Invisible Women, Invisible Workers: Focusing a gendered lens on health and safety in the global garment industry

"Fast fashion should worry all of us" was The Guardian newspaper's provocative headline calling for an international response to the exploitation of workers in global garments and footwear manufacturing. Worldwide, 70 million people work producing clothing and shoes, mostly in developing countries but also in advanced economies like the UK. 80% of these workers are women. The industry is worth US$2 trillion per year, yet workers receive poverty wages to live and work in dangerous conditions. In 2014, for example, over 1000 workers in Bangladesh were crushed to death in a factory collapse, highlighting the prioritisation of profit at the expense of people.

Although workers in supply chains are vital to our everyday lives, we know very little about the women who make our clothes and shoes. The UK government's Work and Opportunities for Women programme highlights urgent concern that there is a lack of systemic collection and reporting of gender-disaggregated data by companies and other organisations involved in managing global supply chains. Women workers in supply chains are simply invisible workers. Sustainable Development Goal 8.8 targets "safe and secure working environments for all workers". Yet without systemic data the problems that lessen women's quality of life in the garment industry are not fully known and are therefore are hard to address. This Future Leaders Fellowship addresses this knowledge and practice gap by generating evidence and promoting action on the specific threats posed to female garment workers.

In the global South, as well as the UK, most garment workers are young women from poor households, often living far away from home. Building on a commitment from the International Labour Organisation to eradicate gendered violence in "the world of work" (Convention 190, 2019), including acknowledging threats that occur beyond the workplace, we will evidence the risks that women workers face inside and outside of the factory, where malnutrition, mass fainting, reproductive and mental health crises, and sexual and physical abuse are reported to be commonplace. Using feminist theory and methods, we aim to highlight and challenge where gender-blind health and safety programmes hide or ignore these pervasive threats to women's wellbeing.

We focus on four producer countries that represent different sites in the evolution of supply chain outsourcing: Cambodia, Ethiopia, Jordan and the UK. Across these locations, a combined 1 million people work making clothes and shoes for leading UK brands including M&S, Topshop and ASOS. Bringing together a diverse and transdisciplinary team, the project uses a participatory and ethnographic approach to investigate women's health and wellbeing at 8 industrial sites in each country, before examining the (inter)national organisation of labour and trade governance, to understand the institutional processes that make and unmake healthy working bodies. Our global approach allows us to identify the complex, more-than-local factors that perpetuate women's vulnerability in garment work and target action to address the systemic causes of inequity within supply chains.

To ensure our project amplifies women workers, we are collaborating with global partners and advisors, including international organisations (ILO/IFC Better Work), labour rights advocates (Worker Rights Consortium), women's rights charities (Care), trade justice campaigns (Traidcraft Exchange) and social movements (Fashion Revolution). We will share our findings in 10 academic papers, 6 interim briefs, 4 local workshops and exhibitions, and an accessibly written final report and monograph. Our initial phase of research for impact culminates in a global launch and exhibition of outputs at Fashion Revolution Week in 2025, intended to counter the invisibility of women workers, generating media attention to galvanise policy and public support for transformative change towards just garment supply chains.