Recherchetool für Materialien

Research Tool for Materials

The materials database contains media on our key topics of working conditions in the textile and clothing industry and the environmental impact of clothing. The types of media include studies, guidelines and reports, as well as films, podcasts and web tools.

 

List of materials

 

Based on interviews with more than 141 people, including 118 garment workers from 25 factories, union leaders, government representatives, and labor rights advocates, this report finds that Pakistan’s government has failed to apply the lessons on labor rights protection and safety it should have learned following the Khaadi protests and deadly fire at Ali Enterprises. As a result, workers in Pakistan’s garment factories continue to experience labor abuses that go unaddressed.

While the scope of the research is limited given the vast scale of the apparel industry in Pakistan, it points to a trend of widespread poor working conditions, overwhelming key concerns voiced by workers and labor rights advocates, and details the failure of inspection mechanisms to enforce compliance with applicable labor laws and regulations.

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Procurement procedures contain their pitfalls. The inclusion of minimum social and environmental standards often does not make things easier. But even with little experience, a fair award is feasible. Together with lawyer André Siedenberg, FEMNET has developed a digital award tool and thus an online decision-making aid for all those who want to procure fairer.

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Gender wage gap in the labour market is a widely discussed issue in relevant discourse and literature. Societal attitude, occupational segregation, vertical segregation, barriers to entry and retention, and discriminatory practices at workplace are often cited as factors contributing to women getting lower wages compared to men. However, the ILO publication titled ‘Global Wage Report 2018/19: What lies behind gender pay gaps” singles out Bangladesh as an outlier where women’s average wages, both raw and factor-adjusted, were found to be higher than those of men. These counter-intuitive findings have raised a lot of interest and queries as regards the underlying causes leading to these results. The present study undertakes a thorough investigation of the methodology deployed by the ILO study and critically examines the factors contributing to the reverse gender gap as found in case of Bangladesh.

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The 24th of April 2018 marked the five-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza textile factory disaster in Bangladesh. numerous multinational textile companies sourced goods from the production in this building, among them a range of companies headquartered in the EU. Five years after the Rana Plaza disaster, to what extent have EU textile companies integrated respect for human rights throughout their operations? Are EU companies carrying out robust human rights due diligence throughout their supply chains to prevent the next ‘Rana Plaza’?

This briefing explores these questions by laying out the main challenges and opportunities in the EU textile sector. Based on data collected by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre over the last seven years on over 170 allegations of negative human rights impacts, this briefing sheds light on the key human rights issues, the scale and geographical dispersion of alleged abuses, and the quality of the responses from EU textile companies to these allegations. It also shares lessons from key legal cases involving EU textile firms where alleged victims sought access to remedy.

The briefing concludes with recommendations for EU policy-makers and decision-makers, as well as to companies, to overcome the existing challenges to respect and protect human rights in the EU textile industry and its supply chains. A key problem at present is the lack of coordination among member states on how to tackle these issues. By surveying the scale of the abuses, the lack of access to remedy for victims, and identifying the gaps, challenges and opportunities, the briefing emphasizes the need for an EU-wide homogenous set of legislation on human rights responsibilities for EU textile companies.

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