The True Cost of Fast Fashion: Impact on People and Planet

[Music] 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 [Music]

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 the story with no background of fashion at all beginning

with nothing more than a few simple questions what I've discovered has forever never changed the way I think

about the things I wear and my hope is that it might just do the same for [Music]

you maybe just start and and say your name and talk about how this kind of began my name is Lucy seagull I am a

journalist and broadcaster based in the UK okay and I have been obsessed consumed with the environmental and

social impacts of the fashion industry for about a decade well I love everything about

clothes you know I love I love the Poetry I love the fabric I love the colors I love the textures I love the

way that they make you feel you know they are our chosen skin well I had the classic massive closet clothes

everywhere bags constantly coming into my house you know every day every other day with some

other item in and never had anything to wear I could never put together a coherent

outfit we communicate who we are to a certain extent through clothing and this is this is again throughout history you

know you have the trends at court you know again Mar Antoinette making this huge hats it's always been it's 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 [Music] ourselves and we used to have a system a

fashion system where people would go to the uh shows so they would do spring summer awesome 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 reinvented 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 clothing was actually

made right here in America as recently as the 1960s we were still making 95% of our clothes today we

only make about 3% and the other 97% is outsourced to developing countries around the

[Music] world I've been in the business for over 9 years now in terms of scale we got

about 25,000 people just on G Manufacturing side we produce one in six dressers sold in a

us if you actually go to the store and you Benchmark the price of a a garment over the last 20 years you will find

that it's actually a deflationary product I the price has gone down over time now has our cost gone down

absolutely not okay the 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 transform the way clothing is

bought and sold the newest H&M store on fth Avenue in Manhattan is the company's largest ever and just one of many new

stores that's planning around the country it's all part of a High Street Revolution fast fashion 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 product

[Music] we you can get this Fringe metallic skirt for $39 at Joe Fresh a brand new

store in town with price tags that might look a little bit more appealing to budget conscious Shoppers American

consumers they really have grasped the fashion part of H&M and we know from before that American consumers are very

value oriented if you match these two together with fashion and value then you have a recipe one Japanese CL clothing

retailer it's making a Fast and Furious march here in the US 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 someplace 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 well globalized production ction

basically means that all of the making of goods has been outsourced to lowcost 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 well we're not going to come to you anymore we're going to switch to another place which is

cheaper in the west they using everyday low price so every day they're hamping me

and I'm hamping my workers this is how it is they're competing the stores are competing in there when the stores are

coming to us for order and negotiating they're telling look that particular store is selling this shirt with like $5

so I needed to sell it in the $4 so you better squeeze our price so we are squeezing then other store is coming and

selling hey they're selling it the $4 so the Target price is three if you can meet the three you are 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 okay survive actually ultimately something's going to give either the price of the product has

to go up or manufacturers have to shut down or cut Corners to make it work cutting corners and disregarding safety

measures had become an accepted part of doing business in this new model until an early morning in April when an event

just outside of DACA Bangladesh brought a hidden side of fashion to front page news Well State media in Bangladesh say

an eight-story building has collapsed near the capital of Daka killing more than 70

people rescue workers are racing Against Time searching through the rubble trying to

find as many survivors as they can hundreds are dead hundreds more might still be buried alive after officials in

Bangladesh say Factory owners ignored and ordered to evacuate some 400 dead hundreds still believe to be missing

garment workers in Bangladesh paying the price for cheap clothing a huge crowd has gathered near the building side 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 [Music]

hope anybody who like me had written about problems in the supply chain

particularly for fast fashion and try to articulate how the risk was being carried by those who are most vulnerable

and the worst paid you Tred 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 ra Plaza to me was like some Horror

Story 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 the the most profoundly impressing

things about the Run of Plaza disaster was that news that the workers had already pointed out to the management

the cracks in the building had they they'd already pointed out that the building was structurally unsafe and yet

they'd been forced back in many survivors are asking how they could have 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 and

his bodies are still being pulled out of the rubble another Factory in Bangladesh caught fire early this morning killing

eight more people as story after Story of clothing Factory 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 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 1,000 poor girls

lost their life because everybody didn't bother didn't give damn [ __ ] and 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 and it might come in coming more

sorry but yeah you know that it's not only the Press pressure it's something ignoring other people's life is it's

it's not it should it's not right it's 21st century it's a global world we are living and we just ignore other people's

life how come this enormous acious 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 Lucy 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 sweat shops 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 sweat shops come to these countries they bring all three of those to these workers and

start getting that process going is it possible that sweat shops are actually good yes horrible awful sweat shops the

word itself sweat shop 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 thank you what does it

does it bother me that people are working in a 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 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 sweat shops yeah I think we have to be very 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's a key characteristics of the type of ones I want to talk to you about tonight Kennedy and that's that there

are places where people choose to work admittedly from a bad set of other options well I mean there's nothing

intrinsically dangerous with sewing clothes so so we're kind of starting out with you know with a a relatively safe

industry it's not like coal mining or or natural gas mining or you know a lot of things that you can that are much more

dangerous so sweat shops 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 so we don't

know yet um how long this embroidery is taking do you think you could ask chantu just just roughly how how long that

whole panel is taking cuz I guess we'll see it later on in the FB price breakdown but it would be great to know

wouldn't it so I'm safia mini 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 that we had a bit too much Navy what are you feeling now

cuz we did put more black into ss14 and that has worked really really well with um

Ora's um designer collaboration have we got enough black Print in the collection uh well we've lost that abstract dust

print this one here in the black but I think this pink be really I think it's one of those prints that everyone's a

bit nervous of but actually will do well I think most fashion brands start with a a concept of a collection or a

look um they don't tend to think uh you know who is going to make the product and um how can I ensure that

producers or or suppliers um are going to eat um so what we what we're trying to do at people tree is really start

with uh 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 you the workers Social Development and

environment absolutely essential to everything they do 1 2 3 happy world fair trade

day [Music] f you

[Music] [Music] this

[Applause] really really [Applause]

great that's beautiful fair trade is a Citizens response to correcting the social injustice in a international

trading system that is largely dysfunctional where uh workers and farmers are not paid um a living wage

and where the environment is is not considered at all to make the products that we buy every

day Shima is one of about 40 million garment Factory workers in the world almost 4

million of these workers are here in Bangladesh working in almost 5,000 factories making clothing for major

Western Brands over 85% 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 [Music]

world May [Music]

NAD the workers must not have any kind of

distrust on their owns if they have there will not be any good working

atmosphere in the factory they must respect our owner is paying us as per rule if they do not have this kind of

confidence you won't get the result [Music]

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 my grandparents settled out here in the 20s and so this is a part of my

Heritage people ask why I'm an organic cotton Farm it's because I don't know any better my granddaddy was an old

German farmer that felt like we should respect the land we're stewards of the land and we respect the life that's in

the land you're actually sitting in uh the high plains of Texas and there's 3.6

million Acres of cotton grown in this region we're literally the biggest Cotton Patch in the world in just the

past 10 years 80% 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 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 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 that are going on the Cotton that's one of the big sales 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 residual residuals that left at the microbacteria

level what kind of impact is that having on the people in our communities where's the cost on

that Monsanto is proud to be the industry leader in agricultural Innovation because of what these

agricultural advancements can do to help you double deals 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 [Music] Beyond

after the wars where all these redundant factories that made War chemicals explosives uh were lying around

um 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 by patenting these genetically modified plants Monsanto has become the largest seed in Chemical

Corporation in history I wanted to speak with someone who had worked with the company and I got word that a former

managing director for India was willing to talk one of my close friends who was in the research division working on this

modified crops he came to my hotel for a drink we sitting having a drink and

after a few drinks he told me hey we going to change type of business you're doing in

India said what do you mean we going to get into seeds bus and we going to make seed business all crops so that we have

the Monopoly on seeds and every Farm come to us to buy seeds every

time that rang aell in my mind if four Farmers 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 Gally mod was not in my

mind even seed Monopoly is something very bad so farmers get into debt when they get the seed because of the high

cost 177,000 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 eological 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 punjob region which has quickly

become the largest user of pesticides in India Dr prit Paul Singh has been studying the effects of these chemicals

on human health and his reports show a dramatic rise in the number of birth defects Cancers and mental illness here

in the region you can go in every village you will see that uh hundreds of patients

are suffering with the cancer 72 8080 80 kids in every village will find the facing the severe Mard and physical

[Music] handicap company fertilizer pesticides they are totally refusing the after

effect of the pesticide and fertilizer and this is the you can say classical symptoms of the toxicity in one Village

there is 6 AED kids like this this war so it will be very uh dangerous phenomena uh in in the

Punjab and P pupils farmers and lab there is small farmers and lab Maxim the labor Ms so they can't afford now

treatment ultimately they have accept to the death of their kids and they are waiting the death of their kids mother

is waiting for the death of this boy 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're not patenting so you get cancer

they're more profits for them it's a win win win win win as for nature and people it's a lose lose 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 first found my husband lying in the

field 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 on our world

there is 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 that 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 going to make us happy it's important to understand that advertising

is a species or a category or of propaganda we think of propaganda as a totalitarian thing very Grim

loudspeakers you know chanting crowds and so on we think of Hitler we always think of of it as a foreign thing okay

but it's actually as American as apple pie well the reason that advertising works is because the smart advertisers

at least are trying to tie the consumption of their product to a 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 n 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 I'm here for the next the next guy I'll be a guard in the next life don't you

me now I know you want this I'm more than maker the shit's creater this name won't

fade away don't you so think of all of the car commercials you see that show um 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'm 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 my spam I don't

know where is literally blown up by you guys saying you guys wanted a haul so here it is okie dokie 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 like fate I just

had to get it like if it could levitate towards me it would have levitated I got this

skirt bright yellow and it was $ 850 it's a jean button-up thing and I just love this I just loved it loved it loved

it it's a gray knit sweater and it has pink hearts all over it I live I love tie-dye things like tie-dye things are

literally the bomb doet it has a little yingying 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 even know if I'm going to wear this now that I got it cuz I don't know if I like

it that much I need to stop I Tred to understand better why people doesn't realize that they're

becoming poorer and poorer and I as myself okay but what has change inp of when I was young and fashion is

something that has dramatically changed I was able to buy one two t-shirt 40- shirt for example a year now I mean also

my my children they used to buy every every party I mean they buy a T-shirt and so I understood that the fast

fashion is something totally new if you have noticed the price has decreased in the last years and it has follow the

middle class disappearing so all the things that people really need are very cost are very costly like uh home like

study like uh life insurance on the other side there is a source of consolation um part of their life I

can uh buy a t-shirt two t-shirt a party or eventually a day day although I'm very poor and I've got

lost I've lost all the things I really needed today we purchased over 80 billion pieces of new clothing each year

that's 400% 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 there's um an article in printer in

uh which is the leading advertising trade Journal of of of its day uh by a very famous copywriter named Ernest Elmo

caulin a grand old man of of uh the art of writing advertising copy there was an article called consumptionism

in that article he says there are there are two kinds of products okay they're the kind that you

use like washing machines cars and so on things that you buy and used 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 with their Innovative buy 1 get three

free pricing a suit from Joseph A Bank is effectively cheaper than paper towels and now they come in these easy to ous

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 10 years um as

the sort of dirty shadow of the fast fashion industry as we get sort of closer and

closer to species degradation to uh trashing our last remaining pristine Wilderness we seem hellbent on producing

more and more disposable stuff it makes no sense fashion should never and can never be thought of as a disposable

product I think after any big change in any industry it takes a while to sort of to feel and smell the dirt that comes

out of something um that is 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 the average American throws away 82 lbs

of textile waste each year adding up to more than 11 million tons of textile waste from the us 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 the sheer amount of cheap clothing even 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 Pepe um it is a disease in Haiti and not only in Haiti I think I can know in any third world country that you're

visiting like you know it's a problem it's a huge problem p 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 buying those are clothes people

donate to charity and charity cannot sell them on their trip store or whatever they pack them ship them to

those Third Country and most of them end up here turns out that only about 10% of the clothes that 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 so I'll tell people stop buying things

that is not good that is Con like you know $10 you're going to go on a on a bar you're going out today you just go

to a store and buy yourself a dress for $10 because I can know it cost $10 I don't to throw it away and tomorrow

you're 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 a Patagonia we hate the word

consumers it's we've got to find a better word we 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 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 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 you know and

