Behind Every Price Tag

This week’s Field Notes made me look at clothing differently. A T-shirt may appear to be a simple product, but behind its price tag is a global chain of decisions about who sets the price, who takes the risk, who does the work, and who has the power to demand change.

The Worker Rights Consortium shows that global brands often hold the greatest influence over prices, deadlines, and production volumes, while factories compete to secure orders. That pressure does not disappear, it moves down the supply chain. WRC estimates that 80 million garment workers still do not earn enough to live on, revealing that low wages are not simply the result of individual factories making bad choices. They are connected to how the industry itself distributes power.

The Clean Clothes Campaign makes this imbalance even clearer. Its 2026 Squeezed Dry report found that sourcing prices for basic garments have barely risen despite inflation and increasing production costs. In real terms, brands can now source a T-shirt for roughly half the value they paid 25 years ago. This creates a contradiction at the center of ethical fashion: companies may promise better labor conditions while simultaneously demanding prices that make those improvements harder to provide.

Better Work offers a more hopeful, but complicated, picture. Factory assessments across major Asian garment-producing countries show that labor standards can improve through monitoring, worker-management cooperation, and stronger institutions. Yet persistent problems such as excessive overtime remind us that improving one factory cannot completely solve pressures created elsewhere in the supply chain.

The Bangladesh GEAR program adds another dimension: who holds power inside the factory matters too. Expanding women's access to supervisory and leadership positions suggests that worker empowerment should mean more than employment. It should include mobility, representation, and a meaningful role in decision-making.

Taken together, these four stories challenge the way we think about responsibility. It is easy to blame a factory thousands of miles away for poor working conditions. It is harder to examine the brands that set purchasing terms, the economic system that rewards ever-lower prices, and even our own expectations as consumers.

That is an important lesson for Megaphone’s approach to human rights: look beyond the visible problem and ask who has the power to shape it. The true cost of a garment cannot be measured only by what we pay at checkout. We also have to ask who, somewhere else in the supply chain, may be paying the rest.