May Day Manifesto Demands Fair Wages, Worker Voice, Climate Accountability

Clean Clothes Campaign chose International Workers’ Day to turn fashion sustainability into a labor test. The group and more than 230 allies across 43 countries published the nine-part Fashioning a Just Transition Manifesto on May 1, 2026, framing the industry’s climate future around fair pay, factory conditions and worker power rather than green symbolism.

The manifesto was shaped through crowdsourcing with young people, garment workers and their organizations, the public, Clean Clothes Campaign network members and allies. Its final version draws on hundreds of inputs, comments and viewpoints, a process that gives the document a broader mandate than a typical campaign letter and makes its politics harder for brands to dismiss as fringe.

What makes it distinctive is its refusal to separate climate from labor. The manifesto calls for decent work, economic, social and gender justice, redistribution of wealth to workers, fair sharing of climate mitigation and adaptation costs, freedom to speak without fear, respect for planetary boundaries and corporate accountability for harm. It also rejects the fashion industry’s take-make-waste logic, arguing instead for living wages, universal social protection and dignified climate-resilient jobs.

That is where the real pressure lands: on enforceability. Brands can adopt the easier language of transition without changing the terms that shape factory life. They can do more now by tying purchasing practices to living wages, protecting worker voice in supply chains, funding fairer climate adaptation costs and making factory conditions visible through public reporting. What they cannot do credibly is call a transition just while asking workers to absorb the cost of decarbonization through lower wages, longer hours or weaker protections.

The manifesto’s 234 endorsements from organizations across Europe and Asia, including Labour Education Foundation, CIDSE and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, show how widely that message is resonating. But the document’s strongest claim is also its most practical: sustainability cannot be measured only by lower emissions or recycled fibers if the people stitching the clothes remain exposed to poverty, silence and unsafe work.

On a day built around labor, Clean Clothes Campaign made the fashion industry confront a sharper standard. A climate transition that does not lock in fair wages, worker voice and safer factories is not yet a just one.