Global Fashion and COVID-19

A very good morning, very good afternoon.

Very good evening, everyone.

Delighted to welcome you today to another really interesting discussion from resilience and resistance to the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the textile and garment supply chain.

Well, we're going to talk about that, but probably not only together with my colleague, Dr. Hamid Foroughi.

We we're absolutely delighted to welcome you.

What I'm going to do now is to share my screen for Hamid and I to introduce you to the way we are going to work and our session generally.

So hopefully you can see my screen.

Right.

Fantastic.

So from resilience to resistance how the covid-19 has impacted the garment and textile industry, so you may have heard this sentence from the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gutierrez.

It's a pandemic of human rights abuses.

And this is going to be very much our perspective today, actually, because, yes, of course, there is a virus.

Yes, of course, is a pandemic which has resulted in so many different things, and in particular a pandemic of human rights abuses.

For two reasons discrimination in the delivery of public services is very much revealing of the structural inequalities that impede access to them.

We've all seen that, including in the U.K., was the situation of hospitals.

Disproportionate effects on certain communities, the rise of hate speech, the targeting of vulnerable groups, and the risk of heavy handed security responses undermining the health response.

Here again, we've seen that everywhere in the world, and it's certainly very much applicable to countries like India and Bangladesh.

So this sort of extraordinary precedence has informed the UN response as much as it helps us frame the Covid-19.

And it has greatly impacted the most vulnerable, as illustrated by our discussion today.

So the comments you're going to hear from all our speakers today are very much based on field work, including our own field work.

I think Professor Bradley just alluded to the fact that we've worked in India and Bangladesh before the lockdown's and during the lockdown through our network.

We're very much looking forward to to going back to meeting people in real life who understand that the situation there is extremely complicated.

But it is also a way for us to express our support to our colleagues on the ground and all the workers and the communities we've been working with.

So this pandemic of human rights abuses I think you understood why we talk about that, because it really impacts absolutely everything from business, equality, state discrimination, migration, labour, women, civil society, regulation, justice and so on and so forth.

Impact has been massive.

Our colleague Sarah is going to tell us more about that but from the buyer's perspective of the industry, you had cancellation of order, transparency, problem in the supply chain, women in particular, you know, they make the biggest amount of workers really have been laid off, problems of safety, problem of living and working conditions, a reduction of pay, international and internal migration.

We all remember the massive migrations in India last year.

We're just wondering what's going to happen now with the new lockdown in India.

Threats to violation of the rule of law here again, the labour law in particular, and the massive threats everywhere in the world, and in particular in India and Bangladesh, but not only.

Extreme inequalities in terms of access to technology.

In a word, the covid-19 has exposed and deepened vulnerabilities everywhere in the world.

And we have seen risk and maybe new risks, new forms of labour abuses, slavery per se, but not only is concerned, so the responses again have been diverse, sometimes rapid, sometimes not.

Our colleagues are going to address this question from the donors, from the brands, and also all that has confirmed or revealed a number of extremely problematic issues from informality of the sector to tracking and registration of worker dependency on buyer, corruption, supply-chain vulnerability of women at risk, child labour, you name it.

So this is basically how we are going to work today.

That's my last slide before I give the floor to to Amit, our programme.

As you understood, we have a three step sort of process of first panel with our panellists listed here.

As you can see, Sarah Ditty, Dr Bhskar Chatterjee, Professor Tamsin
Bradley, myself rapidly Dr of Vivek Soundararajan, Dr Matthew Anderson and Isabella Lieu.

The panel is going to be chairedby Hamid.

Then you have questions and answer.

Then a really interesting session organised by Hamid who's going to say more about it, sort of mini workshop within the panel or the programme.

And then a second panel from resilience to resistance with Leana Hosea, Salil Tripathi, Sebastian Devaraj and Dr Suti Sahriah, chaired by myself.

And then again, questions and answers.

So that that's all for me for now.

I'd like to give the floor quickly to Hamid so that he explain how he sees his workshop and other whatever he wants to add before we start, our first panel.

Thank you very much, Leila.

Just a warm welcome from me, for all of you as well.

As Leila explained, we've been thinking about this.

And we have a great line of speakers, so we're very pleased to have all of you here.

Just I'm not going to let you I'm sure that you all here to listen to the speakers.

I'm going to just say one or two more sentence.

That is, I think the core of the core ideas that we have been thinking about is that we often hear about solidarity, about resilience, that the communities need to build resilience, resilience.

But we have been trying to think, OK, yes, we want during the covid-19 communities need to develop ways to develop the resilience, but we don't want to stop there.

So the idea is that I want to explore here how as academics, as the practitioners, as NGOs, as people who work in the industry, how we could actually help to change some of those wrongest structures.

And in a way, we call it the label of the resistance there.

With this background, I'm not going to really hold up, take much time in terms of my workshop.

I will explain it in after the end of the first panel.

So we'll have about 40, about 40, 45 minutes of time now for our first panel, followed by 15 minutes of questions and answers.

So can I invite Sarah Dutti our first presenter to share her slides and kick this session, kick off the session.

Perfect, we can see your slides.

So.

OK, sorry, I just didn't unmute myself first classic Zoom.

Yeah, hi everyone, I'm Sarah from Fashion Revolution.

For those of you who don't know who we are, we are a global movement of activists made up of all sorts of different types of people spanning the global fashion industry.

And we are basically working towards an industry that values people and planet over growth and profit.

And we were founded in response to the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013.

And at that time we really saw how a lack of supply chain transparency and traceability led to people literally losing their lives.

And so we set out to campaign for greater supply chain transparency and we've kind of been focussing on that and more broadly on working conditions and environmental sustainability ever since then.

We are a very big network now, we have teams in 92 countries with 14 official registered offices and the rest are volunteer teams in seventy eight countries.

And we have also been really successful at kind of galvanising the public and building a very big community of people who care and are taking both personal and collective actions to try and fuel a positive change within this industry.

So my talk today, I really wanted to, I guess, set the scene for what everyone else is going to be talking about today and obviously that focussing on how covid has impacted people working in garment and textile supply chain.

So I think probably a lot of you know a little bit about this, but I think some of the the yeah, I guess some of the stats and kind of facts are quite shocking.

So I think is a lot of us know when the pandemic struck, you know, major brands and retailers cancelled their orders en masse.

And those were often orders that had already been placed and in some case already made and already shipped and since then have refused to pay for at least 16 billion dollars worth of goods.

And other estimates put it closer to 40 billion.

And that's been having a life threatening consequent on workers the length of the supply chain, which I'm sure we'll hear about in more detail from people working in the field.

You know, millions of workers in the global garment supply chain have not been paid their full wages.

They've lost their jobs and they don't and haven't had adequate financial compensation throughout the whole of the pandemic.

The Clean Clothes campaign estimates that about 10 percent of the global apparel workforce has been laid off since the start of the pandemic.

And since a lot of the people who make our clothes tend to already be earning poverty wages for for decades and decades, this has left them with no savings to survive this crisis.

And as a result of the economic fallout of the of the of the pandemic, it's really worked to exacerbate existing inequalities within global supply chains, which I'm sure we'll hear more about from the presentations later on.

So all in all, garment workers are owed somewhere between 3.2 And 5.8 billion US dollars just for the first in lost wages, just for the first three months of the pandemic.

And that's considered conservative estimates.

The instability has also left open the door for union busting by employers and several production countries, which I'm sure we might hear more about how unions are working on these issues later on.

In the first six months of the pandemic, the Clean Clothes Campaign reported that they found at least one hundred and ninety three cases of workers rights violations throughout the network that they work with, mainly across Asia, South Asia and Eastern Europe.

And thirty seven percent of that accounted for wage theft, 30 percent of that accounted for mass dismissals and nearly nine nearly 19 percent union busting and harassment of unionised workers and nine percent reported unsafe working conditions.

And of the cases where wage theft was reported, the most frequently named brands were seen.

And Top Shop, next, PVH and Primark.

So obviously, all the brands we kind of know on our own high streets here.

And I yeah, our own partners, the Garment Worker Diaries Project, which I would encourage you to check out, they've been collecting regular credible data on work hours, income, expenses and financial tools that garment workers in textiles use in production countries and throughout.

They've been tracking things very week by week, very carefully throughout the pandemic and have report have found that reported levels of food insecurity amongst workers has gone from 3 percent to 70 percent since the four since the start of the pandemic until March.

To add to this and the behaviour of brand since then, not just having cancelled orders, but since then has been pretty, pretty serious.

Research from Dr Mark Anwer at Penn State has found through a supplier survey that brand buyers have cut prices by 12 percent relative to last year and have extended their payment terms from forty three days on average before the pandemic to seventy seven days after they complete orders post pandemic.

And then, yeah, and they're also asking for cheaper prices, so Brand, this is Kalpona Akter, I'm sure some of you know her.

She's a very prominent labour rights activist in Bangladesh.

Reports that brands have been asking somewhere between 10 to 50 percent, you know, lower prices for the same products that they were ordering last year.

And as a result, manufacturers, or at least some of them have been asking for 40 percent or demanding 40 percent lower wages for workers compared to last year.

In response, workers have been organising and protesting in big ways, we've seen them protesting on the streets, holding hunger strikes, taking a social media to share their demands.

And we can see a lot of that activity happening now during Fashion Revolution Week.

And this has been happening not only in Bangladesh, but also in India and Myanmar and Cambodia and Ethiopia and Romania and the world over.

The NGOs and trade unions have also been organising in a big way, so there's been the pay up campaign which swiftly formed in the US, which we've been supporting, to mount public pressure on big brands and retailers to reinstate those cancelled orders and pay them in full.

And thanks to their strategic efforts, they have helped sway brands to finally pay billions of dollars worth of cancelled orders.

But there's still lots of outstanding orders that haven't been paid and workers that have gone unpaid as a result.

When for us, when we when the pandemic first hit and we saw that brands were cancelling orders, we created a quick and easy email tool on our website and where people could directly email brand straight into their inboxes, demanding that they reinstate orders and explain what they were doing to support vulnerable workers.

