Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN)-VF Corp, one of the world’s largest clothing manufacturers, whose brands include The North Face, Nautica and Wrangler jeans, will begin to disclose the names and locations of the 91 factories it uses in Bangladesh.
The star.com contacted VF after a labour rights organisation highlighted repeated failed safety inspections at one Bangladesh factory that VF has hired to make university-branded apparel.
Activists said VF’s decision was a surprising policy reversal.
The company, which sells more than $10-billion worth of clothing each year, has long considered its factory list a trade secret, reports thestar.com.
Many companies have kept the names of their suppliers secret to prevent poaching from competitors, but nondisclosure also means companies cannot be publicly linked to factory collapses, fires and labour rights abuses.
“The value (in factory disclosure) is transparency,” said Tom Nelson, VF’s vice president of global procurement. “You guys don’t ask me these questions. In the past if we had factories we wanted to work with from a standpoint of developing a relationship, we didn’t want our competition to know about it. That’s probably a thought of the past. We want to develop more confidence.”
VF is also considering disclosing the names of all 2,000 factories it uses around the world, Nelson said.
The company has been under intense pressure in recent months.
Following the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which 1,129 workers died last April, rival watchdog groups were formed to invest in better building safety and working conditions in Bangladeshi garment factories.
VF Corp was a founding member of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a group of mostly North American companies.
However, the student activist group United Students Against Sweatshops demanded that VF, which produces branded clothing for nearly 1,100 universities, join the rival Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety.
Both the alliance and accord are five-year programs, but the accord, whose members include Canada’s Loblaw, is legally binding and allows for a more prominent role for Bangladeshi union groups, activists say.
The student group has staged sit-ins at the University of North Carolina and other schools in recent weeks and at least 15 US universities, including Penn State, Cornell and Syracuse, have ended or have promised to end their contracts for branded apparel with VF’s Jansport and VF Imagewear because VF has refused to join the accord, said Garret Strain, the group’s international campaigns co-coordinator.
VF spokesman Craig Hodges said the company is aware of only eight universities that have ended their business relationships.
He declined to identify them. “We’re talking about eight out of more than 1,000,” Hodges said.
Strain said the student group recently asked Major League Baseball to direct VF and its other licensees to join the Bangladesh accord. Baseball referred its request to VF.
The students are now preparing a campaign to convince the players’ unions of the major sports leagues to become more engaged, Strain said.
He said his colleagues are also discussing with the Canadian Federation of Students how to convince more Canadian universities and colleges to introduce ethical clothing policies.
VF’s Nelson rejects Strain’s criticism. He said his company has finished inspections in all of the Bangladesh factories; in one particular factory, Optimum Fashion in Narayanganj, a city about one hour south of Dhaka, VF Corp has spent $160,000 on safety improvements.
“We didn’t want to wait around to figure out how to get a loan for them,” Nelson said.
“We have not worked out agreements on how they pay us back . . . We were more worried about the factory and how we make the workers safe.”
Optimum is an example of how factory disclosure may improve transparency and worker safety.
The Workers Rights Consortium, a labour rights organization, has twice inspected the six-floor factory, which employs about 600 workers.
The consortium’s executive director, Scott Nova, said Optimum has made products for VF Imagewear, the VF Corp. unit that makes Major League Baseball-branded items.
In a March 14 memo, six months after his first inspections at Optimum, Nova said the factory still had a number of safety problems.
“The factory still does not have adequate fire exits,” Nova’s memo said.
“There are no fire doors; there is no fire separation; the interior exit route is unprotected and ends with a lockable door; there is not adequate emergency lighting; and there is not an adequate alarm system.
In one crucial area, the factory is even more dangerous than when the WRC first inspected it: management added large, unprotected door openings to the external exit stair, making it more likely that this stair will be unusable in a fire (because it will be exposed to heat and smoke from within the building).”
Nelson initially denied that VF makes any baseball or sports-branded items in Bangladesh.
“Most of it is made in the US, and some in Honduras, Mexico, Swaziland and Indonesia,” he said. “We don’t make any MLB products in Bangladesh.”
When Nelson was informed that Nova and his staff recently purchased a baseball shirt bearing the name and number of Washington Nationals player Bryce Harper, which says “Made in Bangladesh,” Nelson suggested the shirt may be counterfeit.
After Nelson was told that Nova’s colleagues bought the shirt within the past few weeks at a well-known sports clothing store in Washington, Hodges hours later said the company had, in fact, placed four orders for baseball products from Bangladesh a year ago.
The following day, Hodges contacted the Star to say VF discovered it had subcontractors who make baseball products in Bangladesh.
“We looked into this deeply and realised we have two over there, and that may be the connection,” Hodges said.
VF’s disclosure on Bangladesh only goes so far. The company won’t disclose which of its 30-plus brands are affiliated with each factory.
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BBN/ANS-31May14-8:00pm (BST)