At Patagonia, we’ve always been motivated to find real, meaningful ways to build a supply chain that reflects our values. We helped found the Fair Labor Association to work with like-minded companies and experts to set standards that lift up workers’ rights in a globalized world. The Fair Labor Association has done a remarkable job giving workers around the world a voice in their own futures, making them safer at work, and conducting independent monitoring and third-party complaint processes that galvanize real, lasting change for workers everywhere.
As cofounders and active, accredited members of the Fair Labor Association, we’ve worked to improve supply chain transparency standards and lead with best practices so that our customers can feel confident that their products are made without being tainted by human trafficking, child labor or forced labor. This work has made a difference.
But it requires constant vigilance: Tragically, the world is not rowing in the same direction. We support the Fair Labor Association’s call for an immediate end to forced labor and other human rights abuses against Uighurs in China. We’ve been horrified by what we’ve read in the media regarding a systemic, planned effort to force the country’s population of ethnic minorities into lives of factory work and a program to change their basic beliefs.
It’s an unfolding tragedy the world, at every level, must care about.
Patagonia has done the painstaking and important work of mapping the source of our products to the farm level, and we are constantly working to ensure that all of our products are built without human rights abuses and with the smallest environmental footprint possible. And supply chain changes take time: 22 years ago, it took us two years to switch from a chemical, conventional cotton supply chain to an all-organic cotton supply chain. We don’t source any finished goods in Xinjiang, and we are committed to only sourcing from farms and mills where we can confirm there are no human rights abuses. We hope to have continuity with our longtime manufacturing partners, as we know they also feel strongly about human rights and environmental sustainability, but we are prepared to make changes if we can’t confirm that our values are being upheld.
We are committed to working with the Fair Labor Association, other businesses, governments and other stakeholders to ensure all workers are guaranteed their fundamental human rights. We live in a complicated world: one where incredible progress and creative genius exist side by side with inexplicable pain and frustrating inaction on everything from the heating of our planet to the work that we should all be doing together to respect the dignity of our fellow human beings. That’s the promise of the world we live in—and with partnership and leadership, we can get to a better place.