Day: May 16, 2022

As legislators in states like California and New York work to pass laws that hold fashion brands accountable for their labor practices, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY-D) has her sights set on the federal level. 

On May 12, Sen. Gillibrand will bring the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change Act — FABRIC Act for short — to the Senate, a first-of-its-kind federal bill that, as Alyssa Hardy explains in Vogue, would incentivize fashion companies to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. and improve the working conditions of their stateside facilities, and would penalize those who are found paying their workers less than the federal minimum hourly wage. 

“We need to put a prohibition on predatory payments through the piece rates, but we also need to give these companies the incentives to bring the manufacturing back to the U.S. or make it possible for them

Ayesha Barenblat, the founder and CEO of the fashion advocacy group Remake who helped draft the bill, explained that creating and updating garment jobs in the US is more critical than ever due to the fractured global supply chain.

“The supply chain changes since the pandemic have made business difficult for many brands, and for the first time, we are seeing interest in nearshoring products,” Barenblat says, citing the example of mask and PPE supplies during the early parts of 2020. The US had to rely on imports in an emergency when they could have been made domestically if the infrastructure allowed for it. The problem is two-fold since many of the factories in the US are severely behind from a technological standpoint, she adds.

“When you go to Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and other places around the world, you see that the industry has moved on,” she explains. “The grant