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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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Pitiful wages, child labour and sexual abuse is reported to be the reality for some Syrian refugees
Working without permits in Turkey, posing a major challenge for the garment brands that source from the country to supply Europe’s high streets. This report summarizes the responses of 28 of Europe’s largest clothes brands who were asked to explain how they are protecting Syrian refugees in their supply chain. A few are taking decisive action, but many are doing too little.
The document contains recommendations for brands and demands towards different actors.

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This article analyzes the impact of the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse on garment lead firms’ labor standards policies in the light of new governance approaches, especially the pathbreaking Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Based on a sample of 20 Australian and German garment firms, the authors find that firms with low prior baseline standards revised their supply chain and sourcing policies and signed the Accord. Firms with medium and high baseline standards responded variously, from making no changes to revising their policies and signing the Accord. Firm response variation can be explained by stakeholder pressure occurring in different national industrial and institutional contexts following the Rana Plaza incident, which served as a focusing event. Results suggest the anti-applicability of the focusing event framework for industrial relations scholarship and highlight some of the mechanisms driving changes in industrial relations institutions.

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When people in the West throw their clothes away, their cast-offs often go on a journey east, across the oceans, to India’s industrial interior. From the Kutch District of western India to the northern city of Panipat, garment recyclers turn into yarn the huge bales of clothes that come from people and places distinctly strange. With little exposure to Western culture other than the Discovery Channel, the garment recyclers rely on their imagination and the rumours that travel with the cast-offs to create an intriguing perspective on the West.

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The textile industry in Surat, West India, has been shaken for years by violent factory accidents. A particularly serious accident with many deaths led to stricter regulations for building safety. However, since then, the living and working conditions of workers in Surat’s textile factory, the ‘silk city’ of India, have also improved and SOUTHWIND, together with its Indian partner, the Indian non-governmental organisation Peoples Training and Research Centre (PTRC), is investigating this question in this study. The study is based on a qualitative survey of 50 employees from 48 textile companies in Surat. Most of the respondents' employment relationships are informal, unprotected and poorly paid. Their wages are far from sufficient for a decent life. A variety of measures are needed to improve working conditions, and the study concludes with recommendations. The recommendations are addressed both to the Indian state, which needs to improve legal protection for employees, even in small businesses. However, they are also aimed at the German Textile Alliance, which aims to improve working conditions along the entire textile chain.

Editorial team: Jannik Krone and Vera Schumacher

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