Gisela Burckhardt has been advocating for women for years—particularly in the global textile industry. She calls out fashion companies when their suppliers violate labor and human rights and urges policymakers to enact legislation. She also advocates for mindful consumption—and is firmly convinced that the message is sinking in: “Fair fashion is beautiful.”
Original language: German
It’s a bleak autumn evening; rain is pounding on the roof of the abandoned, graffiti-covered bus parked on the grounds of Bonn’s Kult 41 cultural center—where late-night beer drinking and hanging out are the order of the day. But today, the young people want one thing above all else: to swap clothes. That’s because today, Kult is hosting a “Clothing Fair Swap Party.” They arrive with bags and totes stuffed to the brim, and before long, shirts, jackets, skirts, and bags are piling up on the reception desk at the entrance. “That blouse is so cute—why are you giving it away?” one girl asks her neighbor in line. “I don’t know—it just doesn’t suit me anymore,” replies the petite teenager with long brown curls.
Right in the middle of this sea of clothes: Gisela Burckhardt—short blonde hair, an engaging gaze, and chairwoman of FEMNET. The nonprofit organization, based in Bonn, advocates specifically for women in the global apparel industry. FEMNET —the logo is clearly visible in black letters against a blue circle on the fairly produced T-shirt worn by Burckhardt and everyone else helping out this evening: members of FEMNET and Greenpeace Youth. The idea behind the party is to promote a sustainable approach to our clothing. On average, we buy 14 kilograms of clothing per person each year—that’s equivalent to about 23 pairs of jeans or 140 T-shirts—each item often cheaper than a sack of potatoes. A systematic exploitation of people and nature.
Against the Consumer Craze
Because our fast-paced shopping trends—all those cheap blouses, pants, and sweaters piled high on tables under the neon lights of stores—come at a price. Behind the beautiful style lies the ugly reality of exploitation: Millions of female textile workers toil under conditions that are often inhumane to produce our fashion. Thousands have lost their lives in the process—for example, in the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in April 2013 or the fire at the Pakistani factory Ali Enterprises three years ago. There’s a better way to dress well.
Despite the consequences for her personal life, Burckhardt is committed to FEMNET and its cause—helping women secure their right to fair and living-wage work. “We must recognize that behind the glossy advertising slogans are people who pay the true price for our society’s ‘more and more’ and ‘cheaper and cheaper,’” says the chairwoman of the board. The collapse of Rana Plaza and other disasters must not be allowed to fade into the past as yesterday’s news. It is important to her to continue monitoring these events and to demand structures that lead to real improvements.
Breaking Free from the Victim Role
She began questioning the capitalist system and its unjust excesses while studying political science, history, French, and education. In her doctoral dissertation, she focused on the employment histories of women in Rwanda. In the 1980s, driven by her curiosity and her desire to make a difference, she entered the field of political development work. After a lengthy assignment in Nicaragua with the United Nations Development Program, she worked for two years as a project manager for the German Society for Technical Cooperation in Pakistan. That stay marked a turning point in her life: “I didn’t come from the feminist movement, but from the left-wing post-’68 student movement. I didn’t become a feminist until I was living in Pakistan.” There, she worked to help Afghan refugees in the North-West Frontier Province of Peshawar develop sources of income. “I witnessed firsthand in my entire social circle how women were treated as workhorses and baby-making machines. That made me incredibly angry.”
She resolved to make women’s rights her life’s work—alongside her career and family, with whom she would continue to live abroad for many more years. Her son was born in Nicaragua. After a medical examination in Germany, it was determined that he had a chromosomal disorder. “That changed our whole lives; we had to undergo many therapies. We made a conscious decision to move to Pakistan—it’s often easier to have children abroad,” says Burckhardt, who gave birth to a daughter two years later, in 1985. Today she lives with her husband in a suburb of Bonn.
In Malawi, Uganda, Senegal, Venezuela, Peru, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and numerous other countries, Burckhardt works as an expert or consultant on projects that also advocate for the economic and political empowerment of women. When she returned to Germany, she was certain: She must focus her efforts on changing unjust trade relations. This means: questioning our consumption patterns and demanding corporate responsibility. And also: Only by strengthening women’s social and economic standing can they be permanently freed from the role of victims—all around the globe.
Criticism of Corporations: Stop Whitewashing
Burckhardt laid the groundwork for the fight against the exploitation of women in the textile sector through the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC). There, she has been advocating for the rights of female workers for 15 years—such as living wages—and calling on companies to fulfill their responsibility for a clean supply chain. Through her research in Bangladesh, she has documented labor rights violations by suppliers of the discounters Lidl and KiK. The CCC supports a lawsuit filed by the Hamburg Consumer Advice Center against Lidl for unfair competition, which puts an end to the company’s whitewashing. The discount retailer is no longer allowed to advertise that it produces fairly worldwide.
KiK is also in hot water: In cooperation with ver.di, Burckhardt fights wage slavery in the retail sector. On a tour, two women from Bangladesh and three local employees who are suing KiK report on the miserable working conditions. The company is ordered by the court to raise the hourly wage. “In my advocacy for labor rights, my goal has always been to expose the system of exploitation—here and there—as two sides of the same coin,” says the activist, describing the core of her strategy.
To advocate for her cause more vigorously, she founded the nonprofit organization FEMNET with like-minded individuals in 2010 and has continued to develop it ever since. With success: Gisela Burckhardt is now one of the most renowned experts on the subject. Since last year, she has been a member of the steering committee of the Alliance for Sustainable Textiles, initiated by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. There, she advocates for environmental and social standards throughout the entire textile supply chain. Voluntary commitments by companies are not enough for her; she fights for laws—her motto is: “Rights for people, rules for companies.”
