Big Fashion Still Hasn’t Figured Out How to Pay a Living Wage
A decade ago, global fashion companies set out to raise the pay of workers who make the clothes they sell to a living wage. It hasn’t happened. In Bangladesh, the nearly 600,000 people making clothes for Swedish giant H&M—one of the biggest retailers in this space to start talking about paying living wages—earned an average of $119 a month in the first half of 2023, excluding overtime, the latest available data shows.
That is well below the $194 living-wage figure for the suburbs of Dhaka, the capital, where clothing factories are clustered, according to the Global Living Wage Coalition, a research and advocacy group whose benchmarks are widely used in the industry. At those income levels, workers say they have no savings. Often, they borrow from relatives to cover medical expenses or meet unforeseen emergencies.
Some months, they even buy food on credit. Frustration over low wages boiled over in October when workers in Bangladesh set factories ablaze and smashed machines in protest. Western fashion companies say they want wages to rise, but can’t wave a wand and make it happen.
They generally don’t own the factories where their products are made and don’t determine pay for workers. They say they don’t want to go down the road of imposing specific wage levels on supplier factories. Instead, they have tried other solutions.
H&M, for instance, brought Swedish study circles to Bangladesh to train workers in negotiation, experimented with model factories and pushed for more transparent pay structures for workers. Advocates for higher wages say it was clear from the start these methods wouldn’t move the needle. What will work, they say, is setting a higher wage level supplier factories must meet and a clear schedule for
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