THE IMPORTANCE OF FAIR TRADE
Wear Your Values!
What is Fair Trade?
Put simply, the fair trade movement ensures that manufacturers and workers can achieve sustainable trade relationships by being treated and paid fairly. This enables everyone in a company's production chain to work in ethical conditions and to improve their livelihoods.
It means that child labor is never used, and it also takes the environment into consideration.
Fair trade is often achieved by removing intermediaries and by buying products and raw materials directly from the people who create them. When you pay for a fair trade product, you can be sure that a fair portion will go to the producers, enabling them to afford things that we take for granted like a decent home, healthcare, food, and education. The movement focuses primarily on exported products from developing counties to developed countries, but it can also be found domestically.
Ethical and fair trade clothing manufacturing is a way of producing clothing that respects workers, the environment, and communities. It involves practices that ensure fair wages, safe working conditions, and sustainable production.
Principles of ethical and fair trade clothing manufacturing:
- Fair wages: Workers are paid a fair wage, higher than the standard market rate.
- Safe working conditions: Workers are free from forced and child labor, and work in safe and healthy conditions
- Environmental sustainability: Workers use sustainable practices that protect natural resources.
- Respect for local culture: Traditional practices are encouraged, along with the teaching of new ones.
- Transparency and accountability: Suppliers, producers, and buyers communicate clearly and participate in decision- making.
- Community engagement: Communities where clothing is produced have the opportunity to prosper.
“Fair Trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade. It contributes to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions to, and securing the rights of, marginalized producers and workers – especially in the South. Fair Trade Organizations engage actively with consumers, in supporting producers, awareness-raising and campaigning for changes in the rules and practice of conventional international trade.”
-Definition of Fair Trade, International Fair Trade Charter
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