Could Living Wages Help Solve Fashion’s Climate Crisis? New Research Says Yes

Fashion’s massive carbon footprint (estimated at 2% to 4% of global emissions and growing) is under fire. It’s the target of new legislation in New York State. And renowned climate activist Greta Thunberg forced the problem into the spotlight last fall, telling her 14 million Instagram followers: “The fashion industry is a huge contributor to the climate-and-ecological emergency.” Thunberg called for a system change. 

Greta’s right. The only problem is the fashion industry is barreling down the same path it’s been on for decades and can’t figure out how to pivot. A Vogue Business analysis found brands have no “convincing plan” to meet their climate targets. A 2020 McKinsey report concluded that fashion’s current strategies to decarbonize will slash CO2 by exactly zero at decade’s end. A fundamental change is exactly what’s needed.

How fundamental? Well, it’s both deceptively simple and something no major fashion brand is considering: Pay living wages to garment workers.

That’s the eye-opening argument made in UC Santa Barbara environmental scientist Roland Geyer’s revelatory recent book, The Business of Less: The Role of Companies and Businesses on a Planet in Peril, which declares that “labor rather than green products or materials hold the key to social and environmental sustainability.” 

Geyer calculates that raising the world’s 35 million garment worker wages just an extra $100 a week (about what’s needed to reach a living wage in Bangladesh and India) would immediately cut 65.3 megatons of CO2 out of the global economy. That’s more than the carbon savings attained from powering all retail stores with renewable energy and replacing a substantial amount of virgin polyester with recycled polyester.

How does labor make industries like fashion greener? Labor has no environmental impact and draws emissions down through a phenomenon called the reverse rebound effect (more on how it works in a minute). Geyer draws on a background in finance and 20 years studying the impacts of consumer sectors like fashion to make his case. “Every dollar spent on labor is an environmentally impact-free dollar. It’s a zero-carbon dollar. It’s a zero-biodiversity-impact dollar,” he claims.

It’s a provocative argument, one that if taken seriously would turn fashion’s approach to sustainability on its head.

Why fashion’s current approach to climate action won’t work

The Business of Less isn’t about fashion specifically, but the implications are hard to miss. No major clothing brand pays its garment makers in Asia, Africa, Central America or Eastern Europe enough to climb out of poverty. Many retail workers toil for poverty pay. And no mainstream climate action plan in fashion mentions working conditions.

Before persuading his readers that better pay is good for the planet, Geyer’s book spends its early chapters unpacking why the current pursuit of environmentally-friendly products, such as “green” clothing, will ultimately fail to bring our industries in line with planetary boundaries.

For example, fashion is pumping massive investments into sustainable material innovations, like Walmart’s sugarcane-based lingerie, Adidas’s mushroom leather sneakers, and AllBirds’ plastic-free activewear. The problem with this approach is that the manufacture of any material has a massive and unavoidable environmental impact, Geyer explains. Switching to different inputs mostly entails switching impacts, such as from the high carbon emissions associated with synthetics to the land-use change and biodiversity impacts of natural materials.

While brands have no choice but to figure out how to operate with less fossil fuels, without deeper systemic change, the transition to clean energy will introduce new environmental problems. An even bigger worry is that as brands attempt to further wring out more pollution and waste from their collections and use cleaner energy, they could also unleash “rebound effects,” the scientific term for when “green” technological breakthroughs reduce the cost of a product or service and drive consumption up, erasing gains.

The classic example of a rebound effect is a consumer buying a fuel efficient car and using the savings on gas to drive twice as far. We’re already seeing rebound effects in the clean energy sector, as consumers who have cheap solar energy in their homes increase their consumption elsewhere.

How the green labor theory could transform fashion

The Business of Less offers a number of strategies for making businesses and households truly sustainable, from remanufacturing and reuse to using less material per product, but these strategies come with a high likelihood of rebound effects as well. That’s when the book turns to its conclusion that making our stuff with more labor, instead of different materials, is our best bet to transform sectors like fashion. 

