Fashion firms agree to compensate garment workers in Mauritius
Barbour and owner of Calvin Klein and Hilfiger among brands to pay £400,000 after report alleges illegal hiring fees, deception and intimidation.
Ben Skinner Discusses Transparentem’s Mauritius Investigation on MSNBC
Our Founder & President Benjamin Skinner recently sat down with Richard Lui on MSNBC to discuss our newly published investigation into labor rights abuses in apparel factories in Mauritius.
Going Backward Was the Biggest Trend of 2023
Skinny models. White male designers. Shoulder pads. This year, fashion failed on many of its promises.
Transparentem Founder Ben Skinner’s NYT Op-ed on Apparel Supply Chains 10 Years After Rana Plaza
In this New York Times op-ed, Transparentem founder and president Ben Skinner exposes the abuses still rife in apparel supply chains ten years after the Rana Plaza disaster. One big reason: brands’ overreliance on the multibillion-dollar social auditing industry, which often fails to detect problems when factory managers deceive auditors.
‘Effectively and Systematically Gamed’: Why Audits Need an Overhaul
As an inferno ravaged a five-story footwear factory in southern Thailand last week, leaving massive cracks in the blackened walls that had firefighters fearing the building’s collapse, human-rights experts are debating the limits of social audits, particularly in the context of voluntary due diligence in global supply chains.
Uncovering Audit Deception: Countering Hidden Social Compliance Violations
“Sophie Broach, an investigations analyst at the global workers’ rights advocate Transparentem, writes about the nonprofit organization’s investigations into forced labor, child labor and other human rights abuses in economies in Asia, including India, Malaysia and Myanmar, which revealed the seriousness and prevalence of audit deception.”
Tech-Driven Tools To Uncover Labor Exploitation
“The report Hidden Harm: Audit Deception in Apparel Supply Chains and the Urgent Case for Reform, by the nonprofit organization Transparentem, documents many cases of deception during social audits in India, Malaysia, and Myanmar.”
Sweatshop Conditions Hide Behind Low-Quality Monitoring, Report Says
“In interviews at almost 20 factories and spinning mills in India, Malaysia and Myanmar, Transparentem investigators learned that employers routinely hid underage workers during audits, coached them to lie about their ages, or gave them modified identity documents to make them look older.”
Migrant Workers in Malaysia’s Garment Sector Face Severe Exploitation
On Sept. 23, the Malaysian immigration department arrested a Bangladeshi garment factory owner, along with 45 illegal foreign workers, on suspicion of using fake temporary work permits obtained by hacking government systems. The workers, aged between 17 and 67, consisted of Bangladesh, Indonesian and Myanmar nationals, according to immigration director-general Khairul Dzaimee Daud.
Fashion, Xinjiang and the Perils of Supply Chain Transparency
Brandie Sasser, the vice-president of strategic engagement at Transparentem, a US non-profit that investigates environmental and human rights violations in… fashion supply chains, says this is already happening. While she has seen a slew of brands move away from Xinjiang cotton since the Trump ban, “companies have been much more nervous about what they put […]