‘Misleading’: Ethical leaders Etiko, Outland Denim and Joyya boycott Ethical Fashion Guide 2022
Etiko’s founder Nick Savaidis says the guide uses a flawed rating system that gives some fashion brands a pass when they should receive a fail.
Every year, Melbourne-based fairtrade label Etiko receives the highest grade in the annual Australian Ethical Fashion Guide — a dream come true for any of the growing numbers of brands that pride themselves on leaving a lighter footprint on the earth.
But this year, along with fellow ethical brands Outland Denim and Joyya, Etiko sensationally announced it would be boycotting the guide for the first time in the nearly 10 years since Baptist World Aid began rating brands on their sustainability and human rights standards.
The 2022 Ethical Fashion Guide, which assessed 581 brands across 120 fashion companies, scrutinised living wages, forced labour and human rights, as well as the origins of raw materials and sustainable fibres, to rank brands out of 100.
The report found only 10% of all fashion brands pay a living wage while none of the footwear companies, including Birkenstock, Wittner, Nike, Nine West, Keds, and Easy Steps, paid a living wage at any stage of their supply chain.
But Etiko’s founder and director Nick Savaidis says the guide, which is the product of about 10 months of investigation, uses a flawed rating system that gives some fashion brands a pass when they should receive a fail.
“If a brand isn’t paying a living wage to textile workers and paying cotton growers a fair price — then they shouldn’t be given a pass mark,” Savaidis said.
“Greater weight needs to be applied to the payment of a living wage for textile workers and the farmers who grow and process the raw materials.”
Savaidis founded Etiko (which comes from the Greek word for ethical) back in 2005 to champion positive social and environmental change. He says Etiko was the first Fairtrade fashion label in the southern hemisphere and a founding affiliate of the Australasian Fairtrade movement.
Savaidis did welcome the Ethical Fashion Guide’s new percentage system (previous years have used the A-F scale usually seen in the classroom), saying “the historic grading system gave kudos to brands that did very little”.
Outland Denim chief executive and founder James Bartle, agreed that the new percentage system was a step in the right direction as the guide often would “mislead by granting brands with reputations of exploitation a good score”.
It’s actually the second year in a row that Bartle has publically slammed the report — last year he filmed a damning Instagram video where he argued a slew of brands that received a high mark were not “meeting basic human rights needs of [paying] living wages”.
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This year, Bartle says he still has concerns.
“We are also concerned that it is still possible for brands to be in the top (blue) tier overall, even if their ‘Supplier Relationships and Human Rights’ and ‘Worker Empowerment’ scores are below 50%,” Bartle continued.
“In fact, it is still possible for a brand that received an overall score of 48/100 to be in the top tier. We believe it would be clearer if the top tier was made up of brands who scored between 80-100, rather than brands who scored in the top 20% of all brands surveyed.”
The 2022 edition gave out a fairly low average score of 29 out of 100 (the top score was 86) and sorted all brands into one of five colours to indicate where in the group they scored, otherwise known as a bell curve.
Report works, Baptist World Aid says
But Baptist World Aid’s Corporate Advocacy Lead Sarah Knop says she stands by the guide’s reporting system, which had evolved over the last decade to “better respect workers and protect the environment”.
“This year’s report is founded on the same core robust research methodology, but with a greater focus on overall scores out of 100, instead of the previous A+ to F grading system, resulting in a more transparent assessment of each brand’s progress and performance,” Knop said.
She continues that the change-making power of the guide can be seen in the progress regular entrants were making. The average score for brands included in the last two years, for instance, increased from 32.5/100 in 2021 to 34.85/100 in 2022.
Companies included in the report for the first time this year performed a lot worse, however, with an average score of just 9.7/100.
“There is more demand than ever for detail about the supply chains of fashion companies, which is why we’d urge all brands to strive for transparency and for global citizens to leverage their power to influence change by using this year’s report and the online Brand Finder tool to make more ethical decisions,” Knop said.
‘Animal products are harmful’
Savaidis says the methodology could go a lot further to ensure the report lived up to its name. For instance, Etiko is an entirely vegan brand and Savaidis argues excluding the impact fashion brands have on animals is a glaring oversight.
“I don’t believe a brand that sells a majority of clothing made from plastic-based textiles, like polyester, should get a pass mark in the environmental score — they’re contributing to an environmental disaster,” he said.
“The same goes for brands that use animal products. Ethical fashion should be holistic and aim to provide minimal harm to people, planet and the animals that reside upon it.”
One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that the report was a damning insight into the fashion industry’s enormous footprint on the environment and on vulnerable workers up the supply chain.
“With an average score of just 29 out of 100, the report is sobering reading for shoppers, investors and leaders in the fashion industry,” Knop said.
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