Fast Fashion: The Price is the People

**I want to preface this article by saying that this article is targeted more towards those who mass consume clothing, not those who have to purchase cheaper clothes due to financial issues. Overconsumption is the cause of fast fashion but there are people whose only affordable choice is the inexpensive clothes produced across the globe.**

By Audrey Hwang

In the midst of quarantine, e-commerce website ,Shein, rose in popularity. Whether it was the trendy clothes they sold or the cheap prices they offered, everyone online seemed to be buying something from Shein. But behind the halter tops and the jean shorts lies the reality of the textile industry, fast fashion.

Fast fashion is the rapid production of clothing that replicates trends to bring low quality and inexpensive styles to consumers. While the price might seem low to you, that cost comes with the price of human labor exploitation.

The textile industry predominantly exploits females, with approximately 80% of garment workers being women. The reason for this is because of common labor stereotypes, where women don't have the voice to speak back, don't have the power to act out, and are in desperate need of any source of income. This only leads to employers seeing them as tools - ones that can be forced to work for hours with no breaks while running off the fuel of scraps. 

Here's a simple wage comparison between workers:

Average Female Worker in the US	Average Female Fast Fashion Worker in Bangladesh
Wage: $15.40 an hour	Wage: $0.95 an hour

Not only is the difference between wages vast, but the conditions in which they work are even worse. Employees work with little to no ventilation and breathe in toxic substances, dust, and sand. Their factories are flammable, and diseases spread quickly between the workers. We sit in our offices with the AC blowing wind on us during the hot summers, while across the globe, there are people crouched down sewing your attire. 

It's quite literally modern-day slavery that's happening to create the clothes you're wearing right now. Nasreen Sheikh talks about the harsh reality by saying, “..The garments we sewed were washed many times before they reached all the well-known Western stores, erasing our suffering - our blood, sweat and tears - so not a single piece of thread could tell my story.” The voices of women and children are silenced by online trends, only widening the gap between underdeveloped and developed countries. 

The first step we can take to fix these issues is to raise awareness about them. But that's the easy step; the harder one we need to make is to come to the realization that paying more for clothes is better than people slaving away for 20 hours a day. Our government can also take a strong stance and pass legislation to stop companies from offshoring to underdeveloped countries where female labor is easy to exploit. The problem needs to be faced, but we need to sacrifice our shopping sprees to create change.