How ethical are high-street clothes?
Six months after the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in
Bangladesh, Lucy Siegle questions high-street retailers on how they are
improving their supply chains
Lucy Siegle
Sun 6 Oct 2013 06.06 BST First published on Sun 6 Oct 2013
06.06 BST
A young woman with arms outstretched being rescued from the
rubble of Rana Plaza
Saved from the
rubble: rescuers lift a young woman from the ruins of the Rana Plaza factory in
Savar, near Dhaka, in April this year. Photograph: AP
Never mind exactly what Rihanna is wearing, or where Alexa
Chung got her new bag: the pressing news on the high street is about ethics.
It's now six months on from the Rana Plaza catastrophe, in which a garment
factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least 1,133, with a further 2,500
injured and many left severely disabled. Tragically, Rana Plaza wasn't a unique
accident. Fires and building collapses are endemic in the assembly part of the
fashion-supply chain (at least 112 workers were killed at the Tazreen factory
fire in Dhaka in November 2012). Campaigners and analysts have highlighted the
dangers in today's "fast fashion" supply chain that increase the
probability of such catastrophes.
"Fast fashion" desperately needs to reinvent its
supply chain. With business worth £44.5bn, the UK high street is a world leader
in fashion: now it's time to add substance to our style. And as consumers, it's
our responsibility to understand a bit more about supply-chain ethics, and act
on that information. Report after report shows that members of the cut, make
and trim army (the millions who toil in China, Bangladesh, India and Cambodia –
the hubs of high-street fashion production) work for wages that barely cover
necessities. Meanwhile the economic perks for us as consumers are unbelievable:
we've never had access to fashion this cheap.
The pressure on workers is enormous. In the speed to fulfil
contracts for hundreds of thousands of units of a single design to a short
deadline, gambles are taken with human rights and worker safety. A recent
Panorama programme, "Dying for a Bargain", once again showed the
total fallacy of factory audits as finish times for workers were falsified and
workers locked into factories. Research also shows how many western fashion
buyers base their calculations on misleading industry standards set on 100%
efficient factories. The sorry garment production facilities in some cities are
worlds away from efficient, so the workers cannot but fail.
For Fashion Revolution Day a coalition of fashion experts
and campaigners will commemorate the victims of Rana Plaza on the first
anniversary of the collapse, 24 April 2014. Ideas to prevent such disasters
happening again include creating more slack in supply times. If brands extend
their deadlines and increase lead times (even by seven days) this could save
lives. But my research (distilled into the list below) shows little appetite
for that sort of let-up from any of the main retailers.
So who on the high street is facing up to these problems? To
find out, I waded through the research and spoke to NGOs, and I sent a
questionnaire to the main high-street brands to gauge their position on supply
chain ethics. Some chose to engage, some did not. You can find their responses
below.
Below is a list of some of the retailers and retail groups
which are, I believe, doing the most to tackle the supply-chain issue. Size
matters in fast fashion, so my list concentrated on the big players in terms of
sales and volume market share. I have a bias: I believe the Bangladesh Fire and
Safety Accord is the best hope we have of improving safety in that country.
Essentially built from the rubble of Rana Plaza, it is a contract between the
retailers and the trade unions in Bangladesh. It's a legally binding, five-year
pact that makes independent safety inspections of factories and public
reporting on them mandatory. The first list of 1,500 Bangladesh factories to be
inspected has just been published. It is also the first-ever multi-buyer collective
agreement (brands like to act as lone wolves, which is part of the problem) –
but 93 have signed so far. All the retailers that feature here have signed up.
Finally – a huge caveat – none of these brands can guarantee
that they won't be involved in a Rana Plaza tragedy tomorrow. Even for our
top-tier retailers, there is a very long way to go.
JD Williams
Who? Exactly. I didn't ask JD Williams to complete a questionnaire,
as it wasn't on my radar. However it has been praised by NGOs for taking a
co-ordinating role and driving the Bangladesh Accord forward. The company
comprises 30 brands, including Figleaves and High and Mighty – it's a
high-street (and online) stalwart. Its approach to supply-chain ethics
following Rana Plaza is notable because it sees the Accord as a chance for
smaller brands to step up and take the lead: JD Williams has personnel working
on the Accord. Other brands should take note.
H&M
The Swedish giant (which includes Cos, & Other Stories
and Cheap Monday in its portfolio) was the first major signatory of the
Bangladesh Accord. It's the biggest player in Bangladesh (some estimates
suggest 20-25% of its inventory comes from the country) and this encouraged
others to follow suit.
