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

《卫报》（The Guardian）以“快时尚应该让我们所有人担心”为挑衅性标题，呼吁国际社会对全球服装和鞋类制造业对工人的剥削做出回应。全世界有7000万人从事服装和鞋子生产，主要在发展中国家，但也有像英国这样的发达经济体。这些工人中80%是女性。这个行业每年的产值高达2万亿美元，但工人们却只能拿到微薄的工资，在危险的条件下生活和工作。例如，2014年，孟加拉国有1000多名工人在工厂倒塌中被压死，突显了以牺牲人民为代价的利润优先。虽然供应链上的工人对我们的日常生活至关重要，但我们对为我们制作衣服和鞋子的女性知之甚少。英国政府的“女性工作与机会”（Work and Opportunities for Women）项目凸显了一个迫切的担忧：参与管理全球供应链的公司和其他组织缺乏系统地收集和报告按性别分类的数据。供应链中的女工简直是隐形工人。可持续发展目标8.8的具体目标是“为所有工人提供安全可靠的工作环境”。然而，在没有系统数据的情况下，服装行业降低女性生活质量的问题并没有得到充分了解，因此很难解决。未来领袖奖学金通过收集证据和推动针对服装女工所面临的具体威胁的行动，解决了这一知识和实践差距。在南半球以及英国，大多数服装工人都是来自贫困家庭的年轻女性，她们往往住在离家很远的地方。根据国际劳工组织关于消除“劳动世界”中的性别暴力的承诺（2019年第190号公约），包括承认工作场所之外发生的威胁，我们将证明女工在工厂内外面临的风险，据报道，营养不良、集体昏厥、生殖和精神健康危机以及性虐待和身体虐待司空见惯。利用女权主义理论和方法，我们旨在强调和挑战无视性别的健康和安全方案隐藏或忽视这些对妇女福祉的普遍威胁的地方。我们专注于四个生产地，它们代表着供应链外包发展的不同地点：柬埔寨、埃塞俄比亚、约旦和英国。在这些地方，总共有100万人为玛莎百货、Topshop和ASOS等英国知名品牌生产服装和鞋子。该项目汇集了一个多元化和跨学科的团队，在审查（国际）国家劳工和贸易治理组织之前，采用参与性和人种学方法，在每个国家的8个工业场所调查妇女的健康和福祉，以了解建立和破坏健康工作机构的体制程序。我们的全球方法使我们能够识别复杂的、超越当地的因素，使妇女在服装工作中长期处于弱势地位，并采取有针对性的行动，解决供应链中不平等的系统性原因。为了确保我们的项目能够扩大女性工人的影响力，我们正在与全球合作伙伴和顾问合作，包括国际组织（国际劳工组织/国际金融公司更好的工作）、劳工权利倡导者（工人权利联盟）、女权慈善机构（Care）、贸易正义运动（Traidcraft Exchange）和社会运动（时尚革命）。我们将在10篇学术论文、6篇中期简报、4个本地研讨会和展览，以及一份通俗易懂的最终报告和专著中分享我们的发现。我们对影响的初步研究将在2025年的时装革命周（Fashion Revolution Week）上进行全球发布和展出，旨在解决女性工人的隐形现象，引起媒体的关注，激发政策和公众对服装供应链变革的支持。

"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.