German clothing brands asked to up transparency

German apparel and footwear brands should promote workers' rights in their global operations by publicly disclosing the factories producing their products, Human Rights Watch said on Friday.

Supply chain transparency through public disclosure would demonstrate a brand's commitment to ensuring good working conditions for workers throughout their operations, it said.

"German clothing brands should promote respect for worker rights and safety by making their global supply chains transparent," the US rights body said.

"Adidas, a leading German brand, has been publicly disclosing its supplier list since 2007 - demonstrating that transparency is both possible and desirable."

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented lax Cambodian government enforcement of labour laws and the need for apparel brands to improve their monitoring and compliance.

For the report, Human Rights Watch examined labour practices in factories producing products for Adidas, Armani, Gap, H&M, Joe Fresh, and Marks and Spencer among others.

Many factories in Cambodia repeatedly issued short-term contracts beyond the two-year limit to avoid paying workers maternity and other benefits, and to intimidate and control them.

Workers on short-term contracts who tried to form unions or assert their rights were especially at risk of not having their contracts renewed.

Many apparel brands have not taken adequate steps to end this illegal use of short-term contracts in their Cambodian supplier factories - even where their supplier codes of conduct have clauses limiting their use, it said.

By publicly disclosing and updating the names of suppliers, the garment brands enable public scrutiny of their supply chains, which in turn will help alert brands to poor working conditions and other human rights problems in their supplier factories, Human Rights Watch said.

Such transparency also allows brings to light the factories are authorized - and not authorized - to produce clothes for a particular brand.

Brands' suppliers sometimes subcontract their work to other factories that subject workers to dangerous or abusive conditions without authorization and without the brands' knowledge, Human Rights Watch said.

Supply chain transparency helps monitoring groups alert brands to these situations so they can be addressed.

The lack of transparency was evident following the collapse on April 24, 2013 of the Rana Plaza complex in Dhaka which housed a number of garment factories, killing more than 1,100 workers and injuring thousands more.

Unions and labour rights groups gathered brand labels of the clothes produced in the destroyed factories from the rubble and demanded that those brands contribute to the compensation fund for the victims and support broader reform measures.