H&M used to use glossy messaging about its corporate
social responsibility (CSR) and a new collection of "conscious
clothes" to flag its ethical message, but now it is more engaged with
worker rights on the ground. Union partners report that they can phone a
contact in the Stockholm head office if they need to discuss any issues.
Some NGO insiders praise the way the brand eventually
settled a case in Cambodia this year in which a factory's owners cut and ran,
leaving workers destitute. H&M paid a settlement.
Primark
Primark's position in this list may seem counterintuitive,
especially as it was one of the brands using Rana Plaza. However, we shouldn't
be too judgmental on the companies using the facility. As Sam Maher of campaign
group Labour Behind the Label told me just after the disaster: "It could
have been any of the high-street retailers." In the NGO/campaign world
Primark was praised for getting a team to Dhaka, coming up with a credible
compensation scheme and working with unions and agencies to provide immediate
food aid.
Primark owned up. The brands denying involvement in Rana
Plaza cost labour rights organisations time as they sifted through rubble
painstakingly finding inventory evidence from the paper trail. If companies
don't come forward and provide emergency relief and compensation, families and
workers suffer more. When NGOs met recently in Geneva, concerned that the
families of Rana Plaza needed help, Primark provided the equivalent of three
months' salary for 3,300 people.
Activist and union representatives think Primark could be
more open to collaborative union action (acknowledged as the only way to really
change conditions). It is known by supplier factories as a brand that
"pays up", offering 30-day payment terms to factory owners (as
opposed to the standard 60-90 days, which can leave businesses desperate). But
campaigners wonder if this seemingly fairer arrangement could ultimately be
used to drive prices down.
Marks & Spencer
Under its eco scheme, Plan A, M&S has experimented with
a range of initiatives to improve ethics in garment production. The company is
known for stable, long-term relationships with supplier factories. This
represents a big tick in an industry typified by chaotic, last-minute ordering
from whichever factory is cheaper.
M&S does like a technical solution. It has pioneered a
model factory programme in Bangladesh. It has also re-engineered the assembly
line, retraining employees as machinists, which means a salary raise. M&S
is the first major retailer to have committed to ensuring clothing suppliers
are able to pay workers a fair living wage in the least-developed countries
they source from, starting with Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka by 2015. But
campaigners said they lack an idea of what M&S considers to be a living
wage. M&S has yet to publish a list of supplier factories (answering my questionnaire,
it cites "commercial confidentiality" for this buttoned-up approach).
John Lewis
An early signatory of the Bangladesh Accord, John Lewis has
a relatively good history when it comes to sourcing. It tends to work with
long-term suppliers (which develops a more healthy, sustainable pattern, where
abuses are less likely to occur) and offers mainstream access to pioneering
ethical brands, such as People Tree. I value Safia Minney's brand, which has
become more trend-led, teaming up with designers such as Orla Kiely, but which
always begins and ends with the needs of the producer (the opposite to the
high-street fashion model).
Tesco
If you're wondering what Tesco is doing on a fashion list,
it's one of the biggest retailers of value clothing in the UK and a significant
player in Bangladesh. I have issues with supermarkets moving in on the fashion
pound, in the way they have hoovered up much else, and I hate the fact clothes
end up in a trolley as consumables, but Tesco has helped drive the Bangladesh
Accord from the front (it banned Uzbek cotton – picked by enforced child and
student labour – from its vast chain). It produced a wide-selling
"upcycled" collection with ethical designer Orsola de Castro, and has
made innovative use of overstock fabric (held on a vast scale by most big
brands, and which often ends up being shredded).
Credited (or blamed) for redefining the fashion industry by
introducing new ranges each week, Inditex has a charge to answer in terms of
fuelling unsustainable consumption. Yet when the Spectrum factory collapsed in
2005 in Bangladesh, killing 64 and seriously injuring 20, Amancio Ortega (the
then-owner of Zara) pushed through €600,000 compensation – remarkable in the
context of the current production system. While praising a company for its work
after an avoidable disaster may seem questionable, this set an industry
standard.
Inditex has good relationships with trade unions,
particularly in Europe, where it claims to manufacture much of its
fast-turnaround product (getting fashion into stores in days). However it is
unclear what percentage Inditex sources from Europe and overseas.
Arcadia/Topshop
Following the Rana Plaza tragedy, Sir Philip Green's empire
sent out a press release to the effect that Arcadia had signed the Bangladesh
Accord. Mysteriously, it transpired that was not the case, and it finally
joined up last month. Arcadia makes the point that it does relatively little
business in Bangladesh. On the plus side, it has experienced buyers and offices
in its sourcing countries rather than devolving all responsibilities to import
agencies, so the company should know where its clothes come from. However, it's
not a business rated for its collaborative approach, so it's difficult to know
much more.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário