Non-profit UK labour rights organisation, Labour Behind the Label, recently released a report revealing that global fashion brands, including Levi’s, Next, H&M, Gap and Primark, are using a broken billion-dollar audit system that is systematically silencing garment workers in Pakistan, despite widespread evidence of labour abuses in the sector.
Anna Bryher, Policy Lead at Labour Behind the Label, was interviewed by leading German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle in its weekly podcast ‘Inside Europe’. During the conversation, she highlighted how there remains ’significant distrust between worker rights and brands’, calling for brands to help change global systems by ’changing who they listen to’, getting to know workers better and ’not replying on paperwork’.
The 43-page report, entitled “Silenced: How wage ‘compliance’ is failing workers in Pakistan,” examines conditions in factories supplying 15 major international fashion brands.
It identifies serious shortcomings in current audit models that brands use to oversee labour standards in their supply chains. These audit models are repeatedly failing to detect labour abuses in Pakistan’s garment sector.
