of the consumer here and i feel like in the past when you've written these stories that actually has been a bigger part of it but in this case a consumer buying ethical clothing with ethical cotton is in the end just as complicit as one who's just buying whatever she is putting out but this is also part the problem, right? If consumers lose trust in what is meant to be a signifier of doing better, then you risk people not caring at all because they throw their hands up and say, well, you know, it's all bad, so what am I going to do?

13:43And you really damage efforts to do better because no one's going to pay more for a product that promises to be more responsible and more ethical when they don't believe that it is. They're barely wanting to do it when they do. No, I feel that in myself. I think, gosh, if this is what ethical cotton has behind it, it makes you feel very hopeless, I got to say. I want to talk about what some of the brands, though, are doing or are not doing. So like there were brands that were named as having connections to some of the factories in Taiwan, India, Taiwan, Nike, Adidas, Puma. And then in India, Zara, H &M, Gap, Amazon, all having connections.

14:20And let's not get in the weeds of what they knew and what they didn't know. but all of them are doing something or claim to be doing something what are some of the efforts i mean let me just step back from that those are the brands some of the brands that were named i think part of the point here is that if you are sourcing costume from that part of india you are probably exposed to this issue and if you're sourcing fabrics from taiwan you're probably exposed to this issue so this is not specific to those brands but you know they are big names that were caught in these investigations and there were many other brands that were also called out.

14:53All of those brands that you named are taking action. Not all of the brands that were caught in the investigations are, but of those brands, in both cases, what you've seen are companies try and bring in industry organizations to help them work as a group rather than individuals. So in Taiwan, what you've seen is the American Apparel and Footwear Association and the Fair Labor Association convening groups of their members to try and to engage across the industry in Taiwan. So the AFA and FLA got 50 brands together, not all of whom were involved in this investigation. So this points to an effort to bring in more actors to write to the Taiwanese government last year saying that, you know, they'd like some support in addressing and regulating this issue.

15:41They organized a trip out to Taiwan late last year for, you know, a group of brands to talk to the Taiwanese textile industry and start engaging on this issue. Because again, bear in mind for Taiwanese manufacturers that it's operating within the bounds of the law in Taiwan. This is a normal way to operate. And so part of it is finding common ground between the expectations of brands who are dealing with a consumer market that ostensibly doesn't want risks of forced labor in their supply chain and a mode of working that has very large risk of that, but is completely normal and legal. And so to start those conversations.

16:21And I was pleasantly surprised, I guess I could say, that in the case of India, it seems like brands were pretty proactive about responding to the allegations. We can argue about whether they went far enough to address it, but it's not one of the situations where this report comes out and it lands with a thud and everyone just ignores it. And I think that's one of the interesting things about the way Transparentum operates as well. Its mission is not just to do these investigations and generate big scandals. The organization was set up to try and galvanize real change. And so I think part of the reason why you've seen that is before these reports were made public, in both cases, the brands who were caught in these investigations have been given about a year of engagement to discuss how they might respond, how they might act.

17:14And so, yes, what we're talking about right now is like, oh, my God, how could these things still be happening in the supply chain? But we are also able to talk to some degree about what companies are trying to do to address it because we have those 12 months of response. That's so interesting. Who are transparent and like who's behind that organization? So it was set up by an investigative journalist who was writing a lot about modern slavery, wrote a book on the topic, and became frustrated that despite all of his coverage, the articles would get published. And then, you know, the next day, the news moves on.

17:50And the workers are no better than they were before. And so the organization was established to try and leverage those skills, but in a way that perhaps drove more change. So Sarah, I want to talk a little bit about the monetary cost of correcting some of these issues. So for example, in your article, the president of the Taiwan Textile Federation said, we need to let more and more mills understand that there are principles that need to be followed, but clients need to consider affordability as well. So in some cases, or in most cases, brands that take up the charge and want to make this a better, more equitable, fill in the blank process, they are going to have to incur additional costs for production if they do this or pass that off to the consumer, correct?

18:33Yes, but it's complicated, right? Because it all comes down to how margins in the industry work. But yes, fundamentally, if migrant workers are no longer bearing the cost of recruitment, manufacturers who still want to recruit migrant workers will need to take on that cost. And so if that's$6 ,000 per worker, that can add up a lot. So, you know, in the case of this Taiwanese investigation, in most cases, I don't think that the brands have got far enough along in their conversations around remediation to have cost estimates in place. But there was one factory where they had calculated how much it would cost to pay back workers who had paid recruitment fees, and it was$400 ,000.

