Clean Clothes Campaign - Fashion Checker

Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) is a global network dedicated to improving working conditions and empowering workers in the global garment and sportswear industries.

Brands in the fashion industry put millions into advertising themselves as ethical and sustainable, making plenty of claims about paying their workers a living wage. Fashion Checker shows how far from the truth this actually is, giving consumers and garment workers access to real data from the supply chains of the worlds’ biggest brands.

CCC sent more than 100 brands questionnaires to give them the opportunity to showcase the efforts they are making towards paying a living wage to all workers in their supply chain and to disclose their production locations (if they had not done so through the Transparency Pledge). In addition, field research at workplace level has initially been carried out in five countries where access to garment workers is guaranteed; Indonesia, China, Croatia, India and the Ukraine. They collected workers’ payslips, conducted interviews to interpret the information the payslips provide, disaggregated by gender (e.g. on gender pay gaps, work responsibilities, working hours, bonuses, overtime). These wages were then checked against the response given by brands on their living wage benchmarks and the percentage of suppliers paid according to this benchmark.

The emphasis is on expressing the brands’ efforts to pay a living wage through SMART data collected via this research in a transparent and comprehensive format for consumers, garment workers and policy makers. It is hoped that, in the long term, brands representation on Fashion Checker will become a component of a brand’s due diligence and CSR validation process.