And some fifteen thousand emails were sent.

So, yeah, I think I will end on here as well as all of you may know, and why we're kind of here during this week is because it's our annual it's our biggest week of annual action, Fashion Revolution Week.

It happens every year during April to commemorate the Rana Plaza tragedy and to remind the world that there's still so much work to be done to ensure that something like Rana Plaza never happens again.

You know, we know that the apparel industry remains plagued by labour abuses.

And it's really a week where we take the time to renew our call for greater supply chain transparency.

You know, there's been a lot of momentum on supply chain transparency over the past eight years.

A growing number of brands and retailers have taken steps to disclose their production facilities.

But there is still so much more to be done.

There are still so many hidden supply chains, people working invisibly, especially in the informal part of the sector, that we need to to shine a light on.

So, yes, the time is now and the time for full transparency is now across the length of the supply chain, and we would ask citizens everywhere and all of you in this session to speak up to make your voice heard amongst both brands and retailers and governments that we want to know who made my clothes and also our new campaign this year, which I'm happy to talk more about, which is who made my fabric shining a light beyond the first year of manufacturing and that we expect answers from the brands we buy and our governments.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Sarah.

That was great, just on time, so perfect.

Can I ask next Dr. Bhaskar Chatterjee to join us to the panel.

Dr. Chatterjee's was the former secretary in government of India and has been responsible for the promotion of corporate social responsibility in India.

So if I can have him, please, the floor is yours if you can have your talks in about five to six minutes.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And let me, first of all, thank Sarah for giving us a very brilliant presentation on the challenges that the garment and textile industry is facing at the time of the global pandemic.

Seated as I am here in New Delhi, it's pretty much gloom and doom and whatever we talked about, the textile industry is pretty much true of the entire manufacturing sector.

So whether it's steel, whether it is construction, whether it's auto: layoffs, cancellations or redundancies, labour unrest, labour malpractice, cancellation of orders, this is just across the board, reduction in salaries abruptly of pink slips, you name it.

It's just happening all over.

It's a situation that is daunting for countries because their GDP just get wiped off the first wave of the pandemic wiped off twenty five percent of our GDP, one of the fastest growing economies of the world, was completely crippled.

The second wave is far more powerful than the first one.

We've just broken the world record yesterday when we logged in all the three hundred thousand infections on a single day beat the US.

So these are very grim times for all of us.

In the textile sector, particularly if we can sort of divide us into three spaces and those in Bangladesh and India would identify with this very strongly.

First of all, we have a very, very large, completely unorganised handloom sector.

And some of the best products come from the handloom sector where there is absolutely no unionisation, no help, no consolidation, no handholding, nothing pretty much on your own.

A large part of the handloom sector is also endangered by the use of chemical dyes.

And I know from my own experience in the heart of states like Odisha in India, where there's a lot of tie and dye happening and I've seen, you know, hands, faces, arms, legs completely defaced by, you know, handling strong chemical dyes with virtually no protective equipment.

Actually seen it with my own eyes.

The second very large sector in India and Bangladesh is what we call the power loom sector.

And very often the handloom and the power loom sectors are at conflict with each other.

But this is the second level of this organisation.

The power sector is slightly more organised than the handloom sector, but here too the labour practises, I should call them labour malpractices are very severe across the entire space, practically no unionisation of any.

And then the third sector is what we call the spinning mills, and there are many I myself was chairman of the textile mills I have seen.

I was also chairperson of six of Odisha's biggest spinning mills, which I now recall having privatised from the state sector to the private sector and here, too, if demand drops, if people are not ordering the production, then the tendency always is to pass the buck down to the last person standing.

So whether it's man or woman, labour, whatever, they bear the brunt, the most vulnerable bear, the biggest brunt of what happens.

The fourth part and this is the garment sector where you actually prepare clothes from what is manufactured.

This, in my mind, is relatively privileged and I would use the word relatively strongly because here there is organisation, there are people like Sebastian Devaraj and can raise the banner.

We saw from Sarah's presentation how a lot of protests take place.

Unionised labour comes out.

You can say shame on you very loudly with big banners, but you can't win the other three sectors anyways because you're pretty much, you know, not organised in any case.

But here today in Bangladesh and in India because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it is a horrible sight.

It really is full of human rights abuses.

And of course, it's also the other two things I want to mention quickly before I close.

One is what is the government's role?

And the government role here in India, particularly, has been to try and provide sustenance, particularly to medium and small sector employers, so that we try to provide them with easy credit so that they can pass on some of that to pay the salaries of the work staff.

There has been a lot of what you might call pump priming of the economy.

We will try and help out of the medium and small scale sectors as much as we can, particularly in the textiles segment.

The other is the work mainly of the civil society sector, and primarily what they have been doing is to focus on what's happening, to bring to the knowledge of government how much distress there is, and try and get policy initiatives going that actually help out labour.

And lastly, India has seen a huge amount of what we now call migrant labour as factories close as pandemic hits cities, whether they be one or two or three, there's a rush for people who have absolutely no means of daily income to go back to their villages for sheer support and sustenance.

So it is a multifaceted programme, a problem which needs a lot of work together with government, civil society and the private sector coming in in a big way to try to solve these problems.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

That was a very interesting, thought provoking presentation.

In the meantime, we're going to ask Professor Bradley to join us.

She's a professor of international business at the University of cPortsmouth.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please use the chat facility so we could accumulate those questions and present to the panel at the end.

Thank you, Tasmin.

Floor is yours.

Thank you.

Hopefully you can see I've just have the one the one slide with a diagram on it.

Can you see it?

OK, yes.

OK, I'm just very conscious that this panel is being held a day after we hear further details of the catastrophic decision by the UK government to cut its aid spending.

It would undoubtedly have significant impact in terms of our ability to reach the most marginal and the poorest of the poor.

And it's slightly ironic that actually what I'm going to be presenting here is a framework that was put together as a result of data collected for what was then the Department for International Development to inform its programming around modern slavery.

What will remain in terms of its modern slavery portfolio?

We don't know.

And given that our research findings i know Matthew will talk in more detail.

So I won't say too much.

But what we can clearly see is that covid was having a catastrophic impact on people that were already in very vulnerable groups and engaged in very risky forms of work.

So the framework that came out of that research was really designed in a catastrophe like covid and working with vulnerable groups, with limited resources.

How can we ensure that those resources get in quick enough and target the groups that we know have the potentially will slip further and further into riskier behaviour, have very little form of resilience.

Coping strategies will very quickly run out.

Who are the people that are likely to be the most vulnerable and therefore should be targeted first for poor resourcing?

So what we looked at in our analysis of data, and I should say that the data is collected using a longitudinal approach and at a distance called the community narrator approach.

So we targeted workers across a number of different sectors, including the ready-Made garment sector, and we interviewed them over a period of of time as covid was unfolding to try and understand how they were, what kind of strategies they had available, and to understand the context in which they were living.

And also because in a time of crisis, it's so important that we hear the voices of those that are the most vulnerable, so often within the context of development they get spoken on behalf of rather than actually having a platform or space to give their own stories and tell their own experiences.

And I think, as we've already heard, you know, the way that the global brands reacted during covid was utterly disgraceful.

And if we were able to make these voices at the grassroots more audible, it becomes harder for our global brands to ignore or to shrug their responsibility towards those that end up having to bear the brunt of their greedy actions for want of a better word.

So I'll just very briefly talk through this.

I'm happy to share it with anyone who's interested.

But so our framework looks, obviously, we understand, in terms of who are the most vulnerable, a number of different intersectional factors come into play.

So we need to try and understand from a gendered cost religious sexuality.

So on point of view, who are the most vulnerable?

So in our analysis, we were trying to capture across these different categories, but we also have to place the event within the national political economy context and understand the ability and flexibility of civil society, the behaviour of government when these crises hit.

Because all of that we know then impacts on individual experience, all of that actually feeds into and determines the coping mechanisms available.

So we able to identify in our research a number of coping strategies.

So if somebody had savings, they were going to be more resilient.

Savings being drained first.

If they had access to family assets, including home, land rather, then they would be able to last a bit longer.

If families were able to support workers through remittances that access to welfare provision.

So you can see there's a whole list of different factors that we kind of call coping factors that if an individual worker had access to some of these, they would be able to be resilient for slightly longer.

But obviously, these coping factors and realities run out.

So what happens then when you've exhausted all of the strategies available to you?

Well, what happens is that you slip into more and more risky forms of work and a desperate attempt to stay alive.

So we then looked at what happened.

So, for example, for women and girls working and men working within the ready-Made garment sector, we found within this section it was young girls who were the most vulnerable and they would slip into other forms of more risky work in terms of prostitution, more likely to be trafficked, more likely if they went home to then be married.

So we saw an increase in child marriage.

And so, as you can see that this is this is a spectrum.

So we've identified who we see as the most vulnerable, moving down to those that perhaps because of the gendered nature of society, have slightly more resilient than others.

So the attempt was to really try and drill down into who who we need to reach quickly and fast with the resources that we have available.

And I think we need to understand in terms of the impact, for example, that supply behaviour has had on workers within the garment sector, that in terms of what then happens to these individuals, it's not just a case of not having an income and being food insecure.

It's also then in terms of losing from a from point, from a gender point of view, the independence that they may have had.

So we saw in Bangladesh young girls who had achieved a certain level of independence and freedom by moving from areas, for example, the chores into a Dhaka in the garment sector, then having to move back and finding themselves in a really volatile situation and vulnerable to being married off against their will, being trafficked.

So it's understanding the linkages and the consequences of actions from the global level all the way down.

And as I said, capturing the voices at the grassroots is really important in terms of having an understanding how people are trying to cope, understanding what coping mechanisms they have available, and then being able to, as I said, come in and target resource.

I'm going to stop there because I know Matthew will pick up and say a bit more so.

Perfect.

Thank you.

I think it's very suited to now ask Matthew, Matthew Anderson to join us and follow the talk.

Matthew's, senior lecturer in Business Ethics at the University of Portsmouth, the floor is yours.

Thank you.

I just try to share my screen.

Hope you can hear me.

