Can Fashion Fight AIDS?

Like Product Red, which donates a portion of proceeds from the sale of numerous items to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis, linking donations with consumables presumably gives developed world shoppers the ability to conveniently raise funds for people in the developing world. Part of me wants to believe that buying an H&M T-shirt will help prevent new cases of HIV, but another part of me had to do as the shirt asked: stop and think. After all, the root causes of HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis are not merely viruses and bacteria; as evidenced by the countries most affected by them, the root cause is poverty and lack of resources. America’s love of cheap goods and the demand that it puts upon the countries making those goods has not helped the economic inequalities that contribute to widespread disease and suffering. Not to mention our first-world consuming habits have largely contributed to global warming, the burden of which will be most heavily felt in resource-poor areas. H&M, with numerous items under twenty dollars that don’t last more than a season, is a prime example of our disposable culture.

When cute clothes come super cheap, can they still save lives? Or, are they contributing to conditions that foster inequality? I wondered if H&M uses sweatshop labor, which puts those most at risk for new HIV infection—women and girls—in compromising and poor working conditions. My first hunch was yes—most clothes that seem too cheap to be true really are. As it turns out H&M, like GAP, has been implicated in some sweatshop labor scandals. One of their suppliers, Gokaldas Export, was found to have paid wages to factory workers that failed to meet their basic needs and fell short of the minimum international labor standards set out by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). Poor working conditions are something H&M is aware of but actively tries to redress. In their 2005 corporate social responsibility report, they note that they face problems—falsified documentation of working hours, excessive overtime, and lack of employee rights—in factories in multiple countries. While they continue to monitor these factories and look for solutions, they admit that “the underlying idea is that our suppliers need to assume ownership of and consequent responsibility for improving their own organizations.”