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The April 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, which killed over 1,000 garment workers and injured many more, shocked the world. Since then, lead firms, supplier factories, governments and multiple other stakeholders have sought to improve building safety in Bangladesh and to strengthen the governance of labour standards in garment supply chains. This report summarizes the results of the Garment Supply Chain Governance Project, which provides the most thorough analysis of lead firms’ current practices and their impact on garment factories and workers in the context of various public and private labour governance initiatives to date.

Since the Rana Plaza disaster, buyer-supplier relations, lead firm labour governance approaches and worker outcomes in Bangladeshi garment factories have changed. These changes can be attributed to an intensified climate for compliance regarding primarily building safety, but also other aspects of working conditions. While it is difficult to tease out precisely the causal impact of each initiative implemented in Bangladesh since Rana Plaza, our data indicate that this climate of compliance and the resulting changes can be strongly associated to lead firms’ engagement in the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (Accord).

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Despite economic growth and declining poverty levels across Asia, inequality continues to grow, with large groups of society remaining marginalized in economic and social terms.

Women in Asia continue to experience massive structural disadvantages, from early childhood education through their retirement from work—if they wanted and were allowed to work—and into their older age. It is mainly women who are exploited as cheap labour in Asia’s export industries and low-skill sectors, especially agriculture, textiles and the footwear and electronic industries. They are paid subsistence wages and experience increasing precariousness of their working as well as living conditions.

On the heels of all the economic progress now comes rapid technological transformation that is altering the present and future nature of work in ways that offer a multitude of opportunities but also add new levels of risks for social groups across the Global South.

Women are particularly vulnerable and disproportionally affected by these changes, both in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and in the ever-expanding care work across the formal and informal sectors.

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As the Syrian civil war enters its ninth year, more than half of the Syrian population has been forcefully displaced from their homes, with 5.6 million seeking refuge abroad. With its open door policy, Turkey has contributed significantly to humanitarian relief for more than 3.5 million civilians affected by the war in Syria.

The vast majority of Syrians in Turkey reside outside of refugee camps, making their living from waged labour in towns and cities across Turkey, including work in the garment industry. Turkey’s garment industry has become one of the largest sources of income for Syrians, with an estimated 250,000–400,000 Syrian workers.

Focusing on how refugee workers experience and navigate their precarious situations, this report sheds light on both the individual as well as the structural factors that enable and constrain refugee workers in their struggle for a decent life in Turkey. Hence, while the purchasing practices of brands and the domestic policy framework remain decisive in shaping the conditions on the factory floor, refugees’ own agency and struggles must be understood as a constitutive element of their workplace experience.

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On the seventh anniversary of the Ali Enterprises disaster, garment workers in Pakistan still risk their lives in unsafe factories. This report released in September 2019 called for a worker-led labour-brand safety accord in Pakistan, based upon the lessons learned by the Bangladesh Accord.

This report reviews current risks and violations in Pakistan’s textile and garment factories and assesses several current initiatives in the industry that include safety aspects, analysing their commitments and performance. The report concludes with the recommendation that brands and retailers sourcing clothing and textiles from Pakistan heed calls from Pakistan’s labour movement to support the formation of a legally-binding agreement between apparel brands and local and global unions and labour rights groups to make workplaces safe.

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Indonesien gehört zu den zehn größten Exportnationen von Bekleidung weltweit. Wären die Löhne in der Textil- und Bekleidungsindustrie existenzsichernd, wäre ein großer Schritt zur Erreichung des UN-Nachhaltigkeitsziels „menschenwürdige Arbeit“ getan. Ein Blick in die realen Bedingungen in der indonesischen Textil- und Bekleidungsindustrie zeigt, dass die meisten ArbeiterInnen nur Mindestlöhne verdienen, von denen die Beschäftigten und ihre Familien nicht menschenwürdig leben können. Wie aber könnten existenzsichernde Löhne durchgesetzt werden?

Die Studie stellt verschiedene Ansätze vor, angefangen beim Protokoll für Vereinigungsfreiheit über globale Rahmenabkommen bis zu den Ansätzen des deutschen Bündnisses für Nachhaltige Textilien.

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