Worker-centric pricing
Rescue Worker at factory collapse at Rana Plaza, 2016, Pieced and quilted cotton fabric by Greg Climer
We are inviting UCRF members to conduct an exercise on Worker-centric pricing as part of commemoration of the 10 year anniversary of Rana Plaza. This project will run until the end of 2023.
Purpose
The Worker-centric pricing exercise is a simple tool to help examine the pricing of fashion pieces and to look again at fashion sector practices that are often taken as fixed and unquestioned. It is intended to be used with diverse fashion stakeholders such as makers, artisans, students, designers and citizens.
Worker-centric pricing is a way of approaching pricing goods based on workers' weekly living expenses, and not what a brand determines the market is willing to pay. It can be seen as part of a process of building awareness of the existing fashion system’s ways of thinking and doing, and at the same time, seeding ‘ways other’ necessary for systemic change.
When repeated in different locations and with different groups across the UCRF community, the Worker-centric pricing exercise seeks to:
Build insight into and allyship with garment workers’ living situations;
Reveal the apparent arbitrary rationale behind accepted fashion industry practices;
Bring nuance to conversations about price, value and ideas about acceptable work;
Support a rethinking of the priorities of industrial manufacturing, decentring cost and profit to propose a new baseline.
Invitation
Can you conduct this exercise in a factory with workers? Might you bring it into your classroom with students, with artisans etc? Afterwards, please post results to this UCRF google doc for others to view and use as inspiration. An update from this google doc will be shared at the AGM on June 2023 and later in the year a blogpost will be published on the UCRF website. The UCRF board will also post selected findings to UCRF social media channels.
We have prepared the Worker-centric pricing exercise as a downloadable Word document and encourage you to translate this and the costing sheet into languages appropriate for your local setting. The exercise is also described below:
Worker-Centric Pricing Exercise Process
Collate
Gather information from clothing workers about essential weekly living expenses (working in local currency). (Suggested questions, “what do you need for food, rent, clothing, utilities, transport, lessons, medical expenses etc… each week?”)
Gather information about the number of hours that clothing workers are available to work, over and above their usual family responsibilities. (Suggested question, “how many hours are you available to do paid work each week?”)
Using both figures, calculate the required hourly rate to meet necessary expenses.
Include this hourly rate as the line item ‘labor’ in garment price calculations (perhaps using this costing sheet as a guide).
Calculate the sum of all costs (fabric, trims, labor, miscellaneous costs etc)
Once completed, compare this figure to standard pricing methods commonly used in the garment industry. (see one example enclosed)
Reflect
Explore what this exercise reveals, reflect on the different logics behind decision making and what drives them.
Explore design aesthetics which are able to carry the real cost.
Act
Post findings to UCRF Worker-centric pricing google doc.
Apply this thinking to other areas / tools in the fashion industry, update the process above if needed and submit findings to the google doc.
Look for similarities and variations across different pricing examples and across regions. Turn these into questions to be investigated.
Develop new terms/language capturing the values inherent in this way of pricing.
Join the AGM on June 23, 2023 to present the experience and write a blogpost for the UCRF website.
UCRF board to post selected findings to UCRF social media.