Workers

The UK garment manufacturing sector has long been positioned as a responsible alternative to offshore production—faster, closer, and more accountable. A new study challenges that framing. It finds that the same brands promoting domestic sourcing are routinely transferring financial risk onto the factories that make their products—through pricing practices, cancellations, and contract terms that consistently favour the buyer.

A new Roadmap has urged global fashion brands sourcing from major garment-producing hubs to fund and implement a Just Energy Transition across their supply chains, warning that persistent financing gaps, weak adaptation measures and price-driven purchasing practices are shifting climate risks onto suppliers and workers throughout production networks.

An OECD and EUIPO report has presented new empirical evidence linking illicit trade in counterfeit goods with labour exploitation, including forced labour and hazardous child labour. Using correlation analysis and econometric modelling, it finds that economies associated with illicit trade in counterfeit goods often show weaker labour protections, higher informality and poorer workplace safety. The findings call for integrated enforcement and labour-governance responses.

A new University of Sydney–led study shows that low-cost, sustainable cooling strategies could safeguard millions of garment workers facing extreme heat. Simulations of Bangladeshi factories revealed that reflective roofs, fans, and access to drinking water reduce core temperature and maintain productivity, offering scalable protection for an industry employing over four million people.

Bangladesh’s garment workers face grave reproductive health and safety challenges, according to ICDDR.B’s first cohort study. Conducted over two years in Dhaka and Gazipur slums, the research followed 778 young female workers. Findings highlight widespread adolescent marriage, early pregnancies, increased violence at home and in workplaces, and minimal factory-based services. The evidence offers a basis for policy and programme reforms in the sector.

The ILO’s Better Work Women Leadership Development Programme has empowered over 230 Ethiopian women in the garment sector since 2021, leading to high promotion rates and lasting workplace impact. Through hands-on training, mentorship, and leadership coaching, the initiative is transforming career trajectories and advancing gender equity in factories across Ethiopia’s industrial parks and beyond.

A new report from Cotton Campaign pulls no punches: despite minor cosmetic changes, Turkmenistan’s cotton industry continues to thrive on state-imposed forced labour. The 2024 harvest, as documented in a forensic 30-page investigation, lays bare the coercive machinery that feeds global textile supply chains—right from the fields of Central Asia to factory floors in Türkiye, Pakistan, Italy, and beyond.

A report by the Global Labor Institute warns that if 4 key hubs of garment production fail to make climate adaptation investments, nearly one million new apparel and footwear jobs will be foregone by 2030.

Shoemaking that had thrived during the Mughal Era, surviving British Raj, and burgeoning after Independence, today sees itself back to where it had all started. The city of love in India needs to find a feasible solution to the carcinogenic waste of its footwear industry.

Members of the multi-stakeholder Ethical Trading Initiative will soon need to publish details of their tier-1 suppliers on the Open Supply Hub, a collaborative data sharing platform hosting supplier data from around the world.