Creating Financial Resilience

Financial resilience means being able to handle unexpected costs without making you or your household vulnerable. It gives people more stability and choice through life.

Many garment workers struggle to build the financial resilience they need to manage daily life. This is due to a number of reasons; for example, financial services and education are not always readily available in some countries. Gender norms around the world can also make it more difficult for women to control their finances.

Pursuing a living wage for people in our supply chain

Like most brands, we don’t own any of the factories in our supply chain and we’re nearly always one of many customers that a factory is working with to make products. In addition to our own responsible sourcing practices, we need to work together with other retailers, trade unions and governments to bring about real change in worker pay. ACT (Action, Collaboration, Transformation) is helping us do this. It’s an agreement that’s working to pursue living wages throughout the garment and textile industry. As an ACT member, we follow its responsible purchasing practices in our business so that our suppliers can be in a better position to pay wages that meet local wage laws, which is an important part of creating the right working conditions to improve worker wages.

One other aspect is building greater transparency on wage data.

We’re also exploring the use of different tools to gather wage data, as this information will help suppliers better understand their gap to the living wage. Through our factory audits, we check that workers pay meets local wage laws. We’re now exploring more effective ways to gather accurate information so that we can better understand the overall wage gap to a living wage and incentivise suppliers to make progress in this space.

Shining a light on workers rights

It's important what workers making our clothes can understand their rights at work. This includes things like knowing how much annual leave they have, social security benefits and pay. We know that workers who can read their payslips, manage their money, and access social security are less vulnerable, resulting in a more stable and resilient supply chain.

For many years now, we’ve been running programmes in factories where we source our products to empower people with this kind of knowledge.

Learn more about our financial resilience programmes: