Schijvens Corporate Fashion has been committed to creating good working conditions in the factories where our customers’ clothing is produced for many years. We entered into a collaboration with the Fair Wear Foundation in 2010 and have been fighting for fair working conditions in the clothing industry together ever since that time.
We are assessed by the Fair Wear Foundation every year. This year we managed an impressive rise from 8.9 to 9.6, with 100% of our factories being monitored! This has once again allowed us to retain our Leader status.
Living wage
Our main focus is on implementing a living wage in all our factories. We are gradually trying to roll out the living wage tool to all our factories. We managed to do this in our factories in China and India over the past year. We believe the wages we pay for our products should be sufficient to meet basic needs such as food, housing, transport, medicines, education, etc. The basic wage needs to be enough to pay for food, accommodation, transport, medicines, education, etc. That’s why we, at Schijvens, are investigating whether our cost price is sufficient to pay a living wage. Should this not be the case, we will opt to increase the cost price in such a way that a living wage can be paid.
Determining a living wage is an interesting process which involves all factory workers. Implementing the living wage is one thing, but raising awareness among factory workers is quite another. That’s why we also decided to organise living wage training at the factories. We used these training sessions to explain what a living wage entails and why we do this.
Training
The living wage training isn’t the only training we organised over the past year. We organised basic Fair Wear Foundation training and gender training at a number of our factories in Pakistan. The Fair Wear Foundation training is, for example, about the 8 labour standards, how employees can submit complaints if there are any and how we will subsequently resolve these. The gender training is about the woman’s role in the factories, the division between men and women and sexual intimidation.
We organised an Advanced training course about gender inequality at our largest supplier in Pakistan, MYM. This resulted in MYM now intending to take on more women and will also be offering women higher positions.
Collaboration
We are constantly working on improving the working conditions for our employees where safety, working hours and wages are concerned, in collaboration with our partners. The close contact we have with our suppliers makes our relationship quite unique. This close contact also contributes to the sustainable and stable relationship between us and our suppliers. We will offer our factories support whenever the need arises, making sure we can hopefully continue with this relationship for many more years to come.
We were unfortunately unable to get together with our suppliers last year as a result of COVID-19. But of course we wouldn’t be Schijvens if we hadn’t come up with an alternative idea. This resulted in our very first virtual supplier meeting. This allowed us to see and speak to everyone again and so we are now once again up to date on the issues our factories are facing during these uncertain times. We hope we’ll be able to meet up with the entire group again by the end of this year for our supplier meeting in Morocco.
Curious about our Brand Performance Check? Then do go and take a look at the website of Fair Wear Foundation.