Training the Female Managers of Tomorrow
Question, change, improve—true to this maxim, she also raises awareness at the Kult evening event. Before the swap begins, a film flickers across the large white wall behind the stage, shedding light on the daily working lives of textile workers in Cambodia and revealing the misery in which our favorite sweaters are made. The young women and men sit bolt upright in their chairs, listening—after the documentary—to a presentation on the association’s project “FairSchnitt—Studying for a Socially Just Fashion Industry,” which FEMNET launched in 2011. Together with experts, Burckhardt develops educational modules on environmental and social standards in the apparel industry, aimed at universities offering fashion- and textile-related degree programs. She trains “multipliers”—or “Multis,” for short—who pass on this knowledge in workshops, organizes conferences, and builds networks with her colleagues. Tomorrow’s female managers are also expected to realign the industry and ensure more equitable production practices.
After the film and presentation, Burckhardt keeps a watchful eye on the frenzy of swapping going on around her, sorts through rummaged-through piles of clothes, folds shirts, presents the fair shopping guide for Bonn developed by FEMNET, asks guests about their knowledge of fair-trade labels, and gives an interview to a reporter from the local newspaper. There’s no sign of fatigue, even though she has just returned from an overseas assignment in Asia.
Daycare Centers for Garment Factories, a Future for Children
Because FEMNET is also determined to improve working conditions on the ground. In Bangalore, India, the organization plans to work with the local group Cividep to set up daycare centers in the factories that are worthy of the name—and to hold fashion companies accountable for this. Although required by law, there are currently no daycare centers in the factories at all, or the children must spend their mothers’ long workdays in cramped quarters without toys, sometimes sedated with medication. “The women don’t take their children there because they’re afraid they won’t be well cared for,” Burckhardt explains.
She is particularly shaken by the fate of a textile worker whose three-year-old daughter has to walk home alone at noon from the meager daycare center in the housing complex. An hour and a half later, the seven-year-old brother returns home from school—to nothing more than a small, empty room where the two wait for their mother until late in the evening. “The woman is terrified that something will happen to her children. There are no prospects for these women workers.”
Modern Slavery in South India
FEMNET is also active in southern India—in Tamil Nadu, Cividep will conduct a more detailed investigation of the spinning mills as part of a project that has just been approved. The state supplies yarn to the entire world—at the expense of an estimated 250,000 young women who are exploited in the approximately 2,000 spinning mills. Girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen are lured into the spinning mills under the pretense that they will be well cared for and fed. These supposedly well-provided-for girls become serfs to factory owners who produce for Western fashion companies, trapped behind high walls topped with barbed wire.
Day and night, the often malnourished girls walk kilometers back and forth between the massive spinning machines to rethread broken threads at lightning speed. It is horribly loud, and the cotton dust settles in their lungs, leading to illness. Many of the girls are victims of sexual violence. “The girls have learned to obey. They do everything the men demand of them—and are destroyed in the process, swallowing insecticides or setting themselves on fire,” reports Burckhardt, who has already met many young women who have escaped the factory hell.
Pursued by the Secret Service
It is a central concern for Burckhardt to gain a firsthand impression of the abuses—despite all opposition. Armed with a camera and a notepad, she gains access to the factories and makes contact with female workers and union members like 21-year-old Dalyia, who had to earn a living doing embroidery work as early as age eight. At age eleven, she takes a job in a factory—whenever buyers announce their arrival, the child is hidden in the restroom. After working in ten factories amid dust and stress, she resolves to improve working conditions and founds a workplace union. The road to that goal is tough: the factory police attack her and threaten her mother with killing her daughter.
“Women aren’t just victims—they can also be strong. We need to promote that,” Burckhardt is convinced. Together with female union activists, she develops programs to educate women about their rights and help them take their cases to labor court. To this end, FEMNET maintains a solidarity fund that collects donations. Burckhardt’s fight for the unions faces resistance: “For the factory bosses in Bangladesh, I’m a red rag; they see my criticism as harmful to competition,” she explains, “during one of my visits, the secret service followed my every move.”
On the Trail of Unscrupulous Brands
Although the activist prioritizes dialogue with factory owners and fashion companies, she does not hesitate to sharply criticize them when necessary. Not least, she is fighting alongside partners such as the CCC to ensure that companies finally top up the compensation fund for the Rana Plaza victims to the required amount of 30 million U.S. dollars. For her book “Dead Chic: Luxury Labels, Cheap Fashion—Produced Inhumanely,” published by Heyne in late 2014, she conducted courageous investigative work in Bangladesh to expose abuses in factories and make it clear that premium brands like Hugo Boss engage in just as questionable production practices in developing and emerging markets as the discount retailers who are often singled out for criticism.
Hugo Boss denies the allegations—workdays of up to 15 hours, no employment contracts, union-busting, harassment, and structural defects—even though another luxury label that had its products manufactured in the same factory confirms them. Burckhardt stays on the case: At the shareholders’ meeting in May, she goes on the offensive. She has bought shares in order to report critically and raise awareness that, when it comes to standards, expensive brands are often anything but premium.
The young people at Kult know nothing of this; the power of brands still reigns in their minds—Adidas sneakers quickly find their way into a bag, and the blue denim skirt from Esprit goes into a purse. As the last guests of the evening leave Kult and make their way around the puddles in the courtyard, shirts, pants, and jackets are still piling up near the bar. “We need to consume less. We can’t possibly wear all these clothes,” says Burckhardt. Together with the other women on the board, she loads the leftover clothes into the car—for those in need.
The author, Johanna Hergt, works as the executive director of FEMNET.
She studied economics and attended the Cologne School of Journalism for Politics and Economics.
