Call upon brands to reveal their product origin

A coalition of unions and labour rights advocates have urged all global brands to join in a transparency pledge – to reveal where their products are made.

The call was placed in a 40-page joint report, just ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse disaster in Savar – the biggest industrial disaster to date.

Companies that align with the pledge agree to publish information identifying the factories that produce their goods, addressing a key obstacle to rooting out abusive labor practices across the industry and helping to prevent disasters like the Rana Plaza collapse, HRW reports.

The coalition contacted 72 companies and asked them to adopt and carry out the pledge. The report details their responses and measures their current supply chain transparency practices against the pledge.

“A basic level of supply chain transparency in the garment industry should be the norm in the 21st century,” said Aruna Kashyap, senior counsel for the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.

“Openness about a company’s supply chain is better for workers, better for human rights, and shows that companies care about preventing abuse in their supply chains.”

Of the 72 companies that the coalition contacted, 17 will be in full alignment with the pledge standards by December 2017, the report said.