OK, say thank you Tamsin.

I'm not sure I'll be able to cover all of all of the things which which we did in this study, but that the focus of this five minutes, I'll keep an eye on the time, is really on the brand level response.

But I think it'll be interesting to explore how that impacted workers and amplify those vulnerabilities that we've sort of introduced.

One of the challenges of going towards the end of the panel is editing slightly, thinking which ones to delete.

So we've seen some of this already, but I thought it was worth leaving in just the quote from the International Apparel Federation.

So talking about the growing kind of interest and commitments to responsible purchasing practises.

And under this moments, the pandemic was a public test of those commitments.

So really, this part of the study was to see or to look at those commitments and to see what brands were doing and also how they been judged by civil society and other stakeholders.

As we've already heard, there are a number of campaigns using the pay up hashtag.

so launched on 30th of March by Remake by mid-April we have several campaigns using this hashtag twentieth of April, the Worker Rights Consortium launched a covid-19 brand tracker.

And then in May, we get two additional prime trackers, one from Traidcraft exchange and one for the Business Human Rights Resource Centre.

So what we did as part of this study was look at kind of all the trackers that we could find.

So we identified ten of them.

And we're looking at how brands were identified in these different trackers and what changed over time.

To do that in a little bit more detail.

We then identified six case studies to allow for a comparative analysis.

What we were interested in here was some of the institutional factors in terms of what was driving change and also aspects of organisational learning.

So how did companies respond to the pressure from the civil society campaigns?

Did they change any of their supply chain practises?

Did they change their public commitments?

So some of the brands we've already mentioned today, we can see we've got three, which in general we're all seen as having made public commitments and three that either hadn't or made partial commitments.

It is worth saying that none of those companies, none of those brands came away from this pandemic without some form of critique or criticism.

Then what the rest of this table shows is that different multistakeholder initiatives that these brands have signed up to.

And it wasn't really clear that any one initiative was a clear indicator or a moderator of socially responsible behaviour.

But it was interesting to see which had signed up to whicha areas.

The other dynamic is between kind of online and offline.

I think that was interesting in terms of thinking about the the business operations and perhaps some of those business pressures.

And I don't have very long.

So I'm going to go straight to the findings and then we'll illustrate one or two kind of key points.

I guess three three kind of main findings in relation to the brands.

So we did see that in some combination of civil society, action trackers and targeted action, particularly UN and ILO initiatives, did lead to some brand change, at least in their public commitments.

I think it's harder to judge the impacts further down the supply chain, but we did see some changes in public commitments.

So as the case studies, we looked at that there was a notable change from Asos.

Secondly, and this might not be a surprise, but I think it's interesting to look in a bit more detail that how brands communicate to their shareholders about these crisis events is very different to how they communicate to other stakeholders.

I want to give you an example of that in just a moment.

And then thirdly, multistakeholder initiatives, I think we've heard this before that are not enough in themselves.

But I think there was some interesting developments about how factories were being used.

So particularly when those lists are transparent and accessible, they can be part of of additional civil society campaigns.

So I'm just gonna give you two examples before I close before I overrun my time.

The first was around CSR communication.

So this is an example from Marks and Spencers.

But we see similar things with with other brands.

So on my left, it's been left.

On the left of screen, we see a response to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.

And here the highlighting the commitments say paying for shipped products, paying for garments not yet shipped.

The only kind of concession that they make is that payment terms have been extended, as in this case, up to one hundred and twenty days.

But otherwise they highlight their commitments to to paying producers.

So this is the response to the online petitions.

So this is May 2020.

However, in the same month, we also get their financial results being published and here we get statements primarily aimed at shareholders.

And you can see that actually it's about it's about risk management.

It's about what's going to happen with with unsold stock, it's about minimising liabilities.

So he is talking about some summer stock cancellations of orders.

So reducing commitments by one hundred million is about moving into warehousing to be used for the following year.

So all these things have either an immediate impact or an impact on suppliers for the following year.

And I think in terms of academic research and academics, the work on corporate social responsibility, and there's probably more to be done in this sort of looking at those financial statements and statements aimed at shareholders to kind of get a bigger picture of what companies are really doing.

OK, second example, factory lists, I think factory lists are really important.

We saw actually a lot of variation in terms of the data that was was made available.

So variation in terms of data on average wages whether trade union representation was present, gender makeup of factories and but also a big variation in terms of actually the formatting and accessibility of these factory lists, kind of relatively simple things like was it an Excel file or a PDF?

And that makes a big difference to how easy it is to kind of use this data to do comparisons and how to use it for research.

But in some ways, I think the part which is more interesting is also how this data can be used for civil society campaigns by workers.

And this is something that Sebi might to tell us a bit more about, perhaps later.

But I think there's interaction between kind of online campaigns and the kind of the real world on ongoing action of workers.

And here we see an example of how the garment union was using the factory so showing examples of brands which they were manufacturing for H&M and Gap and the factory where they worked.

And I think this is an interesting example of possibly a way of shifting some of those power dynamics.

It's not not straightforward in terms of kind of outcomes and impacts, but I think it's an interesting example of how traceability and transparency can can drive action in different ways.

So it's not just about consumers.

I think I'm over my time.

I will just end with this last slide is perhaps something we can think about in the discussions and talk aboutCovid being a potential driver for change.

So is this a critical junction, a moment of acceleration, then thinking back to the kind of Rana Plaza actually we know from research by Duncan Green at Oxfam was that there was a lot of activity happening several years beforehand to put in some of those structures into place.

And then that moment was kind of used by by civil society, unions and NGOs.

And then a quote I heard Enrich [Sahan] speaking yesterday at a fashion revolution.

And this is a quote from a few years ago.

But talking about building the case for why this is inevitable, making corporates worry that they're on the wrong side of history.

And I think that's kind of an important lesson.

Thank you.

Thank you very much Matthew.

That was a very interesting quote! I shall remember that for the just for for recycling in different presentations.

Can I invite Dr Vivek Soundararajan on to join us as as is Associate Professor of the University of Bath and done a lot of interesting research in the supply chain in ethics and workers rights.

So very interesting profile.

I'm not quite sure in which one who's going to pick up for today's presentation, but I'm sure many areas that he talks would be very linked and very connected to our present discussion today.

The floor is yours.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

So, yeah.

So thanks for the invitation.

And it's great to see everyone speaking about some of the important issues.

And I'm learning every time I sit on the panel or as I listen there as well, every time.

so, I've been doing research on the on the topic of working conditions and supply for the past eight years since my PhD and I published a lot on the Governance, measures and the limitations of multisate initiatives.

And and very recently I've jumped into this idea of labour market supply chains and which is what I'm going to talk about as well.

And so the starting point of this research was that there's been a lot of talk about and writing about governing working conditions in factories.

But there is very little we talk about even I mean, I'll tell you how we talk about as well.

We talk about how the labour get into factories and how are the labour supply chains.

So the focus has been on the power of supply chains and very little on labour supply chains.

And even when it comes to labour supply chains, majority of the focus is on global labour supply chains.

The migration supply chains are not much on the local elections, right, so so I've been doing research on the garment industry, garment export industry, especially the garment export industry and Tamilnadu, that is where I am from in Tiruppur, Coimbatore and Karur and all those regions and heavily in the garment production.

So like every one, my focus, as well as being on the factory conditions as well on governance measures and whatnot, but when I was in the field multiple times, I came to know about how the supply chains, labour supply chains, warehouse, etc..

So that led to a bigger project funded by DFID a couple of years ago, along with my colleagues in political science and development studies and business.

We did a large project and we spent a lot of time in India and Tamilnadu and drove around the whole of Tamilnadu, I would say, and followed the labour contractors, labour brokers and on to the source of workers, workers base and also to workers homes and wherever they come from.

So I'm trying to understand how this labour supply chain works.

And then when these labour supply of responsable can we make these labour supply chains responsible at all?

And this is more important when we think about Covid.

Covid has created a huge labour scarcity because of worker exodus and doubling between us.

As some of the great speakers have highlighted, covid will exacerbate the malpractices within the factory, including forced labour and all those issues, because because of labour scarcity, one of the reasons is, of course, labour scarcity and loss of business etc.

And there are three ways in which factories, mainly factories, get workers.

One directly workers just knock on the door and ask for a job by seeing an ad on the street, a small poster on the street or posters behind companies buse etc.

The second way they get is, of course, through networks look to friends and families and whatnot to get in as well.

And the third is through intermediaries like the intermediaries can be brokers.

There is no formal intermediary.

It's all informal labour market intermediaries.

So there is no career centres and whatnot where they can Jobcentres and where they can go and approach for work in the garment industry.

And there are of course, government schemes, but not directly linked to the private industry.

So brokers and labour contractors is how on a job in a factory, and that is where the majority of the malpractice has happened and researchers abd practitioners have highlighted how brokers and labour contractors exploit and oppress workers in the process of recruiting.

And so and that is what I had in mind as well.

But when I was in the field, I have observed some of these that some of the intermediaries that has not been discussed at all.

They're doing work better than what I have learnt about labour contractors.

So which goes against the labour contractors as the or brokers as they are often seen as producers of precarity.

But what I know is, one, they they are some of these labour contractors and brokers who acting responsibly.

If we use the term brokers, they are not they don't call themselves brokers.

Then I'll give you some examples of who these intermediaries are.

But also a labour contractors and all these intermediaries themselves are in precarious conditions.

And these are the two main points I just wanted to highlight.

So they are not always Willemse.

And the second one is they are also in precarious conditions.

So some of these intermediaries we identified as civil society organisations working for free at the Rotary Clubs and whatnot in local villages like they act and the act of involuntary manner to move workers from from the village to the factory for jobs.

And the second one, of course, we also formed a garment officials.

They were acting as intermediaries as well for no monetary benefits, but also beyond just moving workers they were also focussing on workers well-being after they reached the factory by constantly being in touch with workers.

They also saw village leaders acting as intermediaries.

And finally, we also saw workers themselves acting as intermediaries either for monitoring the mission from suppliers themselves or for a voluntary basis as friends and families.

