California passed Senate Bill 62, known as the Garment Worker Protection Act. The Bill was first introduced in December 2020, passed into law on 8 September 2021 and was approved by the Governor on 27 September 2021.

The sole Los Angeles’ garment industry employs over 40,000 people across some 2,000 factories, confirming the great scope of the new legislation.

The new law makes California – that has the highest concentration of garment industry workers in the U.S. - the first state to require hourly wages for garment workers.

It prohibits piecework, a system in which workers are paid per garment (often resulting in less than $3 per hour), imposing compensatory damages of $200 per employee against a garment manufacturer or contractor, payable to the employee, for each income period in which each employee is paid by the piece rate.

For designers, the Bill introduces a kind of accountability never seen before in the industry.

Under the new Bill, a garment manufacturer shares several joint liabilities with any manufacturer and contractor for the full amount of unpaid wages and any other compensation due to any employees who performed manufacturing operations.

The bill also makes garment manufacturers and contractors liable for the full amount of damages and penalties for any violation made.

It’s important to note that brands agreed on this sort of responsibility, and worker organisations, businesses, and citizens came together to this effect.

No fashion labels came out to oppose Senate Bill 62, considering that this new legislation would have been good for workers, but also  good for businesses by outlawing the sweatshop conditions that have hurt the reputation of “made in Los Angeles” and levelling the playing field between companies that pay a living wage and those that don’t.

The garment worker rights issue has also been growing in other parts of the world.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the fashion industry employs 40 million to 60 million workers worldwide, with 60% of that number living in the Asia-Pacific region.  

These areas have still yet to change their pay-per-piece model.

However, it is important to underline that production has shifted to a more globalized model, and a step forward toward regulating pay within fashion supply chains shows that the industry is starting to change its historical regulations, even in an unprecedent pandemic context.