News & Press Releases - Fair procurement for the public sector © Turgut Arslan - pixabay.com 19 November 2025 Mirror, mirror on the wall - where do the textiles of the public sector come from? There are numerous approaches to make textile supply chains more transparent. Nevertheless, the origin of the textiles that municipalities procure, for example for hospitals or the police, often remains unclear. Why is this, and how can it change? Although the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, sustainability reporting and traceability systems now impose binding requirements, the actual origin of many products remains difficult to understand. Actually, it should be possible to find out whether a bed sheet was made in the municipal hospital or the protective clothing of the urban gardeners in a high-risk area for labour and human rights violations. But discussions with local authorities and experts show a different picture: In the vast majority of cases, the exact origin of the textiles is not asked at all. Even if companies disclose countries of origin, the link to concrete public contracts cannot be established as long as this information is not actively requested. Serious labour and human rights violations regularly occur in numerous producing countries. It is therefore likely that products such as police uniforms or gowns for caretakers or doctors were most likely produced under forced overtime, far too low wages or unsafe working conditions. In the ITUC global right index (pdf-file) Bangladesh, Tunisia and Turkey, among others, are listed as countries with particularly poor working conditions. India, Pakistan and Ukraine are also classified accordingly. All countries that we can assign with an elaborate research to the orders that are in the TED database are listed. Public contracts above the EU threshold (for delivery services, for example, from € 143,000) are published there. Knowing where a product has been manufactured is crucial in order to specifically ask about possible violations of labour and human rights. Only this information can be used to check which preventive measures or complaint mechanisms are effective if production has taken place in a high-risk country. However, since the question of the production site has hardly been asked so far, FEMNET is developing a legally audited handout that should help municipalities to do just that. It will be available from the end of the year.
