Making the Garment Industry Sustainable & Ethical

https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/article/do-you-know-where-your-clothes-come-–-garment-factory-conditions-be-monitored

Some excerpts from an interview about the findings on the 'EU Garment Initiative' in 2016 by Rupa Ganguli & Bart Slob (Ethics at Work)

One of the key areas of importance is the most labour intensive part of the industry currently, which is the garment manufacturing sector!

From the outside, it is often hard to tell how far workers are benefiting from their jobs. “One of the key issues for an EU initiative is transparency,” says Ganguli – “understanding whether workers are being treated fairly and the share they get of the price of a garment.”

Women’s rights are likely to be another focus for the EU.

Women make up the bulk of the garment workforce, but few factories are owned or managed by them. In the rare cases that women are involved in management, the factories are often more receptive to needs such as childcare and women appear to work more effectively, says Bart Slob, Ethics at Work. “We see that in factories where women are involved in management, this is a motivational factor for the women who work on the shop floor to perform better,” he says. “There are few successful women entrepreneurs in the sector, and this is something we would like to change.”

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