Some of the biggest fashion brands in the high street do not do enough to ensure the overseas workers who make their clothes are lifted out of poverty, a report published on Friday claims.
The study, by the UK-based charity War on Want and the anti- sweatshop coalition Labor Behind the Label, has identified Matalan and Mothercare, two companies featured in a local London newspaper investigation into the pay and conditions of workers in Bangalore, India, as among the "worst offenders."
It claims that they are failing to accept the need for overseas garment workers to be paid a "living wage" by their suppliers, that they have no information available on pay levels, and that they failed to respond to questions put to them by the report's authors.
The report, Let's Clean Up Fashion, launched on the eve of London fashion week, criticized retailers including Marks & Spencer, Tesco and H&M, for what it claims is their "unambitious" and "disappointing" approach to improving the wages of those who make their clothes.
It also described as disappointing the response it received from Arcadia group, which owns the brands Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge and Wallis.
The report follows a Guardian investigation into allegations from workers in Bangalore who supply Matalan and Mothercare that they were paid as little as ?0.13 (US$0.26) an hour for a 48-hour week, wages so low they sometimes had to rely on government food parcels.
Similar allegations over pay and conditions were made by workers who made clothes for M&S, Primark, H&M and Gap.
At the time, Primark and Mothercare launched an investigation into the allegations and the other companies said they required their suppliers to pay the legal minimum wage or above.
The investigation followed the Guardian's earlier report in which Primark, Asda and Tesco were accused of breaching international labour standards in Bangladesh. Asda responded by launching an inquiry. Primark expressed concern and Tesco said it could not take action because the Guardian, in order to protect workers, had not provided the names of the factories concerned.
The authors of Let's Clean Up Fashion contacted 34 of the biggest fashion brands to see what they were doing to improve wages for workers in their supply chains, to compare with a similar survey last year.
But the report concludes: "Only a couple of fashion brands will admit publicly that working conditions in their supply chains are significantly below what is desirable. The vast majority continue to hoodwink the public by telling them that everything is fine and the examples cited by campaigners and the media are just glitches."
With a couple of notable exceptions, those that do admit the problems have little to show on the issues we raise. They tend to agree that something must be done on a sector-wide level, but then sit back and wait for it to happen," it added.
The report said it was most disappointed in those which were members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a code of conduct which sets out basic rights for employees across the supply chain, but which "seem not to have grasped the gulf between what most companies do on labour rights and what needs to be done to have a serious impact on working conditions."
Bringing in a living wage for overseas suppliers is something which would currently be achievable for UK fashion firms, the report claims. Gap, New Look and Next are named as retailers with "genuine plans" to address the need for better wages for overseas workers, while it concludes that Primark, which has pledged to be active in work on the living wage, has made "a definite improvement" to its position on pay a year ago.
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