RESPONDING TO STAKEHOLDER CONCERNS ON HUMAN RIGHTS

As part of our commitment to transparency we publish details of where we have been challenged by NGOs and campaigners on human rights in our supply chain and the details of our response and resolution.

This includes being transparent when we are challenged and responding to these challenges in the right way. We always do everything we can to be open and transparent – both in the information we make public and the way we share it. This includes taking every opportunity to learn when things don’t go to plan and to make the necessary improvements in order to continue to be a responsible business.

We aim to enhance the lives and support the local communities of the people who work for and with us. We’re committed to source responsibly and we work closely with our suppliers to make sure they respect human rights, promote decent working conditions and improve sustainability across our supply base.

The following summarises the third party challenges we’ve received since 2014:

2023

CLEAN CLOTHES CAMPAIGN REQUEST FOR BRANDS SUPPORT FOR “THE NEW MINIMUM WAGE IN BANGLADESH FOR THE RMG SECTOR” IN AUGUST 2023.

2021

SIGNING THE CALL TO ACTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES: BRAND COMMITMENT TO EXIT THE UYGHUR REGION

NON-PAYMENT OF THE VARIABLE DEARNESS ALLOWANCE (VDA) IN THE KARNATAKA REGION OF INDIA

2020

COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19 across the clothing sector was completely unprecedented and has been felt acutely by both retailers and our suppliers. We are very proud to have strong long-term relationships with our clothing suppliers; in fact, we have worked with over 70% of our supply base for over seven years.

We continue to track changes in each country and maintain regular contact with our suppliers and factories working through a plan which is as follows:

We have paid and continue to pay for all shipped products
Whilst our previous standard payment terms (75 days) have been extended to 120 days in response to Covid-19, we are continuing to offer supply chain finance which means suppliers get early access to cash regardless of payment terms
We have taken precautionary steps to ensure suppliers are implementing safeguarding measures to protect garment workers. This includes social distancing, sanitising practices, providing adequate protective equipment and additional awareness training about the virus
We fully support the efforts of the Ethical Trading Initiative and our partner the International Labour Organization who are facilitating the coordination and distribution of emergency relief funds, supporting safe working where manufacturing continues and co-ordinating an industry-wide response. We endorsed the “COVID-19: Action in the Global Garment Industry” which you can read on the ILO’s website
We were also involved in submitting proposals to DFID to support their COVID-19 Vulnerable Supply Chains Facility (VSCF), to form partnerships that support and respond to the challenges that COVID-19 presents within DFID-priority countries and ensure the most vulnerable workers and suppliers are prepared for the anticipated economic and social shocks
More widely, we remain committed to our Global Sourcing Principles that outline how we work with suppliers in relation to human rights, sustainability and decent working conditions

2018

FORCED LABOUR CONCERNS ASSOCIATED WITH FEMALE MIGRANT WORKERS IN BANGALORE'S GARMENT INDUSTRY

In January 2016, the India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN), a human rights organisation, released a report titled ‘Unfree and Unfair ’ focusing on poor housing conditions offered to migrant workers in garment factories in Bangalore. Two years later, they conducted an updated study in collaboration with the Garment Labour Union, Bangalore and titled ‘Labour Without Liberty’. This was based on interviews with 63 female workers at three garment manufacturing sites. The reports alleged that the factories were suppliers for M&S and several other brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Benetton, C&A, Columbia Sportswear, Decathlon, Gap (Old Navy and Banana Republic), H&M, Levi Strauss and Co. (Levi) and PVH (Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein). The factory known as ‘Company 1’ was highlighted specifically as an M&S supplier. It is understood that ‘Company 1’ has more than twenty units in Bangalore – the unit selected for the research was reported to be in the Peenya Industrial Area. The reports do not identify the three factories because it’s understood that the authors wanted to raise systemic issues rather than point fingers.