So there are lots of new intermediaries emerged as a result of labour scarcity.

And not all the intermediaries are acting for economic value, but acting for multiple other values as well.

And we also saw that these informal labour market intermediaries, although informal, they are not they are very strategic actors and they they have a process on how they recruit workers and how they move workers from one place to another.

And so which is also something we need to think about as well and how how the whole labour supply chain works.

And the final thing that this the final thing that, of course, I mean, why some of these labour intermediaries that acting in a responsible manner be found two things right?

One, they their local connectedness in a sense that the presence of their family members, how deeply embedded they are in the particular context and how how connected they are in a particular context and actors, whether they act in a responsible manner, because when when it's a small town, it's a small city, information can easily go from one place to another.

So so their family reputation and all those things are connected to how the acting responsibly in a responsible manner.

The second thing is the local self survival.

So some of these intermediaries, as they said, the village leaders and civil society organisations intermediation is not their primary role, their main role as being a civil society organisation, being a training institute, being a village leader.

So their reputation is connected to the primary role.

And so they screw up the intermediary role.

Their primary role will actually get affected as well.

And so that is something to be found as well.

And the second thing, the second main point I highlighted is the labour market intermediaries or themselves are in precarious conditions.

And one of the one of the lens through which we saw is *whispers* caste, and of course, there are many other factors that come into play in creating the precarious conditions of labour market.

And caste has been a prominent reason that has not been studied at all, mainly because it's very invisible.

It creates, its a form of invisible inequality that we don't often see.

And you need to know the local nuances to understand the caste at all, because in the modern life, even speaking about caste has become stigmatised, that people assume that there is no caste inequality, but there is caste inequality.

And so majority of the labour market intermediaries are from lower castes and the majority of the employers are from upper caste and powerful and caste gives economic capital and social capital.

So even though labour market intermediaries can group workers bring workers using their caste status, they cannot hold on or manage workers for a very long period of time.

And because of the employers, caste, power and economic capital, they can lure workers into their factories.

And reduce the control of the Labour contractors and so on, and of course, there are there are various activities that employers are also doing in order to undermine and remove labour contractors and brokers out of the factories and out of the whole supply chain.

But although they want some rely on them and some are trying to get away from getting away from them as well because of the stigma that has been created around these vilification of labour contractors and labour market economies.

So finally, in some way, I wanted to highlight this.

We have we have been focussing on governing working conditions inside factory walls.

And it is important we should focus on what happens to workers before they enter factories and how workers move from point A to point B and finally end up in factory.

And we need to develop governance measures to to to address issues, exploitation and exploitation or even scale up some of the good things that are happening in the labour market.

For that, we also need to know the local nuances and without understanding the local nuances and how inequalities are produced, we cannot develop such governance measures.

And many of the governance measures are failing because, I mean, as our colleagues have highlighted, because they don't want it.

I'm not saying that they need to align with the local nuances because many of the local nuances are oppressive as well.

And so it is.

But it is important to understand how these workers and supply chains and all these things work so that we can develop very strong measures to address any issues that may emerge.

I'll stop here.

Thanks for the time and feel free to ask any questions.

Perfect.

Thank you very much Vivek.

And I'll ask Isabel Liu, our final panel member of today to share her slides of about five or six minutes the floor is yours, Isabella.

OK, OK, thank you.

So today I'm going to talk about sustainable development in China in recent 20 years, although we see that much and the situation in China is much more later and much complex and much more challenging than the West.

But the progress has been significant.

Especially in recent three to five years, industry has been an industry has been taken much efforts in accelerating the revolution of sustainable development.

Today, I'm just going to invite you to join a very humble journey with me to see and understand China's sustainable development by demonstrate three examples from government, business and community and brand perspective.

And so before I go to demonstrate those examples, I want to raise my humble opinion that sustainable origins from people's consciousness or wills, why our heart is key towards the consciousness that enable us come over all the difficulties limits and the challenges as to how to bring people together, make misunderstandings to harmony and to make barriers into collaborations.

So first, a journey I'm going to take you back to 12 years ago.

I don't know if you can see my slide.

OK, back to 12 years ago.

And it was when the Sustainable Fashion still very new concept for China.

A company called Younger Group, a public, textile and clothes enterprise in Ningbo invite one of China's most influential fashion designer and educator, Professor Wu Haiyan, a pioneer in journey with Military Equipment Research Institute, of the general logistic department who established a military help material research centre.

Professor Wu, with a number of scientists in the Hamp, have failed to address the bottleneck problem in fibre processing through the improving efforts of briefing of cannabis to Hamp research centre searching to new varieties, which has been exaggerate from drugs characteristic those who are known on top of that.

Those are known toxic varieties fired by Ministry of Public Security and the scientists to make sure that the excellent characteristics of the cannabis are well preserved.

The improve of the fabric of Hamp has such incredible functions of moisturise, absorbtion, brief abilities, antibiotic and anti radiation.

Correspondingly, Professor Wu inject some key qualities such as natural, environment friendly and house to the concept of sustainable lifestyle brand.

It is called HANP Family, launched in 2009 with a variety of products from Homeware Furniture to Men's and Women's Clothes, Underwear.

When you walk into the HANPs family lifestyle, you will see the natural, elegant home and spirits.

The HANP's industry is highly valued by the country and the military and is truly achieved military and civilian cooperation, back feeding, agriculture, low carbon, environmental protection.

By 2020, a young girl group plant ten million of hams with an annual output of one million tonnes of hemp fibre, solved employment problem of one million rural labourers, and the drive three millions of rural, poor and people out from poverty.

The brands have benefitted millions of rural family.

And then the next I am going to take you to the west of China is called Sanjiangyuan, an area of Tibetan plateau in China's Qinghai province, which contains headwaters of three great rivers of Asia the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Mekong River.

And parts of the areas are protected as the Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve, the Three Rivers source Ecological Environment Protection Association established, establish a public welfare project of the Three Rivers source and design our alliance in two thousand nine, the local horsemen's of those communities are accompanied and supported by the Sanjiangyuan Designer's Alliance, which has been organised and committed for many years to carry out environmental protection in the three river resource area.

And the Designer Alliance conducts a sustainable handicraft training for environmentalist in local community and have been a benefit for hundreds of local peoples supported and funded by initiatives and experts and expert volunteers of those Three Rivers Source Design Alliance, a brand called Jia Ru was born in the end of 2015, and the teams use their hands and the creativity of transforming local natural materials into pieces of aircraft and using medium platform to promote and assist in cells, which is support sustainable operation of this charity project.

And the brand has been reach enormous success, including myself as well as a few Chinese celebrities, has been a great fan of the brand.

And at the final stop so there are some beautiful products and images about the brand.

And then at and final stop, I'm going to take you to the south part of China, a front of a small city in Guangdong province.

Twenty years ago, a German born, a German born Kathrin von Rechenberg left Paris where she was used to work for a luxury brand like Chanel, Christian Dior.

She left as she came to Sheng du in search of a particular kind of materials called tea silk China, intangible cultural heritage and Rechenberg, founded her brand called Rechenberg art couture, and spent decades to live out her philosophy of making durable Tea silk art clothes that appreciate with time.

The tea silk does pose a sense of varieties and pose with the soul its needs sunshine, running water plants and the soil to make it, which is very perfect combination of nature and manmade.

There are many variables in the products process that colour, the texture and the length of each garment are different and most incredible that teasilk colour change by the time scrolls like red wine, the longer it sits the better it taste.

Normally Rechenberg waste a few batches of a few batches of new fabric for seven and eight years or even longer until it matures.

After being made into a garment the Tea silk can grow up once again each time its grow and the upper body renders the fabric softer and more skin friendly, unlike other comics, is fading and is fading is more like a fusion with the wearer's body, which will change and ultimately will achieve a oneness between human and a clothes.

So Rechenberg was honoured as ambassador for Tea Silk Intangible Heritage in China due to her achievement and efforts of promoting tea silk culture and craftsmens.

And there are more and more designers, scholars and businesses have found a way to express their own philosophy in making clothes of beauty and brands bring up the confidence and inner beauty of customers Perfect Isabella.

Can I say we are now running under a bit of a pressure on time?

OK, yeah.

Thank, thank you.

I was fascinated to have the perspective from the industry and see that there are possible alternatives to fast fashion.

So that's great to explore that.

I'm going to now stop your running a little bit behind of time, but so we have going to have about maybe ten minutes for questions.

So I have already got a couple of questions from which I'm going to ask.

But if you have other questions, please use the chat facility to write the question or raise your hand that we could add the first question.

I'm hoping that I'm hoping that Dr. Chattergee is still hear.

We've got a question from Sebastian asking about the lack of collectivisation amongst the workers in all the sectors is primarily the cause of massive labour malpractice.

The pandemic has further exposed the inability of state institutions to deliver justice when organisation amongst the workers could perhaps be the best way to ensure the protection of human rights, the health industry, environment and a conducive social environment to overcome the pandemic crisis.

Does the recent dilution of labour laws make sense?

So the question questions about the essentially the derision of labour laws in India particularly, and given the covid situation, I don't know if we have a.

We have Dr. Chatterjee here to answer the question or knows to I'm afraid Hamid Dr. Chatterjee had to leave, someone may want to take up this question and indeed, the scrapping of labour laws everywhere in the world and India in particula, Sebi would you like to elaborate further maybe on your question and we can have a short discussion on that.

Maybe perhaps what I would say in the later part of the thing would also be useful here.

But we do feel that the only way, the only way of ensuring some amount of good working conditions or even improving the industry, its health and its profitability could be by protecting.

Certainly.

But I mean the fact think when what we already seen in the second wave is that because of lack of organisers, look, I mean, the state not being able to protect workers and the absence of workers being organised and punches, it hit them so hard now that workers are falling ill and nothing was put in place during the pandemic and nothing has been learnt.

So I was thinking and we have been pushing this idea of the ease of doing business and people not to be too proactive on the union side, which is, I think, adding to the crisis of the pandemic.

Surely Sebastian, I can't talk for Dr. Chatterjee, but what I can tell you, working on CSR related issues in India for a while you may have seen this, a new reform of the CSR law has been implemented or came up in January again after a few reforms.

