Women’s Empowerment: Climate Resilient Jobs of Dignity

Summary

In 2024, Remake committed to launching a two-year campaign to raise awareness and drive fashion brands to adopt policies and practices that tackle wage theft, gender-based violence, and climate impacts borne by women in factories in Los Angeles, Lahore, and Dhaka, positively impacting 20,000 women and girls. Through the Women’s Empowerment iInitiative, Remake will foster the empowerment of Los Angeles, Bangladesh, and Pakistan’s growing women-led labor movement while training the next-gen women field organizers who will continue to support the health, well-being, economic security, and dignity of women garment workers.

Approach

Remake commits to a two-year campaign to raise awareness and drive fashion brand commitments to tackle wage theft, gender-based violence, and climate impacts borne by women in factories from Los Angeles to Lahore to Dhaka, positively impacting 20,000 women and girls. Remake will engage media and citizens with a public campaign humanizing the women who make clothes across multiple cities and geographies. Beyond shifting narratives, this commitment will engage the world’s top 50 brands to commit to climate adaptation resources. Remake will lead the media, citizen, and brand engagement having built a network of connections over the last decade of advocacy. Partner organizations will provide the human-centered narrative, data, and worker stories to fuel this campaign.

In order to scale the commitment, Remake will work in the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles that serves LA’s 45,000 garment workers, Labour Education Foundation that serves Pakistan’s four million workers, and AWAJ that serves Bangladesh’s 4.1 million workers. Remake will work with partners to develop and launch this multi-year campaign to both empower women garment workers to share concerns of wage theft, gender based violence, and heat stress.

In addition, the community organizers are next-gen women, most in college or early twenties who work with Remake to build media and public awareness to elevate the campaign. 2,000 next-gen women are already trained to be engaged in Remake’s work to build a more equitable and sustainable world. Through this commitment, an additional 1,000 gender and climate justice women changemakers will be recruited and trained to support garment workers win wage theft cases. Our next-gen women organizer network is how we reach four million citizens to be in solidarity with our worker partners.

Based on this coalition approach we will seek to win 4 landmark commitments from fashion brands to financially support climate resilient jobs of dignity.

Action Plan

The Women’s Empowerment Initiative will roll out over 2025-2026 in three phases:

Phase 1: Stakeholder Consult and Campaign Design, January – March 2025: run stakeholder sessions with the Garment Worker Center (LA) , LEF (Pakistan) , and AWAJ (Bangladesh) to collect wage theft and heat impact data, cases, and testimonials to build out a multi-year education campaign and engage 2,000 community organizers on the campaign design and strategy.

Phase 2: Campaign Launch and Stakeholder Engagement, April – December 2025: Build a year-long campaign strategy, including monthly virtual and in-person training of organizers , community partners and labor leaders on the data, campaign design and key milestones. Remake will create social media and live activation toolkits and hold press conferences to build public awareness. Pilot, test, launch campaign; centering women worker voices through a mix of press, social media and live activations. Run a train the trainers model, to empower our next-gen organizers to recruit additional organizers to join the campaign. Engage brands behind the scene to secure commitments. Monitor, evaluate and share commitment wins.

Phase 3: January– December 2026: Grow organizer base from 2,000 to 3,000 through a train the trainer model and mix of on and offline educational resources to build out the next generation pipeline of sustainable and equitable leaders. Bring worker partners from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Los Angeles together with field organizers to assess wins, lessons learned and to refine campaign design. Provide testimony to Congress on the outcomes of the campaign to reignite interest in our federal level bill the FABRIC Act, post US elections, to create long-term wins for garment workers.

Through the Women’s Empowerment initiative, Remake will foster the empowerment of Los Angeles, Bangladesh and Pakistan’s growing women-led labor movement while training up the next-gen of women field organizers. While this campaign would be the first multi-year effort, focused on three important geographies, Remake has a decade of experience winning cases and passing laws.

Background

Fashion is built on a system of exploitation. Today 70 million very young women of color toil in sweatshops making pervasively low wages and grappling with gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) . These women are hired to the lowest-paying jobs on the factory floor with limited advancement. Most factory supervisors and management are men of higher social status. In this setting, GBVH is ubiquitous with an estimation of over 80% of women in the garment industry subjected to GBVH. In Bangladesh, 60% or more of women and girls suffer from physical violence, sexual violence, or harassment at work. In Pakistan, the rate stands between 70% to 80% (Solidarity Center, 2018) . These women face climate heat stress: as temperatures heat up, production hubs are not set up with coolant systems with women reporting heat exhaustion, dehydration, and growing gender-based violence. They also face wage theft and poverty: most earn insufficient wages and face frequent wage theft, trapping women and girls in a cycle of poverty. In addition, they face gender-based violence: sexual harassment and violence are rampant in factories and company-provided dormitories.

Moreover, the $2.5 trillion fashion industry is failing to protect female garment workers from climate-related disruptions (Cornell) . Instead of absorbing the costs of heat waves, floods, and subsequent shipping delays, most companies transfer these burdens onto women workers through poverty wages, precarious employment, and unfair labor practices.

Progress Update

Partnership Opportunities

Remake is seeking an additional $280,000 in financial resources and media support to amplify the education campaign., Remake works in radical collaboration with our Global South partners. Remake will fundraise together, and mobilize the campaign strategy best practices and media network to elevate the demands of worker partners.