Free2Work History

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The Company Description of Its Time

Free2Work is filed as the consumer-facing half of this letter's labour-rights pair: it provides consumers with information on how products relate to modern-day human rights issues, so that through the site you can learn how your favorite brands are working to address forced and child labor, with in-depth information through industry pages, news feeds and blog posts. Where the Fair Labor Association, filed nearby, works with companies and factories from inside the supply chain, Free2Work stands at the barcode and reports outward: there is a tale behind each barcode, the filing says - most products travel through various parts of the world and through many hands before they reach the final consumer, and the goal of Free2Work is to shed light on this process, empowering consumers with information about the likelihood that products are made with forced or child labor.

What the 2012 Apparel Report Found

The historical record preserves a long introduction to Free2Work's 2012 Apparel Industry Trends Report, and its findings are the most quotable research in this letter. Two decades ago it was standard practice for an apparel company to publicly deny any responsibility to workers in its supply chain; after years of worker and consumer activism, a number of companies have developed extensive corporate social responsibility programs. The report assesses fifty apparel companies' CSR practices, and its sharpest finding concerns wages - the one concrete working condition it calls the most accurate impact barometer: while a handful of the CSR management systems assessed correlate with a known improvement in wages, most do not, and only a small number of brands report guarantees of higher-than-minimum wages at the factory level. Most brands have adopted the right policies - the most common Policies grade is an A - while the most common Worker Rights grade is an F.

The report's constructive edge matters as much as its criticism. It highlights model initiatives such as the Freedom of Association Protocol in Indonesia and the Fire and Building Safety Agreement in Bangladesh - issue-specific, direct stakeholder-brand-supplier agreements it calls a new path for enabling workers' voice - and encourages companies to measure and report the impact of their CSR systems, particularly in wage gains, since these programs are only useful where they are creating concrete change for workers. The organisations behind the project are filed at the end: Free2Work is a project created by Not For Sale, which equips and mobilizes activists to deploy innovative solutions to slavery, and supported by the International Labor Rights Forum, founded in 1985, which promotes just and humane treatment for workers worldwide. Feedback, the filing notes, goes to feedback@free2work.org. The full 2012 report is carried in the References, as the historical record linked it.

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