Over the years, companies have developed a variety of responses to evidence of labour rights abuses in their supply chains.

Most began by denying that they had any responsibility for poor working conditions, saying that didn't own the factories that produced the goods they sold. Some even denied that working conditions were poor at all.

The next stage was to accept responsibility and adopt a code of conduct: a statement of the rights that should be respected for all workers producing clothes bearing the brand. Some of these codes are better than others, but in themselves they are just words. A large number of companies are still in this position now.

Most companies have moved beyond this to trying to implement the standards set out in their codes of conduct. They have developed monitoring programmes based on inspections of factories, remediation measures to correct the problems that they found, and in some cases third-party verification of working conditions. A whole industry of social auditing, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, has grown up around this. Yet these complicated systems are failing. Poor working conditions remain systemic throughout the garment industry.

Many companies have recognised that they can't solve these problems alone, and joined multi-stakeholder initiatives, collaborative forums of companies, trade unions and labour rights groups. For British companies, the usual such organisation is the Ethical Trading Initiative. These are tools, not panaceas, and companies only get out from them what they put in.

Poor conditions remain the rule, not the exception, because the 'compliance' systems put in place by the brands are running against the very structure of the fashion industry and of the societies in which clothes are produced. The next stage for the brands and retailers is to address these endemic issues, like their own purchasing practices, trade union suppression, and the increasing use of temporary, casual labour.

Some of these concepts are explained further in the articles below.