NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 10: ASOS signage attends the Teen Vogue celebration of Fashion's Night Out at... [+] West Village - Bleecker Street on September 10, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Arun Nevader/Getty Images for Teen Vogue)
Iconic retail brands have been recently implicated in a BBC investigation into the unethical practices of Turkish textile industry. ASOS, an online fashion company and Marks & Spencer, an iconic British high street retailer, have both been identified as possessing child workers in their supply chains.
In one case, the investigators found 7-8 year-old children sewing boxer shorts. The BBC found children exhausted from working 60-hour weeks and are unable to attend school.
ASOS’s operated a 'fashion with integrity' initiative to 'manage all aspects of our business transparently'.
M&S found the reports 'extremely serious' and 'unacceptable'. The company offered legal employment to legal refugee and pledged that 'we will do all we can to ensure that this does not happen again'.
ASOS’s operated a 'fashion with integrity' initiative to 'manage all aspects of our business transparently'. In response to the allegations, ASOS argued that such practices were contrary to their code of conduct.
'We have not found child labor in any of our approved Turkish factories. Most importantly, our team oversees remediation programs for vulnerable people who they discover in the workplace. In the example BBC Panorama showed, that was a factory we didn’t know about – unapproved outsourcing.'
One supplier, Hazar Tekstil, sub-contracted its work to small workshops across Istanbul, Turkey’s industrial hub. It is in these unregulated and unapproved areas that children were forced into employment.
ASOS offered to support affected children and Syrian refugees 'despite the fact that the factory has nothing to do with ASOS'. Hazar Tekstil has been dropped by ASOS.
But it is not sufficient to claim ignorance, either for unknown suppliers or for creating an environment in which unauthorized outsourcing can occur. Companies are responsible for the conditions in which their goods are produced. They also have a responsibility to understand where their suppliers operate and must ensure they have high standards of visibility within that chain.
The investigation also found evidence of exploitation of refugees. Three million Syrians live in Turkey, fleeing the war and destruction of their homeland. Their desperation makes them easy prey for unscrupulous employers.
'They know they are being ripped off,' observes Darragh MacIntyre the lead reporter 'but they can do nothing about it.'
In many cases the investigation finds the employment of Syrian refugees working far below the Turkish minimum wage. One undercover report found a facility produces garments for high street retailers Mango and Zara, in which employers worked 12-hour shifts in dangerous conditions.
Mango stated that the facilities in which its brand was found stated that the factory was a 'sub-contractor' and operated 'without Mango’s knowledge'. This is the classic defense within the supply chain: outsource and deny. But companies’ moral responsibilities – and increasingly their legal responsibilities – extend beyond the primary supplier.
Zara claimed that it had audited the offending factory in June 2016 and itself found 'significant non-compliance' with their code of conduct and had given the supplier until the end of the year 'to make the necessary improvements'.
The main method for companies to combat such practices is the audit: where inspectors arrive unannounced an ensure that the facilities and practices are compliant with the company code of conduct. But the child workers noted that audits were ineffective, as the children were simply hidden away until the auditors left. In one episode, the children were required to hide from 10am to 6pm.
Clearly the current system for supply chain integrity appears to be dysfunctional. Not only are auditors being duped, by buyers are being outfox as suppliers engage in unauthorized outsourcing.
Undoubtedly, the supply chain is a complex leviathan. It ranges over many countries and suppliers. Despite this, that a team of investigators can uncover a wide array of abuses in just a single city with relative ease is an indication that many retailers are failing to understand their own supply chains and are failing to ensure fair treatment of staff employed within supply chains. If such practices are permitted to persist, brands will grow associated with these malpractices.
'If a machine breaks, they’ll fix it,' stated one refugee, 'but it anything happens to a Syrian, they’ll throw him away like a piece of cloth.'