Senator Kirsten Gillibrand recently introduced her Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change (FABRIC) Act in the US Senate. The FABRIC Act aims to protect nearly 100,000 domestic garment workers and help revitalize the sector by improving working conditions and reforming the piece-rate pay scale applicable now.
The act proposes to address these issues through five central pillars: restructuring pay rates and providing minimum wage as a floor with productivity incentives on top; establishing new liability measures that compel major retailers to become allies in combating workplace violations; introducing record-keeping and transparency measures; incentivizing reshoring; and creating a domestic garment manufacturing grant program aimed at revitalizing the industry.
Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are original cosponsors of the act.
American garment workers face the second-highest rate of wage theft of any group of workers in the country, according to the press release. At its peak in April of 1973, the US apparel industry employed 1.4 million people. This number has steadily declined since. As of April 2022, only 93,800 Americans were employed in apparel manufacturing.
Today, apparel imports from China to the United States are over 10 times higher than 30 years ago, and between 1995 and 2020, China gained an estimated 1.25 million jobs in apparel and apparel-adjacent manufacturing while the United States lost roughly 700,000 jobs.
The US garment industry now loses out on approximately $30 billion annually that is instead imported from China.