19:16But then on an ongoing basis, you're then paying this cost regularly to bring in new workers as needed. A couple of things on that. Obviously, a large company has more bargaining power than an individual worker. So theoretically, if you're saying you want to hire 100 migrant workers, you could negotiate with a broker for a better fee rate. So that could bring down the cost. But either way, manufacturers who operate on very thin margins suddenly have this new cost they've taken on. They are going to want to pass that on to their customer. And this is a very cutthroat industry in a downturn, everything revolves around, can I get the cheapest price?

19:58And so if a manufacturer is chasing a customer and wants to lock them in and is being crushed on prices, it's difficult for them to want to advocate for something that's going to increase costs. And then you pass that off to the consumer and you say, this is an ethical cotton made thing. And then we've got headlines. And then the consumer doesn't believe it. Oh no, So it's a real snake eating its own tail here for sure. Let's talk about the wild card that is Donald Trump here. What has the U.S. government's role been in some of these areas that we've been discussing? And then how do things like the gutting of USAID affect that?

20:39It's such an interesting question. And I think with so much of what is going on in the U.S. at the moment, there's not a simple answer because on the one hand, I've spoken to people who've said, we believe there is opportunity under a Trump administration to have much more forceful regulation that forbids goods that may be linked to forced labor coming into the US. On the other hand, a lot of what the administration has done so far in terms of doing things like freeze USAID is going to really damage organizations on the ground that help shine a spotlight on these issues and allow us to find out about them in the first place.

21:24So as we started out by saying, most brands don't really know where a lot of their raw materials are coming from. It is very easy and convenient to turn a blind eye to issues that might occur so far down the supply chain. Often we only know about them because NGOs or other organizations have gone onto the ground and done this work that is time-consuming and expensive to bring it to light. And a lot of the money that might have gone towards that is not going to be available anymore. Although it wasn't so much the US as Europe that's really been the driving force here, right? The EU had been bringing in some very progressive regulation that was meant to make brands much more responsible for issues that happen far down the supply chain and was requiring companies to start really trying to figure out where stuff was coming from and demonstrate that they were taking steps to make sure that things were being produced responsibly, like right down to the raw material level.

22:21Those regulations are really under attack, that there is a shift in the vibe in Europe, just like there is in the U.S. Competitiveness rather than social values is the buzzword of the day. And regulation that was meant to make brands more responsible is increasingly just seen as making them less competitive, increasing red tape, and it's likely to be watered down. Is there any consumer ability to drive change here? If I'm a consumer that cares about human rights and labor and other things, I mean, you can put diversity in the same bucket. What power do I have at this point to shop my values? Where do you see that going in this conversation?

23:03Look, I think the consumer always has power. And whatever, you know, if something individually is important to you, then it is worth doing the research into the best of your ability, trying to shop places that reflect that. Whilst acknowledging that in all likelihood, they too are just doing the best they can. It's all going to be very flawed. But, you know, the amount of consumers who are so dedicated that they're spending their time doing this, we've seen it's a niche. It's like the group of consumers who buy organic food. It exists. It's a market, but it's not the mainstream market. And as long as it's not the mainstream market, I don't think that mainstream brands are going to feel like they have to make the shift to meet consumer needs.

23:42Let's end on a moment of hope amid all the darkness that we've been discussing. I think it's not unrelentingly bleak, right? I mean, there are organizations like Transparentum that are trying new approaches that do seem to be bearing fruit. There have been successes in the past. I was just thinking about one of my first exposures to this issue was Uzbekistan, which was pretty notorious in the 2000s for basically pulling all the kids out of school and sending them to the cotton fields every year. And there was a successful, mostly successful boycott movement that actually changed conditions there.

24:16Like these problems can be, if not entirely fixed, things can get better. Oh, yeah. And I think even just the fact that we know that there being consistent scandals about it, that is progress. These issues are being talked about. A light is being shed on them. And over time, I hope that forces movement and action. So there's always room for hope. I think that's a nice positive note to end on, all things considered today. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Sarah. Please be sure to check out Sarah's articles, Ethical Cotton is Being Picked by Child Laborers in India, and Why Can't Fashion Eliminate Labor Exploitation from Its Supply Chains at businessoffashion.com.

24:57These and other stories are available to Be A Professional subscribers only, and you can find the links in the episode notes. I'm Brian Baskin. And I'm Sheena Butler-Young. We'll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks so much for joining us and be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. You've been listening to The Debrief, produced by Olivia Davies, mixed and mastered by Eric Bria.