[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 [Music] [Music] year [Music] spee speech forign speech speech fore spech speee speech For foreign fore for [Music] foree fore spee foree foree fore [Music] speeech speech Speech spee 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 foreign speech for speee [Music] for [Music] speech Speee [Music] spee [Music] fore foreign spe [Music] 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 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 if 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 in industry it's has too much impact and Effect on millions of people worldwide and common [Music] resources will we continue to search for happiness and 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 [Music] [Music] [Music] for [Music]
