The apparel industry is one of the world’s largest industries, generating around €1.5 trillion in annual revenues and employing over 50 million people. Often a catalyst for economic growth in largely agrarian economies transitioning into industrial production, the apparel sector is also responsible for high environmental impacts and social challenges such as cheap labor, and exploitative, unsafe and polluting factories.
To address these challenges, IDH is developing sustainable business models, policies on public private projects, and collaborative improvement programs in some of the key apparel producing countries including China, Vietnam, Pakistan and India.
Establishing a sustainable manufacturing framework
IDH apparel program has two main objectives: aligning standards across the apparel industry, and proving the business case for company practices that focus on the social and environmental impacts of apparel manufacturing.
Driving sustainability in the apparel sector is hampered by a myriad of auditing and assessment standards. IDH apparel program promotes harmonization in standards to shift away from compliance to capacity building to address the root causes of unsustainable practices.
On the social side
worker engagement and productivity training will improve managers’ understanding of employee perspectives and improve working conditions, which has proven to have positive effects on worker satisfaction, and decrease worker turnover, rework and return rates.
Watch the video to find out more

On the environmental side
IDH drives improvement in:
- Energy efficiency and greenhouse gases
- Air emissions
- Wastewater treatment
- Use of chemicals
Listen to Lewis Perkins, president of the Apparel Impact Institute, and hear how we are upscaling our work that has already generated huge savings for textile mills and laundries.

Driving marketing transformation in apparel
The apparel sector is often characterized by a “race to the bottom”, and IDH aims to revert this to achieve industry-wide transformation in terms of harmonization, sustainability and working conditions. IDH brings together brands, public representatives, sector associations and CSOs to learn about and address sustainability issues in the industry, and to identify solutions and recommendations to develop a more sustainable apparel sector. The platform that are set up to identify improvement areas (such as the Race to the Top platform in Vietnam and Pakistan Buyers’ Forum), help identify opportunities for sustainable business models. They subsequently provide a jumping off point for starting pilots to develop and demonstrate best practices. These, in turn, help inform policy around sustainable business practices, moving forward a sector association, ministerial policy, or the industry as a whole.
In 2018, IDH continued the pre-piloting and piloting of Life and Building Safety (LABS) to improve working conditions in terms of occupational health and safety (OHS) in the apparel sector. So far, seven brands and retailers are joined with the program. In the expansion stage in 2019, they will apply and monitor harmonized life and building safety standards to avoid deadly fires and collapses; and improve working conditions in the industry.
In Vietnam, IDH has scaled it’s work on empowering workers and improving the dialogue between workers and management in the Race to the Top (RttT) program. This results in improved working conditions as well as higher productivity. Next to this, IDH has played an important role in growing environmentally sustainable production, by expanding and showcasing business cases that reduce energy and water consumption in Pakistan and Vietnam. IDH looks to scale this further by rolling out cleaner production programs on a regional level through the Apparel Impact Institute. The Institute was developed in 2018 and has begun engaging mills. It will start delivering impacts from 2019 onwards.
Fostering worker-management dialogues
A case-study on how dialogues between workers and management in factories are improving working conditions and productivity.

In many apparel factories, dialogue between workers and management is limited. This limits the ability of workers to raise their concerns, which fuels dissatisfaction and in turn, hampers productivity.

Together with apparel companies, the Vietnam government, and dialogue experts (international and local), IDH organized a change mechanism. We developed and rolled out a curriculum comprised of dialogue and lean training methods within factories to deliver soft skills training to management and supervisors, as well as organize elections of worker representatives and train their dialogue skills, to be able to build trust, raise issues, and develop solutions.

Interventions by IDH resulted in the installation of improvement circles, where workers resolved issues together with management. These improvements led to reductions in worker turnover (5%-points, from 13 to 8 % per month) in factories, while boosting productivity and reducing rework rates. This increases profitability and the bandwidth to further improve working conditions.

The program is working with a growing number of factories, but also scales its work by linking the learnings back to sector associations and the local government. The results have been used in workshops which IDH co-hosted with the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, demonstrating the viability of labour code reform and the ratification of ILO convention 98 on collective bargaining.
Publications
Title | Type | Year | Regions | TAF |
---|---|---|---|---|
Establishing safe working processes in Industries | Brochure | 2021 | - | - |
How the Z76 company switched from outdoor gear to producing COVID-19 face masks | Case Study | 2020 | - | - |
STATEMENT: GARMENT INDUSTRY COALITION LAYS OUT JOINT PRIORITIES FOR THE GARMENT SECTOR | Commitment | 2020 | - | - |
66% higher retention rate in apparel factories through career advancement programs targeting women’s needs | Other publications | 2019 | - | - |
Impact in Race to the Top | Brochure | 2019 | - | - |
Mill Optimization Results | Report | 2017 | - | - |
No publications found.