Clothing & footwear

Yes. Labour Lens grades the company, not the country. A brand making clothes in Bangladesh can be Good if it names its factories, has them independently checked, shows a living wage and traces its cotton.

What the country changes is the starting point. Legal wages there are below a living wage and unions are restricted, so a brand has to show its own evidence. See how each country is rated on the Resources page.

It means the last major stage happened in Australia, under award wages and Fair Work protections. The fabric, yarn and cotton were usually made somewhere else, and the label says nothing about them.

Ethical Clothing Australia goes further. It checks that everyone making the brand's clothes in Australia, including people sewing at home, gets award pay and conditions.

The minimum wage is the legal floor a government sets. A living wage is what a worker needs to cover food, housing, schooling, healthcare and a little saving for their family, measured against benchmarks such as the Global Living Wage Coalition's.

In most of the countries that sew the world's clothes, the minimum is well below a living wage. Paying the legal minimum alone doesn't count as a living wage on Labour Lens.

They check different things. Fair Wear audits garment factories, runs a complaints line for workers and asks members to work towards a living wage, so it counts as working towards one. GOTS certifies organic cotton through the supply chain and has social rules, but its audits are announced and it doesn't require a living wage.

amfori BSCI and SMETA are commercial social audits. They're useful but easily gamed and rarely check wages properly, so they count for little on their own. Every label and how it counts is on the accreditations page.

A factory audit stops at the sewing floor. Cotton picking is linked to forced labour in Xinjiang and Turkmenistan and to child labour in several growing countries.

To be Good, a brand that uses cotton in most of its range has to trace most of it to the country of origin or buy it certified, for example GOTS organic or Fairtrade cotton. Brands that use little cotton, such as wool or linen labels, pass this check on that basis.

Not reliably. A higher price doesn't mean more reaches the people who sewed the garment. The Clean Clothes Campaign (opens in a new tab) says wages may be a far smaller share of a luxury garment's price, because the people who sew high-end clothes don't usually earn more than those sewing for the high street.

Luxury labels are graded on the same evidence as everyone else: where they make things, who checks the factories and what workers are paid.

Second-hand, rental and repair businesses can be graded Good when they have no red flags, because they create no new demand for factory or farm labour. They don't earn stars, which are for companies that go further for the people who make new products.

A resale business that also sells new stock says so on its page. Browse them on the second-hand page.

Brands and unions signed the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, now the International Accord, which inspects factories and lets workers report safety problems. Labour Lens records whether a brand has signed it.

Survivors and the families of those killed were compensated through a scheme coordinated by the ILO, which reached its US$30 million target (opens in a new tab) in June 2015.