- The cost of cotton: Cotton subsidies
- The cost of cotton: Dirty cotton
- The cost of cotton: Funding exploitation
- Sweat-shopping: Introduction
- Ethical Commitments
- Sweatshopping: Feeling the 'squeeze'
- Sweat-shopping: The role of companies
- Sweat-shopping: A change of clothing
- FAQ: Where can we find an 'ethical' supplier?
- Redress Fashion Campaign Resources
Time for material justice!
The efforts of many companies seem more like a public relations exercise than a real commitment to change the causes of poor working conditions.
Rather than making meaningful changes to their own behaviour, most brands and retailers focus their ‘ethical’ efforts on audits to check that suppliers are complying with codes of conduct. These address the effects, not the causes, of poor labour practices and repeatedly fail to pick up serious abuses of workers’ rights — especially when workers themselves do not have a real voice in the process.
Companies need a clear commitment, at the highest level, to ensuring respect for workers’ rights throughout their supply chain. ‘Ethical trade’ must be an integral part of how the business operates, not an ‘add-on’.
This will include:
Paying suppliers enough for workers to receive a living wage.
Ensuring workers are free to organise and speak out. This is essential to achieve and uphold basic rights, for effective monitoring of conditions, and to ensure compliance by factory owners.
Working with suppliers to improve conditions and provide market incentives for improvements in labour practices, for example with long-term contracts, and making respect for labour rights a key supplier selection critierion.
Ensuring reasonable terms of trade with suppliers, for example, making predictable orders, giving adequate warning and delivery times, and paying suppliers on time.
To meet their ethical commitments, companies must ensure they have adequate information about conditions throughout their supply chains, and make this available for independent monitoring so they can be held to account.
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