Unjust Supply Chains
Exploitation in the garment industry is widespread. These conditions are not accidents of the market, but the predictable outcomes of a fashion industry built on cost-cutting, corporate opacity, and a lack of regard for worker lives.
Challenging supply chain inequity
At the WRC, we know that transparency, accountability, and worker power can counter this structure. At the top of the supply chain, global brands dictate prices, timelines, and production volumes that factories must meet to keep contracts, ultimately passing that pressure onto workers who have limited recourse to resist.
Inequity in supply chains
Unchecked corporate power leads to a chain of cause and effect: from unfair purchasing practices by global brands that impose impossible prices and timelines on factories, to the resulting poverty wages and wage theft endured by millions of garment workers.
UNFAIR PURCHASING PRACTICES
The international fashion industry is shaped by a power imbalance between global brands and factory suppliers, driving a race to the bottom on production and labor costs within and across countries.
This immense price squeeze has led to decreasing margins for factories who in turn squeeze workers to produce more goods, faster than ever, even while minimum wage levels have stagnated in many countries. As a result, workers are making more clothes for less money, inflating profits in the $1.85 trillion industry, while 80 million garment workers still don’t earn enough to live on.
POVERTY WAGES
Poverty wages in the global garment industry are sustained by structural forces that extend far beyond individual factories. At the core is the gap between legal minimum wages and living wages. Minimum wages are set through political processes that often prioritize profits and competitiveness over human need; they frequently fall four to five times below what workers require to meet the most basic expenses for food, housing, healthcare, and education for a family. A living wage, by contrast, is defined as the income sufficient for a worker and their family to live with dignity.
Even these inadequate minimum wages are often not delivered in full. Wage violations are pervasive: unpaid overtime, delayed or withheld wages, and failure to pay legally mandated severance and other benefits such as pensions are widespread practices. Research shows that, during the pandemic, workers in apparel supply chains lost billions in wages and severance owed.
Driving this systemic shortfall are the purchasing practices of global brands. By demanding rock-bottom prices, imposing long payment terms and unilaterally imposing fines on suppliers for any non-compliance, brands shift financial risk onto factories and garment producing countries. With profit margins tightly constrained, factories cut labor costs, leaving workers to absorb the impact through low wages and ever-increasing production pressure. This downward pressure has created a business model under which keeping wages at or below poverty levels is not an aberration, but a condition of participation in global supply chains. The result is predictable: millions of workers live in economic precarity, unable to sustain themselves and their families and largely rely on debt simply to survive.
LABOR ABUSES
Workers in global supply chains systematically face exploitative working conditions, including sub-poverty wages and their frequent non-payment, gender-based violence and harassment, unsafe workplaces, excessive overtime hours, discrimination based on gender, race, and caste, digital surveillance, and brutal retaliation against efforts to collectively organize or protest against these conditions.
SUPPLY CHAIN TRANSPARENCY
Supply chain transparency is the foundational first step to ensure corporate accountability and meaningful human rights due diligence. When brands publicly disclose exactly where every garment is made — down to factory names, addresses, number of workers, and subcontracting tiers — workers, advocates, and consumers gain the information they need to ensure accountability when rights are violated. Without that visibility, abuse remains hidden, and redress is impossible.
The WRC is a founding member of the Transparency Pledge coalition, which builds on pioneering transparency requirements for university goods, and sets a minimum standard for apparel and footwear brands: publish your supplier list, align with open‐data standards, and update information regularly.
This has resulted in the growth of supply chain transparency with most major brands now publishing in line with the Transparency Pledge. But there are still notable exceptions – brands that refuse to disclose where their clothes are made, dragging down industry standards and dodging accountability to workers and consumers.
Sustainability and a Just Transition
The garment sector is both highly exposed to climate impacts and a major contributor to climate change. The industry is responsible for up to 10% of global carbon emissions and is one of the most water-intensive industries, generating 20% of global industrial wastewater. Garment workers already endure rising heat, flooding, and other extreme weather that undermine their health, safety, and livelihoods. Inside factories, heat stress compounds existing health risks and other labor abuses, while climate-driven disruptions intensify pressure from managers to speed up work and meet deadlines. These conditions heighten risks of abuse, erode workers’ ability to organize, and deepen economic precarity.
At the same time, the industry’s structure drives overproduction and waste of apparel and footwear on a vast scale with 85% of used clothes ending up in landfill. Yet brands demand ever-shorter lead times and ever-cheaper prices from factories which then impose relentless production targets on workers. This pressure forces a pace and volume of output that not only harms workers but also fuels the industry’s outsized carbon emissions and environmental damage.
A just transition in this sector requires systemic change. Reducing production to a humane pace and standard workweek, without job losses, is both possible and necessary. If coupled with fair pricing and living wages, this would cut emissions, improve working conditions, and build economic resilience to climate shocks.
Sustainability cannot be achieved through voluntary pledges or focus on environmental impacts alone. It requires aligning human rights and climate goals. Only by embedding workers’ rights at the core of environmental strategies can the garment industry move toward a truly just transition.
A Living Wage
A living wage is embedded in international labor standards, including ILO Convention No. 131, which requires that wages be sufficient to meet workers’ and their families’ needs. Yet in garment supply chains, wages typically fall far short of this threshold. Research shows that across the sector, the vast majority of workers still earn less than half of a credible living wage, despite public pledges by brands.
The Worker Rights Consortium’s approach has been to close the gap between brand commitments and reality. A key contribution was the Alta Gracia factory in the Dominican Republic—the only apparel factory globally to commit to and deliver a verified living wage, approximately 2.5 times the industry average. As independent monitor, we audited payrolls, interviewed workers off-site, and verified compliance with both Dominican law and Alta Gracia’s higher wage standards. At the time of the factory’s closure, workers received full severance, demonstrating that living wages can be both paid and enforced. More broadly, WRC’s enforcement of brands’ legal obligations has returned over $150 million in unpaid wages and severance to workers worldwide. This has shifted industry norms: brands can no longer deny responsibility for wage outcomes in their supply chains.
At the structural level, WRC’s focus is on unfair purchasing practices —the principal barrier, alongside lack of corporate accountability, to achieving living wages at scale. Unless brands are required to change how they price, source, and schedule production, their commitments will remain aspirational rather than real.
Binding Regulation
For decades, garment corporations have relied on voluntary commitments and third-party auditing schemes that fail to prevent rights abuses in their supply chains. In response, the Worker Rights Consortium has advanced binding agreements that compel brands to act. These agreements draw on our model of binding labor codes that apply to the production of US collegiate apparel. Notable examples of these agreements include the Bangladesh and Pakistan Accords on Fire and Building Safety and binding Gender Justice Agreements in Lesotho and Indonesia. These frameworks create legally enforceable obligations for corporations, independent complaint mechanisms for workers, and real consequences for violations.
Freedom of Association
The most effective and sustainable way to enforce labor standards is through worker organizing and voice. Yet garment-producing countries rank among the worst offenders in restricting freedom of association and collective bargaining, with workers in the sector facing some of the most severe and systematic violations of these rights.
Without being able to exercise collective power through associational rights, garment workers remain vulnerable to exploitation and abuse – harassment, dangerous conditions, excessive hours, and wage theft. Protecting and expanding grassroots worker organizing is therefore essential—not only for labor rights, but for strengthening democracy itself.