When we came home, my mother always insisted that my brother and I change our clothes. "Put on something from home," she told us. It was to preserve the best clothes we had, to last as long as possible. And it wasn't just because of what it cost her and my father to earn the money to buy it. My mother, the daughter of a seamstress and dressmaker herself, knew how much each item of clothing cost to make. It was money, but above all work, effort, sacrifice. With globalization and most of our clothing production now in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Honduras or China, we have become completely disconnected, lost sight of the work hours involved, the people who sacrificed hours of sleep or seeing their children to make them. Instead, we only consider its value for its price.

Human rights organizations have been denouncing for years the exploitation of these workers, mostly Asians, but also in almost all underdeveloped countries on all continents. They work no less than 12 hours a day with very little pay and no social protection. The day they get sick or have to miss because their children don't have school, they don't get paid. Textiles are one of the most exploitative industries on the planet. All this to produce at ever lower prices and in larger quantities extraordinary. With the United States as the largest consumer. And the jeans, like his spine. An X-ray of this industry clearly shows us the serious shortcomings of globalization and the consequences of climate change.

“Fast fashion”, a mass production of modern and cheap clothing that is worn, at most, for a season and discarded, “is causing an economic, environmental and human rights disaster”, assures the journalist Dana Thomas, author of "Fashionopolis", a best-selling book worldwide and that lays bare a reality that has been known for years but that we all prefer to ignore in exchange for dressing in good cheap branded clothes Of course, the purchase of garments of this type is focused on the middle class. But it is also massively consumed by young people from all social classes in the world.

Manufacturing80 billion garments a year requires enormous amounts of water and toxic chemicals. It employs one in six people in the world (if we take into account the entire garment chain from cotton picking and fabric design to sale), most in very dangerous working conditions for your health and for very little money. Fast fashion also produces mountains of clothes that don't sell or are discarded and end up in landfills.

The average American consumes 400% more clothing than 20 years ago and generates an average of 80 pounds of textile waste each year. According to fashion designer Eileen Fisher, the garment industry is “the second biggest polluter in the world”, second only to oil. Rivers in developing countries, which provide drinking water for local people, are being polluted with toxic waste from indigo jean production and leather tanneries. Pesticides are used excessively in the production of cotton - increasingly required -, causing cancers and other terrible health problems, not to mention the degradation of the soil and the loss of its productive capacity. All this can be seen in the cities and regions of Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and China where these clothes are mostly made.

And all of this producescatastrophes such as the one that occurred on April 24, 2013, when the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed, where dozens of "fast clothing" workshops were operating. 1,134 people died and another 2,500 sustained injuries of some kind. It was the most serious textile factory accident in modern history. Most of the victims were the seamstresses and their young children who were in “nurseries” -organized by themselves- because they have nowhere to leave them. Built on swampy terrain and with illegally added upper floors, the building was a structural disaster waiting to collapse. When the rubble began to be removed, the labels of the products that were manufactured there appeared: Benetton, Mango, Primark, Walmart.

And it is very likely that while you are reading this article, you are wearing jeans made in one of those workshops. If not, chances are you used them yesterday. Or you will tomorrow. A study by British anthropologists found that half the world's population wears jeans on a daily basis. Five billion pairs of these pants are produced annually. The average American owns seven, one for each day of the week, and buys four new pairs each year. Except for the basics, like underwear and socks, blue denim jeans are the go-to. most popular ever. “I wish I had invented those blue jeans,” confessed French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in his memoirs. “They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity, everything I expect from my clothes.”

Denim was a textile rarity until 1870, when a tailor named Jacob Davis enlisted the help of his fabric supplier, Levi Strauss, to mass-produce his latest design: studded metal studded work pants tension key. Davis proposed that Strauss become partners if he would pay half of the patent, which at the time cost a hefty $68. Today, Levi Strauss & Co. still designs and sells most of the jeans. It is probably the longest running and most successful clothing brand since the Industrial Revolution. The popularity of jeans was on the rise around the world as American consumer culture expanded. The young people of the sixties and seventies adopted them as their second skin. Until, in the early 1980s, they went to an even higher stage when the large mass garment producers, which have their epicenter about ten blocks from Seventh Avenue in New York, began makingdesigner jeans. ”. Fashion designers began to make their own models. “Jeans are sex”, defined Calvin Klein. "The tighter they are, the better they sell." To shore up his point, in 1980, Klein cast 15-year-old actress and model Brooke Shields for his promotional commercial. "Do you want to know what's going on between me and my Calvins?" the teen purred in her childish voice. "Nothing", was answered. The ad was so provocative that ABC and CBS television networks immediately banned it. But it had already had its effect: Klein sold 400,000 pairs in one week. Then I go to two million a month. Sales of jeans of all brands skyrocketed to record numbers: more than 500 million in 1981 alone.

Until the late 1970s, most jeans were made of stiff, shrunken denim, or “unwarped”. To soften them, you simply had to use them. A lot. It took a good six months of use to "break them in". After a couple of years, hems and pocket edges may start to fray. The fabric faded to a dusty blue, with the scuffing showing the wearer hadn't even taken off his pants to sleep.

