As You Sow: Labor Standards

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Labor Standards: Gap Inc.

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Gap Inc. sources apparel from more than 3,000 supplier facilities. The company has been both a lightening rod for criticism by activists and a leader in experimenting with independent monitoring at a few supplier facilities in Central America. In 2004, in a unique partnership with As You Sow and shareholder colleagues, the company took a big step forward as a leader on supply chain issues by publishing the first extensive, detailed public supply chain report about its performance in monitoring its code of vendor conduct.

Working on behalf of Domini Social Investments, As You Sow brought together other concerned shareholders with Gap management and proposed development of a model reporting template that would provide a quantitative basis for evaluating performance.

We believed Gap might be willing to issue a model vendor standards report because it had previously bucked its industry peers in 1996, agreeing to independent monitoring of a supplier factory in El Salvador, the first major retailer to agree to genuine outside scrutiny. After many months of discussions we agreed on a collaborative approach. A tool was developed to assess a factory's overall level of compliance through quantifiable metrics. The tool rates factories according to the number, type and pattern of compliance violations during a 12-month period. We worked closely with Gap along with our shareholder colleagues in the development of the metrics as well as other features of the landmark report released in May 2004. For more information on the report and the response to it, click here.

Learn more with this summary assessment of the Gap report by As You Sow.

"A dramatic change in strategy for a retailer that has long been on the defensive about working conditions at the factories that make its clothing."

- Wall Street Journal

"Creating sustainable and scalable solutions across the retail apparel and garment manufacturing industries is immensely difficult"... "collaborative multi-stakeholder engagement is the only way to create sustainable change industry wide."

-Gap CEO Paul Pressler

Gap's second corporate responsibility report was issued in July 2005 and continued to provide hard data on conditions at supply plants in the same manner as the report. In response to comments that the first report lacked independent assessments of its supplier program, the second report includes critiques by two respected firms -- Social Accountability International and Verite. As You Sow was kept closely informed by Gap about the development of methodology and format for both Gap reports and was given opportunities for feedback and critique.

A key concept promoted in the 2005 report is development of a "balanced scorecard" in assessing factory performance. The scorecard places social compliance front and center with traditional supply-chain performance indicators such as cost, quality and on-time delivery. This is an important element in making a strong business case for social compliance to the rest of the business community.

Nishita Bakshi, our Research Associate accompanied Gap auditors on visits to two Gap supplier facilities in North India in November 2005, including a non-profit project supported by Gap.