Description
AbstractFast fashion runs on rapidly producing bulks of low-quality clothes that are quickly discarded, contributing to serious environmental pollution as well as notoriously poor labour conditions, making this business model incompatible with the Green Deal. This paper argues that the interconnectedness of environmental and social justice concerns, recognised by the Commission and apparent in the example of fast fashion, allows for assessing the effectiveness of legislation to bring about the Green Deal’s socially just transition by investigating its effects on labour standards. To that effect, this paper reviews two pending legislative proposals for instruments that aim at addressing working conditions in the fashion industry, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence (‘CSDD’) Directive and the Regulation prohibiting forced labour (‘FLR’), by comparing the proposals to a ‘true pricing’ approach. True pricing provides a model for an economy in which companies identify, measure, prevent and remediate environmental and social costs they currently offload to communities. Such an economy is brought closer by legislation that pushes all companies to incorporate into their policies substantive duties to address their negative societal impacts, backed up by effective enforcement when those duties are violated. Although the two proposals are laudable, this paper identifies several opportunities for the EU legislator to improve their effectiveness. First, the CSDD Directive should include proportionate obligations for SMEs, reduce the role of unreliable compliance methods used by fashion companies, require responsible purchasing decisions to end perverse incentives to contract with cheap partners that do not provide transparency on their complex value chain, and improve its civil liability scheme to accommodate victims in third countries. Second, the FLR should reverse its burden of proof to allow effective enforcement on the Member State level and incentivise transparency, and should adopt a system of remedies, which is currently lacking. The opportunities shown by the adoption of a true price lens reveal how the implementation of the Green Deal can promote social justice in the fashion industry.
| Period | 2023 |
|---|---|
| ISSN | 1152-9172 |