Clean up fashion: Where did we start?

Six years ago, Labour Behind the Label published a report entitled "Wearing Thin: the state of pay in the fashion industry." The report demonstrated that workers the world over producing for UK high street companies were living off poverty wages, and that few companies were taking the issue seriously.

"The evidence that the legal minimum wage is insufficient, even to cover the needs of a single worker," it concluded, "is overwhelming...The majority of companies are not addressing the problem of low pay. They attempt to demonstrate that what workers are paid is adequate, or use the pretext that 'nobody knows what a living wage is' to do nothing, or simply ignore the concerns of workers and consumers."

 At the start of 2006, we decided it was time to check in with the fashion industry, to see what progress it had made on living wages. We took the opportunity to see what they were also doing on two other key issues: trade union rights and monitoring and verification