An £8 shirt arrived at my door last week—organic cotton, the listing said, ethically made, carbon-neutral shipping. I held it up to the light. The stitching was competent. The fabric felt reasonable. And I thought: this is impossible.
Not impossible in the sense of "implausible." Impossible in the mathematical sense. The numbers don't work. They cannot work. And yet here was the shirt, and there was the receipt, and the arithmetic that should have prevented this transaction from existing had somehow been negotiated around.
I want to show you how.
But more than that, I want to show you why—why the system persists even when we've documented exactly what's broken, calculated precisely what it would cost to fix, and demonstrated that millions of consumers claim they want something different.
Because what I found, when I stopped looking at price breakdowns and started looking at what those prices actually demand from buyers, is that the barrier to change isn't economic at all.
It's psychological. And it's more sophisticated than anyone has named.
£8
Let me begin with what that price represents.
For a shirt to exist, cotton must be grown or polyester synthesized from petroleum; fibers must be spun into thread and thread woven into fabric; the fabric must be dyed, which requires water and chemistry and the infrastructure to manage both; it must be cut by someone who knows how to read a pattern and sewn by someone—usually a woman, usually young, usually in Bangladesh or Vietnam—who sits at a machine for ten or twelve hours repeating the same motion thousands of times; the finished garment must be inspected, packed, loaded into a container, shipped across an ocean, unloaded, warehoused, distributed to retail locations or fulfillment centers, displayed or photographed, marketed, sold.
Everyone along that chain expects to be paid: the farmer, the mill, the dye house, the factory, the shipping company, the warehouse, the brand, the retailer, the advertising agency, the web developer. Every one of them takes a cut.
And at the end of all that—after months of labor and thousands of kilometers of logistics—you hand over £8.
The arithmetic does not work. Or rather: it works only if someone, somewhere, is being paid a fraction of what their contribution is worth, or if something, somewhere, is absorbing costs that never appear on the receipt.
This much we know. This much has been documented by labor organizations and investigative journalists for two decades.
What I want to show you is why it stays broken—even after we've identified exactly how to fix it, even after we've calculated that the fix costs pennies, even after surveys show consumers claim they'd pay more for ethical production.
The answer isn't about willingness to pay more money.
It's about willingness to know.
1–3%
Let's establish the baseline: how much does the person who made your shirt actually receive?
According to CARE International, garment workers receive approximately 1–3% of the final retail price.1 On an $11 t-shirt, they calculate, roughly 33 cents will find its way to workers.
Research by Oxfam Australia found similar figures: approximately 4% of a garment's retail price goes to factory-level wages total, but that 4% covers all factory labor—management, inspection, packing.2 The seamstress herself receives a smaller fraction still.
According to McKinsey research, since 2000, global clothing production has roughly doubled.12 Consumers in wealthy countries buy about 60% more garments than they did at the turn of the century and keep them for about half as long. Prices fell in real terms even as supply chains became more complex.
We now have a generation of consumers whose calibration of "normal" has been trained on subsidized prices. The £8 shirt isn't an outlier. It's the reference price.
And here's where something interesting begins to happen—something that standard economic theory doesn't quite capture.
~1%
Now the number that should, in theory, fix everything.
Oxfam's modeling suggests that paying a living wage would increase retail prices by approximately 1%—adding 10 pence to a £10 shirt.2 Not a minimum wage, which according to Clean Clothes Campaign reporting was raised in Bangladesh in late 2023 to 12,500 taka per month (about half the 23,000 taka unions argued was necessary to lift workers above the poverty line), but an actual living wage.5
On a £10 shirt, that's 10 pence. On an £8 shirt, it's 8 pence.
I need to be careful here: this is modelling, not a guarantee. The living-wage gap varies by country, factory, and role. And critically, even if brands committed to this uplift, the money would need to reach workers through supplier contracts and wage-setting mechanisms—which is not automatic.
But the order of magnitude matters. We are not talking about doubling the price. We are not talking about making clothing unaffordable. We are talking about pennies.
Eight pence stands between the current system—in which the vast majority of garment workers do not earn a living wage, as documented by the Clean Clothes Campaign6—and a system in which they might.
So why hasn't this happened?
The standard answers are: brands prioritize profit over people; shareholders demand maximum returns; supply chains are too complex to reform; governments compete by suppressing wages.
All true. But incomplete.
Because here's what those explanations can't account for: ethical brands exist. Brands that have committed to living wages, to transparent supply chains, to sustainable production. They're real. They're documented. Some have been operating for 30+ years.
And they remain marginal.
Not because their model doesn't work—it works fine at small scale—but because something prevents them from reaching the mass market needed to transform industry practices.
Standard economics says: if there's demand, the market will supply it. Surveys consistently show consumers claim they want ethical fashion, that they'd pay more for it.
