Social Labelling in the Global Fashion Industry

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An international multidisciplinary conference for academics and practitioners

Social labelling can be described as an attempt to assure consumers and potential business partners that the labour practices connected with the production of a good or the delivery of a service meet a range of internationally agreed employment standards, generally those based on ILO conventions. As consumer awareness and concern with ethical production increases, and forecasters point to an as yet untapped market potential so the search continues for robust means by which ethically conscious fashion consumers, and indeed other stakeholders, can be reassured. But this raises a series of questions. Can the market secure ethical outcomes and can a social label provide a credible guarantee of those outcomes? Who are the stakeholders in this process and how are their interests given a voice? What can we learn about past experiments with social labels? What are the alternatives? Does a union label mean that a product is sweat free? This timely international conference seeks to bring academics and practitioners together to critically examine the phenomenon of the social label from a range of historical, empirical, theoretical and politico-economic perspectives.

Key note speakers

Robert J Ross:  Consumers and Producers: Agency, power and social  enfranchisement

Scott Nova: Workers Rights Consortium

You can read more about our guest speakers by downloading the PDFs to the right of this page.

To download the programme click here.

To download the flyer for this event click here.