Penalised for peeing: the fight for women workers’ rights

US-based community organiser Anya Dillard meets PUMA’s Teamhead Social Sustainability, Viola Wan to learn more about the challenges garment factory workers face. They also discuss the responsibilities of brands towards women working in their partner factories and what they’re doing to ensure greater gender equity.

—------

PUMA has ten target areas, each with goals, that PUMA is striving to reach by 2025. This episode focuses on Human Rights. Human rights in the apparel and footwear industry and supply chain refer to the fundamental rights that all workers are entitled to, regardless of their occupation or nationality.

What it actually means: PUMA and other brands must ensure we’re doing everything possible to monitor and improve factory working conditions for all colleagues. This includes being aware of the conditions in factory sites, which brands generally don’t own, and so aren’t as easy to control.

The lowdown:

Goal 1: Train 100,000 direct and indirect staff members on women’s empowerment

How we did in 2022: 168,037 factory workers and 2,077 PUMA employees have been trained so far.

Goal 2: Map subcontractors and Tier 2 suppliers for human rights risks

Clothing brands like PUMA often rely on multiple suppliers. This complexity makes it challenging to monitor and address human rights at every level of their supply chain. They need to create a system that detects and resolves any potential violations quickly. While this work has been ongoing for the last 20 years at PUMA, we wanted to expand the scope from the product manufacturers to their subcontractors and all of their component suppliers.

What we did in 2021 and 2022: Tier 2 and Tier 1 subcontractor mapping completed. In the 2022 Sustainability Report - through collaborative efforts with the sourcing team, we mapped more than 200 non-core Tier 2 suppliers. The next step is to monitor the working conditions of these 200+ factories (See page 61)

(And in case you’re wondering: Tier 2 are factories which manufacture components that go into PUMA products, and Tier 1 are the factories which put the components together to make the final product. A tier 1 may need to use a factory for a specific process that they don’t have in their own factory, like embroidery for example, this is called subcontracting).

Goal 3: 25,000 hours of global community engagement per year

How we did in 2022: We achieved a total of 43,000 hours, 18,000 over target.

PUMA publishes all of its progress, challenges and setbacks in its Sustainability Report. You can find the 2022 report online now by going to about.puma.com