On Saturday, a voice clip on Catalunya Ràdio captured the demands of one of the sales assistants from the textile and footwear sector who had joined the strike and was demonstrating in the center of Barcelona. She described an unusual scene that I would have liked to see with my own eyes: that at the Chanel store on Passeig de Gràcia, due to a lack of workers to attend to customers, some managers had to stand behind the counters. The protests had as their main objective to halt the new collective agreement proposed by the employers' association, which represents a step backward in the labor rights of a sector that is already among the most precarious. To reduce these rights, they intend to adopt the already known dynamic through which working classes have been impoverished in recent decades: gradually replacing veteran employees with new batches of hires with much worse conditions. Until the day comes when we can no longer even remember that there was a time when jobs had more dignified conditions. The saying "we will live worse than our parents" is a resistance-free acceptance of this neoliberal drift that wants us to consider this change in the organization of work and the distribution of wealth of increasingly greedy companies, capable of squeezing the base of their production pyramid to 19th-century levels, as a kind of fatal destiny.
Out of curiosity, I check on their website how much a Chanel handbag can cost: five thousand, six thousand, eight thousand euros. Sales assistants in the sector are currently paid twenty-one thousand euros, but they want to reduce the figure to eighteen thousand for new hires. This means that the life of a woman dedicated most of her weekly hours to selling luxury bags is worth a couple or three of these bags.
Among the main companies that are part of the employers' association seeking this change is Inditex, a group that has just launched its first advertising campaign starring a star like Bad Bunny. In our world, more based on the defense of cultural symbols than on the real materiality that allows us to pay bills and eat every day, the Puerto Rican singer can be seen as a figure of prestige who defends immigrants and diversity and inclusion, while at the same time fronting for a large corporation that is sustained by an extreme model of exploitation. The shop assistants are the last piece of the puzzle. The first ones, those who make the clothes and shoes, are far away and we will not see them protesting in front of any establishment. The conditions under which they manufacture what we wear approach, in many cases, levels of slavery. Thanks to this brutal inequality and the fiscal engineering tools available only to those with economic power, Inditex obtained net profits of 5,866 million euros in 2024, an increase of 9% compared to the previous year. So it is not a company with economic problems precisely that wants to further impoverish its workers.
On the other hand, the fast fashion sector is one of the most polluting on the planet. Selling clothes that barely last a couple of washes, made from synthetic fibers that cannot be recycled, and creating needs that do not exist in consumers in order to convince them to change their outfits every two weeks (thus extracting wealth that is the fruit of labor) ends up generating huge amounts of waste and emitting gases into the atmosphere. Of course, in shop windows and on social media, in magazines, all looking pretty in butter yellow, which is trending, or the shorts that now have to be below the navel. And it is that the mirror does not return to us the reflection of what is behind what we consume: exploitation and pollution at unprecedented levels.
