Blue Tin Productions, a ‘worker-owned clothing manufacturing collaborative’, was set up in 2019 with the aim of dismantling the exploitation of workers who are kept disempowered, and made invisible by the system.
The initiative is hoping to launch a new office which will model “truly sustainable manufacturing and labour practices”.
So what?
Blue Tin Productions hopes to set a precedent for how the clothing industry should operate, and aims to be replicated by garment workers globally at a large scale.
They’re also a model for a new way of decision making, with their collaborative style engaging all employees and giving them economic and management positions that wouldn’t typically have been available.
The manufacturing collaborative ticks all the boxes with ‘typical’ sustainability, but the positive treatment of their labour shows they are one step closer to being truly just and regenerative. There is certainly lots that we can learn from their behaviours. However, collaborative operations aren’t limited to the clothing sector – so could we see similar structures in other industries?
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