Fair Wear's Theory of Change

Vision of success

Fair Wear Foundation’s overall vision of success is a world where workers in the garment industry see their rights to safe, dignified, properly paid employment realised. To achieve this goal, it is necessary that:

• Brands continuously improve their internal mechanisms, including their purchasing practices
• Brands – in cooperation with their suppliers and trade unions – systematically and effectively prevent, mitigate and remediate risks and violations of labour rights throughout their supply chains
• Policy makers and regulatory oversight organisations create an enabling environment for the effective enforcement of labour rights

Fair Wear promotes a supply chain approach of ‘shared responsibility’ to social compliance in the global garment sector. We believe the management decisions of clothing brands have an enormous influence on factory conditions. Fair Wear has a unique member verification methodology, the Brand Performance Check. During a performance check, Fair Wear investigates the level of integration of social compliance into the core business practices of the member company and assesses how the management and purchasing practices of the brand support the Fair Wear Code of Labour Practices.

Pathways of change

For Fair Wear’s vision of success to become a reality, we envisage that changes are needed across five different actor groups: Fair Wear member brands, other brands, suppliers, trade unions and workers and policy makers. In Fair Wear’s vision of success these actor groups will change towards the following:

• Fair Wear Member Brands continuously improve their internal mechanisms and share their best practices
• Other brands, and particularly those that are members of platforms that encourage responsible business conduct, take responsibility for their full supply chain and cooperate towards systematic and effective prevention, mitigation and remediation of risks and violations of labour rights
• Suppliers facilitate systematic and effective prevention, mitigation and remediation of risks and violations
• Trade unions negotiate labour conditions and monitor remediation of labour rights violations
• Policy makers and regulatory oversight organisations – through complementary international, regional and national regulatory frameworks and legislation – enable the effective enforcement of labour rights

We consider social dialogue to be key towards creating sustainable changes in the supply chain. In such a dialogue, the most important stakeholders are at the table to negotiate improved working conditions. Social dialogue is successful, in Fair Wear’s view, if workers are making use of (internal) grievance mechanisms and if trade unions systematically negotiate working conditions and monitor remediation.

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Read the full Theory of Change narrative here.