Ensuring a sustainable future for the South-East European Textiles

Fair Wear has an active presence in Eastern Europe, namely North Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria. On 11th May 2022 – at the invitation of IndustriAll – Fair Wear’s regional coordinator for Eastern Europe, Biljana Solakovska Mihajlovska, spoke during the national workshop in North Macedonia organised as part of the project “Ensuring a sustainable future for the South-East European Textiles, Clothing, Leather and Footwear Industries”.

The workshop is a continuation of IndustriAll’s earlier organising and collective EU funded bargaining project in the region. The three European industry associations, Euratex, CEC and COTANCE have joined IndustriAll Europe to support fashion brands in rethinking their supply chain strategies. North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania are among the participating countries.

During the workshop, we presented Fair Wear’s approach toward fair pricing and living wages. The new Fair Price App was presented and well-received as a tool that will allow fashion brands and factories to ring-fence the labour cost based on a transparent methodology for costing/pricing of goods. The suppliers present at the workshop were particularly interested in the tool and in general, it was found to be a constructive and tangible way of moving forward towards a sustainable industry and gives scope for better price negotiation.