Remake

Advocate for and help pass the first federal fashion bill, the Fashioning Accountability and Building Real Institutional Change (FABRIC) Act, which will end wage theft nationwide and offer incentives like tax exemptions and grant programs for brands looking to manufacture in the United States.

We will garner the support of apparel brands, manufacturers, labor rights groups, civil societies, citizens, press and lawmakers. The FABRIC Act is geared to help women and BIPOC-owned businesses with the grant program. We will educate the public and set call to actions to get bi-partisan support.

To incentivize domestic manufacturing:

● The establishment of a $40 million Domestic Garment Manufacturing Support Program to supply grants to manufacturers for equipment costs, safety improvements, and training and workforce development. 

● A 30 % reshoring tax credit for garment manufacturers who move manufacturing operations to the US. This credit will be applicable to costs associated with reshoring production.

To create world-leading worker protections in apparel production, the bill also amends the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to include:

● The establishment of a nationwide garment industry registry through the Department of Labor to promote transparency, hold bad actors accountable, and level the playing field.

● New requirements which hold fashion brands and retailers alongside
manufacturing partners jointly accountable for workplace wage violations to
incentivize fair workplaces, starting at the top.

● Setting hourly pay in the garment industry and eliminating piece rate pay until the minimum wage is met to ensure jobs with dignity. 

The United States garment sector is a $9 billion industry employing 95,000 people today with Made in USA clothing on the rise. There are apparel manufacturers concentrated from coast to coast in California, New York, Georgia, North & South Carolina and Texas that create everything from high-end denim and luxury handbags to fast fashion and swimwear. Since peak employment of 1.4 million garment workers in 1973, offshoring and outsourcing have reduced the US garment manufacturing sector.

Globally, fashion is a $1.5 trillion industry, but its manufacturing supply chains around the world are often rife with abuses, including forced labor and extreme poverty pay. The US took two historic steps towards ending this exploitation in 2021, by passing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and California’s Garment Worker Protection Act. But more remains to be done. While many American garment workers earn a middle class living, as a group they still suffer the second-highest rate of wage theft of all workers, with some earning as little as $2.68 an hour, far below the federal minimum wage. Some factories abuse the piece rate system of pay, by which workers earn pennies per garment sewn rather than the minimum wage. These abuses are systemic, as layers of contracting separate brands from their garment workers, creating opaque supply chains with no oversight. 

The US is in a unique position to accelerate domestic manufacturing coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic and lead the world in the booming $5 billion global market for responsibly produced apparel. 

We believe that the best way to improve the clothing industry for its workers and small businesses (mostly women and BIPOC owned) is to pass smart legislation to regulate the industry. 

Our solution is to educate and advocate for smart policy that supports the workers and small responsible businesses.

Our solution serves the 95,000 garment workers across all 50 U.S. states who are mostly women of color making less than minimum wage. They work long hours, often in poor working conditions and are underpaid. We work with organizations like the Garment Worker Center to understand the needs of garment worker and the issues and challenges facing them. We listen to and share their stories with our community. By passing legislation like the FABRIC Act, workers will be guaranteed to make minimum wage. And, it will level the playing field for women and BIPOC owned clothing businesses against the world's largest brands who benefit from cheap labor. 

With the passage of the FABRIC Act, local fashion companies will be incentivized to onshore production with tax credits. Designers and small business owners who would prefer to have localized production to ensure transparency, traceability, that workers are paid fairly, and reduce their environmental footprints, will be more likely to keep manufacturing here. 

Additionally, with grants and investments being made into revitalizing the fashion industry in the United States, the bill will ensure that small businesses have all the relevant and necessary infrastructure to build their business in a sustainable and profitable manner, right here in the U.S. 

As supply chains see more disruptions with climate change and other disadvantageous global events, having a well-established local fashion industry will reduce operational and financial shocks for fashion companies.

Yes! The FABRIC Act is a federal level bill and will work across all 50 U.S. states. In addition, we are organizing in every state in the country to build a coalition of support to help pass this bill. 

Our mission is to fight for fair pay for women in the clothing industry. We exist to end poverty wages, unsafe working conditions and gender-based violence with which our clothes are made today. 

We both help launch small businesses and sustain small businesses by working to level the playing field for responsible businesses against major brands. Small businesses are where women and BIPOC owned companies are concentrated. We publish and feature article roundups of BIPOC brands, examples here and here. Our social media highlights BIPOC and women owned brands and we run panels on BIPOC-women owned businesses, example here: https://remake.world/stories/i...

Inequity is pervasive in the garment industry. The industry is 80% women (mostly women of color) who have for decades toiled with sweatshop wages. The pandemic revealed how a core part of brands’ profitability is achieved by consistently underpaying suppliers and garment workers. Along with agro-exports, fashion is one of the most unequal industries in the world.  

A lack of regulation and obsolete labor laws that do not reflect modern supply chains perpetuates insecure employment and wage theft for garment makers. Remake in partnership with the Garment Worker Center recently helped pass a landmark piece of legislation in California, the Garment Worker Protection Act (SB62) which ends the piece rate pay system in California’s garment industry and makes brands and their suppliers jointly liable for ensuring that garment makers are paid a minimum wage. Joint liability gets to the root cause of why the apparel supply chain today is plagued with sweatshop wages and excessive and unsafe working conditions, which is the commercial practices and prices set by brands and retailers. 

Our theory of change is that by advocating for and passing smart policy reform, we can bring women back into manufacturing jobs and businesses. The FABRIC Act places liability requirements onto clothing brands that work with factories paying less than the federal minimum wage and it includes a 30% reshoring tax credit to cover costs for brands seeking to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. It also creates a $40 million Domestic Garment Manufacturing Support Program for factories to update their facilities and improve them for workers.

Remake Founder & CEO Ayesha Barenblat is a social entrepreneur with a passion for building sustainable supply chains that respect people and our planet. With over 15 years of leadership to promote social justice and sustainability within the fashion industry, she founded Remake to mobilize citizens to demand a more just, transparent, and accountable fashion industry. Remake’s free educational resources, advocacy campaigns, and sustainable brands directory are focused on making fashion a force for good.

Ayesha has worked across the public, private, and civil society sectors to promote the rights and dignity of the women who make our clothes. Prior to founding Remake, she led brand engagement at Better Work, a World Bank and United Nations partnership, to ensure safe and decent working conditions in garment factories around the world. Prior to this, she ran the fashion vertical at BSR, providing strategic advice to brands including Levi Strauss and Company, Marks and Spencer, Nike, and the Gucci Group on the design and integration of sustainability into business. She has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

She counts both Karachi and San Francisco as her homes, and she is happiest when spending time with the women who bring our fashion to life and amplifying the stories of fashion’s most essential workers.