News |
Over 50 retailers, member of ICS, committed to feature their suppliers on Sustainability Map
- April 14, 2021
- 8:45 am
About
The opacity of global supply chains is becoming ever more criticized. The challenges to ensure good working conditions in the textile industry, including both social and environmental issues, involve all actors.
Consumers and brands are pressing for greater visibility and transparency in the supply chains, in the business relationships at play and on working conditions and environmental impacts data. Transparency and traceability are thus at the cornerstone of this revolution as powerful tools for the promotion of corporate accountability for garment workers’ rights.
Both consumers and brands are pressing for change and this can be a great opportunity for factories to be part of this change. On the one hand, consumers do not want to buy clothes made by women and men that are working in dangerous conditions, over-worked, paid poverty-level wages or in polluted environments or simply if they do not have enough information on the goods they wear. On the other hand, both brands and factories benefit from greater transparency, encouraging them to engage and collaborate with various stakeholders such as civil society groups and trade unions in order to identify and remedy problems more swiftly, leading to better and fairer working conditions in factories.
Collaboration
The International Trade Centre (ITC) in partnership with the Initiative for Compliance and Sustainability (ICS) have created a FREE online gateway named Sustainability Map that enables factories to gain visibility in the international supply chains and connect to international buyers. Companies can easily create and manage online profiles and start to market their businesses.
Since its launch in 2017, over 50’000 companies, including international buyers, intermediaries and producers from more than 20 countries, have created their company profiles on the Sustainability Map platform.
To join the platform, factories receive invitations from ICS Members with whom they are already doing business. The Factory ID has already been populated by data provided through the ICS audit process (limited to general data about their company’s location, production and processing activities). Factories are invited to check or if needed to update data relative to their identification only before accepting to make it publicly available through Sustainability Map. Information about the ICS audits’ dates and types will be automatically shared and would not be modified. Factories own their Factory ID and can modify and update information about their factory identification, with the goal to share this data first with their ICS members’ clients and then by publishing transparently their Factory ID to make their business more transparent and attractive to international buyers. The Factory ID identifies a factory as one of the suppliers of a specific or multiple ICS Members.
Benefits
It is very challenging for factories, suppliers and brands at all levels to monitor and control working conditions and environmental impacts across these highly globalized networks of actors.
To remedy this, there is a clear need for greater visibility and transparency in the supply chains, in the business relationships at play and on the social and environmental conditions within production sites. Transparency and traceability are thus at the cornerstone of this revolution to promote corporate accountability for garment workers’ rights. The duty of vigilance is the path towards progress in transparency and accountability across global supply chains.
Transparency empowers factories to improve their working conditions by promoting their good practices and create a two-way communication between suppliers and buyers.
- Factories promote their best practices.
- Brands map their supply chains on a secure and neutral platform and promote their due diligence in measuring their suppliers’ compliance and sustainability performance.
- Transparency tools and processes may be used to report grievances to related actors.
The main need is to cross-check all data to ensure that the compliance level is always maintain in the factories. Mutualization and collaboration is then key and ICS with its brands members fully believe that the opened and neutral platform proposed by ITC with Sustainability Map will help this monitoring
The Network
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