So why doesn't the market respond?
I think the answer is in what the honest price actually demands from the buyer. And it's not money.
The Complicity Premium
Let me describe what I'm calling the Complicity Premium—a psychological cost embedded in honest pricing that has nothing to do with the monetary amount and everything to do with what paying that amount forces you to acknowledge.
When you pay £8 for a shirt, you can remain innocent. The price is normal, unremarkable, consistent with your reference point. You're just buying a shirt. Nothing about the transaction requires you to think about where it came from or what made it possible.
The £8 price permits ignorance. And ignorance, in this context, is comfortable.
But when you stand in front of two shirts—one priced at £8, one priced at £45—and you're told the £45 shirt is priced honestly, that it pays living wages, that it includes environmental costs, something changes.
The higher price isn't just asking for more money.
It's asking you to acknowledge that the £8 shirt was never normal. That every time you bought at that price, you were receiving a transfer—a transfer extracted from workers who had no power to refuse, from communities who had no choice but to accept the factory, from ecosystems that couldn't defend themselves.
The £45 price forces you to see that you have been complicit. Not because you're a bad person—you didn't design this system—but because you benefited from it. Every cheap shirt you ever bought was a deposit into your account, withdrawn from someone else's.
Paying £45 means admitting you were never paying the real price. And that admission carries a cost.
I'm calling this the Complicity Premium—the psychological price of acknowledging your participation in exploitation. And here's the mechanism: consumers will pay to avoid that acknowledgment, even if the payment takes the form of continued exploitation.
This is not the same as "people are selfish" or "people don't care." This is about the cognitive and emotional work required to hold two thoughts simultaneously:
- I am a good person who doesn't want to exploit others.
- I have been benefiting from exploitation for years.
That dissonance is painful. The brain will do significant work to avoid it.
And the £8 price lets you avoid it. The £45 price forces you into it.
The Evidence of Avoidance
Let me show you how this mechanism plays out in consumer behavior.
When ethical brands explain their pricing—"this shirt costs £45 because we pay living wages"—the most common consumer response is not gratitude or appreciation. It's defensiveness.
"I bought an 'ethical' t-shirt for £40 and honestly it's no better than Primark. Total rip-off."
"These brands just use 'sustainability' to justify marking up cheap clothes."
"It's virtue signaling for rich people."
Notice what these responses do: they reframe honest pricing as dishonest. They transform the brand attempting to include real costs into a scammer attempting to exploit consumer ethics.
This reframing is psychologically necessary. Because if the £45 price is honest—if it really does reflect fair wages and sustainable production—then the £8 price is dishonest. And if the £8 price is dishonest, then everyone who's been buying at £8 has been participating in something ugly.
So the brain protects itself: the expensive brand must be lying. Must be marking up. Must be exploiting virtue.
This is not stupidity. This is sophisticated psychological defense.
And it's exactly the mechanism that keeps honest pricing unviable at scale.
The Marketing Paradox
Here's where it gets interesting: ethical brands cannot market their way out of the Complicity Premium.
The more explicitly a brand explains its pricing—"we charge £45 because we pay living wages, unlike fast fashion which pays £8 and exploits workers"—the more directly it triggers the defensive response.
Because what the brand is actually saying, whether it intends to or not, is: "You, the consumer, have been complicit in exploitation. We're offering you a way to stop being complicit. It costs £45."
The consumer hears: "You've been doing something wrong. Pay us to feel better about it."
That message, no matter how gently delivered, activates resistance.
The alternative—marketing ethical fashion without mentioning exploitation, just emphasizing "quality" and "craftsmanship"—fails in a different way: it provides no explanation for why the price is higher, which means the consumer defaults to "markup" as the explanation.
Either way, the brand loses.
This is why transparency, despite being morally correct, is commercially disadvantageous. The more you reveal about true costs, the more you force consumers to confront their complicity. And the more you force that confrontation, the more they resist.
The mechanism is self-protecting: the system that depends on consumer complicity makes acknowledging that complicity psychologically expensive. And that psychological cost keeps consumers locked into the system.
The Structural Lock
Let me show you how the Complicity Premium creates a market structure that traps everyone.
For brands:
Path A: Price honestly (£45). Trigger the Complicity Premium. Consumers perceive you as expensive or exploitative. Remain marginal.
Path B: Price competitively (£15–£20). Compromise on standards to hit that price. Converge back toward fast fashion practices. Lose differentiation.
There is no Path C. The Complicity Premium makes honest pricing commercially unviable at mass scale.
For consumers:
Option A: Buy the £8 shirt. Remain innocent. Don't think about where it came from.
Option B: Buy the £45 shirt. Confront complicity. Acknowledge years of participation in exploitation. Experience cognitive dissonance.
