Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the making of the current labour regime within UK fast fashion and focuses in particular on forms and spaces of worker voice. It highlights recent bottom-up initiatives and points to the role of social reproduction in progressive labour strategies.

Paper long abstract:

The UK fast fashion industry has been characterised by economic and social downgrading over the last decades, underscored by monopsonistic capital structures as well as the super-exploitation of an informalised labour force. This paper examines the making of this labour regime and focuses, in particular, on forms and spaces of worker voice. It contrasts the decline and evolution of formal organised channels with more recent bottom-up initiatives, highlighting the role of social reproduction in progressive labour strategies.

While employment conditions in the industry have gained constant media and, increasingly, political focus, grievances rarely made it beyond the informal structures of the industry. Austerity and monopsonistic supply chains are key factors in this situation which can be evidenced through data from the UK’s dispersed labour market enforcement agencies, on the one hand, of social auditing data, on the other. This contrasts sharply with a further source of data which stem from labour and community organisations which have developed over the last years. What is distinctive about the latter initiatives is that they, both, perceive work and employment issues from a wider, reproductive labour, perspective. Strategies based on the latter perspective have resulted in considerable successes and contain important elements of worker-driven supply chain governance. It will be argued that such strategies should take a central role in frameworks of mandatory human rights due diligence.