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Company Response

1 Apr 2022

C&A's Response

… We work currently with 9 factories in Haryana, 8 factories in Karnataka and 20 factories in Tamil Nadu.

Our central compliance team as well as our local Indian sustainable supply chain team revisited and checked in the past days all audits and visits conducted in these 37 facilities of the past 3 years and did not find any of your described allegations in our records. Please note that we conduct during our visits and audits a series of confidential worker interviews to detect challenging topics such as GBVH…

To work on proper remediation, we require more information, especially factory and case details… as we are committed to investigate and remediate.

Please note that C&A’s team of social compliance professionals share your concerns about protecting the vulnerable. We have very clear successful procedures in place to avoid any retaliation against affected workers.

On the other side C&A does not have a cut and run policy towards our suppliers, as we aim for long term relationship with our supply partners…

The allegation that C&A sets unreasonable production targets we refuse to accept. On the contrary our sourcing team members discuss, agree and book production capacities with each supplier ahead of time to avoid unrealistic production targets. Additional our local sourcing team offers immediate support to suppliers in case an issue occurs during production…

C&A’s Code of Conduct includes a clear prohibition of GBVH…

In case a violation is discovered, C&A requires the supplier and factory to remediate with clear timelines. The remediation includes both compensation and protection of the victim and long-term initiatives such as training for workers & management. Where available, we work together with expert organizations such as CARE. While we only record a few incidents of sexual harassment across all main C&A sourcing countries, we do not see this as evidence for GBVH not occurring in the C&A supply chain…

C&A piloted an approach for prevention and mitigation of gender-based violence in four factories in Myanmar… and India… Both projects included creation & implementation of a sexual harassment policy, training for Sexual Harassment Prevention Committees and human resource management and training for workers and management on the sexual harassment policy...”

[The full response in attached]

Timeline