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 way way bigger Challenge and excitement is

actually looking at my industry and saying you know what I'm going to try and do it in a way that is not as

harmful to the planet business through advertising has uh has pulled Society uh along into this

belief that uh happiness is based on stuff that uh true happiness can only be achieved with uh you know an annual

seasonal weekly daily increasing the amount of stuff you bring into your life that that we want to encourage our

customers to to think twice about those assumptions to understand where they came from and through that understanding

to know that uh we can all together you we can change how this is done the customer has to know that they're in

charge without them we don't have jobs you know 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 I love the embroidery shantu

the embroider is really nice don't 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 swallows is a fair trade fashion

business but it's also a development Society so it helps more than 3,000 people in

this Village I come here every 4 months um we we call them production trips and um and

we're working with the producers trying to find out you know what are the barriers to making a great product and

to to getting it to the market and we're also doing Fair tray capacity building so looking at you know what what are the

obstacles to delivering more social benefit or improving you know the Environmental Protection in the in these

areas for me this this is about partnering this is about finding Creative Solutions

together with them with the team here um and really listening to what their problems are and finding a way that that

works together I want to invite um the best employee here at swallows I want to

invite one women 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 market place and come back and tell all your

friends either if she does it single thread single stitch then maybe she needs to do

more densely more concentrated [Music]

so she continues for a bit we're going to go up to the sample room now for ss15 can she come and show us the next one

that she does [Music] yeah I kind of hope that people tree

wouldn't be necessary and I hoped that you know we would have a trading system that looked after people's rights and

the environments and but the more and more involved I got in developing and working closely with Partners the

more you know dirt and and filth I discovered about how trading practices you know undermine everything that we

believe in and everything I know most people believe and value um I don't know people you just really

grew organically it grew from um a really great collection of people that feel passionately that there's a

different way of of of working of living of consuming of you know interacting with people a a humane way um and uh you

know I mean I I didn't necessarily feel that there'd be a thousand shops selling people tree today um and I see there

there's so much more that we need to do so I think it's not just about you know creating jobs for the 7,000 people that

work for people tree it's also about being a catalyst for change you know within the industry and showing proving

the model works [Music]

yeah when we were first in organic I think there was only two or three of us at the time we formed the Texas organic

cotton marketing cooperative and the deal was they'd grow it and I'd sell it so started going to like Jacob Javits

and having this whole deal cotton plants and everything and of yeah we're 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 direct

connection with clothing and so you have to start looking that 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 the 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 CU that

literally defoliates uh takes the leaves off the plant so that when we Harvest we're the bowls 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

the cotton stripper and it's called a cotton stripper because it literally comes along and strips

uh use kind of fingers and it literally strips all of the B bowls off of this this plant so when you look over there

you can see the arice has been there and and it's taken all the plants [Music]

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 at Co 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 kpur 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 Lifeline of North India so this river is being polluted and killed by the leather

factories of kour with growing demand for materials like cheap leather kour is now the

leather export capital of India every day here more than 50 million lers

of toxic waste water 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 kour 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 en

[Music] en people in that area are in the tight grip of tary

pollution the local environment is contaminated soil is contaminated the only drinking water source groundw is

contaminated with chromium agriculture cultural produce even vegetables and salad items are

produced there People's Health are affected people have different kinds of dermal

problems skin rashes boils pules even numbness in the limbs people have stomach ailments maybe they have cancers

also [Music] ch

you can have the best of materials moving into the highend fashioned Market in Milan or Paris or London but there

has been so much of work which has gone behind it and so much of chemicals has gone into it the fluence have been

discharged into 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 uh business has not accounted for them because uh it's only since the 1950s that we've really had this

industrial uh 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 weers 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 a lot of the resources that we use to U make our clothing are not accounted for

in the the cost of producing those clothes uh so when it has has uh water uh that's used to produce clothing land

that's used to grow the fiber uh chemicals that uh are used to to die uh those things uh all are inputs um and as

inputs they cost something uh and they also give outputs in some cases good outputs the clothing themselves uh jobs

but in other cases bad outputs like harmful chemicals or greenhouse gas emissions and those things have costs as

well foreign fore spech

foreign speech foreign for speee

for 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 city's 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

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for for 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 you know we need to give them work but it has they have to be treated with

the same respect that we treat our children our friends they're not different from us Livia fth 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 and had just been invited to speak at a conference on the future of fashion

if First 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 he has been caused in the last 15 to 20 years of his

existence fast fashion wants to produce fast so the Garment worker has to produce faster and cheap so the

government worker is the only point of the supply chain where the margin has squeezed and you have this 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 a pair of jeans for $20 or are they taking us for a

r because they're making us believe that we are rich or wealthy because we can buy a lot but in fact they're making us

poorer and the only person who is becoming richer is the owner of the fast fashion Branch so that makes me a little

bit angry you spoke about a commitment to try and and promise a basic living

wage what does that mean uh how do you define a fair living wage in Bangladesh you know

um what does that mean and I have a pilot project in three factories and by 2018 15% 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 that's Incorporated in our way of working how much and that's not

for us to say a sum but we do an assessment all the time to make sure that it covers the basic needs of the

workers so it's I 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 [Music] film and C Cambodia garment workers have

had enough recently taken to the streets to demand a minimum wage increase in the country as protest continued workers

were met with violent crackdowns as police began to open fire with live [Music]

rounds [Music] a woman has been killed and several

people injured in clashes between clothes Factory workers and Riot police in

[Applause] Cambodia [Music]

