Blue Tin Production

We need funds to be able to expand our membership locally and internationally. As work toward developing a new global model in fashion supply chains led by garment workers, we hope to be able to provide the resources and tools (our model) as well as seed funds to working-class women of color and former/current sweatshop workers to build worker cooperatives that create agency, racial/gender equity, and economic mobility that is stable, systemic, independent, and in their own vision for the world. 

Building the capacity to expand is critical: we receive requests to join our co-operative from current/former sweatshop workers daily. They are intergenerational women primarily from Middle Eastern/South Asian, East Asian, and Latinx backgrounds, as well as Black and African women in working-class neighborhoods globally. We recognize a deep need to train and support more women and mothers particularly who are survivors of violence and trauma in a way that is not paternalistic or top-down, but in a way that restores agency and is healing in and of itself. As survivors of violence, we want to build capacity for garment workers to demand more for themselves and their communities, and have the tools to do so.

I am an Iranian-American community organizer, writer, author, and creative. My work focuses on the intersections of labor, capitalism, gender, surveillance, the carceral state, anti-Muslim violence, and global militarism, and fast-fashion supply chains embody all of these systems. I believe one of the biggest challenges to our movements today is how deeply siloed we view the issues we can about are, yet if we’re able to do work that is systemic and structural, it is truly revolutionary and intersectional. That’s why my work has been particularly focused on fashion supply chains: if we can create models of liberation for working-class women of color directly faced with all of these systemic violences, then we can create liberation for us all. 

I started Blue Tin Production as a truly community-based project to attempt to answer and explore these questions, but on the terms and vision of garment workers: fellow Muslim women, women of color, teen mothers, queer and trans women of color, domestic violence survivors, and refugees. And these are exactly the people we are building our vision of the future with, and comprise Blue Tin. 

1 in 6 people on the planet work in the global fashion industry and 98% do not receive a living wage. Most garment workers are women of color living in the global south or undocumented women living in the U.S., working in sweatshops that systemize gender-based violence to meet production quotas. Garment workers are strategically silenced, and are faced with retaliation by multi-million dollar brands for speaking out against their conditions. In the U.S., it is common practice to hire undocumented workers then conduct an ICE raid of ones own factory after a few months to avoid paying wages. The industry creates more greenhouse gas emissions than all maritime shipping and international flights combined. 

Blue Tin Production is an apparel manufacturing workers co-operative run by immigrant, refugee, and working-class women of color. We take a visionary and abolitionist approach to fashion supply chains: we’re not interested in reforms that maintain structural hierarchies, and instead are building a new model for global supply chain on our terms. We’ve set international standards in labor and sustainability and are working on developing our revolutionary process as a model that can be replicated by garment workers on a global scale.

BTP is centered on re-imagining labor and sustainability in the fashion industry while developing long-term, structural racial equity. We’re cited by global fashion leaders as a unique model with innovative approaches to some of the most pressing issues facing supply chains while meeting the critical needs of those marginalized.

The issue is not about creating workplaces of “less violence,” but the violence of fashion supply chains is multi-faceted and intertwined with colonization, patriarchy, white supremacy, racial capitalism, and militarism. So we, too, take a holistic and intersectional approach to our work. As a worker co-operative, we are run, operated, and owned by those most impacted, and designed for those at the epicenter of intersections of violence to build leadership, agency, and economic mobility. 

Within our first year alone we set global records in labor and sustainability: for example, while average factories produce 22% textile waste, BTP produced only 9%, exceeding even what experts held to be possible. 

Our work is global-focused: we are in conversations with garment workers in Jakarta, Lagos, and Los Angeles to launch satellite locations as case studies so we can perfect our model and cultivate garment worker power on a global scale.

In order to measure our long-term growth and impact, we are working with professors, researchers, and international human rights/labor organizations to develop our revolutionary model of fashion production into an easily replicable standard that can be applied globally. On a local level, we hope to continue to be able to grow our internal capacity and hire, train, and holistically support additional women of color across the United States. 

In order to maintain our global lead in innovative approaches to labor and sustainability, we will continue to research and develop new approaches to manufacturing and what it means to create a non-capitalist workplace, but rather one that is rooted in community building, political education, self-care and mental health, and people rather than profit-driven growth. Our work is visionary and disruptive, as working-class women of color at the epicenters of layered structural violence to envision the world they want to thrive in, and build it for themselves and our communities every day. We believe that liberation is not a far-off distant ideal, but that we can also create moments of liberation for ourselves and our communities here and today--and that we owe it to ourselves to do so.