The paradox, I suppose, in India is that it's going to direction in a way, it's supporting CSR It's the first country in the world to have this compulsory see-saw mechanism and so on.

And at the same time, labour law has always been extremely weak.

On the contrary and maybe Isabella want to say something about that.

On the contrary, this is counter intuitive for the contrary to China, where Labour has made great  progresses.

I don't know, Isabella, you working in China with China, you talked about sustainability.

Maybe you'd like to say a word about the progress is not that is perfect at all, we have implementation issues, we have the problem of unionisation, but great reforms, I would say.

Yeah, first of all, the sustainable fashion come to China is very late time and a complex of the whole country, no matter from the time development as well as the complexity of the population and the landscape is very difficult.

But since 20 years its come to China, especially in recent three to five years, it has pushed into a much more broader scale in terms of bottom to top, from top to bottom.

They are more and more businesses and designers and institutions are taking actions to push towards the revolution of sustainable fashion.

But at the same time, they are also at the same time, they also lack of gas, lack of depth and deep level of research, innovation, technology and people.

So you can say, yes, it's reached a great success, a great success in a broad scale, but in the deep scale is still needs, much more develop.

And so that, I'm sure it's not coming from a one night or or a one organisation can lead The answer is go through from the government to businesses and consumers.

So as is everybody need to take action.

But the action come from the consciousness.

As I say, that is education, education and education.

So as long as we bring our consciousness to understand how important to protect our matters, then the actions can coming.

So the people and consciousness is the key Okay, great.

Thank you Isabella.

We got maybe a question about Sarah, from Sara, and then I go to Sebastian.

So I think I've got some question about your new campaign and Who made my fabric?

And the question was about why the fabric?

Why was it that you kind of chose that particular campaign slogan?

Yeah, sure.

Absolutely.

So obviously, we've seen a lot of progress, as I was talking about in my presentation on, you know, an increasing number of major brands and retailers have published their supplier list, but that's mainly been at the first tier of manufacturing.

So they're the kind of final stages of production are happening.

And as Matthew described, this has been a really welcome step forward, especially amongst worker rights and environmental advocates.

However, you know, we're still seeing a significant lack of traceability and transparency when you look beyond the first tier.

And that's often where some of the most egregious human rights violations are happening.

So.

You know, obviously, we haven't talked about it today in detail in any means, but there's been the recent allegations around potential forced labour in the Uyghur autonomous region where we have launched the campaign as part of a collaboration with our partners and collaborators, the Tamil Nadu Alliance.

And of course, there's many, many mainly young women working in textile mills in Tamil Nadu who often face restricted freedom of movement, very low wages, sometimes sexual harassment, are working very long hours.

And and then elsewhere around the world, when you look further down the supply chain, there's all kinds of environmental damage and other types of human rights abuses happening.

So we've been asking who made my clothes for seven years now?

And we thought, you know, now that we've seen a bit of progress, we should really try and shine a light further down the tiers of the supply chain and see if we can push for more visibility and just more conversation and awareness around not just where clothes are manufactured, but where fabrics are made and yarns are spun as well.

So that's where this is coming from.

There's three kind of main activities.

We're encouraging people to do, that's and we, as I mentioned in my presentation, we have a very handy email a brand tool on the home page of FashionRevolution.org with an email template.

All you have to put in is your name and your email and it and you choose what brands you want to email.

We have a list of sixty two brands who have reported links to textile mills in the Tamil Nadu region that you can email asking them who made my fabric.

We're asking consumers obviously to use social media to contact brands with the same message and then to leave product reviews on brands websites as another kind of cheeky way of poking and prodding brands and retailers and raising awareness amongst other consumers as well about the need for for more transparency deeper in the supply chain.

Thank you, Sebi.

Did you meant to comment or because you had your hands up.

Just a quick question to Isabella, I just wanted to know whether I missed her speaking about in China, there is increased opportunity for workers to participate in the process.

So we develop and that's about it.

Has there been any relaxed, single improve the participation of workers in the development of the garment?

No, I think that has been a good publicity.

But what is the workers might be a bit of corporate.

I understand what you mean.

So first of all, since the technology revolution coming to China has been achieved, enormous success.

So there are a lot of the manufacturers are starting to use machines instead of labourers.

So the efficiency of the labour work has has has been upgraded to be more management level.

So at the same time, I see there are a lot of workers and also the manager of the workers are longing for better trained, get a better grading about the training and understanding how to make the manufacturing, how to make the supply chain much more efficient.

So I see that the longing of the people to study and to learn more is very strong.

And and then another thing is that I see from compare with some 20 years ago when a sustainable fashion come just come to China to now, the workers wage has been hugely changed from here to here.

Yeah.

So so we try to see that normally as a workforce in China,, they could during their work.

They can and the family can be gotten rid of the problem of poverty.

They can better supply their family.

And even some of them, some of the mothers who live in a very rural family, they were not able to, before they would not have a salary, but they can using their hands and the craftsman's to make some money at dispell times.

So the salary raise has been much increased compared with 20 years ago.

So so indeed, a lot of things need to learn about, let's say, from the technology part, from the people that longing to learn and from the people that has been changed, a salary raise, which I can see as more optimistic than I had, although there's a huge pressure on the brand side and on the organisational side.

But I see that people have to faith and optimistic towards future.

OK, perfect.

Thanks, Isabella.

There were a couple of other questions, including questions from Chris, but we are going to transfer them to the next panel because we are running short of time.

I'm going to go immediately into the mini workshop that we had planned, just hopefully within would be a kind of a different type of setting that instead of having always giving us material, doing stuff, we will be divided into three groups.

And we can start discussing some of these questions that I'm going to discuss with you shortly.

So hopefully provide an interactive environment where we kind of share our views.

OK, can you see my slides?

OK.

So I guess the idea of this workshop is to look into some of the research that I am doing on the idea of social memory and what the term social memory capital, the idea is that we will talk about shortly to date and how the communities and groups can build a social memory capital in order to build resilience and in order to develop resistance against some of these issues that we talk about, for example, to claim justice, to claim for the rights.

And we know that industrial disasters are quite common.

Some of these disasters have gained iconic status, for example, and they get to meet media headlines and they managed to shift public sentiments, at least temporarily, as we heard about, for example, Rana Plaza and how it managed to change the perceptions about fashion.

There was much more focussed around the idea of fast fashion, but all of the most of the time, just iconic events have a history.

They are not isolated.

Right.

So if you go, for example, the case of a garment industry in Bangladesh, these industrial disasters happen way before Rana Plaza, in 2005, there was a fire incidence of a garment factory killing 22 people and 2006 again, similar incidents happened, again in 2006, these are also the major incidents is not the least of the they have been many other incidences which were with a smaller number of casualties.

And just even as 2012 was a very major incidents in Ashulia as a garment factory that killed one hundred and twelve workers, none of these events really got similar attention to the Rana Plaza and didn't really start to change the public sentiment as much as.

It was, it took just Rana Plaza killing of more than 1000 people.

That really changed the public sentiment As I said, there are similar incidents that we can see, for example, in Grenfell Tower in London or the Plasco building in Tehran is, again, a garment site.

We saw that these iconic incidents that captured the mood of the people and push for certain changes in that in terms of making corporation more responsible.

The number of questions to consider, I think, about these industrial disasters that do this iconic tragic incidents help stop similar disasters in the future.

How do we learn from these incidents?

Right.

Because when they happen, we want to be able to learn from them by a lot of what happens in a lot of times that these things happen again and again.

And it looks like there hasn't been much learning from these incidences.

And why, the other question is why do
some of these incidents trigger a structural and long term changes while others do not.

So while the answer to this question is quite complex and is, as we say, is the kind of a million dollar question, some of the theories are out there, the idea that the idea of social memory, of historical memory that could be central in this process of learning, building resilience and attribution of responsibility and structural change.

That idea is that if we remember more publicly about these incidents and we know who are the people who are responsible for causing that and over the course of time then means that the communities can build resilience to deal with the situations that would be more learning.

And those people who are responsible cannot walk away from those actions.

For example, in the case of Grenfell Tower, we have an idea that we see that Grenfell should remain a sacred space.

So we saw a lot of memorials around this, a lot of movement, a lot of organisations that people look for when the anniversary of Grenfell Tower and London looking to for justice and putting pressure on the organisers sorry pressure on the government and on the companies to build the chemicals to take more responsible action.

So we'll see that social memory is used to help mobilise as we speak and help to claim for justice.

Again, we see that social memory has been used for building solidarity.

So we see that huge group of people across London and elsewhere in the UK gathered in solidarity with victims of Grenfell Tower.

We see the same for the Rana Plaza.

The huge protests were taking place in different in in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but also in other parts of the world to start to us to show solidarity with the victims.

And particularly for Rana Plaza, this happened, a lot of it is online.

We see, for example, in an anniversary of Rana Plaza that we have a lot of a lot of the kind of campaigns and social memory.

Part of it is social.

We saw that the fashion revolution, as Sarah Ditty mentioned, have been very helpful and responsible for organising some of this campaign.

So says my clothes.

But other organisations, such as Clean Clothes Campaign and also individual groups and other NGOs, both national and international NGOs, have been helping.

And we have seen the culmination of the efforts of all of this.

It has been much more effort in terms of pressuring the companies to do so.

Obviously.

I mean, interestingly, is that there has been some changes as we go in terms of anniversary of the Rana Plaza.

So initially there was a lot of emphasis about the victims.

We see more maybe around 2015, a lot of more emphasis about holding those companies such as Benetton and Zara into account.

And more recently, we see that gradually there has been more attention about how we need to have a much more better wages for workers.

And more recently, we see that there has been shifting attention, in part asking those using the memory of Rana Plaza to asking people to consume more responsibly.

So within this background, we like to divide us to three different groups and within the groups, we would like to discuss two questions.

You have the options of for each question option A question, a question B, and so firstly, you will have about five minutes to introduce yourself to each other in the group.

