According to a recent story from Quartz, it takes about a week for top-tier fashion CEOs to earn more than a Bangladeshi factory worker will earn in a lifetime.
Citing a recent Oxfam report, the story breaks down the almost-cartoonishly evil earning gap between the CEOs at “the world’s top five fashion brands” and the workers they rely on at the lowest wrung on the fashion ladder.
For instance, Stefan Persson, H&M’s chairman, made roughly $809 million (not a typo) in 2017, while Amancio Ortega, the founder of Inditex (parent company of Zara), made about $1.37 billion in 2016 (also not a typo), which is, scientifically speaking, a fuck ton of money.
But over that same time period, Oxfam’s report cited a Bangladeshi woman who makes just $900 per year, a scenario that “repeats across other countries in the region, such as Vietnam and Cambodia.”
So how do we fix the disparity? The story proposes that we “reward work, not wealth,” by “using taxes and public spending to effectively redistribute wealth.”
“If we could do that at a global scale,” they argue “perhaps fewer factory workers would go hungry while building up the immense fortunes of multinational corporations and their shareholders.”
You can read more about it at Quartz.
