News - The Partnership for Sustainable Textiles (Textiles Partnership) 08 December 2017 The Textile Alliance: Review of 2017 and outlook for 2018 Control group of the Textile Alliance at the Klausurtagung on 23.11.2017. Photo: © Textile allianceThe Textile Alliance has been in existence for three years now, but it was only since June 2015 that the textile (trade) companies joined the alliance. Today, around 90 companies are members, responsible for around half of textile sales in Germany. In addition, the Federal Government, under the auspices of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), around 20 NGOs, standard organisations such as GOTS and Fairtrade and trade unions are active differently in the alliance depending on the organisation. The year 2017 marks the end of an intensive test phase in the Textile Alliance: All members had to create individual action plans (roadmaps) for 2017. These action plans were thoroughly examined to see whether they were in line with the Alliance's self-imposed objectives and constituted progress for the respective member. Finally, at the end of November, the Steering Committee of the Textile Alliance adopted binding time and quantity targets for the years 2018 to 2020, which each member must work on. So a lot has happened in the Textile Alliance – and yet important decisions are still to be made in 2018. The textile alliance wants to have an impact on three pillars: Review process: This pillar is about the individual responsibility of each member, which consists in the creation of a separate roadmap (a set of measures) per year and the reporting on the implementation of the roadmap in the following year. Pioneering work has been done here this year: Criteria and indicators had to be developed, which should serve as guidelines and guidelines for the development of the roadmap. There were many hot discussions in the specialist working groups on chemical and environmental management, natural fibres, social standards and living wages as well as the AG review process. Alliance initiatives: This second pillar is about bundling implementation activities on a theme of several members, mostly in the producing countries. Alliance initiatives are not small-scale projects, but aim at broad-based systemic changes. The assumption behind this is that many problems in the supply chains can be tackled more effectively together. Here, FEMNET has proposed an alliance initiative to improve the situation of 14 to 18-year-old girls in the spinning mills in Tamil Nadu, in the south of India, on the proposal of our partner in India. Four companies (Otto, Tchibo, Hugo Boss, KiK) support the initiative, so far there have been two trips to India and a kick-off workshop. In a total of 300 spinning mills, trainings for and with the girls are to be carried out so that they can get to know and demand their rights, and a dialogue between NGOs, companies and the government is to be initiated at the same time. There are three other alliance initiatives: a) Chemical management in Bangladesh and China, b) Water management in Pakistan and c) Seed availability in Central Asia. However, all alliance initiatives suffer from insufficient participation of members. Learning platform: The Textile Alliance is also a learning platform for members. Review process in 2017 The development of this process was in the foreground this year. All Members had to submit individual roadmaps and set targets in areas 1 on the basis of a predetermined indicator grid. Social standards and living wages, 2. Environmental and chemical management as well as 3. sustainable natural fibers. The roadmaps were checked for plausibility by an external service provider. Unfortunately, only 20 out of around 90 companies (about 22 percent) have voluntarily published their roadmaps this year, although a significantly larger number had been pledged by the economy. In addition, other members have not complied with this roadmap obligation, so that this year around 40 members have left the alliance or have been expelled. This was a necessary step to ensure the credibility of the alliance. However, it is worrisome that so many members have not faced the roadmap creation. Of the 21 NGOs in the Textile Alliance, 13 (approximately 62 percent) have published their roadmaps. The published roadmaps of the companies have shown a very different level of ambition. Important alliance goals such as living wages are mentioned by some companies, but without setting ambitious and clearly measurable goals. The exclusion of discrimination against women, among others, and the guarantee of health and safety at work are hardly mentioned in the published roadmaps. Few companies set targets for disclosing their supply chains. In addition, numerous objectives do not show the degree of coverage, i.e. the proportion of suppliers that a measure is intended to achieve. This makes it impossible to understand whether the objective concerns only pilot projects or covers all suppliers. Through the publication of roadmaps, it became clear that the textile alliance needs mandatory time and quantity targets for the target formulation as well as for the topics to be covered. We have made ourselves strong in the process and it is a success that in November the steering committee agreed on binding time targets that are valid for all members. Although civil society has fought for more ambitious goals in tough negotiations here, the agreement on time and volume targets is to be seen as a step forward, because they give the Textile Alliance a more binding character. And it becomes clearer what is required of a member as part of the independent monitoring process. What's missing: a convincing control system As of 2018, there is an obligation to publish all roadmaps. Mandatory publication is a key achievement of civil society, as it makes it possible to understand the activities of each member in public. In 2018, progress reporting is also scheduled for the first time. The publication of progress reports will not be mandatory until 2019. Civil society is committed to ensuring that the external service provider is accompanied and controlled by a body that has competence in terms of content and is formed from the stakeholder groups represented in the Textile Alliance (a so-called multi-stakeholder body). This will be necessary because there will be a margin of manoeuvre for many objectives to assess whether a goal has been achieved or not. The first round of the plausibility check has shown that this discretion cannot simply be left to the external service provider, as the latter is not mandated to make substantive assessments, but rather to examine them formally. In our view, a multi-stakeholder body must be set up for this task. It will also be important for Members to report publicly not only on their activities, but above all on the impact of these activities. Other key topics for 2018 will be the work on living wages, complaint mechanisms and transparency of the member companies' supply chains. The Alliance intends to make significant progress in these three areas. Furthermore, civil society calls for the textile alliance to be supplemented by the next federal government with legal measures on disclosure obligations for supply chains and human rights due diligence obligations for the textile industry. This would hold all companies accountable and the commitment would not only lie with the 50 percent who are currently members of the Textile Alliance. Status: 7.12.2017. Bonn.