For the next ten minutes will be for you to think about Can you think of a community that have been able to organise and utilise their memories in the fight for justice or whether they have utilised their memories to build resilience?

And in each case, can you discuss what helped them to mobilise their memories?

Are there any particular type of memories that are more successful in mobilising than others?

My colleagues will be in the age group and will help you to kind of facilitate the session.

So I will be now Sorry Hamid, and to everyone.

Sorry to interrupt, but we really very much running out of time.

So if you don't mind, I think we should limit the discussion to 15 minutes.

One thirty five.

Now, I'd like everybody to come back in 15 minutes so that we share some comments about this workshop and exercise and then we move to the next panel.

If you don't mind.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

We do.

We can only discuss the 15 minutes so you can discuss one of the questions or more of them.

Depends on how you get on We're breaking out breaking into three rooms, is that right?

That's correct.

We have three rooms.

I just want to make sure that we have a presenter for each group.

We do have you see myself, He my colleague and Hamid in the rooms.

And if ever you lost, you go back to the main room and we'll see you all in the main room in 15 minutes.

Yes.

Perfect Breakout rooms were not recorded to encourage more active participation I don't know if Hamid is back I see his name, but I don't yet see his face.

Let's just wait one or two minutes so that everybody comes back, oh Hamid you're here.

Fantastic.

Shall we share the findings of each room?

Yes, I think that would be great to do a quick discussion.

I can perhaps share our group, so I think that was a very fascinating discussion and I think a couple of things came up.

One is that I think Sarah Ditty gave the example of the indigenous movement in South Dakota looking at the pipelines and how they organise themselves.

And I think a lot of things that a lot of those groups who are target victim of these industrial disasters, they are somewhat maybe lack resources or they're somewhat marginalised.

So the importance of reaching out to bigger community and how to build alliances, how to find other stakeholders that feel that there this is not only their issue, but also the issue for the broader society.

I think that came up and I think Sebastian mentioned the issue of transparency, that how we look at the role of corporations and the social memory, we should look for more transparency, some of the stuff that was, I think, a summary of our group.

Fantastic, He would you like to summarise what we said, you said in your group?

Yes, of course, actually.

Thank you very much, for joining us.

And I think everybody's been sharing some opinions about those questions and especially about the Rana Plaza.

People believe that if if, you know, the fashion revolution don't bring doesn't bring this topic up, maybe many people has forget it already and it should be something we highlighting in the whole industry.

So, yes, we discussed about this and I think really great.

Thank you.

And I think everyone so I'm going to quickly share my screen so that you see what we talked about in our group.

Here you go,  so question one, Suthi mentioned the idea of gender justice, alluding to the famous or infamous, I should say, rather a daily rape tragedy, and it's use by the media.

Isabella alluded to the idea of human rights and the right to vote in the UK, which is also an interesting example.

I thought myself about a number of mining incidents in China, which are very often referred to even today.

Tarick mentioned the idea of post-colonial liberation for women in the Middle East, in particular at the level of Damascus University after the Turkish occupation.

At the time, a woman took the ownership of the liberation movement and we reflected upon that.

And we're all wondering whether the situation is not worse today and it's likely worse.

We share the idea of having to fight for labour, for justice, for human rights, really brought us brought our attention to an incident which happened in 1911 in the US and which is very much used even talk today in the classroom to explain mantain memory about labour rights.

And we were sharing this comment about the fact that, unfortunately, as we all know with globalisation, the right we fought for in certain countries are now diminished because, well, companies are going elsewhere.

They are forum shopping.

They're going to countries where human rights are less protected.

And then we responded to another question about this global campaigning.

And Pete, again, shared a very interesting example about shotted cities and how we could maybe raise that level up and use good examples of practises to export them elsewhere.

And of course, we finished our discussion talking about the famous or infamous, again, Bhopal incident and how the global campaign in India has changed and yet at the same time not really change anything because we still have lots of victims of the Bhopal case.

And the tragedy, unfortunately, still very much impacting the population in India.

So that was our finding Fantastic.

So thanks very much, everyone, for being so enthusiastic and participating to this sort of exercise.

That was a break in a way and a way to also know each other better.

So if you don't mind that we are going to move back to the panel format.

We're starting the new session.

The second session is from resilience to resistance.

We have a number of great panellists, including Salil Tripathi, Leana Hosea, Sebastian Devarajj and Suti, Dr. Suti Sahariah.

So I know Salil has to go not too late.

So if you don't mind.

Salil, Salil, I'm sorry, could you please introduce yourself and take the floor for the five first minutes?

Sure, yeah, no, I was just turning on the camera and saying, yeah, hello everybody, I'm sorry that I'm going to be rushing through with what I have to say, but I'll stay as long as I can.

My name is Salil Tripathi and senior adviser for global issues at the Institute for Human Rights and Business, which is a global think which works on corporate accountability.

And I'm going to basically talk about a report that we are publishing next week so I can give you the initial highlights of what we have found.

And it is very much at the heart of the conversations you've had today, which is on the garment sector in Bangladesh.

And we focussed on that from the perspective of covid and its impact.

And we chose to work on it with with several objectives in mind.

Research partner is, of course, the Choudhry Centre for Bangladesh Studies at University of California at Berkeley, and we also with supported by UNDP Bangladesh.

And the idea is to try to find out what happens when there is an event over which the industry or the government does not control such a pandemic because No one, you can ascribe it to human agency.

I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here, so I'll just say that.

And in that case, when it happened, how the state and businesses react is one important question.

And the other important question is who bears the burden of when things go wrong?

And what we found, but we decided to do was very detailed interviews.

We did interview about thousand of workers by through cell phone.

Brack University was a partner.

But we also had detailed interviews with 10 international brands for Bangladeshi suppliers, two leading unionists from Bangladesh and four international organisation, which did some advocacy around it.

And what we found was that the companies essentially, let me go step by step.

So firstly, let's talk about the brands, the brands responsible.

They were shell shocked.

They did not know how to deal with it.

And initially, yes, they did suspend payments.

They did cancel contracts.

But when the situation became clearer, when they understood a little better, then they decided to look at it more seriously and then started having negotiations.

Only one company amongst us actually took the first major look on the part of the contract.

The others did not do that, the company said the Bangladeshi company said that we felt a lot of pressure.

We always do face pressure and we did all that we could.

And the government was wonderful to us because it gave us the leeway to have a furlough system and they were able to suspend payments during the lockdown, which lasted one month.

Now, Bangladesh is in a second lockdown as we speak.

And then the third part is, of course, the union who said that, look, all these talk and conditions are very good.

But the impact on the ground, as we felt, was that people were having poor nutrition, food was being bought less, people had to go and go back to their town and some of them never came back.

And a lot of jobs have been lost.

And what the advocacy campaigns told us that they thought this was a good opportunity to highlight the abuses going on and to point out quite clearly to people that this is what's going on and what you can do as a consumer.

And so they started having tracker's by mentioning which companies were doing what, which companies were not meeting that expectation and what was being done about them.

And that's what the report goes into, very detailed in analysis and conversations and interviews with them.

And at the end, we have made some recommendations which frankly are not narrow step recommendation.

The incremental recommended nothing that changed the face of the world, because I think we think that the supply chains are here to stay, the idea of reassuring is not really a possibility.

I don't think people are going to bring the factories closer to market.

It may be possible in some industries.

It may not be possible at all in the garment sector because I think the institutional memory of running and the cost structure is not going to make it possible.

So fast fashion becomes a part of the issue that, you know, is it possible to pass on some of the costs?

Is it really necessary for things to be as cheap as they are these are moral questions?

You can legislate it and you can see that a T-shirt has to cost ten dollars or ten pounds or something like that.

But that is the kind of question that needs to be looked at.

And the other thing that needs to be looked at is some kind of a rating mechanism, which is where the industry and the unions in Bangladesh are able to evaluate the brand by their performance.

And I think one of the interesting things that come out is that there's a lot more understanding of collective action, that sometimes it's possible that the union in Bangladesh and an international brand has a common goal, sometimes with the union in Bangladesh and an international advocacy group, which is a common goal in the union in Bangladesh, which is a common goal with the Bangladeshi manufacturers.

And I think this is not an issue as of now.

It has been.

It's pretty much run by businesses as a negotiation, but I think there is a role for the international community to set some rules and norms and for the Bangladesh government to enforce its laws better.

I think I'll stop there.

Fantastic Salil really interesting, is also food for thought, and I'm going to give the floor to Sebi because, of course is the specialist on how collective action, really.

Sebi, what do you think about what Salil was saying about this decided collective action and that there is a margin for error is there is room for us to act better?

Yeah, I agree with Salil.

We need to work together.

But yeah, I'm from, as a unionist, I feel we need to really spend a lot of energy building work leaders who are able to speak understand the global supply chain.

Currently there is so much of a ignorance, so much fear and so much of understanding that, you know, the high insecurity have absolutely no rule.

The set arbitrary, kind of the same for their employment and unable to even participate in an intelligent manner.

And so what we feel is that it is an absolute importance of building intelligent leadership amongst the women workers who are deeply disturbed by all this insecurity.

So one of the things we are trying to do is see if we could hold the brands accountable for the impact of pandemic prices in a more transparent manner, because we don't know who's who's taken what position, because we give the manufacturers saying that its brands are back out.

We don't have information on that.

So there is some way if we could come together across India, across Asia, which is the biggest manufacturer for the fashion industry to get more information and feed it to the workers so that they can be really.

We've lost you Sebi, but I'm sure you're going to come back, certainly a mini Internet connection problem.

Salil, what do you think about what Sebastian just said?

I think it's terrific.

Absolutely.

And, you know, the voice of the union and the tragedy is in most of the most of the countries in which these industries tend to go is precisely, precisely the weaker regulation mechanisms.

And they tend to go there because wages are low and it is possible to act in a in a very liberated or liberalised manner.

And I think those are problems.

And I think one of the positive outcomes, we all hope is a strengthening of independent union that I want to spread the word independent, because at least in South Asia, I know India and Bangladesh a bit.

And I think the situation is similar in Pakistan and elsewhere.