The reports allege five out of eleven ILO indicators for forced labour existed: abuse of vulnerability, deception as a result of false promises, restriction of movement, intimidation and threats and abusive working and living conditions. Workers, mainly migrant, were accommodated in hostels located nearby the factories were found to have their movement restricted by factory employees and hostel management. In the case of ‘Company 1’, women were escorted from the factory back to the hostel in the afternoon and were reportedly banned from leaving the hostel during weekday evenings. On Sunday’s they could leave the hostel unaccompanied, however this was only between the hours of 4pm and 7pm.

We were in contact with ICN before the publication of the report and were given the opportunity to review some general text from the report. We source from a number of factories in and around Bangalore (as of December 2018 we had in excess of 20 active factories – please refer to our interactive map). We therefore asked if ICN could provide us with factory information to enable us to identify the one factory that we are linked with in the report. Understandably they would not supply us with the factory name to ensure there was no retaliation on workers.

We will not tolerate or condone any human rights abuses within any part of our business or supply chain. We have also identified forced labour as one of our salient human rights issues and specifically in India we have also highlighted recruitment practices of migrant workers as cause for concern. Our Global Sourcing Principles, which are contractual, prohibit forced labour in all its forms. They also require suppliers to respect the right of workers to leave the workplace after their shift and workers’ accommodation arrangements must not restrict workers’ freedom of movement. In 2017, we published our Modern Slavery Toolkit for Suppliers and Partners and in 2018 we published our Forced Labour Toolkit for International Suppliers and Partners where we provide further guidance on our expectations. This includes stating that forced labour extends to scenarios where workers are restricted in their movements or confined to a workplace or accommodation.

Given the general and anonymised information in the report and a lack of factory name, we used our best judgement and our Regional Compliance Managers and independent auditors visited several factories that we thought it could be but found no evidence of any of the issues raised in the ICN report.

We went back to ICN again to ask more firmly that they needed to provide us with more details about the factory to allow us to more fully investigate, verify allegations and, if required, provide appropriate remedies to affected workers. ICN unfortunately refused our request once again.

Whilst this is unfortunate, we do feel the ICN report was balanced, and as explained was “to raise systemic issues rather than point fingers”. It gave useful recommendations for the Indian Government, supplying factories, NGOs and trade unions and brands like M&S. Research and reports such as this are important in highlighting issues and especially if differences are found in the treatment of different categories of workers.

Subsequently we have carried out the following actions:

Carried out a baseline assessment of the workers in each of our factories to better understand the proportion of migrant workers in our supply chain;
Played an active part of the Ethical Trading Initiative’s (ETI) Tamil Nadu Multi-Stakeholder Initiative (TMNS) which focusses on migrant workers in Southern India and are working collaboratively with many of the brands mentioned in the report to tackle some of the systemic issues within the garment industry;
Reviewed our policies and management systems to help prevent issues raised by ICN from reoccurring. We have asked our compliance teams and independent auditors based in India to be extra vigilant about the issues raised by ICN and incorporated hostel checks within our compliance audits and have adopted the Hostel Guidelines published by the Tirapur Stakeholders Forum. These Guidelines would also inform the development of any corrective or remedial action plans should we find issues during the course of our checks or indeed if we become aware of issues by other means; and
Launched our M&S Forced Labour Toolkit for International Suppliers and Partners at our first ever international human rights conference in Delhi in January 2018 with over 250 attendees from our retail partners, M&S international retail and sourcing offices as well as logistics, IT, facilities, Food and Clothing & Home suppliers.

We will continue to oversee and enforce the implementation of our requirements and take on board the information and the findings in the report on the employment conditions of migrant workers, and work with brands to ensure good recruitment practices for migrant workers within our supply chain.

2016

BBC PANORAMA – ALLEGATIONS OF SYRIAN REFUGEES WORKING IN TURKISH FACTORIES

In October 2016, a BBC Panorama programme looked at the issue of Syrian refugees working illegally in the Turkish garment industry in factories supplying M&S, Next, ASOS, Mango and Inditex.

We are acutely aware of the complexity surrounding Syrian refugees in Turkey and we have been engaged for over 18 months regarding the legal employment of Syrian refugees.

