Responsible Sourcing and Human Rights in Clothing and Home

In Turkey we  implemented a women’s empowerment pilot programme in nine factories with a total worker population of almost 6,000 workers. This three-stage programme includes: gender gap analysis using the UN Global Compact Women’s Empowerment Principles Gender Gap Analysis Tool, employee surveys on perception of gender equality and working environment, and gender equality training.

Read more about our current programmes in our 2024 Sustainability Report.

In response to the Covid-19 health impacts on workers and communities in Bangladesh, we worked with CARE International on a project to address low vaccine uptake by urban marginalised populations. Together, we set out to ensure all 100,000 workers in 34 factories in Gazipur had access to the vaccine. CARE ran awareness training and provided electronic registration and vaccination certificates for the workers.

Read more in our 2024 Sustainability Report.

Our International Marks & Start programme began in 2004. Its aim is to reduce discrimination and provide employment, and in early 2022 a new Marks & Start programme was launched, which aims to establish a Centre of Excellence for the Apparel Industry in Sri Lanka. It supports those with disabilities, or those in other marginalised groups, to access employment.

At M&S, our social audit programme has been running in our Clothing and Home supply base for over 20 years. We were a founding member of Sedex, which aims to drive improvements and convergence in responsible sourcing practices. The audit programme enables us to monitor compliance with our global sourcing principles, international standards and local law, as well as to identify opportunities for capacity building in our supply base.

Whilst we are confident there continues to be a role for traditional social audit programmes, and we are currently expanding these further down our supply chain, we also recognise their limitations in highlighting certain worker issues. Therefore, over the last couple of years, we have been developing and implementing pilot worker voice programmes to gather more direct worker feedback on their experiences working within our supply chain.

And in 2019, we invited Oxfam to carry out a gap analysis of our supply chains in India and the UK to help us better understand the true worker experience and identify the changes we need to make in our own operations and those of our suppliers. One of Oxfam’s key recommendations was also to scale up our worker voice programmes to help shape a best practice framework for the industry. Since then, we have carried out pilots in over 90 Clothing and Home factories, with a population of over 70,000 workers.

Our key learnings to date are as follows:

• Worker voice provides a hugely valuable mechanism to identify issues which may not typically be found in audits
• Different mechanisms and platforms may be successful in different locations and for different worker demographics
• Programmes should avoid and minimise duplication between brands in shared factories
• Worker engagement and trust that issues will be addressed is key to the success of worker voice programmes, as is factories’ commitment to action to address worker feedback
• Feedback enables implementation of an appropriate mechanism for dialogue and/or grievance between workers and management.

In 2024, based on the above learnings, we created Global Supply Chain Worker Voice Best Practice Guidelines.

HEALTH PROGRAMMES   

Targeting women garment workers and their communities, our health projects have delivered immediate and midterm interventions, to support and re-stabilise community health care systems and services, deliver targeted health messaging and communications in and around factories, and build community-level capacity for collective action. The projects complement workplace safety guidelines already being implemented in factories and a result of these interventions, the garment supply chain benefits from safer working conditions, reduced absenteeism and improved productivity.  

The projects strengthen the functionality of public-private healthcare networks to maintain crucial services and improve linkages between facilities and factories for reduced long-term health consequences. Women garment workers are supported to become community leaders to mobilise WASH interventions benefiting themselves, their families and communities.

We have run these projects in Cambodia and Bangladesh, with lighter versions in India, Sri Lanka and China.

HEALTHWORKS

Another example is where we developed HealthWorks with Project Hope and the Reproductive Health Association of Cambodia (RHAC) to address simple root causes of absenteeism, and fatigue and increase health and nutritional awareness in 7 factories in Cambodia. We trained over 14,000 workers and upskilled the medical professionals on site to help improve employee health as well as workplace productivity.

FCDO VSCF

We also participated in several projects in the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office Covid-19 Vulnerable Supply Chains Facility (VSCF) fund in Bangladesh. VSCF aimed to form partnerships with businesses and NGOs rapidly, to respond to the financial challenges from Covid-19 and help with longer-term resilience. In one VSCF project, M&S partnered with CARE to address the health impacts of the pandemic on 80,000 garment workers and their communities. Working across 15 communities, the project strengthened urban primary healthcare systems by maintaining health clinics, providing support for Covid-19 testing and quarantining, setting up digital wellbeing centres, training local health “champions”, and educating factory workers and management on risks of sexual harassment and violence to women. The results showed that 98% of all factory staff surveyed reported a safer working environment. In addition, they saw an increase in health and hygiene measures by factory workers, and the delivery of guidance combatting gender-based violence to 73,000 workers in 25 factories.

WAGE DIGITISATION PROGRAMMES   

Opening bank accounts for those who were previously unbanked and processing direct transfer of salaries to bank accounts for low-income factory workers using biometrics such as fingerprints rather than documentation has had a direct, positive, wage-related impact for the worker in many ways:

• Living wage increase through reduction of leakage and corruption associated with cash salary payments;
• Security of cash
• Income on their cash
• Social inclusion
• Becoming part of the formal economy
• Financial security and control leads to a desire to further improve education and promotion opportunities in workers

WORKPLACE COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAMME   

Effective workplace engagement is key to achieving a healthy workplace environment. It is important to start by building trust through efforts to improve information provision and consultation with workers. 

To help our suppliers in this task, we developed a Workplace Communications programme - a two day training course and toolkit available for all our suppliers, which set out how to develop or improve the provision of, and management interaction with, trade unions, worker committees, effective communication channels and trade union relationships.

FACTORY SAFETY PROGRAMMES   

For several years from 2012 we implemented a Fire Safety programme in all factories in Bangladesh with Worldwide Responsible Accreditation Production (WRAP). The programme was unique to M&S due to its fire champion module which takes workers right through from how fires start, the context and risks within the workplace, to how to effectively evacuate the workplace, the importance of safe practices and how they play a part in reducing the risk of fire in the workplace and their homes. By December 2015, all of our garment factories had a worker fire champion in place. This training is now carried out with the International Accord.

LEADERSHIP AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES   

We worked with Emerging Leaders, an NGO that provided leadership training to around 50,000 supply chain workers in Kenya, east Africa and South Africa, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The training takes participants on an incredible journey to a new mind-set and empowers them to take others on the same journey as leaders in their communities. Many tell us that the programme has led to improved productivity, better retention of high quality, motivated employees and less dependency on casual labour.

Between April 2019 and March 2020, we directly helped 4,704 people in our supply chains through our partnership with the Emerging Leaders training programme (last year: 15,000). In addition, an estimated 56,875 people have benefited indirectly according to the Emerging Leaders multiplier methodology. (https://marksandspencer.sid2-e1.investis.com/sites/marksandspencer/files/press_release/2020/plan-a-report-2020.pdf)

GENDER EMPOWERMENT PROGRAMMES   

Since 2016, we’ve worked in partnership with the British High Commission and Change Alliance programmes in India to promote gender equality and ensure safe environments for female workers. The POWER programme (Providing Opportunities to Women for Equal Rights) encourages women to join and lead the labour market, and comprises three pillars: gender equality (addressing stereotypes), accountability (creating a mechanism for complaints to be heard), and responsiveness (creating a culture that enables women to speak up).

Key initiatives include helping female workers build communication skills, manage their money, maintain good health, and plan for the future. Starting in 2022, the second phase of POWER helps women build on the work done so far, taking on new responsibilities at work and leadership roles, both in and out of the factory. The programme offers training in gender and life skills, and identifies technical skills required for progression. The first cohort includes 16 manufacturing units, 16 peer trainers and 1,700 workers.