What tends to happen is that the unions tend to be supportive, I mean tend to have very close political links, and that creates its own conflicts of interest that the regulatory capture, the political capture and financial capture, those are the risks that come up yeah Absolutely, the same is true for different reasons in China, so the idea of having independent group in.

China is a different kettle of fish.

It's a different category.

And yet the problems are very similar.

So the idea of having an independent group of people call them union and able to be fit for collective bargaining.

And Sebbi was alluding to the training of women.

And I'm going to give the floor to Ramani if she wants to.

And you want me to go back to you first Salil?

I go back to you first.

I just want to say one sentence because you mentioned women.

Bangladesh is an excellent example of that.

Some of the top leaders are all women union leaders in the two republics, women leaders, and they're named in the reports.

I can take this and.

Of course, Salil we've been working with Nazma, fantastic work.

And there are other very strong women in Bangladesh doing an excellent work as union leaders.

Ramani, I wanted to give you the floor about the law and then I would like to give the floor to Suti about women because he's worked on women a lot.

But Ramani, because we have a question in the previous panel on how the legal challenges and the legal sort of scrapping, degradation really of the labour law in India in particular, has impacted the situation of workers.

We work together on that.

So would you like to say a few words.

Yeah, hi, thanks.

So I was just wondering, we are waiting for these changes in the labour laws to unfold because we are also getting information that the courts will be seised of a matter of whether it will want to address the legality of all of these reforms that are being brought out, legality, as well as the constitutionality part of it.

So as of now, this is only a conjecture.

But one issue that we are all bothered about is the is the freedom of association and the impact of these reforms on the freedom of association, because organising labour together, that has been one of the major ways in which we were able to make some level of headway in the previous generations whenever we talked about labour welfare and such kind of things.

And I feel that some of the news reports that have come out with regard to these reforms have actually impacted that.

And that would be a cause of concern because if there is in any way a limitation that is imposed on the labour organising themselves together.

So that would mean that it would have an impact, a detrimental impact on their negotiability, negotiating power as an employer, as an employee, and importantly, even the workplace benefits.

So that's one area of concern.

And the second is also the dilution of the principles of labour welfare, especially with regard to the work and the idea of contract coming in and not, you know, some kind of an equalising the position of both the contracting parties so that there might be more individualisation of the contract, and there is also a field that the work at most fear itself may be.

Maybe a little detrimental to the and to the employee as such, so that's one feel that we have here and then we are waiting for the court to pronounce upon it and then possibly we'll take more on it.

Thank you so much.

And I have to say that Ramani is professor of international law with South Asian University in Delhi.

Thank you so much, Ramani for joining Ramani and I group have worked together on these issues.

So certainly freedom of association, working conditions, labour generally labour laws being attacked everywhere in the world really is not only India, Bangladesh, China, the region, it's everywhere in the world.

And as we were saying, reminding us of the need for us to to fight for these rights, they are not here forever.

We need to make sure that they say, I see that Sebastian is back.

Sebastian, would you like to to add up what you were saying?

And then I'll give the floor to Suti on women workers in particular and unionisation.

I think I missed an important part of this thing.

And I just went out I was just saying that what is very much needed is scope for workers participation in an intelligent manner.

And that is where I think linking with the international community or different people who are interested in building workers participation is very, very important.

And towards this and we have been trying to form an All India Federation of Garment Workers Unions.

About 10 or 11 of the unions have come together to try and register the Federation for Garment workers we've also been collecting of common issues across different manufacturing units across India, as well as in different countries where the same brand is producing.

And the impact of the epidemic has been similar on all these communities, especially against women.

In terms of the crash, pregnant women being denied employment and wages, I think some of these things are very basic human rights, women's rights and the brand should step in.

And so to build that kind of pressure right now at the ground is so very, very weak bargaining power.

Employment has become so insecure.

Workers are not even thinking union.

It is about hanging on to their employment.

We are not even paid and not but be organising we are not even paid these tax free.

That is to offset the inflation.

That means the real wages are eroding.

Yet we don't see workers sort of responding to collectivisation.

So it is a tough ask.

And I think reaching out to international organisations of campaigns and the ground organisation is a combination to build of resistance or else I think we are in for a long haul.

On this, indeed, I think we'll get back to you, Sebastian, and certainly Salil, about new forms of resilience and resistance.

That's the topic really of the of the panel.

But Suti would you like to say a few words about how woman you've been working with have been able to resist and go through all that this year?

Well, yes, to begin with, my specialisation is a very different area from the garment industry.

I've been working in the areas of informal entertainment and sex industry for the last few years.

But having said so, you know, last year I was a part of the DFI project which was conducted in India, in Bangladesh alongside the Leila and Tamzin, that was when the pandemic started and the lockdown kicked in in India.

At that point of time, we spoke to around 20 women working in the informal garment sector, also kind of catering to informal garment factories in and around Delhi.

And at that point of time, it was the early days.

And I'm talking about the resilience.

There was a kind of hope that things will get better, you know, and and some women, of course, of the past with a bit of time, received some kind of money from the government in support.

Welfare five hundred rupees.

But I spoke to a group of women yesterday and today, leading up to this talk.

So the situation on the ground at the moment, as for the women are concerned, is really, really bad, because it seems that since the since last few months, the factories have stopped hiring women, you know, and that the demand for piece, piece workers and than permanent workers and the demand for workers also very less.

And because of wage for most women who are single mothers or living in families who are not able to go back to the to the towns, the entire situation and the second lock down kicking in, they're not really sure how they're going to survive because there are no jobs.

And we tend to talk about resilience and resilience, you know, from my own experience of having worked with the women working in the informal entertainment sector, that we tend to see that in the informal groupings of unions, of informal unions, of women tend to build up the resilience in the sense that is it is a process.

This is a question of adaptability and transformation.

And it's also about kind of you might have enough strength to deal with certain situations.

Tamsin mentioned about savings.

And if you have a certain kind of savings, well, you might be resilient if you have land or a place to go home, but then externally it has to be supported.

You know, in terms of the sex industry, you know, if there's a violence women theycome together and help each other.

But that's for the garment sector is concerned.

No such systems exist.

There's no informal way to support the women who are working in this industry.

And also, we tend to talk a lot about big brands.

You know, we always the reference point is Rana Plaza, but in the Indian context the little that I know what the garment sector, there's another layer within the garment industry, that is the local factories that produces clothes for the big masses here.

And that's where the abuse takes place.

You can, you know, hold the big brands accountable.

To an extent.

There might be some pressure, but what about the you know, the big chunk of the informal places where women work and and there's a lot of exploitation going on as we speak and because of which there's also kind of what we have seen in the last few months is the illegal trafficking of women not working for the garment industry as well in and around Delhi.

Because a lot of these factories are invisible because they are catering to local markets and not necessarily international market and and the public here, the people who are either high end consumers or the low end consumers, they're not kind of aware of these issues.

Sarah did mention about raising awareness about writing to brands and know.

But then as for the Indian, consumers are concerned, they're not really concerned about these issues, but the resilience and the resilience and concern that has to be some systems in place.

And it's not just about individuals, it's about the processes within the system, how you come to a decision, how you take decisions.

And that is kind of missing.

Recently, I did a very small study with sex workers in Nepal.

And what I found out there is that, you know, the there's a some kind of human rights movement that was building up for the last few years and because of which, the sex workers were kind of aware about their rights and they able to negotiate their their rights during the pandemic.

They were able do, you know, get some kind of access to some kind of social welfare measures and food and so on.

But as for the women working in this sector, our concern is they don't know they're not aware of their rights because they do not know what human rights are, what type of labour rights they entitled to.

And also there is lack of fund to support them.

So these are some of the issues which I kind of came across the last few days Thank you so much Suti.

So, these issues are very salient today, not exactly new because we know about the informal sector.

We know about these problems for a long time, but they are even more perceptible and problematic really today.

Salil and Sebastian, would you have examples of practises which have emerged in terms of resistance and resistance during the covid-19 pandemic?

And then I'll give the floor to Isabella, who would like to ask..

to say something.

I'll be very quick on that.

I mean, there are no concrete examples other than exactly the kind of awareness raising that you're speaking of.

There's a lot more awareness of the problem.

One of the key problems with a pandemic situation and that it does allow the state the right under the derogability principle of suspending certain rights.

So one of the major tools for resistance has always been mass mobilisation of people.

Now, of course, political rallies and, you know, the farmers movement in India have shown the religious incidents, have shown that people are able to get together and meet.

But the surveillance culture that has been brought in by many governments and the persistent attacks on reforming or, you know, political participation does become very major setbacks for the organisation.

But I take encouragement from the fact that, you know, I mean, I'm not looked at it myself in a big way, but Sebastian and all our friends from India would be to tell us more is the internal migrant situation there we did publish a report on that by taking into account some of the stories that we were hearing from people on the ground.

And I think that there are these grassroots opposition, thee are these grassroots resistance movement that are coming in, which are fortunately not going to go back to my original point, that they're decoupled from the political process.

They are not political parties, entities.

And I think that's where there is a [inaudible] and that's why I'm encouraged by the Bangladeshi unions, the leadership that we speak with tends to be non-political.

It's very interesting.

Thank you so much, Salil.

Sebastian, on the same question, any interesting and courageous practises you've observed you've maybe supported during the pandemic?

Not in a very big manner, but I think it was emerging that the migrant workers were saying initially the migrant workers were not really mixing with the local workers, and it was seen as people who took away employment work for long hours, you know, so they weakened the bargaining of the local workers earlier.

But the pandemic and the crisis and what we saw, the conditions that the migrant workers put in to, has changed their perception of migrant workers?

And there is a lot more understanding with the migrant workers and the situation.

And in many instances, many instances, local workers have supported the migrant workers who stayed back or were coming back to work.

And now India is a different kind of situation.

Definitely, there is a change in the attitude of the local workers toards migant workers, because I think this is a very positive, positive sign of it all, not being in conflict relationship as a competitor, but as someone who is being extremely exploited much more than perhaps they themselves.

This is emerging.

I mean, you've seen them in action and small actions that really supported the elections and they deserve the support in and rent payment and not collecting rent.

