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Research published in this study on the Italian footwear and apparel industry shows that competition with Eastern Europe and Asia in Italy is depressing wages and worsening working conditions.

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This report aims to contribute to a better understanding of the corporate-controlled social auditing and compliance industry. It takes stock of evidence on the effectiveness of the dominant auditing regimes and the auditing firms that are currently active in the apparel industry. The case studies presented in detail in this report illustrate how – far from being an effective tool to detect, report, and remediate violations – corporate-controlled audits often actively aggravate risks for workers by providing misleading assurances of workers’ safety and undermine efforts to truly improve labour conditions. By doing so, this report builds upon previous analytical work done by academics, journalists, and labour advocates, as well as on the Clean Clothes Campaigns’ (CCC) substantial experience working on remedy in specific instances of human rights violations in factories over the past thirty years. This history provides a rich case base of more than 200 documented instances of auditing failures which serve as the basis for the primary analysis. Evidence clearly shows that the industry has failed spectacularly in its proffered mission of protecting workers’ safety and improving working conditions. Instead, it has protected the image and reputation of brands and their business models, while standing in the way of more effective models that include mandatory transparency and binding commitments to remediation. In order to shift this balance, auditors and monitoring initiatives need to involve workers in a meaningful way. They must be transparent and accountable by adhering to enforceable regulations that provide legal and commercial consequences for auditors and auditing firms that fail to identify essential and foreseeable, and thus avoidable, human rights risks. There must be legal and commercial consequences for the sourcing companies who fail to stop, prevent, or mitigate identified human rights risks and remedy actual human rights violations. Without an enforceable human rights due diligence framework in place, ineffective social audits will continue to be relatively meaningless in terms of ensuring worker safety and promoting humane working conditions. At worst, they could risk further entrenching inhumane working conditions. Addressing the gaps in the identification of human rights risks and violations is vital in order to ensure the industry starts to focus on actual prevention and remediation.

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Deloitte Access Economics has been engaged by Oxfam Australia to provide analysis of Australia’s garment industry. Specifically, Oxfam has requested Deloitte Access Economics answer two specific questions:

• Current factory wages: What is the typical share of the overall price to Australian consumers of garments produced in global supply chains which is spent on factory worker wages?

• Living wages: How much would the overall cost of bringing a garment to Australian consumers increase if a living wage were instead paid to factory workers?

• Using previous research, publicly available data, and data from several Australian businesses, Deloitte Access Economics has put together a cost structure framework of Australia’s garment supply industry. This framework represents the whole industry as an average and is not representative of a specific business or garment.

• Deloitte Access Economics has also estimated the impact on retail prices of moving towards a living wage. This analysis assumes that all players within the supply chain pass on the full cost of the wage increase. This does not answer how companies could adjust their operations or how a living wage could be implemented.

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The annual report 2016 of the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) focuses on three topics: Fashion and textiles, environmental costs of products and sustainable consumption.

Fashion and textiles – The prize of beauty: Every year, there are up to twelve new collections in the clothing stores on Germany's high streets. But this fast fashion is having a huge impact on the environment and on the people who live in manufacturing countries.

Environmental costs of products – Money and the environment: A flight to Barcelona for EUR 20, a kilogramm of pork for EUR 3 - we're still miles away from full ecological prices. This might cost us dearly in the future. What should the state do?

Sustainable consumption: The dominant lifestyle choices and consumption patterns of people in industrialised countries are identical testing the resilience of the global environment.

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The Cambodia Garment Worker Diaries tell the story of female garment workers economic lives and their working conditions. It was a yearlong study of the lives of approximately 540 female garment workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia and India. In Cambodia, MFO selected 186 participants from communities in Phnom Penh and Kampong Speu. The study takes the workers’ wage, expenditures, live in the factory and the coping strategies with financial stress into account.

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