[Music] foree for two days Cambodia was a Battleground the city of the police the

paratroopers were brought in as if there were war on the street of why because workers in the textile

industry continue to demand a minimum wage of at least $160

for speech foreign

speeech foreign for spe speech foreign

fore speech foreign spee speech fore speech foreign today is the

funeral of uh a factory worker he was beaten to death he had uh suffered a lot before his death uh this morning and he

had done nothing wrong he among his uh fellow workers wanted to have a better living

[Music] conditions [Music]

[Music] we will continue his fight so that all Cambodian

workers will have de living conditions thank you sir 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 lowcost 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 [Music] it you cannot fool us and exploit of

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 or 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 altogether you see that workers are increasingly exploited because the

price of everything is pushed down and down and down just to satisfy the this impulse to accumulate capital and that's

profoundly problematic because it leads to the mass impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people around the world

if you write to any of 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 no excessive overtime hours

all that stuff um but when we submitted a Bill in Congress a few years ago or worked with worked with people to do

that we called it the 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 we can't have rules we can't have we can't have that they want

to keep it with voluntary codes of conduct now they you know they've fought for and they've won laws to protect

their stuff and their interests but you know 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 peace of the pie that's what we constantly have to ask ourselves

are those buyers immoral or do they just don't or they immoral the system they're working for and the system that allows

companies to do this is amoral the individuals concerned are simply product 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 wolf 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 you could CR but you couldn't criticize the economic system system that got a free pass you

couldn't criticize just you know and if you don't criticize something for 50 years it rots it goes to seed but 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 like they don't like

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 like there's no um collect 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 that are

making the clothes for them before you can solve a problem you have to admit you got one and before we're going to

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 for the environment the great threat is that Capital must continue to

expand infinitely in order to survive it it can't have any limits on its expansion and its growth the natural

world clearly does have limits there 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 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 I think we need huge systemic change 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 going to 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 stop this stuff about improving

their conditions deal with a system or else you're not serious 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 you know I can't tell you the number of people I talk 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 Frid here can

we Black Friday shopping Mania is still playing out tonight at malls Across America in some places across this

country tonight it's as if someone announced we in danger of running out of stuff and those who need stuff had

better go out and buy it now cuz it's going away forever Walmart doing more than 10 million transactions in the

first 4 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 uh

than on any other uh day of the year here Nation this orgy of Christmas shopping proves America is back we are

once again yes 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 yeah USA USA USA

USA oh my god I've kept my grip so

tight I won't let anyone get in my way I want beautiful things golden rings golden rings and I get what I

want I live just to get what I want and I want want [Music]

it I want it all and now I want

it and I you to get how how you to get cuz

I I want to [Music] know

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foreign I grew up on a farm merried a guy that grew up on a farm and uh those of us living on the farm and pl you know

live there it needs to be safe for us too and and the new chemicals that were coming out and the intensity of the use

was just continuing to increase and um and then in 2005 um Terry started having some loss

ofine motor skills and this and that and come to find out he had a gleo blastoma multi Army stage forward 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 uh that worked on him we've you know Leck is got huge cancer clinics and uh a

hub medical Hub uh we didn't have to go someplace else to have a brain tumor surgery we were're able to stay right

here because he does so many of them he said that these kind of t tumors are found in men age 45 to 65 that work in

the agricultural industry or the oil field and so while I don't have a Smoking Gun in the blood test that say

the use of uh cotton chemicals and 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 of cotton that use a lot of chemicals and so at that point in time organic is 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

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 I'm sure that we we will see a significant change over the next

10 years um whether it's in time or not is another question if you know Martin Luther King

Jr at a speech in a Brooklyn church he said that what what America needed was a revolution of values it needed to stop

treating people like things needed to stop treating people in ways that were just about profit but instead to treat

people in a real and human way my God we can do better than this if if what we want is to spread as I would argue we do

spread industry around the world not concentrated in one place let it let the benefits be

shared globally then let's do that in an orderly reasonable careful way we need to recognize that capital is just money