Garment work has leaned on women's low-paid labour for over six centuries
Historian Judith Bennett found that in both 1381 and 1700, about a third of English working women made textiles or clothes. Six centuries later, most garment workers are still women, from home sewers in Edwardian Bristol to rural migrants in Phnom Penh, and the pattern of cheap, subcontracted labour looks remarkably similar.
The industry stretches from fibre growers and textile mills, which spin yarn and weave or knit cloth, through garment makers and fashion houses to retailers and second-hand dealers. Machines such as the cotton gin, the sewing machine and the loom helped launch industrialisation itself. Sewing machines spread first to middle-class homes and then working-class ones, creating outworkers who stitched at home for subcontractors; Bristol's 1901 census found women outworkers made up nearly a third of the city's clothing workforce.
By the early 20th century, rich countries' garment trades often ran on immigrant labour in sweatshops, with crowded rooms, shifts of 10 to 13 hours and pay below a living wage. Globalisation moved most manufacturing overseas, while old centres such as London, Milan and New York's SoHo turned toward design, modelling and retail. Export processing zones, which let firms import materials and re-export finished goods free of duties, rely heavily on women: 90 percent of the workforce in Nicaragua and 80 percent in Bangladesh, according to UN Women.
Today the numbers are vast. World textile and apparel exports reached 772 billion dollars in 2013, and China, which makes over half the planet's clothing, exported 161 billion dollars of apparel in 2016, far ahead of Bangladesh at 28 billion. Guangdong province alone hosts more than 28,000 exporting firms, though rising wages have pushed Chinese makers toward automation since 2015. In Cambodia, garments account for 80 percent of exports and employed 800,000 people in 2019, most of them women; researcher Michaela Doutch found about 80 percent of women garment workers there are rural migrants.
Low wages carry heavy costs. Bangladeshi pay was around 30 euros a month against 150 to 200 in China, and women earn roughly a quarter less than men. The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building near Dhaka, where cracks had been spotted the day before, killed 1,134 people and made Bangladesh one of the most heavily audited sourcing hubs anywhere. In Ethiopia, a 2019 NYU report found some factories replacing their entire staff every year.
Source: Clothing industry
