Tag: graduate school

As an activist for human rights along the fashion supply chain, it is easy to label corporations, governments and factory owners as “the bad guys”. They are the ones perpetuating unfair labor practices, right? In many ways, yes, but it’s too simple to stop asking questions there. Digging deeper into the situations causing them to exploit people, and understanding exactly how these powerful players are able to skirt systems put in place to protect workers is at the crux of solving this issue. Addressing these oversights and bringing everyone to the table to find pathways for mutually beneficial change is crucial to building better businesses that are able to navigate the apparel supply chain in a way that incorporates human rights at every level.

At NYU Stern, the Center for Business and Human Rights is working on research to tackle exactly these issues in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Stern established the Center for Business and Human Rights in 2013, the first of its kind. Forming right after the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, the center decided to take a close look at how the government and brands address this tragic loss of life in the sector. After their first report, they identified a major issue causing human rights violations to be transparency in the Bangladeshi supply chain. To shine a light on the breadth of the garment industry and how different factories operated, they created an interactive mapping tool to track all the factories in the country. Their latest report, Five Years After Rana Plaza: The Way Forward – released just this month, assesses this critical juncture in the Bangladeshi garment industry where the Accord (mainly comprised of European brands) and the Alliance (mainly comprised of American brands) are gearing up to transfer their responsibilities to the government and outlines recommendations for moving forward.

Although we are five years out from the Rana Plaza disaster and some improvements have been made, the industry is still on the verge of a major disaster in the Bangladeshi garment sector due to the drastic inequalities between factories that have emerged. Instead of lifting up the industry as a whole, the Accord and the Alliance groomed select factories to raise their standards for foreign export, while other factories lagged behind and even decreased in standards as they produced for countries with more lenient standards, the Bangladeshi domestic market or even served as subcontractors for these larger sanctioned factories. In effect, they managed to create a bifurcation between factories and further engrained subcontracted work as a necessary component to meeting foreign brand’s demands.

After reading the report and talking with April Gu, the Associate Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights, I learned how the center is advocating for steps forward that will help to raise accountability with the Bangladeshi government, create a shared responsibility over worker’s rights and funding for remediation, and provide more transparency throughout the web of factories operating in the country. Stressing the importance of mitigating risk across the sector, brands don’t want to invest so much money to remediate factories just to have their garments show up in a subcontracted factory with major fire or structural problems and cause a media frenzy. The next steps for the center are to start forming a task force and build the timeline for their Shared Responsibility model. 

This is not the first organization to preach the necessity of shared responsibility and accountability across all parties involved, but their neutral stance and ability to bring different stakeholders together helps them accomplish this better than other advocacy groups. When given a platform to come together and collaborate on important social and environmental issues in a non-competitive space, brands are able to learn from each other and discover ways in which they can collectively change the industry for the better. Since the center is housed in a business school and is approaching the problem from that mindset, they are able to bridge the gap between workers rights and business strategy.

Beyond their research and advocacy work, the staff at the Center for Business and Human Rights also teach courses at NYU Stern in the Business and Society Program, embedding this into the core business curriculum. A speaker series is also put on for all NYU students to explore careers in Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Innovation to encourage them to follow career paths in these fields.

I’m happy to see programs like this emerging within a business context and hope to see more. One of the recommendations from the center for the way forward for Bangladesh is to shift the way in which brands purchase from suppliers. They are encouraging companies to consider including a social component into the cost of good. Having worked in the industry managing production and negotiating pricing with factories, I am acutely aware of how ingrained this mindset of driving down the price of the garment at all costs and the pressures brands feel from consumers to keep their pricing low. The idea of disrupting the industry in this way, and being able to change the way in which fashion businesses interact with their suppliers through education would certainly be revolutionary. I hope to start seeing this shift as more business students are taught to address issues of human rights and ethics along the supply chain.

Multi-stakeholder partnerships were my reason for returning to graduate school, how are they formed, how do different members work together, how are the goals decided upon when everyone has a different approach? Last semester I studied Race to the Top‘s structure in Vietnam and their perspective of setting standard auditing systems throughout the country and also collectively raising money for creating a sustainable garment sector. The Center for Business and Human Right’s approach in Bangladesh focuses more on stamping out subcontracted work and raising the industry as a whole, as well as a system for collective funding. These initiatives are in their nascency and it is too early to measure the positive impact they’ll have in the industry, but it’s great to see the big players taking the first step and start to work together on these pressing human rights issues.