Germany is committed to fair wages in the textile industry in Asia and Africa. “With all its brutality, the pandemic has also made us aware of the consequences of the low-wage model in the textile industry,” said Development State Secretary Bärbel Kofler on Thursday at a conference of the industrialized nations organization OECD in Paris.
Because wages of seamstresses in Asia and Africa are well below living wages, job losses during the pandemic have plunged many families into an existential crisis, she said at the meeting on sustainability and due diligence in the textile industry.
Kofler called on companies to take the duty of care for their own supply chain seriously and to take steps to raise wage levels together with suppliers. “The working group in the German Textiles Alliance has shown that there are good examples waiting for imitators.” So far, living wages have not been paid in most of the textile industry’s producing countries. This particularly affects women, who make up around 80 percent of the workforce in the textile supply chain.
The conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is considered one of the most important forums on care and sustainability in the textile industry. The devastating collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh in 2013 provided the impetus for the ninth meeting of government representatives, companies, trade unions and scientists. At that time, 1,138 seamstresses died. As a result, the OECD developed guidelines for promoting responsible supply chains in the clothing and footwear industry, which are aimed at internationally active companies.