The Fair Wear certification and respect for people

What is the lowest salary in the textile industry? Read to the end to find out the answer.

75 million people work in the textile industry, and 85% of them are women, which is why this sector has the potential to become a driver of positive change, impacting millions of families around the world.

FairWear Organization is one of the largest entities engaged in the fight for the rights of workers in the textile industry, bringing change to a field where low wages, precarious working conditions, sexual assaults, violence, and health and physical safety risks are extremely common.

The principles of FairWear are clear and simple:

• The right of workers to freely choose to work
• Freedom of association and collective bargaining
• Stopping discrimination
• Stopping the exploitation of children
• Payment of decent wages
• Reasonable working hours
• Safe and healthy working conditions
• Employment relationships with legal contracts

Products carrying the Fair Wear label are made in production units that have been audited, assessed, and objectively comply with all the above principles. Every FairWear product purchased brings a bit of change to the lives of workers in the textile industry, helping to establish a standard that more and more employers must follow. It's a slow and ongoing process, as millions of people who make our clothes continue to be abused and mistreated.

These may seem like issues happening thousands of kilometers away from us and almost unreal, but we are connected to all these phenomena through the clothes we wear.

Now that we have outlined a bit of the landscape of the textile industry, we can also talk about the lowest salary in the field. Its value is zero. In the textile industry, forced labor, or slavery, is currently practiced. According to the Global Slavery Index, 40 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016, and the textile industry ranked second in industries where this phenomenon exists. Nearly three-quarters of the victims are women.

According to the same Global Slavery Index, in 2016, in Romania, 4.3 out of every 1,000 people were victims of slavery, representing 86,000 people.