CCC's response to the 'Review of H&M group’s Roadmap to Fair Living Wage'

CCC's introduction to the response reads:

'In 2013, H&M published its ‘Roadmap towards a fair living wage’, in which the fast fashion retailer laid out several goals for the years to follow. They included a commitment for 850,000 workers to be paid a living wage by 2018. 

In the wake of public scrutiny over H&M’s failure to meet that commitment, Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) was asked by H&M – one of ETI’s dues paying members, along with Asos, C&A, Inditex and others – to perform an evaluation of the brand’s progress over the past five years (2014-2018). In December 2018, this evaluation was published as the “Review of H&M group’s Roadmap to fair Living Wage” (hereafter: the Review).

Clean Clothes Campaign International office (hereafter: CCC) was one of the stakeholders that ETI contacted in its research phase. Some of our assessments of H&M’s living wage work are reflected in the Review, and we agree with most of ETI’s recommendations. However, we were surprised to note that some essential information is not highlighted strongly enough or is completely missing from the Review. We believe that including this information would have led to additional findings and recommendations.

This paper lays out key shortcomings of the Review that are strongly intertwined with the shortcomings of H&M’s roadmap itself, and even more so with the way H&M approached its implementation.'