In the first HREDD Compass, our Executive Director raised a critical question: how can companies create the relationships of trust needed to address labour conditions and potential risks, especially in times of volatility?
Experience from our work with partners shows that this trust is built through structured collaboration: by investing time in developing a shared understanding of risks, making commitments explicit, and jointly addressing structural drivers, such as purchasing practices and gender inequality.
Such was the case in the project ‘For fair fashion: improving due diligence, wages, and gender equity in the Turkish garment sector’. In partnership with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), Fair Wear collaborated with brands Kuyichi, Schijvens and Zeeman and nine of their suppliers on addressing gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace by leveraging responsible purchasing practices, even in times of hyperinflation.
The relation between gender, purchasing practices and labour violations
Across production countries, a consistent pattern emerges: when commercial pressure on suppliers increases, risks for workers increase, and these risks are not distributed evenly. Women and other vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected, particularly through forms of violence and harassment that remain largely invisible in traditional monitoring systems yet affect more than one in five workers. While anyone can be affected, women are disproportionately impacted, and perpetrators are disproportionately male. Violations remain hidden because survivors do not feel safe speaking up, have low trust in the effectiveness of remediation processes, or do not report them at all due to a lack of awareness of what constitutes gender-based violence and harassment. Fair Wear’s research on gender-based violence and harassment in the Turkish garment industry and earlier research in Vietnam reflect this. These dynamics directly affect trust: where pressure increases, workers are less likely to speak up, and companies lack the visibility needed to act effectively.
A gender-responsive action plan: a case study on advancing gender equality in supply chains
“Prior to working on gender, understand that you need trust and a shared language to address complex topics such as violence and harassment at work, and the role that gender plays in that. "
- Zoé Daemen, CSR Specialist People at Zeeman.
Against this background, Fair Wear and brands Kuyichi, Schijvens and Zeeman focused on addressing the root causes of gender-based violence and harassment through a coordinated, multi-lever approach:
1. Embedding a gender lens in policies, processes and contracts to make gender equality commitments, gender risks and gender-responsive processes explicit.
Brands and suppliers analysed their existing policies and processes and added a gender lens to these in a process of joint learning. A key insight was that explicitly communicating your organisation's commitment to gender equality, expected behaviours, and accountability helps build trust and clarity between partners. When expectations, responsibilities, and consequences are transparent, it creates a more level playing field and enables more effective collaboration.
2. Training workers, supervisors and management to raise awareness about gender-based violence and harassment in the place of work and capacitate the Occupational Health and Safety (OSH) committee to address and prevent violence and harassment.
This process was critical in building a shared language, an essential precondition for trust and effective dialogue on sensitive issues. Participants noted that sessions led by a local expert created a common understanding of discriminatory and harassing behaviour.
Training also focused on raising awareness about available grievance mechanisms; a critical element, as gender-based violence and harassment are not commonly discussed and rarely show up in traditional audits, so companies need to find different methods for workers to raise such issues safely. To facilitate this, brands and suppliers focused on strengthening gender‑responsive, anonymous and survivor‑centred grievance mechanisms, such as establishing or improving OSH committees.
3. Working towards the payment of a living wage, ensuring that price negotiations do not create extra pressure on factory floors.
Addressing purchasing practices was a critical component in building trust and reducing pressure at the factory level. This was particularly meaningful in the context of Türkiye, where hyperinflation impacts the economy and living wage benchmarks change frequently. At selected suppliers, brands discussed open costing using wage data from Fair Wear factory onsite assessments to understand the living wage gap: the difference between current wages and a living wage. Brands took individual approaches to paying towards a living wage, such as structurally including the cost of labour when a living wage is factored into pricing, or paying annual bonuses to compensate their share towards a living wage. These approaches demonstrate how aligning commercial decisions with social outcomes can help address root causes of risk, rather than shifting pressure onto workers.
Lessons for action at scale
This project illustrates how trust can be built in practice: through sustained collaboration, transparency, and shared responsibility between brands, suppliers, and local stakeholders. It also points to a broader lesson for the industry: trust is not a starting point, but an outcome of how companies engage, make decisions, and share responsibility across the supply chain. Addressing complex issues like gender-based violence requires coordinated action and alignment across multiple levers, from purchasing practices to worker engagement and local expertise. Without this alignment, even well-intentioned interventions will fall short.
For collaboration to succeed, partners must develop a shared understanding of risks, root causes, and their respective responsibilities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives like Fair Wear play a vital role in facilitating this process, bringing stakeholders together, grounding action in production country expertise, and translating due diligence into practical tools and approaches.
To learn more about this project or how these approaches can be applied across your supply chains, contact [email protected].