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Last year Labour behind the Label released a report entitled Let’s Clean up Fashion, the report interrogated eleven high street retailers’ claims about their ethical trading programmes and concluded that none of the companies was doing enough. On Friday, Labour behind the Label released their 2007 update. This year’s report focuses on three issues: wages, freedom of association and collective bargaining and moving beyond monitoring.

The report notes in its introduction the vast differences between the wages of company directors and executives and those of the workers at the other end of the supply chain. It states that two years ago Sir Phillip Green claimed a £1.2 billion dividend, enough to double the salaries of Cambodia’s entire garment workforce for 8 years.

Let’s Clean up Fashion 2007 analyses how many companies have been targetted for exposes in the last year. It argues convincingly that these exposes are not just troublesome cases, but are the result of endemic cases in the industry. It concludes that whilst some companies are now admitting there is a problem with wages in the sector, only a few have done anything about it and of those very few are engaging with the problems systematically.

Gap, New Look and Next however, comes out rather well. The report stated “Gap’s strength has been in building positive relationships with trade unions and NGOs, dealing quickly and effectively with problems in factories when they emerge, and taking a lead on building cross-sector work.” Labour behind the Label states that New Look are “one of the companies most open to our concerns.” They are encouraged by New Look’s work attempting to come to grips with a living wage in Bangladesh and their approach to using local groups for monitoring and verification. In Labour behind the Label’s view “Next seems to have started to take up our challenge of moving beyond pilot projects to a more systematic approach, at least in terms of the living wage.” Well done Gap, New Look and Next.