High street stores must go beyond Fairtrade cotton
Friday, 10 February 2006 00:00
Topshop is the latest high street fashion retailer to announce its involvement with Fairtrade cotton, having signed a deal to sell Fairtrade cotton marked lines produced by ‘alternative trade’ companies Gossypium, People Tree and Hug. This follows Marks & Spencer’s recent launch of its own products bearing the Fairtrade cotton mark, and a similar move by catalogue retailer La Redoute.
Does this mean that these companies have ‘gone ethical’?
Not yet, but Martin Hearson, LBL’s Campaign Co-ordinator, hopes it is a start:
Fairtrade cotton represents an important step for cotton farmers in developing countries, and this is an important point; however, there is much that these high street companies need to do to convince us that their commitment to workers’ rights is real and that Fairtrade cotton is not just a fig leaf to cover the embarrassment of exploitation in their supply chains. We welcome these commitments to Fairtrade cotton and hope they will be accompanied by improvements in working conditions throughout the rest of these companies’ supply chains.
The Fairtrade cotton Mark is an independent product certification label applicable only to cotton production, and not to the other stages of textile and garment manufacture. At this stage, it does not offer consumers a guarantee that workers’ rights are fully respected in these other parts of the production process, and that the clothes are “sweat-free”.
Factories producing for all three of the high street retailers involved have been implicated in serious workers’ rights abuses in recent years. The Mark also applies to only a small number of product lines in each of the high street stores involved: we can only guess about the origins of the cotton used in the rest.
In contrast to the high street stores, People Tree, Hug and Gossypium use alternative supply chains, which are set up to meet guidelines set out by the International Fair Trade Association (IFAT).
What consumers should demand
While the Fairtrade Foundation and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) are considering the development of Fairtrade standards to cover other stages of garment production, these are still a long way from becoming a reality. Until that time, LBL is calling on the high-street companies selling clothes under the Fairtrade cotton Mark – whether under their own brand or produced by an ‘alternative’ manufacturer – to take the following steps, all of them feasible and none of them without precedent among major clothing brands:
- Join a multi-stakeholder initiative, such as the Ethical Trading Initiative, where companies, labour rights activists and trade unions work together to address workers’ rights issues.
- Publicly disclose the names and locations of the factories or workshops where clothes made from Fairtrade cotton are produced.
- Demonstrate credible, independent verification of working conditions in the factories supplying Fairtrade goods, conducted in association with local trade unions and NGOs. This includes publishing audit results.
- Allow external parties to access the factories to verify working conditions.
- Demonstrate that workers in the factories involved are organised into a free trade union to defend their rights through collective bargaining.
A mixed bag
The companies involved in Fairtrade cotton are not all the same, and so it’s important to set out the differences between their approaches to workers’ rights:
Topshop and La Redoute have so far displayed very little willingness to engage with labour rights campaigners. Despite repeated invitations to enter into dialogue with LBL and other labour rights groups, we have been disappointed with both companies’ attitudes towards specific instances of workers’ rights violations, and towards addressing the general, systemic problems of low wages and exploitation in their supply chains. Topshop has an impressive code of conduct, but we know little about how it ensures that the claims about working conditions made within it are implemented and verified: our assumption is that the answer is weakly, if at all.
Marks & Spencer, as a member of the Ethical Trade Initiative, has taken a more progressive stance, working with trade unions and labour rights groups to demonstrate a commitment to workers’ rights. Yet without disclosing the name, location and audit results of the factory producing its product lines, especially the Fairtrade cotton ones, how can consumers be sure about the working conditions involved? The social audits used by M&S in most of its factories are demonstrably flawed, and workers, as well as consumers, should expect more.
People Tree, Gossypium, Hug and other ‘alternative’ traders are mission-driven companies who, we understand, do not produce through mainstream factories, but rather apply the development-orientated principles of fair trade throughout their supply chains. LBL supports this work, although there is more that these companies could do to demonstrate to consumers how this commitment is implemented: we have discussed this further elsewhere.
For more information, see our Q&A on Fairtrade cotton .
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