Worker Rights

With aggressive European Union mandatory human rights due diligence legislation under development, GoodWeave International and Fair Wear Foundation have joined forces to address child and forced labour in hidden and informal parts of apparel and textile supply chains.

Investigation into Lululemon exposes major shortcomings in legislation that experts say act as window dressing.

What is needed is an international watchdog that puts more pressure on retailers to treat their supply chains fairly is an essential part of the puzzle. Until a regime is in place with genuine teeth to ensure retailers toe the line, the modern slavery behind high-street fashions will only continue.

The Rana Plaza disaster of March 2013 exposed many faultlines in the fashion ecosystem. That tectonic day threw up a whole lot of issues that were furiously debated the world over. One critical issue was the seemingly confrontational interface between business and human rights. In this freewheeling conversation, Salil Tripathi, Senior Advisor at the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) and Sanchita Banerjee Saxena, IHRB Research Fellow and Director at the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, talk about the lessons for business and human rights.

The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has lifted its ban on Indian garment exporter Natchi Apparel Pvt Ltd, which supplied to H&M, among others. The ban was lifted after the company provided evidence that forced labour at its factory had been eliminated.

Asos, Bestseller, H&M, G-Star Raw, Inditex, C&A are among global 19 brands who have agreed to exhort garment and textile factories in Turkey to respect workers’ rights.