From the age of 16, Maggie describes her life as "having workers' rights weaved through every strand of it". She became interested in ethical trade in the 1980s through her work on social development issues in the Philippines, where she saw at first hand the impact of global corporations on the lives of urban squatters, landless peasants, and plantation workers and their children.

A critical turning point for ethical trade

She says a turning point came in 1987, after a British manufacturer with offshore facilities in the Philippines refused to award its workers a two per cent pay rise set by the Aquino Government to help them cope with spiralling inflation. "That two per cent was a tiny step towards a living wage" she says. "The manufacturer refused to budge and the workers went out on strike. The manufacturer just shut the factory down and set up another one under a different name!"

Although the workers lost their battle, says Maggie, the response of one of the UK retailers that sourced from that factory was significant. Sir John Moore, then chairman of British retailer Littlewoods, stated that his business would never knowingly break the national labour law of any country from which it sourced. "This was really the first time a British retailer had publicly acknowledged its responsibility towards the workers in its supply chain, and the first time the issue of workers' rights in global supply chains was raised as an issue in the UK."

Back in the UK in the 1990s, Maggie continued her links with the Philippines while starting to campaign on workers' issues more broadly.

She became involved in lobbying the toy industry to take responsibility for workers' rights after a devastating factory fire in Thailand. After the industry responded by developing a code covering the rights of toy workers, the large campaign organisations in the West began to realise the importance of getting large retailers and brands to take workers' rights seriously across all consumer industries.

The creation of the Ethical Trading Initiative

"We had to start somewhere, so a snappily titled offshoot of the UK NGO trade group called The Monitoring and Verification Group was set up, and together we thrashed out what we were going to ask companies to do."

ETI's creation blew my mind away - for the first time we could get people with completely different backgrounds to sit around a table together.

Out of that, the London-based New Economics Foundation prepared a report called Open Trading which was launched to a room full of company representatives the day after the Labour party came to power on 2 May 1997. The Ethical Trading Initiative emerged out of this and, says Maggie, "it blew my mind away".

"For the first time we could get people with completely different backgrounds to sit around a table together - NGOs, trade unions and companies - and learn from each other. I'd been campaigning for years and had no idea about the complexity of company supply chains till then. It's been a huge learning curve for me and I became unusual in my own labour rights community because of my belief - held to this day - that we can achieve a lot if we work together."

The involvement of the campaigning community in bringing reality to discussions has been just as important as getting companies to the table. Maggie says the biggest difference over the ten years since ETI's inception, is the trust that now exists between many company, trade union and NGO members of ETI.

"You can have a dialogue, you can exchange information and experience and you can sit around a table and have an open discussion, with everyone emerging better informed and able to do something when they leave the room.

Working on projects overseas has also helped build trust. You spend a lot of downtime with people.

"Working on projects overseas has also helped build trust. When you travel to project locations with people, you tend to spend a lot of ‘downtime' with them and get to know them much better. You deepen your understanding of other peoples' views - you start hearing each other much more clearly."

Maggie says that most of the big changes for workers have taken place at the top of the supply chain - the companies who bring brands and products to the UK market. Change further down the chain has, however, been limited. "Working hours in the garment industry are worse than they have ever been and systemic change is simply not happening."

Governments have yet to be fully engaged

Other key parties, she says, like national and local governments, have yet to engage. She says:

Codes of conduct should be used as a way of helping develop mature systems of industrial relations in sourcing countries, where governments provide the space for workers to be able to organise for themselves and bargain collectively with employers.

Maggie hopes that in the future there will be a shift in mindsets within the major sourcing countries at least, even if not across the board. She hopes that governments will get much better at enforcing laws that protect workers' rights and take decisive action on urgent issues for workers, and that workers all the way down to the very bottom of the supply chain will have their rights respected.