En la producción y el consumo de moda del siglo XXI muchas cosas parecen haber cambiado; algo que no es extraño considerando que vivimos en un mundo de innovación acelerada cuyas novedades nadie podría predecir hoy. Un estudio de McKinsey del año previo a la pandemia, daba cuenta en efecto de la tendencia hacia un aumento de la personalización (más estilos, colores y medidas), del acortamiento de los ciclos de producción (más “temporadas”, más colecciones) y un consumo cada vez más efímero: en promedio hoy compramos un 60% por ciento más de prendas de vestir que hace 15 años y conservamos esa ropa por solo la mitad del tiempo en que solíamos hacerlo.

However, if we observe more carefully, we can see that this high -speed train in which this industry travels is driven by a vapor locomotive of the nineteenth century, how can this be possible?The last great technological revolution in the sector was the sewing machine and despite certain improvements in its lender and precision, the “a machine-a machine” relationship has been maintained since then.The changes that have been operated, and the decrease in prices that make this model possible, have therefore been the product of transformations at the design level and management strategies, but fundamentally, to reduce wages and precarize the working conditions ofWorkers (without forgetting the intensive use of resources that make this activity the second most pollutant on the planet).

It could be thought that this description applies only to the new rapid fashion brands that have global scale and that compete based on their low prices.However, the structure of this productive model exists from the emergence of the old department stores, and both large and small firms, which manufacture basic products or design collections base their productive model the same strategies.

This is corroborated in our country, whose production is almost exclusively for the domestic market and in which three major features of this model can be verified:

- Domesticization, outsourcing and informality:

There are practically no companies that carry out all the activities of the manufacture of a garment.Fundamentally occupying the design and marketing, firms outsourly central tasks such as preparation, or directly the entire production to a vast network of workshops that in turn subcontracts other smaller workshops or home seamstresses.It is estimated that in the country there are 150.000 workers in the industry but only a quarter are registered and among them a very small percentage is part of these “factory factories” that are today the brands.In the words of a local entrepreneur: "I am not a textile businessman, I have a marketing company".

@Msnbc @Joyannreid for if the letter of the law is challenged by veiled probable cause in public in a voice of fact ... https: // t.CO/NJIJFNHXXS

— STEPHANIE MOON HOPE Sat Sep 12 23:48:26 +0000 2020

-It intense and precarious work:

Being a clothing worker is synonymous with poverty.Agreement salaries (the formal) are the lowest in the industry and among the informal ones, half does not even reach the minimum wage.These salaries contrast with high labor intensity, since 60% of workers have days higher than normal (in many cases more than 12 hours), and high pressure to produce, conditioned by the payment to piecework (another nineteenth -century tradition).In extreme situations, they are not even paid with money but with vouchers or species, or on account of providing accommodation and services.In these "sweat workshops", they also highlight the poor material conditions that include bad lighting, non -ergonomic equipment that over time generates problems in the spine or limbs, wired in poor conditions, overcrowding and absence of measures to prevent and combat the fires.

-A women's and migrants industry:

For all these aspects, it is traditional that the industry occupies populations particularly violated and vulnerable, in general poor women and migrants.They were mostly women and children who perished in the Rana Plaza de Bangladesh in 2013 and also in the workshop of the closest Viale de Caballito street in 2006.Basically women are tens of thousands in the neighborhoods of the country, which with a sewing machine and surrounded by precariousness, receive the batch of fabric and spend long nights in candle to deliver them on time with their seam.They are also those that in the registered workshops do not go to the doctor not.

We are not few who consider that as a society we are paying too expensive for this production and consumption paradigm, but it is the same as always those that carry the greatest costs.This model must change towards a more sustainable fashion for people and for the environment.In Argentina, this implies that there must be policies that protect the competence industry from countries with increasingly low wages, and that also promote genuine industrial development, that foster both innovation and creativity and the rights and interestAll its participants.

A modest first step in this direction is to ask and ask companies who makes the clothes we are buying, claim that traceability policies are applied that transparent the route of our garments and certify compliance with all regulations.

This idea by the way is not new either.There are examples in history, where working and consumer women joined to achieve this goal, as in the United States of 1902, when the women's campaign of the National Consumer League joined that of the International Trade Union of Workers of the Workers of the Workers of theConfection and the National League of Women's Trade Unions (a fight that in Argentina gave the “needle union”) progressively leading to the reduction of subcontracting and the improvement of working conditions.

In a text of this campaign those women said: “The responsibility of some of the worst evils sufferedThe items they buy are produced and distributed, and insist that these conditions be healthy and in accordance with a respectable existence by the workers ".A century later, everything indicates that if we want to advance, we will first have to reorient our steps in that same direction.

AT Andrés Matta and Jerónimo Montero Bressan