Fashion isn’t doing enough to address forced labor, a new benchmark study reveals

If the fashion industry was being graded on its efforts, as KnowTheChain did, it would receive a failing mark with an average of 21 out of 100 possible points.

For years, KnowTheChain, a partnership between the nonprofits Humanity United, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre and Verite and ESG analytics firm Morningstar Sustainalytics, has turned a gimlet eye to the world’s largest brands to suss out if their due diligence practices are resulting in meaningful change for workers.

2023’s batch of 65 big-league names, which range from luxury stalwarts like Prada (9 points) and Kering (23 points) to fast-fashion purveyors such as H&M Group (49 points) and Zara owner Inditex (38 points), is nearly double that of the 35 companies that KnowTheChain analyzed in 2021. But they also fared worse than the latter group, which gleaned an average of 41 points.

Critically, more than 20 percent of the 2024 cohort scored 5 points or less. Not only do brands remain “largely reactive” to human rights violations instead of embedding the due diligence practices meant to circumvent them, the report said, but they also “routinely” failed to provide or disclose remedy to victims of abuse—an “indictment,” it added, in a sector where such ethical breaches are “consistently uncovered.”