All these things are emerging.

Super interesting indeed Sebi.

We'll see what happens now during the new lock down, hopefully the lock down is not going to be too long and we won't see the same migration in India.

But that was interesting to see that against the prediction.

There was a form of empowerment as well of these of these migrant workers, I suppose.

Thank you very much.

Isabella, you wanted to add up something in.

I remember we have a question from Chris which actually relates to the discussion, Isabella.

OK, sorry that I as a creative entrepreneur, I'm not able to give more opinion from research background or research database, but I can say something from my experience.

So regarding the women's position, women's power, let's say in China has really reformed since the one child policy.

So when people mention about one child policy probably, I think it's very controversial.

How can you how can you say just one child or the one child only born in one family and women has the right to to give birth right?

But in another position is that the one child policy really empowers women's position far more beyond than you can imagine.

For example, I'm a case.

So they are asking the one child policy.

They are they are so many women, which before they have traditional family sense to think that only men is important in the family.

Well but now they are a huge amount of women take responsibility in the leadership, in organisation, in family, in the businesses like me.

So I and I can do whatever I want to do to using my feminine approach of power, no matter how soft or strings I can raise my voice in whatever I stand for.

So this is very important.

And as well as you see in China, there are so many women's is raising the position like I do.

So that's what I want to say, that there's no such system in the world is perfect.

No, even we evolved in 20 years later, while hundreds of years later as a human beings, we were not able to have a perfect system that can satisfy for everybody.

But there's one thing that we always mention today about the resilience is when when you're in the situation or in a system that is not able to perfect, what are you can do.

What you can do is that how you can maintain the resilience and the resilience means that you take the negative to the positive, you take to the impossible to possible.

And that comes from one this one is done optimism of people and also including me and also the country of China.

Most people are very positive, maybe because they're working very hard.

And another that is that is always go through your heart and your efforts and efforts has to come from your heart.

And that's sort of that's sort of the resilience always standing from your heart, no matter things for example, in this pandemic, I have been talking with a few of my friends who are all female leaders.

I was asking, what's your business looks like in this horrible pandemic?

They have surprisingly, they have the same response with me.

They said, OK, thats not that it's not a big deal for me.

I always have solution, the wills to come over the difficulties and I think death might be them.

The embrace list and the wisdom of the women power as well as nowadays they need more and more wisdom and embrace is embracing all the darkness or the difficulties, whatever we can.

Thank you, Isabella.

Well, we've seen in Asia and everywhere we've worked in Asia and Africa the number of hyper resilient women for sure, a hyper strong woman.

And what I in your comparison that without imposing a one child policy I think educating and linking women, general condition, women empowerment.

I don't like this word because I think women have power already, but women position in society, their education, their freedom to have children or not, etc.

to their work condition, of course, matters a lot.

On that point before we take Chris question, Suti, because you work so much with women all over India and Asia generally, would you like to say a few words and maybe relates to research?

Researchers really.

Leila I wasn't able to hear the last bit of it, can you say that again?

So, no, I was just saying, knowing that you have worked so much on women in South Asia and this idea of, you know, education, empowerment, again, I don't like this word, but making sure that we have a very holistic approach.

When Isabella was mentioning the idea of the one child policy that we want to impose a one child policy, but the education of women, their sexuality, their their place in society, how it impacts positively their work as well.

Well, from the research that I have done and the type of communities that I have been dealing with, very vulnerable communities, for example, women who are working in the sex trade who are victims of human trafficking and who are working in the informal entertainment sector.

But then the evidence that I have got is that women have a choice, they have agency.

And in most cases, it is their choice to be there.

And we have seen that income, no matter where it comes from, it does empower them.

And because of the income to have decision making, they can make decisions within the household sector.

And what have led to factors that have led them down is not it's basically the same things like child marriage, lack of education or intimate partner violence, and because of which they have been driven out of their communities and a and mostly a desperate attempt to kind of find jobs that pays them well.

But once they get into whatever whatever sector they work in and when they come in contact with their peers, and that's where the resilience kind of builds up.

And sometimes, as in as I've seen in the case of Nepal, many of these unions are led by women.

And they kind of empathise with their peers and a number of initiatives like vocational training, psycho counselling and the kind of build resistance to violence, then to speak up in one voice, which normally the normal women, people who are part of the society in the sense that we would not face that kind of stigma, it's those kind of provisions are not available to them.

So when it comes to vulnerable women and when they get together, they tend to speak up in a much stronger voice against any kind of atrocities.

And it's building up and especially since study in relation to covid-19.

You know, what I have seen is that the human rights movement, if it's the grassroots, it does empower women once they get to know their rights, to learn to speak in unison.

And that's where they kind of become more stronger and that's how they build the resilience.

But then to support the resilience, there has to be external factors as well.

In terms of legislation, in terms of fund funding of these movements have to be stronger with time.

And if that is lacking, it cannot be sustained for a very long time.

Of course, thank you so much, Suti, and we're going to do a bit of shameless promotion, you have a book which is going to come out pretty soon, Rockledge, on the work you've done on the what you call the informal entertainment industry, which is basically, to some extent, the sex industry in Nepal in particular.

It's very interesting in the sense that, you know, there are many things we can compare and things which are very much relevant to our discussion today.

I'd like to give the floor to Chris, if you would like to ask his question, because I'm conscious of time and I think we need to bring our panel to a close.

But, Chris, you had a related question.

Really?

Would you like to ask it?

Sure.

Thank you very much.

My question was, it's an uninformed question, so I apologise for what I don't understand about about this But I wondered if there was a collective action that could be made between the garment manufacturers in the Indian market to combat the supply create supply side power to come to combat the demand side of brands and buyers.

If that was completely naive or there was another force in the market that was that was working against this I'd be really interested to hear your views.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Chris.

I think Sebastian is going to be the best person to answer this question.

Leila, I'm sorry.

Could you repeat what Chris said?

His accent was a little difficult.

No problem.

So Chris was wondering whether is this something collective happening in India in particular.

So maybe you could elaborate on what you try to do.

You mentioned that before, but this sort of garment union pan India, the garment union, something collective big enough to fight against the situation.

Yeah, I think Salil also mentioned something like that, at different times, different interests come together and I think primarily the workers are the biggest stakeholders in this whole process and they have been completely excluded, voiceless, have no opportunity to see in the end and often often shortcut methods are used to shortchange their interests.

And definitely, definitely a much more healthier industrial environment can be created if we could if we could work on actually certain things.

I mean, they're definitely going to be some conflicting issues all the time, which we could negotiate and we could compromise with each other.

But I think there are certain fundamentals on which brands can work with the unions and manufacturers can work with the unions and governments can be made to bring about some laws.

And I feel the new way is just not throwing stones at somebody.

But the importance of sitting and talking and trying to find a solution to dialogue is so so important and for which the workers should be given that space should be given that information a certain amount of transparency.

If you want the workers participation to be intelligent, to be democratic and to be decent, you can be all the time accusing them of throwing stones and closing down your factories when you kick them in the dark all the time.

And when you get kept in the dark, the only way you can do is scream and shout and kick.

I think that is the responsibility to avoid that kind of outburst.

And the workers lays very heavily on the brands and the manufacturers.

So it's in their own interest.

It's in their own interest that people become more transparent and.

Surely the brand, the manufacturers and the state as well, you know, we shouldn't forget the state is we're going back to the sort of ILO tripartite model, but it's surely very important.

Salil I you have to go.

Would you like to add up something as a final remark?

No just to say that and understood Chris's question.

It was maybe I got it wrong, but was it you know, what can the local suppliers do coming together on their own regardless of the strength of the unions when they are dealing with the with the brand?

And I think that's one of the things worth exploring, excluding.

I only look at the Bangladeshi situation.

And one thing that's very clear is that there is a lot of awareness amongst Bangladeshi suppliers about the grades and variations between different brands.

I mean, they were able to tell us that these companies get, well, these countries, and it's like a normal occurance some who are bottom feeder, some who are very good and a lot but in the middle grouping.

So I think if there is some kind of a system that can be developed, perhaps with organisations and NGOs to evaluate the brands, how they behave, because that would be a very good tool for both the domestic suppliers as well as the domestic union, because I think there is a commonality of interest here, which I think is an encouraging thing between, let's say, the Indian manufacturer and the Indian worker, which they've always seen each other as antagonistic.

So I think if something can be built but this requires goodwill, certainly.

I mean, the workers will have the goodwill because they want a better deal for themselves.

But that requires some goodwill from the Indian manufacturers or Bangladeshi manufacturers.

And how much unity there is, I don't know.

It should also not lead to kind of a cartelisation, you know, whereby the large players, because the economies of scale driveout the smaller niche players, because, you know, by creating a standard which everybody cannot adhere to.

But I mean, now we are going into the structure of the industry, an organisation which is a fascinating topic by itself.

Yeah.

Exactly, food for thought, really.

I think we are going to conclude on this encouraging note because, you know, there is so much to talk about.

Thank you very, very much, everyone.

I'd like to thank all the panellists for their great remarks coming from everywhere in the world, from India, Bangladesh, the U.S., the Middle East and obviously Europe and the U.K..

I'd like to thank my colleague, Dr. Hamid Foroughi, who's here again for organising this fascinating discussion with me.

I'd like to thank as well the team in particular, Gloria, Barnaby, He, Claudia and Olga for all their great support.

And I'd like to thank you, the audience, for being so interested and enthusiastic.

So the meeting has been recorded.

It will be on the research features webinar website on the website of the University of Portsmouth.

You had the link in the chart.

Hamid would you like to say something as a concluding word?

Just thank you very much for everyone was fascinating.

I enjoyed the conversation.

Hopefully we can again in the future have some similar event, perhaps the next year or the following year and hopefully in person next time.

Yes, absolutely.

We all very much looking forward to that.

So my best wishes to everyone, everywhere I'm thinking in particular about our friends in India and Bangladesh, the situation is really not good there.

And so please protect yourself.

Be careful, take care, and we'll see you in person as soon as possible.

Have a great afternoon, everyone, and see you very soon.