We have a local team on the ground in Turkey who visit all of our suppliers on a regular basis and interview workers. During 2015/16, they ran supplier workshops on the Syrian refugee crisis highlighting labour law and how to legally employ Syrian workers.

The key issue is that until January 2016 Syrian refugees had no ability to work in Turkey, as they were not allowed to apply for work permits. The Turkish Government changed the law in January but only to allow Syrians to work on a permanent basis with the factory having to apply for the work permit on their behalf. Unfortunately, this process can take many months and the requirements for a permanent work permit excludes many Syrians from receiving them. This leads to Syrians trying to obtain work informally and casually, being paid cash.

We had previously found no evidence of Syrian workers employed in factories that supply us, so we were very disappointed by the BBC’s findings, which are extremely serious and are unacceptable to M&S.

Within 24 hours of being supplied with the factory name, we conducted our own unannounced audit, which found one Syrian adult casual daily labourer paid in cash, without wage slips, and employed through an agent working at the factory. The worker was above the legal minimum working age and was being paid a wage equal to comparably skilled permanent workers, he did not have the required work permit.

We have worked closely with the factory to put in place an action plan who have been fully cooperative throughout the process, this included offering the Syrian refugee permanent legal employment. This was declined and they have subsequently left the factory.

We have continued to monitor the factory closely to ensure that they adhere to our Global Sourcing Principles and carried out future visits and audits in all factories on an unannounced basis.

It has always been our policy not to “Cut & Run” following an incident such as this, but to work with the factory to ensure our standards are upheld and these issues do not happen again in the future. As the owners of the factory cooperated fully and were unaware that the Syrian worker had been employed on a daily basis by the factory, we did not exit this factory merely as a result of the Panorama programme and we have continued to monitor it closely to ensure it amends its practices so it does not occur again.

We have also reviewed our management systems to identify lessons learned and improvement opportunities. As a result, we developed a relationship with a non-profit foundation called United Work which provides support for refugees regarding their fundamental needs (educational advice, recruitment, working permits and on-the-job-training), this is free and sponsored by the Dutch Government. We require our suppliers to let us know when they would like to recruit a refugee and we then introduce the factory and United Work to each other. Since the beginning of 2018, we have successfully helped 17 Syrian refugees into legal employment in our supply chain in Turkey.

We have also continued to carry out training with all our suppliers to highlight the legal process to employ Syrians with work permits. All our formal compliance audits continue to check work permits routinely.

We have also recently partnered with MUDEM, a Refugee Support Centre, and signed a Cooperation Protocol on Remediation of Working Conditions of Refugees. This provides a confidential mechanism for Syrian (and other refugees) to raise complaints or issues in our factories anonymously. Should this happen MUDEM will liaise with us to resolve and remedy any issues. As of May 2019, we have had no issues raised with us via MUDEM.

In addition, we continue to be members of the in-country Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Turkey Working Group, working collaboratively with other Brands on a best practice and due diligence approaches to protecting Syrian refugees seeking work in the garment industry but given the scale of the plight of Syrian refugees, and the sheer scale of the issue of informal workers in all industries, not limited to the garment industry, we also recommended a convening of all brands sourcing from Turkey, to establish a multi-industry wide collective action plan and next steps.

In October 2018, at our second human rights and modern slavery conference in Turkey we took the opportunity to publicise our Modern Slavery Toolkit for Suppliers and Partners. We translated this document into Turkish and sent it to all our suppliers. The conference was attended by 172 attendees including Government officials, Turkish employer’s association, other brands and Syrian employment agencies. A highlights video of the conference can be viewed here.

With teams from other brands, ETI representatives, the Turkish Government and Employer Associations, we believe we have a great opportunity to help improve the situation for employment of the Syrian Refugees.

2015

ALLEGED MISTREATMENT OF MIGRANT WORKERS ON A FRUIT FARM IN KENT

2014

GCL (GROSBY) FOOTWEAR FACTORY, CHINA

Key Facts and Figures

Responding to stakeholder concerns on human rights