This season, the billionaires are mostly wearing… inequality.
With the Sunday Times annual rich list published today, it’s striking to note just how many of the UK’s richest people have made their fortunes in fashion – an industry riddled with human rights abuses, waste, pollution and exploitation. 12 of the 250 made their money from the garment industry.
Despite the past two years causing havoc for global fashion supply chains, the family that owns Primark have seen their wealth increase by £2.5 billion in the past year alone. If, like us, you struggle to comprehend that number it’s £2,500,000,000. This moves them higher up the top ten of the Sunday Times Rich List to number 8.
A large proportion of Primark’s clothes are made in Bangladesh, where the legal minimum wage for garment workers (which itself is known not to be enough to live on) is just 8,000 taka (£73.85) a month. This works out as just £886.20 a year.
It would take almost 3 million years for a garment worker earning minimum wage to earn £2.5 billion (and it’s worth remembering that a lot of factories are struggling to pay their even workers this).
The problem is global. Back in 2020, it was revealed that the fast fashion company BooHoo underpaid its workers in their UK factories, with some earning just £3.50 an hour. Since then, the resulting scandal, combined with rising business costs, have caused Boohoo’s share price to plummet.
For most people, losing half their wealth would be catastrophic. But not for the owner of Boohoo, Mahmud Kamani, who lost almost half his net worth in the last year, and still has £720 million.
Most workers in the garment industry (the vast majority of whom are women) couldn’t afford to lose half their money in a year and still eat – they often don’t earn a living wage.
During the pandemic, brands like Primark and Boohoo, among many others, cancelled orders at the last minute – resulting in workers in Bangladesh and India losing their entire income, with no social security net to fall back on.
It’s time for a new look.
With around 75 million people employed in the industry worldwide, fashion needs to clean up its act. Supply chains are incredibly complex, with many items produced outside ‘official’ factories, and brands deliberately failing to investigate where their clothes are really made, and the conditions those workers live in.
We’re calling for a fashion watchdog so that all brands are forced to change the way they do business and treat their suppliers properly and fairly. For too long, billionaires and the companies they run have been able to get away with exploitative and damaging practices.
The gap between the incomes of garment workers and those who own fashion retailers is vast - and poor pay and appalling working conditions are rife throughout the global fashion industry. It’s not a pretty picture. Price is no indicator of ethics – even the most expensive of luxury brands source cotton from the Xinjiang region of China, notorious for its use of Uighur slave labour.
Not only do workers suffer, but the environmental toll of the industry is huge, with fashion producing more carbon emissions than aviation and shipping combined, as well as being responsible for 35% of ocean microplastics and using up huge quantities of water.
Fashion may be making billionaires, but it’s coming at a cost to people and planet that we refuse to continue paying.