More than 1,100 people were killed in the clothing-factory collapse in Bangladesh last month. Yet most consumers will probably continue to buy clothes without asking questions about their origins, experts say.
The eight-story Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, which collapsed on April 24, housed five garment factories. Clothes for Loblaw Co.’s Joe Fresh brand and U.K.’s Primark were among the labels found there; both companies apologized on their websites. Western clothing brands are increasingly under pressure from consumer advocates to improve the safety conditions of the country’s 5,000 factories. On Monday, H&M , fashion retailer C&A of the Netherlands and Zara parent Inditex agreed to sign a fire-safety agreement in Bangladesh. But as The Wall Street Journal reports, it was Americans’ taste for ultra-cheap clothing that helped keep demand high for Bangladesh’s factories. In fact, adjusting for inflation, clothing prices here have actually declined over the last decade.
“There is a wild misapprehension that consumers actually care,” says Iain Davies, an associate professor at the University of Bath School of Management in England. Most research showing support for ethical consumption has largely focused on low value, commoditized products like food, coffee and cosmetics, he says, and doesn’t take into account the value consumers place on higher-end goods and fashion. “Do Consumers Care About Ethical-Luxury?” — a study published in the “Journal of Business Ethics” in 2012 and co-authored by Davies — concluded that consumers are less likely to switch luxury brands based on where and how they were made “due to the low priority of the ethics in the purchasing decision.”
Consumers are more sensitive to price tags than to product origins, studies show. Less than a third of shoppers in another 2006 survey were willing to pay more to avoid a sweatshop-made product. In the study, “Consumers with a Conscience: Will They Pay More?,” published in the American Sociological Association journal Contexts, one rack of socks was label-free and the other was labeled “Buy GWC — Good Working Conditions” with an explanation saying the socks were not produced with child labor, in an unsafe environment or under sweatshop conditions. Only half the participants bought the ethical socks when there was no price differential, and barely one-quarter paid for “Good Working Conditions” socks with a 50% premium.
In polls, people say they abhor the use of sweatshops. When they go shopping, experts say, they either forget these opinions or choose not to act on them. It’s called the “social respectability” or “social desirability” bias. “For more than 20 years, polls have been showing a large disconnect between consumers’ stated values and their actual purchases,” says Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of business research company GreenBiz Group, in Oakland, Calif. “Dating back to the late 1980s, large majorities of Americans have been telling pollsters that they would gladly buy green or responsible or ethical products,” he says, “but the reality is that only a small percentage of them — usually well under 10% of shoppers — do this.”
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For those who can afford to pay for expensive goods, a powerful brand can trump social concerns. Last year, for example, a group of Apple customers led by Change.org, a for-profit social-change advocate that provides services to nonprofits, collected over 250,000 signatures in a petition to get Apple to improve its factory conditions — but said they drew the line at ditching their own iPhones and iPads, Apple admitted in a report that 62% of its suppliers across Asia failed to comply with working-hour limits, and that five facilities employed underage workers. Still, one Change.org organizer told this reporter, “I love [Apple products] and I don’t want to stop using them. They are the best products that are out there.”
There’s another possible reason more people don’t match their buying decisions to their beliefs: Their friends don’t. People are more likely to question the origins of a garment if it’s common practice among their peers to do so, says Ian Robinson, a lecturer and research scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and co-author of the 2006 study about socks. “Most people are conditional co-operators,” he says. “If other people pay more for ethical products, they will. If other people don’t, they won’t.” People can show off their Fair Trade coffee in a shopping basket or the kitchen, Davies adds, but that’s not so easy with clothing. “There is no socio-cultural benefit for an individual to buy something that isn’t recognizable as ethical,” he says. “People buy clothes because of how they look.”
But shoppers will also forget their Fair Trade sensibilities if the price isn’t right, experts say. They will not pay a large premium for Fair Trade coffee, one 2011 study found. That study — “Consumer Demand for the Fair Trade Label,” by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the London School of Economics — found that sales of a more expensive than average Fair Trade coffee remained steady when the price was raised by 8%, but a 9% price increase in a cheaper Fair Trade coffee led to a 30% decline in sales as buyers switched to cheap unlabeled alternatives. “There is no clear evidence that people actually seek out such ethically certified goods and pay a premium for them,” it concluded.
For their part, fashion labels whose clothes turned up at the Rana Plaza factory have issued apologies. On its website, Joe Fresh released a statement: “Our sincere apologies go out to those affected by the building collapse in Bangladesh.” It also pledged to set up a relief fund for the victims and their families, and said it was committed to ensure that its suppliers respect local construction and building codes. Primark, owned by U.K. food-processing company Associated British Foods (ABF), is also working on a support package for workers affected by the disaster. Benetton said one of its suppliers had subcontracted to one of the Dhaka-based manufacturers without the company’s knowledge. (The companies did not respond to request for comment.)
Clothing retailers are also making efforts to improve transparency. Fair Indigo is an online retailer that markets itself as Fair Trade USA — a nonprofit certifier of Fair Trade products — by paying workers fair wages and says it supports two impoverished schools in Peru. Los Angeles-based American Apparel also markets its clothes as “sweatshop-free.” They are in the minority, experts say. More major brands and retailers at the top of the global apparel supply chain need to give consumers real choice, Robinson says. Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, Target, Gap, H&M and Nike are members of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an industry group that aims to measure environmental impacts of clothing and footwear. It will include social and labor metrics this fall, a spokesman says.
In the absence of Fair Trade clothing labels, one person’s ethically made T-shirt is another’s sweat shop. Low wages, long hours and poor conditions — up to a point — will be acceptable as long as Americans demand low-cost fast fashion, Makower says. “Most shoppers simply want to check the box to be told that a company has taken certain measures to prevent irresponsible or unethical behavior, whether it’s environmental pollution or human rights violations,” he says. A small percentage, he adds, will want some kind of certificate. “But shoppers will revert to traditional purchasing criteria like price, quality, style, brand,” Makower says. “As we’ve seen with so many other issues, the public’s memory is pretty short.”
Source: Market Watch
