Protecting The Rights Of Workers Who Make Our Products

Apparel is a dirty business. Even putting aside environmental harms such as coal-powered factories, water waste and toxic chemicals, globally, our industry is a long way from treating the people who work in factories, mills and farms equitably. Issues such as excessive overtime and low wages remain pervasive; too often, the voices of these workers are not heard.

At Patagonia, we are implicated in this system yet working to bring about industry-level change. That’s why we commit to understanding the root causes of issues and developing programs to minimize our harm on the environment and create a positive impact on the lives of people who build our products. When we talk about our focus on quality, we see this as encompassing environmental and social aspects, rather than purely the technical features, or innovation present in the products we make.

Every Patagonia product is made in a factory that we share with other brands, which means we do not own the factories where we manufacture. This presents both a challenge—since we are often among the smaller buyers—and an opportunity to foster change and bring the industry along.

Each product we create demands specific machinery and technical expertise sometimes only found in certain countries and, even more specifically, in certain factories. If we tried to own and manage all of our facilities, it simply wouldn’t be possible to build the breadth of high-quality, technical outdoor products we offer. However dependent we are on these factories, our decades of experience in apparel production have taught us that increased partnership with suppliers, and collaboration with other brands—those who share factories with us, and across the industry—is crucial if we are to live up to our commitments.

For example, we have spent more than a decade working on local, legislative and industry levels to eliminate broker fees for migrant workers, a common legal practice in relatively small countries where there aren’t enough domestic workers to fill manufacturing jobs. In these situations, third-party labor brokers charge foreign migrant workers thousands of dollars simply to get hired. While we’ve been at this work on our own for many years, we knew brand collaboration was imperative for large-scale improvements for migrant workers. For context, Patagonia is, on average, only 1-5% of a single supplier’s total production. We needed strength in numbers. Now with a handful of other apparel brands working alongside us, as a group we have helped recoup roughly $1.7 million dollars on average per year for more than 3,000 workers in Taiwan. But we know more needs to be done to scale and sustain this change. That’s why we are actively seeking like-minded brands to partner with so we can leverage greater, more widespread improvements together.

Besides collaborating with brands to protect workers’ rights, we also partner extensively with respected organizations such as the Fair Labor Association (FLA), Fair Trade USA, International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Better Work, Anker Research Institute, Better Buying Institute and others to ensure that we are aligned with leading standards and stakeholder expectations. For instance, the FLA remains crucial in our work to eradicate labor broker fees for migrant workers. They bring together suppliers, government officials and other brands to drive industry-wide progress. We could not do this work alone.

Our commitment to partner with labor and human rights organizations goes back decades. In 1996, Patagonia took part in President Bill Clinton’s Taskforce on Sweatshops, alongside a small group of companies. This initiative led to the formation of the FLA in 1999, of which we were a founding member. The FLA is now a coalition of over 200 brands, civil society organizations and universities, working in partnership to improve working conditions and the lives of workers who make products around the world.

Additionally, in 2014 we became one of the first Fair Trade USA brand partners in apparel. Our now decade-long commitment to working with Fair Trade-certified factories has resulted in more than $31 million going directly to workers in our supply chain via premiums we pay on every product made in Fair Trade Certified factories. Those premiums, which were used for things like cash bonuses, childcare, food baskets and other necessities, went on to benefit more than 85,000 workers. Today, more than 90 percent of our apparel is made in Fair Trade Certified facilities. While we’re proud of these stats, when we take a step back and put it up against the 75 million total apparel workers in the world, it’s clear there is still much work to do as an industry.

While partnerships are important, none of our impact work and progress could happen without the trust and support from our suppliers. We build long lasting relationships based on transparency and commitment to uphold our rigorous Supplier Code of Conduct and Benchmarks. These documents are the cornerstone of our Social Impact Programs, which we publish for anyone to use, and outline the requirements and expectations for our supplier partners. They are built on FLA principles, which include ILO conventions, international best practices, and respect for local laws and collective bargaining agreements.

Standards alone are not enough, however. We also regularly monitor our supply chain partners through annual audits and work closely with them and experts to problem solve.

Two key priorities for our work are low wages in the supply chain and excessive working hours, identified by the ILO as some of the most significant challenges facing workers around the world. Each is a more complex problem than it might seem, with multiple root causes, such as an inequitable global economic system, weak laws and oversight, and global poverty. As such, each issue requires a multi-faceted solution involving industry, government and civil society.

These two issues were the catalyst for our commitment to achieving living wages for everyone working at our apparel sewing factories. We are progressing toward that goal through initiatives such as Fair Trade, wage data collection, building studies and pilots, and industry engagement. We are not there yet but publish information on our work and where we currently stand against benchmarks on our Living Wage page.

Moreover, low wages, excessive working hours and other worker-related challenges can often be the result of poor purchasing practices by a factory’s buyers in any number of areas from product design, forecasting and planning to pricing and payment terms. For example, if a brand places an order and then changes its mind and significantly increases the order volume with little notice, the factory may have to resort to working excessive overtime hours to meet the new demand. At Patagonia, we embed Responsible Purchasing Practices (RPP) into the departments directly or indirectly involved in making production decisions—so everyone working in this area understands their impacts and strives not to contribute to the problem.

We also seek review and feedback of our efforts. As an accredited member of the FLA, Patagonia’s RPP program is audited and evaluated by an objective third party. The FLA holds us accountable to its principles and monitors our progress annually.

One of the RPP requirements is gathering feedback from our suppliers on how we are doing as a brand partner. We work with the Better Buying Institute to gather extensive feedback from our manufacturing partners about our actions and processes so we can learn where our strengths and weaknesses lies. This information is further used to improve our practices and to hold ourselves accountable.

There is no lack of commitment and passion at Patagonia to protect the hands that make our products. However, it is not just through our own actions, but through scaling our impact that meaningful and long-lasting change can happen for workers across the apparel industry.