The Green Theory of Labor (my terminology; his concept) works primarily through what Geyer calls a reverse rebound effect. The presumption is that households have a fixed amount of disposable income, and every dollar spent on people’s time and skills is de facto a dollar not spent on something with an innate environmental impact, such as taking a flight to Bali, buying a third flatscreen for the spare bedroom, or blasting the air conditioning all day. “That extra $20 spent on a T-shirt to pay someone fairly is $20 spent without any environmental impact, because I just paid for people’s time,” explains Geyer. 

There are two key ways that fashion could harness the Green Theory of Labor to start to drive a systems change. The most immediate way is to just pay people more, from cotton farms to retail stores. “In an industry where wages are too low already, I think it makes more sense to just increase the wages,” says Geyer. A mere $10 a day raise for all garment workers would be an additional $84 billion a year in the global economy that’s going towards to an impact-free resource through the reverse rebound effect.

The second is to make clothing more time and skill-intensive to produce, a sort of reversal of the fast fashion paradigm. “You could use labor to increase the aesthetics, quality, or repairability of garments,” says Geyer. 

Brands can also continue to invest in repair and resale businesses, as these industries are inherently labor-intensive and thus doubly sustainable thanks once again to the reverse rebound effect. They can also market labor-intensive and skilled clothing as climate friendly and green.

The industry can also add labor back into clothes simply by enforcing labor standards and slowing production down to a humane pace. Big fast fashion brands like Shein and Fashion Nova are known for churning out clothing as fast possible under grueling working conditions and forced overtime. By Geyer’s logic, making fast fashion more humane would automatically make it more sustainable, all without changing what it’s made out of. “A living wage t-shirt brings the environmental footprint way down, way more than trying to make a T-shirt out of bamboo or hemp,” he says.

What if living wages just kills jobs and other potential criticisms

There are of course many potential criticisms to a living wage approach to climate action. One critique is that raising wages will just kill jobs, as the price of clothing goes up and consumers can afford less. But not if the focus is on raising wages in industries where pay is “excessively low,” like fashion, as Geyer recommends. This would actually create jobs for those who need them most, as low-wage workers finally have money to spend. Currently, garment workers can’t even afford the dirt-cheap clothes they make.

Another argument is that products will become too expensive. This argument is particularly weak in fashion, as brands like Shein, Fashion Nova and Boohoo peddle garments for under $10 apiece (some go for as little as $2). Raising wages alone would not increase the price of fashion very much. A living wage payment in India, for example, adds only 20 cents to the cost of a T-shirt, according to one study.

A more releastic scenario is that higher wages will compel companies to automate more, leading to fewer jobs and more impacts, the ultimate rebound effect. But we can also imagine smart policies and tax incentives that would help avoid this outcome.

The best argument in favor of paying people more to fight climate change is that the social benefits alone are enough to give it a try. If paying fair wages has powerful carbon-saving potential, it could be the closest thing to a “Magic Bullet” we’ve got, aligning labor rights and environmental efforts into one cause to save the planet.

“It’s just fantastic,” says Geyer of labor’s green power. “Because we achieve two really important sustainability goals at the same time.”

From degrowth to human-centered sustainability

On its surface, The Business of Less is part of a long intellectual tradition that questions the logic of infinite economic growth. William Stanley Jevons, back in 1865, first pointed out that making energy more efficient would increase its consumption, not decrease it, with his book The Coal Question. More recent growth critiques, like Jason Hickel’s Less Is More, insinuate that we will have to abandon industries like fashion altogether to meet our ecological goals.

But Geyer’s book ultimately draws its own more hopeful conclusion that it might be possible to have economic growth by reimagining our economy around humans instead of stuff. And we can start by redesigning our stuff to be more humane than it currently is today.

From a consumer standpoint, shoppers need simply embrace a new concept that many of us have intuited all along: Living wage clothing is sustainable clothing. In fact, it might be the greenest clothing we own.