Fast Fashion: Ethical/moral Perspectives And Stakeholders

This report is about fast fashion. Fast fashion is an enormous industry with billions of dollars in it. Big fashion companies like: H&M, Zara, Forever 21, Gant, Walmart… are changing there stores constantly to stay up to date on the latest trends, this is why they are a part of fast fashion. They produce their clothes in fabrics in development countries like China and Bangladesh. Low wages and child labor happens very often in these fabrics. They don’t really check the age of the people that are working in their fabrics and the conditions there are very bad. The main goal for this paper is to give people more information about fast fashion because it affects a lot of people. A lot of people are buying this clothes even though they are conscious about the violations of human rights that are in fast fashion. Of course a lot don’t know about this problems or know very little about it. in this paper I will be giving more information about the ethical and moral perspectives, the stakeholders in fast fashion, about the sustainability in it. and I will give my own recommendations to avoid unethical or unsustainable outcomes in the future.

Ethical/moral perspectives:

there are a lot of dark sides in fast fashion that people very often ignore or just don’t care enough about it. the factories are dangerous and the workers are earning a very little amount of money. For example: on the 24th of April 2013 an eight story garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh leaving 1134 deaths and around 2500 injured people. This of course could happen to everyone but: the owners of the building ignored to stop using the building after there were cracks that appeared a day before. The garment workers had to return to work the next day, and that is when the building collapsed in the morning. The owners didn’t care about their workers and let them work even though it wasn’t save at all and that caused so many deaths. Companies are using this developing country to save money. I believe that clothes that are getting cheaper isn’t a bad thing because people need it, but if human rights have to be broken to get the clothes that cheap than it isn’t worth it to me.

The Stakeholders:

The definition of an stakeholder is “Any group or individual who can affect of is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives”(Freeman 1984). Stakeholders are important because they give your business practical and financial support.

In a company there are two sort of stakeholders.

Internal Stakeholders:

• Employees
• Manager
• Owners

External Stakeholders:

• Suppliers
• Society
• Government
• Creditors
• Shareholders
• Customers

Stakeholders affect your company and likewise. Customers as stakeholder provide the income and cash flow that a business needs to run and make profit. You have to understand what a customer wants and needs.

For your company it is important to treat your employees as your most valued assets, give them respect, and actively involving employees in important decisions. This are examples of ways how companies are influenced by employees as a stakeholder.

Sustainability:

Sustainability has many definitions, with the three most common being an activity that can be continued indefinitely without causing harm; doing unto others as you would have them do unto you; and meeting a current generation’s needs without compromising those of future generations (Fletcher 2008; Partridge 2011; Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, as cited in Fast Fashion, Sustainability, and the Ethical Appeal of Luxury Brands). Fast fashion isn’t sustainable. SDG’s is a good way to measure if a companies has plans to be more sustainable or not. Fast Fashion companies don’t follow SDG’s good enough. For example Swedish fashion chain H&M has worked with factories in Myanmar. Young children from even 14 years old are working more than 12 hours a day and got paid only 13 cents an hour. This violates numbers one, two, four and more. These humans in fabrics obviously live in poverty because they don’t earn a lot and they have to work hard and long. In a documentary named China Blue (2006) you could see that the people in the clothing fabric don’t get a lot of food to eat. Because there is so many child labor in fast fashion these kids don’t have quality education.

“The triple bottom line is a theory that recommends that companies commit to focus on social and environmental concerns just as they do on profits” (Will Kenton, 2019). In my opinion, fast fashion companies only care about the profit side of the triple bottom line because they often don’t care about their employees and they only are interested in the profit that they are making.

Recommendations:

we all know that fast fashion is a huge problem. To stop this I think that companies should pay more attention to the conditions of a factory. To push them to do so there has to be an organization to watch companies and where they produce their products and give them fines if the conditions in the factory where they are producing aren’t good enough. Another recommendation is to make agreements with the factory owners that the company has to know everything that happens in the factory at all times (so not only at inspections).