Nguyet Vu fled Vietnam in the 1980s, and after settling in Australia, the former bookkeeper ended up turning her hobby into a profession.
"My cousin suggested I try sewing from home," Ms Vu said.
"I started with small jobs for contractors. My skills were basic, and I made mistakes.
"Every mistake cost me — literally. Contractors deducted money from my pay, sometimes even half of what I had earned. But I had no choice."
Ms Vu was speaking this week in Sydney at a Generation Women event, a multi-generational women's storytelling night, in which participants share a personal story on a theme.
She told the audience that she would work up to 12 hours a day, sometimes earning as little as $100 a week.
Rachel Reilly, the national manager at Ethical Clothing Australia, which partnered with Generation Women for the event, says worker exploitation isn't just something that happens offshore.
She says outworkers, who by definition often work in their own homes, underpin the local industry and are generally mature women, potentially from migrant backgrounds, who may not understand their rights.
"These kinds of conditions create the ripe environment for exploitation to occur and then in addition to those demographics of outworkers is the structure of the local industry," Ms Reilly said.
"One garment might be touched by many hands.
"And because of that cascading supply chain, right down to an outworker's home, it's really challenging to have visibility over the conditions in which that outworker is employed.
"They're often invisible in the supply chain, which in and of itself creates the risks of exploitation."
Ms Reilly says this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with profit margins.
"This isn't just because the price point on the garment is cheap," she said.
"Outworkers will walk past expensive shops in Australia that are selling garments for $500, $1,000 and they're like, 'Oh yeah, I made that,' and they're being paid $10 an hour, and that garment's being sold for a significant amount."
Ethical Clothing Australia provides accreditation to textile, clothing and footwear businesses who manufacture onshore and are adhering to the relevant Australian workplace laws that ensure correct rates of pay, entitlements and superannuation.
"We only have about 120 businesses that are accredited with us in Australia when there's probably quadruple that that would be eligible to have this certification," Ms Reilly said.
"The ones that are eligible could just not want to go through the accreditation because they have dodgy operations, because they find it too hard, [or] because they don't see the value.
"Whereas with these businesses that have signed up to us, they're actually taking that stand.
"They're going through a rigorous audit, a yearly audit of their operations and their supply chain to say 'actually, yeah, we do value our workers. We do want to make sure that they're being paid correctly.'"
How to ensure you're not buying clothes made by exploited workers
Ms Reilly is encouraging consumers to look out for the Ethical Clothing Australia label on the clothes they purchase.
She's also encouraging people in the fashion industry to get accredited.
"It's the only real way that you can get that far down that cascading supply chain to an outworker to make sure that they are being adequately supported," Ms Reilly said.
"The accreditation programme comes in and can help a principal business map their complete supply chain, do the checking right down to the outworker in their home to make sure they're on the right skill level, receiving the right rates of pay, getting their superannuation and checking that they're in safe working conditions.
"And really, it's good for business.
"Embedding ethics and the proper legal frameworks into your business model is only going to be beneficial in the long run."
