New Good Practice Case Study: Promoting Social Dialogue

Fair Wear joined the Global Deal, an OECD initiative to promote social dialogue, in 2017 and made clear commitments to work to promote social dialogue in global garment supply chains. One of those commitments was to commission and share research on the key obstacles to social dialogue in various garment-producing countries, alongside recommendations on addressing those obstacles moving forward.

This newly published paper by the Global Deal highlights the research that Fair Wear, with partners Cornell University’s New Conversation Project, Mondiaal FNV and CNV Internationaal, conducted from 2018 – 2020. The study identifies barriers to efficient social dialogue: resistance to freedom of association and collective bargaining, hesitancy on the part of workers to engage in dialogue with management, and fragmentation of trade unions. Despite these obstacles, the paper illustrates through several case studies that effective social dialogue can be established and draws lessons on facilitating social dialogue in garment supply chains.

This ‘best practice’ case study can be found here.

The full research reports can be found here.