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Myanmar is one of the emerging textile production countries. After the end of the military dictatorship in 2011 and international sanctions, the country's economic development is booming. One of the growth engines is the clothing industry.

More than 90% of Myanmar's clothing industry is made up of women. Most of them are under 26, many are minors. Men mainly work in supervisory and managerial positions, they give instructions, exert pressure and some do not shy away from violent behavior. There are discriminatory tendencies towards women both in the legal framework and in society. The traditional view that certain tasks are unsuitable for women still applies in Myanmar.

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Despite publicised worker-welfare violations, many fashion retailers continue to post record sales and profits, indicating that consumer concern does not always translate at the cash register. Research has shown that worker welfare is a less salient area of concern for fashion consumers, and the aim of this research is to investigate the reasons why this may be the case.

Due to the exploratory nature of the research, a qualitative methodology was considered the most appropriate. Twenty-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with Australian fast-fashion consumers to investigate the underlying reasons worker-welfare violations are less likely to elicit pro-social consumer behavioural change and are a less salient area of concern.

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This report focuses on the South Indian garment industry clustered around Tirupur and specifically on the labour challenges faced by the industry. We conducted 135 interviews and engaged in a series of consultations with around 100 further participants (including business actors, workers, NGOs, union, and government agencies) in South India during 2018-19 to explore these challenges and potential solutions. We found that the industry is at a crossroads. Despite decades of growth it faces three main labour challenges – competitive threats from lower cost producing countries, labour shortages, and reputational challenges around decent work.

To tackle these challenges, local actors have experimented with a range of different approaches. We identify four main alternative pathways to change: (i) Economic upgrading; (ii) Responsible migration; (iii) relocation of manufacturing; (iv) Diversification. We recommend that the industry and its stakeholders should collaborate to develop a shared Vision 2030 and accompanying goals to address decent work and economic growth in the sector. This should be used to drive alignment around a common strategy and provide a means for external branding of the cluster. A multi-stakeholder taskforce should be formed to lead the Vision 2030 initiative.

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Since 2016, the hits for the Instagram hashtag #sustainablefashion have increased fivefold. More than half of the world's fashion purchasing leaders consider sustainability to be one of the most important business strategies. Accordingly, the supply of sustainable clothing is growing fivefold every year. Nevertheless, the share of the overall market remains low: Less than 1% of products released in the first half of 2019 were already labelled as ‘sustainable’. There is a lack of international standards for sustainability and clear definitions. Sometimes this means ecological standards, sometimes social aspects in production. So both keywords such as organic materials, recycled materials, supply chain transparency, water consumption, plastic use as well as fair wages for factory workers, overtime rules, occupational safety and co-determination. Karl-Hendrik Magnus, partner at McKinsey & Company and expert in the fashion industry: "There is still a long way to go towards objective standards that are internationally binding. Only then will there be an even greater pace of development."

These are the findings of the study ‘Fashion’s new must-have: sustainable sourcing at scale’, for which McKinsey interviewed 64 Chief Purchasing Officers (CPO), who are responsible for more than $100 billion in total procurement value. In addition, in street interviews, consumers in four major European cities and industry experts were surveyed and data from online fashion retailers were evaluated by the research service provider Edited.

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The Government of Uzbekistan operates a system of forced labour which has been estimated to coerce approximately one million people involved into the cotton harvest. Following courageous reporting, activism, and whistleblowing, the Uzbek government has committed at the highest levels to eradicating forced and child labour from the cotton sector. One of the two determined annual reports that both measures incidences of forced and child labour in the cotton sector, and attempts to diagnose strengths and weaknesses in Uzbekistan’s reform effort is produced by the International Labour Organization (ILO) through its third-party monitoring unit stationed in Tashkent. Established through a Multi-Donor Trust Fund by the World Bank, with support from the European Union, the United States and Switzerland, the unit has produced three annual monitoring reports since 2015. Following serious criticism of the third-party monitoring methodology, ethicality and accuracy by civil society, the first author of this evaluation was invited by the ILO’s Chief Technical Adviser to review the 2017 cotton harvest report. To conduct the review, benchmarks drawn from the international methodological literature and the ILO’s own monitoring manual were employed. Once applied serious breaches were identified. A series of questions prompted by the review’s initial findings was sent to the ILO’s third-party monitoring unit for clarification. No response has been received.

Among the greatest concerns raised during the review was a lack of explicit reference in the 2017 harvest report to the vulnerability of participants who may be victims of state-organised labour, the special sensitivities this prompts for research, or the complexities associated with conducting accurate fieldwork in a deeply authoritarian country where surveillance, arbitrary detention, torture, and repression are lived realities for citizens.

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