News - The Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (Textiles Partnership)

Does the textile alliance still make sense?

If the devastating production conditions in the fashion industry are to change fundamentally, we need legal, binding requirements. These should oblige German and European companies to ensure compliance with social standards along their entire supply chain. If they do not comply with their duty of care, sanctions must follow. Only when companies pay their producers for violating human rights and labour standards can disasters like Rana Plaza be avoided.

FEMNET continues to represent this position. The women's rights organization sees additional voluntary measures by companies as a supplement to legal rules. For two years now, FEMNET has been actively involved in the Partnership for Sustainable Textiles, or Textile Alliance for short, initiated by Gerd Müller, Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development. The aim is an action plan for a sustainable textile supply chain.

This process is very tough and time-consuming. The Textile Alliance currently has around 180 members, including around 160 companies. This means that civil society is underrepresented and has few forces. Compromises are being negotiated in several working groups. While the large companies maintain CSR departments, usually deal intensively with the topic and have already prepared sustainability reports themselves, many medium-sized and small companies are breaking new ground here. However, the discussion in the Textile Alliance is often based on them, because the Ministry (BMZ) also wants to get them on board. The companies or their associations complain that, for example, drawing up a roadmap that is not particularly demanding from a civil society perspective – in which companies set their own targets for the implementation of social and environmental standards along the supply chain for the coming year – is too burdensome. Their goal is to reduce the already low demands. But without effort there will be no improvement in working conditions! The skepticism about how serious companies really mean it is widespread among NGOs. Criticism is growing that civil society serves only as a fig leaf. In its 2016 annual report, the Foreign Trade Association of German Retailers (AVE) writes: “We continue to recommend our member companies to join the Alliance, as most of the AVE members should already have no difficulty in meeting the Alliance standards through their current commitment.”

Against this background, the question arises whether all the personal commitment and effort that FEMNET and other NGOs contribute is worthwhile. In fact, it sounds like everything is for the best (at least for the companies), the current commitment seems to be enough, according to AVE. Then why even a textile alliance? The fact that the situation for the seamstresses has not improved despite all the commitment does not seem to occupy the AVE. There are therefore legitimate doubts as to whether the creation of the roadmaps means progress. Targeting small and medium-sized businesses, which account for less than 30 percent of the apparel industry's revenue, delays the process and reduces the level.

That's why FEMNET has made a push for a joint alliance initiative that could actually make a difference on the ground. The aim of this multistakeholder initiative is to abolish the slave labour of young women in South Indian spinning mills. From FEMNET's point of view, the added value of the textile alliance is that several companies could join forces with trade unions and NGOs to achieve improvements in suppliers on the ground (see report on Multistakeholder Initiative for Tamil Nadu).