High street clothes shops are having to pay increasing attention to regular and thorough monitoring of suppliers, as journalists and campaigners join forces to turn the spotlight on ‘sweatshops’
Pressure on clothes retailers to check and monitor the ethical credentials of their supply chains has increased in the past month with the launch of a new campaign and a flurry of accusations against some of the UK’s best known clothing retailers.
The Labour Behind the Label campaign, backed by a coalition of groups including trade unions, Oxfam, War on Want, CAFOD, and the Central American Women's Network, is demanding that high street retailers take a more positive stance on the pay and conditions of garment workers employed by suppliers.
It also demands that retailers should make sure their suppliers allow their workers to be ‘actively involved in determining the level of a living wage’.
Labour Behind the Label has decided to target retailers by urging supporters to bombard retailers with protest postcards. Among those on its hit list are Adidas, Benetton, C&A and Virgin Clothing.
However it has asked supporters not to send cards to Levi Strauss, Littlewoods, Marks & Spencer and Monsoon, which are all members of the Ethical Trading Initiative and therefore, it believes, ‘committed to a living wage.’
The issue of ‘sweatshops’, of course, is by no means as clear cut as some campaigners like to make out. The plain fact is that for millions of workers in the third world, a ‘sweatshop’ may be preferable to no shop at all.
There is also the very real danger that the efforts of campaigners will become a weapon for use by those seeking to protect domestic markets.
Although one of the main emphases of the campaign is the conditions of workers abroad, it does point out that an estimated one million home workers in the UK often earn only £2 an hour making clothes for the high street, compared with the minimum wage of £3.60.
The postcard sending campaign comes at a time when the campaign focus against clothing retailers is shifting from the need to have in place a suppliers’ code of conduct, to the extent to which they are monitoring their suppliers in a regular and systematic way.
A recent study by the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency (CEPAA) found that only 35 of 71 companies which had implemented codes of conducts for suppliers were actually monitoring them.
As a result, CEPAA director Ritu Kumar has called for independent third party monitoring of codes.
The pressure on major companies to improve their monitoring is also mounting as media coverage of alleged ‘sweatshop’ activities gathers pace. Most of the national newspapers have run stories on the subject in recent weeks, but there has been concerted coverage from the Independent's Global Sweatshop campaign, and also lengthy reports in The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and the BBC Newsnight programme.
Levi Strauss, Marks & Spencer, Pringle, Laura Ashley, C&A and Debenhams have all been the subject of press stories relating to their suppliers in eastern Europe. Next and Principles (part of the Arcadia Group which also owns Burton Menswear, Dorothy Perkins and Top Shop) both ran into trouble in recent weeks after a TGWU campaign highlighted what it alleged were unsavoury labour practices at one of their London suppliers.
All the companies concerned vigorously defend their record.
Marks & Spencer last month met representatives of the Labour Behind the Label campaign to talk about allegations that it has been selling clothes made by Indonesian labourers working for less than 50p for a ten-hour day. The company has hotly denied the charges, saying it does not buy clothes from two of the three suppliers involved and has not bought anything from the third for five years.
Clothing company The Gap has also come under fire.
Greater attention to supply chain issues in the UK mirrors developments in the US, where a pressure group, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is heading what The Financial Times has called ‘the most powerful student movement since the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s.’ Its supporters are challenging the US-government-backed Fair Labour Association guidelines which they claim are too soft.
USAS won an important concession last month when Nike named all of its 41 foreign suppliers for the first time and offered to take selected student activists on tours of all the plants to demonstrate conditions are adequate.