“Break the chains: transparency in the 2020 supply chain(s)”, October 2020

The Clean Clothes Campaign has published its latest position paper on corporate transparency in textile global supply chains…

Many initiatives have been taken up in the last four years … the Transparency Pledge represents a minimum standard, since it requires garment companies to disclose a number of specific information on their suppliers along the chain … To date, 76 global garment companies have aligned, are close to align or have committed to align to the pledge…

In the last four years, a range of Multi-Stakeholders Initiatives and other agreements have also been set up at local, regional or global levels, fostering companies’ best practises and voluntary minimum ethical standards…

These initiatives are laudable, but they have a limited impact…

Transparency’s aim is to enable brands’ stakeholders to have access to information and facilitate brand collaboration and collective action in order to stop, prevent, mitigate, and provide remedy for labour abuses in supply chains.

… [F]or transparency practises to be meaningful, disclosures must enable stakeholders to “work” with published data. This requires information to include quality data on suppliers such as presence of unions, workforce information (gender, migrants), purchasing practises, grievance mechanisms…

The Clean Clothes Campaign calls for a system change, in which full transparency of information is mandatory … and includes information on the manufacturing process and locations, social aspects -including wage levels- and product life cycle, to be provided in open data standards and machine readable formats.

Also, the paper proposes a set of demands of policy reforms to be enacted at the European level, addressing non financial disclosure, human rights due diligence, and public procurement legislations.