The Covid-19 pandemic has had immense impacts on the garment and footwear sector, including in global supply chains. For the PLWF, Covid has reinforced the need to accelerate the payment of living wages but has also necessitated the broadening of our assessment scope to account for the impacts of Covid-19 on garment workers globally. To do so, the PLWF created a supplementary methodology to evaluate how investee companies under PLWF engagement were responding to Covid-19 in their global supply chains while taking into account the business challengesposed by the economic situation.
The PLWF found a strong link between companies implementing appropriate practices to improve wage levels in their supply chain and strong management practices to account for Covid-19 impacts. These practices include building long term, resilient relationships with manufacturers
and greater collaboration with stakeholders such as global unions to facilitate workers in achieving collective bargaining.
The full publication on the Platforms vision on Covid-19 can be accessed here.