This metric is part of a Clean Clothes Campaign project to investigate wages in apparel supply chains. The project, Filling the Gap: Achieving Living Wages through improved transparency, is funded by the European Commission and comprises research, campaigning, capacity building and advocacy around an innovative Transparency Tool.

The Transparency Tool enables users to see at a glance which fashion brands and retailers have the largest gaps between their public commitments on wages, what workers are actually paid, and what they should be paid to be earning a Living Wage in their regional context.

The aim of the project is to empower workers and workers’ organisations to advocate for their rights and equip consumers with the knowledge/evidence that will enable them to make responsible and sustainable shopping decisions, and to hold brands accountable. The resulting increased transparency and traceability, along with the empowerment of workers, trade unions and CSOs, will lead to concrete improvements in these global supply chains.

The research was split into two parts: a survey of the brands and an on-the-ground survey of factory workers, initially in China, Indonesia, Croatia, India and Sri Lanka. This metric is derived from the brand survey portion of the research.

Scoring in detail:

• The brand does not disclose any information about its suppliers: 1 star
• The brand discloses some information about its suppliers but is not fully Transparency Pledge compliant*: 2 stars
• The brand is fully Transparency Pledge compliant: 3 stars
• The brand is partially Transparency Pledge compliant and discloses extra information** that is not required by the Transparency Pledge: 3 stars
• The brand is fully Transparency Pledge compliant AND discloses extra information that is not required by the Transparency Pledge OR publishes this information in a downloadable format*** or on the Open Apparel Registry: 4 stars
• The brand is partially Transparency Pledge compliant AND discloses extra information that is not required by the Transparency Pledge and publishes this information in a downloadable format or on the Open Apparel Registry: 4 stars
• The brand is fully Transparency Pledge compliant AND discloses extra information that is not required by the Transparency Pledge AND publishes this information in a downloadable format or on the Open Apparel Registry: 5 stars

* Transparency Pledge compliant means that the company publishes the following information in English: The full name of all authorized production units and  processing facilities; The site addresses; The parent company of the business at the site; Type of products made; number of workers at each site.
** Extra information beyond the Transparency Pledge could be a gender breakdown of the workforce at each production facility
*** A downloadable format could be Excel, Json, CSV.

Please note: in the Transparency Tool, this Transparency Score is represented a 4 point scale. However, here the score is represented on a 10 point scale, for the sake of comparability and compatibility with other assessment frameworks hosted on WikiRate.org This means a "1" score in the Transparency Tool is equivalent to a "2.5" score here.