Everything until the mid-1980s, when companies decided to do the work that until then was done by the user. Jeans began to be placed in large industrial washing machines with pumice stones that artificially wore them down. The Guess brand had a method in its Los Angeles factory by which it exposed the garments to an extreme seven-hour wash. The operation was dubbed “finishing” and created a new parallel industry of car washes that gradually moved out of the United States. First it went to the maquiladoras on the border with Mexico and then, accompanying globalization, they moved to Asia.

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One of the new great jean producers for the US market was the enemy country until a short time before: Vietnam. An economy that barely 15 years before was practically agrarian, in a short time was reconverted. They built some 6,000 textile and garment production companies, mainly based in Ho Chi Minh City. By 2018, they employed 2.5 million workers, representing about 16% of the country's exports and more than 30 billion dollars in revenue. That number is estimated to jump to 50 billion by next year.

“On the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, in a dismantled plant in an industrial zone lost among slums, behind an almost imperceptible door, some 200 young Vietnamese work. The lighting from the fluorescent tubes is poor and I have the feeling that at that moment inside that workshop it is 45 or 50 degrees, easy. Huge fans try to cool the room to no avail,” says Dana Thomas in her book. “Pristine midnight blue jeans are stacked on metal tables and platforms. Young men clad in the same jeans they make and knee-high rubber boots put their pants into some twenty giant washing machines. The ground is inundated with an inch or two of dark blue water. The men do not wear gloves and their hands are stained black.

The machines they use are not state-of-the-art. They require at least 15 liters of water to wash one kilo (three pairs) of jeans. A huge waste of water that comes out polluted with chemicals and is not recycled.

“Her business is washing, not worrying about the planet”, says an industry expert in an Insider magazine story.

“Behind the washing machines there are about a hundred men and women who wash other jeans by hand. They scrub them in the knee and thigh areas with soaps and pumice stones. There's a dust in the air that makes me cough. Only a few workers have cloth masks to prevent inhalation. The guide explains to me that what flies in the air are the particles of what they are scraping. And that it is very polluting. There are many respiratory diseases here. But sanders cannot afford to turn down a stable job no matter how polluting it may be. They process at least 400 pairs of jeans a day, six days a week, not including overtime. There is a group of women that is dedicated only to bleaching pockets and hems. They do it with a machine that emits a high-pitched noise similar to that of a dental drill. Six pairs per minute. All day,” says Thomas.

The city of Xintang, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, is called “the world capital of jeans”. There the working and pollution conditions are even worse than those in Vietnam. Every year, 200,000 garment workers in Xintang's 3,000 factories and workshops produce 300 million pairs of jeans, 800,000 pairs a day. The local water treatment plant closed years ago, so factories dump contaminated water from washing machines directly into the East River, a tributary of the Pearl River. The bed no longer has life. They are black and poisonous waters. Greenpeace denounced that the river contains high levels of lead, copper and cadmium. The streets of Xintang are covered in blue dust. Workers in jean factories suffer permanent skin rashes, infertility, and lung infections.

In Cambodia, whose textile sector accounts for more than 80% of the country's exports, unions denounced that workers - many of them minors - manage to cover 80 hours a week for barely over a hundred dollars a month. In Argentina and Brazil, a few years ago, it was uncovered how Inditex, the Spanish company with Zara, Bershka and Stradivarius stores, used slave labor to make its products. The Brazilian government uncovered dozens of clandestine workshops in 2011 and the company was fined one and a half million dollarss. According to the NGO Reporter Brasil, 433 irregularities were registered in the 67 companies that this fashion giant has in the country. In Argentina, it was found that exploited children and adults worked and lived in small sewing factories "under the system known as hot bed" in working days of "13 or 14 hours that lasted from seven in the morning to ten or eleven at night, from Monday to Friday and Saturday until noon", according to the complaint filed by the La Alameda Foundation. For its part, Oxfam Intermón denounced last year the extreme situation in which around 263,000 women produce clothes, who are exploited in the maquilas of Central America. According to the report, the workers are mostly young people between the ages of 18 and 35, with a low educational level, mothers with dependent children who are heads of single-parent families and come from rural areas.

“This is a model of production and organization of work that is based on the feminization of precariousness and the vulnerability of women to grow”, denounces the report. The minimum monthly wage in the maquiladoras in Central America is between $148 in Nicaragua and $300 in Guatemala, below what is legally established for other sectors of production. Another NGO, Ropa Limpia, also denounced the situation in Eastern Europe and Turkey two years ago: “Post-socialist countries function as the backyard sewing workshop for Western European brands and companies. Turkey, being one of the world's textile giants, has its own cheap backyard, the eastern Anatolia region. In addition, Turkish companies in the textile sector subcontract to an entire region that includes North Africa and the South Caucasus.” According to the NGO, in all countries there is a large difference between the legal minimum wage and the estimated minimum living wage. “This difference is even greater in European countries that offer cheap labor than in Asia. The countries with the lowest statutory minimum wages (below 20%) relative to the estimated minimum living wage are Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. According to 2013 data, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania have lower statutory minimum wages than China, and those of Moldova and Ukraine are lower than those of Indonesia.

The route of the jeans crosses all the continents and in each factory it leaves its trail of exploitation and environmental contamination. After 150 years of its invention, perhaps it is time to stop wearing these pants that we love so much and put on some "house clothes".