Exploitation in the fashion supply chain is rife. 

It starts with the workers; the people making our clothes. The vast majority of big fashion brands do not disclose the number of workers in their supply chain who are paid a fair living wage, despite decades of campaigning from worker unions and labor rights groups. Just this month, tens of thousands of garment makers in Bangladesh have been protesting in the streets, demanding a $208 minimum monthly wage. The demonstrations have been extremely dangerous for workers; one Bangladeshi woman was killed after police opened fire on protestors. 

All too often, those of us in the Global North disregard the skill and craft of garment makers, whose stories are woven into the threads of the clothes we wear each day. Up to 80% of items bought on Black Friday are thrown away after just a few uses, or no use at all. Yet, each item is made by a pair of hands; a pair of hands belonging to someone who—like us—spends much of their day working to provide for themselves and their families. The expertise of garment workers is valuable and precious, but when we treat clothing as disposable, we devalue their labor, too. 

Meanwhile, brands continue their race to the bottom. Multinational corporations, often helmed by billionaires, are pushing garment factories to sell goods for the lowest price at the cost of workers’ rights, dignity, and safety. And so, garment makers are forced to work faster than ever before. In 2020, an undercover investigation found that workers making clothes for Boohoo in Leicester in the U.K. were being paid £3.50 per hour, and just last year an undercover reporter discovered that Shein’s workers were being paid just three pence per garment, working 18 hour days, and making up to 500 items in one shift.

The cost is also environmental. Precious resources like soil, crops, and water are required to make the textiles that workers cut and sew into garments. And clothing made from spandex, polyester, nylon, and acrylic are derived from fossil fuels, which accounts for about 67% of garments. All of these natural resources are grown, harvested, extracted, and shipped—labor done by workers. And yet, neither the labor, the craft, nor the Earth is factored into Black Friday sales.

Then, there are the citizens. As prices are slashed, Big Fashion’s marketing machine is telling us that cheap, “affordable” clothing made using exploitative labor is what we deserve. The indoctrination is everywhere—on social media, livestreaming, transport advertising, billboards, TV adverts, influencer haul videos, and celebrity endorsements. It’s next to impossible to avoid. And though the advertising is expensive, brands can afford it. They use the money they have made on exploitation to onboard celebrities in megabucks contracts, and incentivize influencers to use affiliate links so the rest of us can “tap to buy” in just a few clicks—with the option to split payments via Klarna.

In an interview for my podcast, All The Small Things, cofounder of The Or Foundation Liz Ricketts said that “when we are consuming, we’re laboring. If you’re scrolling on your phone and buying things you are literally laboring and making money for advertisers because you’re giving them your time and eventually, your money.” It’s true that the discounts are hard to resist. But at this rate, it’s easy to end up with more clothes than anyone could ever need—many of which will be thrown into a bin liner, tags still intact. 

And finally, there are the carriers. The fashion industry is reportedly producing 150 billion garments per year. This is nearly incomprehensible—especially considering there are seven billion people on the planet with over 50% of the global population dressing themselves in secondhand clothing, according to estimates by the Or Foundation. With so much overproduction comes a lot of waste, but this is unevenly felt, too. 

Much of the Global North’s textile waste is ending up in landfills across the Global South and sold in places like Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana. Young women and girls, many of whom have been displaced by climate catastrophes, work as kayayei, a Ga and Hausa term for a female head porter. They carry bales of up to 55 kilograms from local landfills to markets, causing irreversible damage to their spines after just a few months. All of this only to end up in debt as soon as the bale is opened because the garments are of such poor quality. In fact, of the garments they carry, 40% end up as waste despite efforts from the local community to salvage them.

Black Friday is notorious for promoting, reinforcing, and rewarding overconsumption. But how often will the items purchased at 80% off be worn—and for how long? When we cram our garments into a clothing “recycling” bin or drop them off at a charity shop, we are forcing others—often kayayei and other marginalized people in the Global South—to labor for us, pushing them further into debt from the clothes we forgot we even bought. Our clothes have so far killed several kayayei on the job. No one should die for fashion.