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[narrator] 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.
[interviewer] 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.
[de Castro] 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 re-invented.
[de Castro] The shift is moving ruthlessly, um,
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 1960s, 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.
In terms of scale, we've got 25,000 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 5th 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 52 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.
[all screaming]
[crowd] We love Topshop!
[man] You can get this fringe metallic skirt $39 at Joe Fresh,
a brand-new store in town.
With 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 value-oriented.
If you match these two together, with fashion and value,
then you have a recipe.
[woman] One Japanese clothing retailer is making
a fast and furious mark here in the U.S.
The price has dropped.
The way of making that product has completely, completely changed.
And you have to ask yourself at some point,
"Where does it end?"
The global marketplace is some place
where we export work to have happen
in 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 3,
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.
[narrator] 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.
[crowd clamoring] [whistle blowing]
[wailing in foreign language]
[woman 1] Rescue workers are racing against time,
searching through the rubble, trying to find
as many survivors as they can.
[man 1] Hundreds are dead,
hundreds more might still be buried alive, after officials in Bangladesh say
factory owners ignored an order to evacuate.
[man 2] Some 400 dead, hundreds still believed to be missing.
Garment workers in Bangladesh paying the price for cheap clothing.
[woman 2] 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.
[speaking in foreign language]
[clears throat]
[Siegle] Anybody who, like me,
had written about problems in the supply chain,
particularly for Fast Fashion,
and tried to articulate
how the risk was being carried
by those who are most vulnerable and the worst paid.
You try to articulate that, but you could never have envisaged
that there would be such a catastrophic illustration
of 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 1,000,
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 almost $3 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 1000 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 is.
There might be more coming.
Sorry, 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 21st 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.
Um...
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 20 years ago in Japan.
You were worried we had too much navy.
What are you feeling now? Because we did put more black in to SS14
and that has worked really, really well
with, um, Orla'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 gonna make the product?
And how can I ensure that producers
or suppliers, um, are gonna 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]
[speaks in Japanese]
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 40 million garment-factory workers
in the world.
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 wage of less than $3 a day,
they are among the lowest paid garment workers in the world.
[Akhter speaking in foreign language]
[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]
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 '20s,
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 microbacterial 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 '50s 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, 17,000 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,
there have been more than 250,000
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 21.
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 $8.50.
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 bomb.net.
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 80 billion pieces of new clothing
each year.
That's 400 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 1, Get 3 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]
[Charlot] So I'll tell people, stop buying things that is not good,
that is costing, like 10 dollars,
you going to go on a ball, you going out today.
You just go to a store and buy yourself a dress for 10 dollars.
Because it cost 10 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 3000 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 SS15.
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 7000 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 800 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 50 million liters of toxic wastewater
pour out of the local tanneries.
Heavy chemicals used to treat the leather like chromium-6
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.
[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 1950s
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 15 to 20 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 1.5 million jeans
for, you know, 30 cents each, 50 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 $5
or pay $20 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 2018, 15 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 $18 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 50 years,
it rots, it goes to seed.
One of the ways a healthy society works
is 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 today.
It's the reason why workers in Bangladesh are paid so little.
Because if you're operating in a capitalist system,
the main thing you have to do is create profit
and you have to create more profit than your competitors.
And this is what drives companies
to push wages down and down and down.
But companies don't go-- Like fashion retailers
don't go to places like Bangladesh, for any other reason except
they can get the cheapest labor possible.
There'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 Bangladesh
because it can reap the biggest profits out of those people
that are making the clothes for them.
Before you can solve a problem, you have to admit you got one
and before we're gonna fix an economic system
that's working this way, and producing such tensions
and inequalities and strains on our community,
we have to face the real scope of the problem we have
and that's with the system as a whole.
And 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 hard
about alternative systems that might work better.
[Hilary] For the environment, the great threat is that capital
must continue to expand infinitely in order to survive.
It can't have any limits on its expansion and its growth.
The natural world clearly does have limits.
There are very defined limits to how much the world can sustain
in terms of production, in terms of trade,
in terms of transport and distribution.
And it's quite clear that we've already overstepped
a lot of those limits, which is why you're seeing such stress
in the natural world at the moment.
[Hoskins] 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 planet
or to be exploiting, um, you know, their neighbors.
So, I think we need huge systemic change.
[Wolff] If you don't change the system,
you're leaving intact
the decision-making of these enterprises,
which means a small group of executives and shareholders
are 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 against.
So, stop this stuff about improving their conditions,
deal with the system, or else you're not serious.
[Kasser] Our economic system is one of consumer capitalism,
and that's why the government needs to have consumption
at 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 is
based on materialism, it's based on these kinds of values.
That's what it needs in order to survive.
That's part of the fuel that it needs.
The 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 10 million transactions
in the first four hours of the frenzy.
A record 15,000 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... Yes!
[audience cheering]
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.
[audience cheering]
Yeah.
[chanting] U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
[woman screaming]
[man] Oh, my God!
[inaudible dialogue]
[crowd clamoring]
[speaking in foreign language]
[Akhter speaking in foreign language]
[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.
And, um, then in 2005,
um...
Terry started having some loss of fine motor skills,
and this and that, and come to find out
he had a glioblastoma multiforme, Stage 4 brain tumor,
and, uh, at the prime age of 47 years old.
And, uh, he died at the age of 50.
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 45-65,
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 3.6 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, not 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.
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