Tag: Garment industry

T-shirt made in Bangladesh. Customer looking at the origin and import country of a cheap fashion product in clothes store or shop. Ethical consumer behavior. Woman holding label and price tag with tex

^{Type
post

Author
News
Date
September 28, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Work

Tagged
Automation, Garment industry, Harris Quinn, Job loss (due to automation), Palaniswamy Rajan, Sewbots, SoftWear Automation, Sweatshops, T-shirts}

What Do Robots Find Hard? Sewing a T-shirt, For One Thing

_{Humans automatically and constantly adjust hand movements to the ever-changing alignment of cloth. Robots just freeze} _{News

September 28, 2021

3

Artificial Intelligence, Work}

Menswear entrepreneur Harris Quinn wrote a thoughtful piece at Wired recently on the mixed success of efforts to automate sewing via Sewbots, for example, developed by SoftWear Automation CEO Palaniswamy Rajan: One reason that sewing lends itself so well to the grinding labor of sweatshops is that it is very difficult to automate. That’s because cloth is pliable and constantly moving. The Sewbots face unexpected hurdles: But no two batches of cotton are exactly alike, often varying from harvest to harvest; variations in the fabric and dyes further complicate matters. Each variation can necessitate recalibrating the system, interrupting operations, and SoftWear has to train its machinery to respond accordingly. “The biggest challenge we have faced getting to a production system Read More ›

Bündel roher Baumwolle (Gossypium arboreum), Südindien

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post

Author
Heather Zeiger
Date
April 12, 2021

Categorized
Business and Finance, Censorship, Ethics

Tagged
Better Cotton Initiative, China, Chinese Youth League, Cotton, Ethical Trading Initiative, Forced labor, Garment industry, H&M, Uyghurs, Xinjiang}

Clothing Retailer H&M Canceled for Revealing China’s Forced Labor

_{About a fifth of the world’s cotton is grown in Xinjiang, for which Uyghur labor is conscripted, partly through the detention camps complex} _{Heather Zeiger

April 12, 2021

6

Business and Finance, Censorship, Ethics}

Recently, I wrote about the fact that many fashionable products consumed in the West are produced by forced Uyghur labor. Those who speak out pay a steep price, as Swedish clothing retailer H&M can attest. Two weeks ago, H&M was Canceled in China after the Communist Youth League decried the company’s comments on forced labor in Xinjiang on Weibo, China’s biggest social media platform. The comments themselves dated from last year (March 2020). The online vitriol is likely in response to sanctions recently imposed by the European Union, the U.S., the U.K., and Canada on Chinese officials for human rights abuses. Earlier in March (2021), Newslines Institute for Strategy and Policy, an international independent organization, published a report showing that Read More ›