World’s largest retailer Inditex has pledged to work towards maintaining workers’ rights and a steady stream of payments to all suppliers amidst the struggles of the industry where manufacturers and suppliers are wrought with cancelled orders and unfulfilled payment issues.
The Spanish fashion conglomerate has entered a joint agreement with global workers’ union IndustriALL to ensure that bargaining rights and workers’ rights to unionise is maintained throughout the company supply chain.
They will also pay the suppliers on time so that the workers’ wages can be honoured. The agreement was first signed in 2007 and renewed in 2019.
The pandemic has made life tough for the garment industry as cancelled orders, payments and closed stores meant a lot of factories were out of business, rendering thousands in the industry jobless.
Even during the catastrophe when all the stores across Europe and US were closed in May, Inditex honoured all payments for orders whether completed or in production.
Inditex and IndustriALL, which represents 50 million mining, energy and manufacturing workers, said they would strengthen their commitments in order to minimise the impacts of the pandemic.
