Paying the Price

This quarter, graduate students enrolled in ENVS 597: Power, Privilege, and the Environment are writing short responses emerging from readings and/or discussions in class.

Paying the Price

By: Rebecca Williams

 

This spring is the sixth anniversary of the deadliest textile manufacturing incident in history: on April 24, 2013 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a building that housed multiple textile manufacturing facilities collapsed, killing over 1100 people. Owners of these facilities were aware that the building’s structure was compromised, but failed to address it to keep production moving. The 1100 lives lost were collateral to the fashion industry. This building collapse is one of many, and despite the media coverage received by this disaster, workplace injuries for people working in the textile manufacturing industry has become the standard business model.

 

Andrew Morgan’s 2015 film, The True Cost of Fast Fashion, documents the human rights atrocities and environmental degradation caused by the fast fashion industry. The nature of fast fashion, including its quick production time and unsustainably low manufacturing costs, has created a trend of disposable clothing; fast fashion items are made to be worn approximately 10 times before it is either unwearable or has fallen off trend. The low retail price that consumers pay for fast fashion masks the “true cost” of consumerism and disposability.

 

What is the “true cost” of American consumerism? Consumerism is a driving force of capitalism, an economic system that relies on markets and constant growth to define its success. Capitalism defines itself on the division between those that have, and those that have not. Without these defining categories, the insatiable demand of growth would be obsolete. In the globalized system of the fashion industry, it is people of color in developing countries that bear the burden of capitalism’s growth. This separation and devaluation of non-white bodies as the means of success perpetuates global inequality. America is built on the devaluation and commodification of people of color to build wealth among white people. “Understanding slavery’s history and ballast enables us to appreciate to which devalued black bodies, to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, have financed both whiteness and the American Dream, and I would add global white supremacy” (Pulido, 2017, pg. 5).

Further, capitalism requires places to deposit its waste. Pulido writes, “Industry and manufacturing require sinks- places where pollution can be deposited. Sinks typically are air, land and water, but racially devalued bodies can also function as ‘sinks’” (2017, pg 6).  The fast fashion industry finds its sinks in the bodies and the communities of people who make its products.

 

Textile manufacturing workers are exposed to toxic chemicals and hazardous materials daily to produce the clothing at a price Americans have becoming entitled to. Textile manufacturing injuries include fainting, skin burns, cancer and silicosis. The communities that surround these facilities are polluted from manufacturing effluents dumped into local waterways.

Globalized capitalism, and therefore white supremacy, are the systems that have brought the United States government into power. It is ineffective to rely on the government to address the exploitation of people of color working in textile manufacturing because these economic and social models serve as reinforcements to the dominant power structure. “Indeed, the state is deeply invested in not solving the environmental racism gap because it would be too costly and disruptive to industry, the larger political system, and the state itself” (Pulido, 2017, pg 6).

 

The social and environmental damage caused by the fast fashion industry are part of a larger distribution of power. This dominating system fuels itself on consumption of cheap clothing; is this a price we are willing to pay?

Works Cited

Pulido, L. (2017). Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Environmental racism, racial capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. Progress in Human Geography, 41(4), 524–533.

Links:

https://truecostmovie.com/

https://www.racked.com/2018/4/13/17230770/rana-plaza-collapse-anniversary-garment-workers-safety