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Workers still find themselves struggling to survive on the breadline, working excessive overtime just so they can make ends meet. |
| New Look | | Print | |
Page 2 of 3 Detail on Workers RightsWagesNew Look told us about a project in Bangladesh to “provide decent jobs for workers”, which has begun with “community surveys on worker needs including household expenditure.” The aim is to “build up the right context of living wage” to include different elements, such as schooling costs. New Look said that it would “develop a quantitative figure” to be used by its suppliers, and crucially that this will be included in price negotiations. This project is in conjunction with the consultancy Impactt and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), but does not seem to involve local trade unions or labour rights groups as such.Freedom of AssociationIn 2006, we expressed concern about New Look’s activities in this area. It responded directly to this in 2007 by saying that, This year we are working on three projects which involve improving the access for workers to management, and aim to improve the link between workers’ needs and management action.None of these involve trade unions; all seem to focus around workers committees. For example in one UK factory, We are launching a project with one of our key UK suppliers to develop a workers committee in their factory...The aims of this project are to give employees a way of communicating issues to management and therefore improve management understanding of workers’ needs and enable them to better respond to them...The development of this project will enable significant learnings for us about people’s attitudes to change and bringing about effective worker representation. It is our intention at the completion of this project to explore ways in which this may be rolled out to other suppliers. We queried this approach in our meeting, asking why a workers’ committee was being formed rather than a trade union: the response seemed to be that it was a more pragmatic approach that managers would more readily accept. Monitoring and verificationNew Look said it has doubled its investment in ethical trade, such that “our programme now covers our top 20 suppliers, who are responsible for more than 70% of our intake, up from the top 10 suppliers and 55% of our intake last year.” The target for next year is to reach 95% of the suppliers. As for how it monitors factories, it told us that, “we always use appropriate local organisations to conduct worker interviewers which have a proper understanding of the local situation and culture.” For example, it uses former garment workers in China. It continued, we talk to workers in their homes and outside the factory, where there is no risk of intimidation. Worker testimony is used to challenge the testimony of managers and documents since we believe that it is often the workers who give us the best picture of what is really going on in the factory. Our worker interviewers always leave their contact details with the workers they have spoken to and workers often telephone to add further information or updates. We think that this demonstrates that our programme is beginning to provide an ongoing complaints mechanism which is actually used by workers. Our conclusionWe are encouraged by New Look’s responses to our concerns in at least two areas. If its project in Bangladesh is successful, especially factoring a quantitative wage figure into its price negotiations, we hope it will roll out the learning elsewhere: transparency about the figure it arrives at and how it is implemented will be crucial if it is to implement it. On monitoring and verification, we are pleased that it has been using local organisations who are closer to workers than other auditing bodies would be: we have given it the benefit of the doubt although a clearer breakdown of the oranisations it uses, the criteria for selecting them, and the coverage of local stakeholder involvement would be useful. ur main concern is that it does not seem to involve trade unions in as much of its work as it could. It gave us a bewildering list of NGOs from several countries in explaining who is involved in its auditing, but not a single trade union was mentioned, despite the emphasis that we place on them. It did say that, “50% of the factories monitored over the last 18 months [were] unionised and union reps have been involved in the assessment.” We are surprised that it is developing a workers’ committee close to home in the UK, since trade union rights are well protected by law: a workers’ committee, however democratic, is very much a second best to a proper trade union and collective bargaining. |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 13 September 2007 ) | |||||
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