Option C: Buy nothing. Increasingly difficult as social and professional norms require clothing.
The path of least psychological resistance is Option A. And the market structure rewards that choice—by keeping £8 shirts abundant and £45 shirts marginal.
For workers:
The Complicity Premium doesn't just keep wages low—it makes wage increases structurally illegible to the consumer.
If factories paid living wages, retail prices would need to rise (even slightly). Higher prices trigger the Complicity Premium. Consumers resist, choose cheaper competitors. Brands lose market share. Factories lose orders. Workers lose jobs.
The mechanism protects exploitation by making the alternative psychologically expensive for the very consumers who might otherwise demand change.
What This Explains
The Complicity Premium explains several phenomena that standard economic analysis struggles with:
Why surveys don't match behavior: Consumers claim they'd pay more for ethical fashion (because claiming otherwise would require acknowledging complicity). But when faced with actual purchase decisions, they choose cheap (because avoiding confrontation is worth more than stated values).
Why transparency backfires: The more a brand reveals about true costs, the more it triggers defensive reframing. Opacity is commercially advantageous because it permits ignorance.
Why ethical brands can't scale: Not because the model doesn't work, but because the psychological cost of honest pricing increases with market size. The larger the audience, the more consumers who must confront complicity, the stronger the defensive resistance.
Why "vote with your wallet" fails: Individual consumption choices require individual consumers to absorb the full psychological cost of acknowledging complicity. That cost is high enough that most people won't pay it, even when they can afford the monetary price.
This is not a moral failure. This is the system working exactly as designed—designed not by conspiracy, but by the accumulated logic of markets that reward psychological comfort and punish psychological confrontation.
The Hidden Ledger
Now let me show you where the costs that don't appear on the £8 price tag actually land.
Start with wages: when the pandemic hit in 2020 and consumer demand collapsed, major fashion brands cancelled orders and refused to pay for goods already produced—goods that workers had already sewn, already finished, already packed for shipping. According to the Clean Clothes Campaign, garment workers were owed between $3.2 and $5.8 billion in the first three months alone. By early 2021, the total had reached $11.85 billion in unpaid wages and severance.4
Eleven billion dollars that workers had earned, that brands owed, that was simply never paid.
Then environment: textile dyeing and treatment are responsible for approximately 20% of industrial water pollution globally, as reported by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.8 Cotton farming depletes aquifers and relies heavily on pesticides. Synthetic fibers shed microplastics that end up in oceans and, eventually, in human tissue.
The Impact Institute, in their "True Price of Jeans" study, calculated approximately €33 in externalized social and environmental costs for a case-study pair of jeans—cotton and denim sourced in India, manufactured in Bangladesh.7
These costs are real. They manifest as polluted rivers, depleted aquifers, carbon in the atmosphere, chronic illness in factory towns, poverty wages that trap families across generations.
They just don't appear on the receipt.
The £8 price tag is not a measure of what the shirt costs. It is a measure of what the buyer is asked to pay—which is a very different thing.
The difference is absorbed by workers who aren't paid enough to live. By communities whose water is poisoned. By the atmosphere that absorbs carbon. By taxpayers who fund environmental cleanup. By the future that inherits the consequences.
And by consumers who choose not to know.
The Transfer
I've been describing this as though you were an observer, as though the extraction happens between brands and workers, between billionaires and seamstresses, between them and them.
But the arithmetic doesn't let you stay outside.
When you buy an £8 shirt, you are receiving a transfer—not from the brand to you, though that's the story the price tag tells, but from the worker to you. From the community with the poisoned river to you. From the atmosphere to you. From the future to you.
The gap between what the shirt actually costs and what you actually pay isn't absorbed by the brand. The brand passes it on. The gap is filled by people who have no choice: workers who accept poverty wages because the alternative is no wages; communities that accept the factory because the alternative is no jobs; governments that suppress labor costs because the alternative is losing investment to a country that will suppress them further.
Every time you pay £8 for a shirt that actually costs £38 to make fairly, you receive a £30 transfer. That transfer comes from somewhere. It comes from someone.
You did not ask for this transfer. You may not have known it was happening.
But here's what the Complicity Premium reveals: at some level, you chose not to know. The choice was made available to you—the £45 shirt was right there, with its explanation—and you chose the £8 shirt. Not because you're a bad person, but because not knowing was easier than knowing.
The Complicity Premium is the price of awareness. And the system survives because that price is high enough that most people won't pay it.
The Geometry of Capture
If you want to know where the money that doesn't go to workers actually goes, you need only look at who has become wealthy from this industry.
