Responding to Stakeholder Concerns on Human Rights

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.

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.