ABSTRACT

The last decade has seen a rapid rise in online fashion retailing. A growing number of apparel retailers and clothing and footwear brands now retail on the web, and the market share of online clothing sales is growing every year. The period has also witnessed high-profile campaigns against global sportswear brands and media exposés of poor working conditions in factories supplying retailers in the United Kingdom and other Western countries (BBC 2008, Spar and La Mure 2003). Reports have identified major labor violations in garment supply chains, including low wages, excessive working hours, lack of freedom of association, dangerous working conditions, physical and verbal harassment, and child labor (Clean Clothes Campaign 2005). As a result, there is growing pressure on retailers to improve ethical traceability and disclose information about labor standards in their supplier factories. One of the traditional barriers to disclosure has been the practical difficulty of communicating information about working conditions to consumers in a meaningful way at the point of sale in retail stores. Information on traditional garment tags or labels has been limited to fabric composition, washing instructions and country of origin, and there is limited space on these labels to provide information on working conditions in complex supply chains. Online retailing spaces provide several opportunities to overcome this barrier. A large amount of information on working conditions can be shared with consumers on web pages, and decisions on the level of detail can be left to the individual user through links that enable customers to draw as much or as little information as they need, depending on their own individual information requirements. This study therefore seeks to explore how information about working conditions is currently communicated to consumers in online fashion pages and to assess the progress of social labeling on the web in the garment sector.