Amancio Ortega, founder of Inditex (Zara): according to Forbes 2025 data, net worth approximately $120 billion, making him the ninth richest person on Earth.10 The Persson family, founders of H&M: billionaires. Xu Yangtian, founder of Shein: Bloomberg estimated around $21.5 billion.11 The founders of Boohoo—whose Leicester suppliers were caught in 2020 paying workers as little as £3–£4 per hour according to Guardian reporting, well below legal minimum wage—have accumulated fortunes in the hundreds of millions.9
Workers receive 1–3% of retail price. Factories operate on thin margins. The brand and retailer capture the rest. From that remainder, shareholders and executives extract fortunes that would be difficult to spend in a hundred lifetimes.
But here's what the Complicity Premium adds to this picture: the wealth extraction is protected not just by market power or political influence, but by the psychological architecture of the consumer.
Every consumer who chooses the £8 shirt is choosing, whether they know it or not, to protect the system that makes billionaires. Not because they want billionaires to exist, but because acknowledging the alternative—that they've been participating in exploitation—is too uncomfortable.
The Complicity Premium doesn't just benefit the wealthy. It protects them—by making awareness expensive enough that most people won't pay for it.
Why This Mechanism Matters
I want to be precise about what this diagnosis changes.
Standard analysis says: consumers are price-sensitive, so brands compete on cost, so workers get exploited. The solution: make consumers less price-sensitive through education, transparency, moral suasion.
But if the barrier is the Complicity Premium—if the problem is that honest pricing forces consumers to acknowledge complicity, and that acknowledgment is painful enough to avoid at cost—then education and transparency don't solve the problem. They intensify it.
The more you educate consumers about exploitation, the more uncomfortable the Complicity Premium becomes. The more uncomfortable it becomes, the stronger the defensive reframing: "ethical brands are scamming us."
This explains why decades of investigative journalism, documentary films, and advocacy campaigns have produced awareness but not market transformation. Awareness without structural change just makes the Complicity Premium more expensive—which makes the defensive resistance stronger.
The mechanism is self-reinforcing: the more clearly you show consumers they've been complicit, the harder they work to deny it.
The Structural Villain
You might think, after reading all this, that I'm saying consumers are the villain. That if only people were more moral, more willing to face discomfort, the system would change.
I'm not saying that.
The villain is the structure—the market system that has made complicity comfortable and awareness expensive, that rewards ignorance and punishes knowledge, that has trained an entire generation on reference prices so low that honest pricing looks like exploitation.
Every actor in this system—workers, brands, governments, consumers—is behaving rationally given the constraints they face. The worker accepts the poverty wage because refusing means no wage. The brand compresses costs because failing to means losing market share. The consumer buys the £8 shirt because the alternative requires confronting years of complicity.
No individual actor is powerful enough to break the circuit. The ethical brand that tries to price honestly triggers the Complicity Premium and remains marginal. The government that raises labor standards loses factories to neighboring countries. The consumer who commits to buying only fair-priced clothing must either spend five times their clothing budget or own 80% fewer garments.
This is not a moral failure. This is the system working exactly as designed—designed not by conspiracy, but by decades of market logic that discovered, entirely by accident, that consumer complicity is a weight-bearing pillar of the business model.
Remove the complicity—force consumers to acknowledge it—and the structure wobbles.
So the structure protects the complicity. By making acknowledgment expensive.
What Now
I want to conclude not with prescription—not with "buy this, don't buy that," which misunderstands the mechanism and places responsibility for structural change on individual moral choices—but with an observation about knowledge and what it allows you to see.
You now understand something about how this system maintains itself that most economic analysis misses: that the barrier to change is not primarily about money or willingness to pay, but about the psychological architecture that makes complicity comfortable and awareness painful.
The Complicity Premium is real. You've felt it—every time you've seen a "sustainable" brand and thought "they're probably just greenwashing" or "that price is ridiculous," you've felt the defensive reframing at work.
Now you know what you're feeling. And knowing changes what you can see.
When you see an £8 shirt next to a £45 shirt, you're no longer just seeing two prices. You're seeing two different invitations: one invites you to remain innocent; the other invites you to acknowledge complicity.
The system depends on you choosing innocence. It has made that choice cheap and easy. It has made the alternative expensive and uncomfortable.
But here's what knowing the mechanism gives you: the defensive reframing—"ethical brands are scamming us"—is no longer invisible. You can watch yourself do it. And watching yourself do it makes it harder to do unconsciously.
This is not nothing. Structural problems require structural solutions—regulation, enforcement, trade rules that prevent externalization—but those solutions require political will. And political will requires enough people who've paid the Complicity Premium, who've done the uncomfortable work of acknowledging participation, who can no longer comfortably look away.
You can't be told to pay that premium. No one can make you. But now you know what it is. You know what it costs. You know what avoiding it protects.
The choice, as it has always been, is yours. But now you're choosing with the ledger open. The real one.
Now you've seen the mechanism. What you do with that knowledge is yours.