Supply chain transparency - starting with publishing names, addresses, and other important information about factories producing for global apparel companies - is a powerful tool to assert workers’ human rights, advance ethical business practices, and build stakeholder trust.

Companies have a responsibility to take steps to prevent human rights risks throughout their supply chains, and to identify and address any abuses that arise despite those preventative efforts. In order to live up to that responsibility, they should adopt industry good practices.

By publishing factory names, street addresses, and other important information, global apparel companies allow workers and labor and human rights advocates to alert apparel companies to labor rights or other abuses in their supplier factories.

An apparel company that does not publish its supplier factory information contributes to possible delays in workers or other stakeholders being able to access the company’s complaint mechanisms or other remedies. Workers and labor rights advocates often expend sub- stantial time and effort trying to collect brand labels or using other methods to determine which companies are sourcing from factories where human rights abuses are occurring. Meanwhile, they lose valuable time and put workers at risk of retaliation and continued exposure to dangerous or abusive working conditions. Such delays re- duce the overall effectiveness of grievance redress mech- anisms that apparel companies and other parties put in place.

Disclosing names, addresses, and other relevant information about supplier factories helps make it possible to determine whether a brand has sufficient leverage or influence in a particular factory or country to achieve re- mediation of worker rights abuses.