Mosaic Fashions (representing all those named above) have sent me a comprehensive response to my letter. They really appear to be wanting to improve conditions for their workers and this letter comes from their Global Ethical Trading Manager.
Since the publication of ‘Lets Clean Up Fashion’ there have been a number of changes at Mosaic Fashions with respect to Ethical Trading. Whilst all the Mosaic brands had existing supplier policies on Ethical Trading (which were in place for many years) we have recently replaced these with a new group-wide Code of Conduct. The Code is now fully aligned to the Ethical Trading Initiative’s Base Code and is also based on all eight of the International Labour Organisation’s Fundamental Conventions.
We have also recently established a local Ethical Tradign team in China which has allowed us to dedicate more time and resources to implementing and monitoring our Code of Conduct in China – our biggest sourcing country. This year we have increased the number of monitoring and follow up visits with our suppliers. Where we find issues of concern , we agree action plans with our suppliers to ensure these issues are resolved through a process of continuous improvement.
We have taken the decision not to join the Ethical Trading Initiative simply on the basis that maintaining membership is extremely administrative and resource- hungry and we feel that resources are better focused on directly improving working conditions, such as capacity building programmes (for example, our in-country training programmes) or further monitoring of our supply base. We want to ensure we devote sufficient time in understanding workers’ concerns by talking to them and finding out about their likes and dislikes. This informs our strategy as, ultimately, we want to ensure that we are delivering improvements that benefit workers.
Turning to your specific questions:
The countries where Coast suppliers are based include: China, Turkey, Romania, Lithuania, Morocco, Bulgaria and UK.
Our Code of Conduct states that suppliers must pay workers either the legal minimum wage or industry benchmark standards, which ever is higher. But this should always be an amount that provides a ‘Living Wage’, in line with the ETI’s Base Code. Often workers’ wages are paid directly into a bank account. These two areas are monitored to ensure suppliers are meeting our Code standards on wages and benefits.
As we do not employ workers directly, there is no contract between Mosaic and workers. Instead, workers are often employed directly by our supplier and therefore the contract of employment would be between the the worker and the employer. Again, this is an area that is monitored against our Code of Conduct.
The Code applies to all workers in our supply chain adn our suppliers are expected to communicate the Code to workers and their own suppliers too. I am currently looking into a number of issues much further down our supply chain, including workers involved in cotton production.
The number of visits we conduct on each factory can vary. This can be greater in a country like China (which may be more than once, twice or even three times a year) and less frequent in Europe.
In the future we will be providing more information on our Ethical Trading activities on our websites. This is anticipated by late 2008.
I do hope that this goes a long way to reassuring you that we take these issues seriously and are actively addressing them.
