China-Partnership Agreements

In the partnership activities of 88 German municipalities and 16 Federal States with Chinese cities and provinces, the social dimension of the China engagement of German companies has been barely addressed. With current research on working conditions at Chinese suppliers to Aldi and Adidas as well as subsidiaries of Metro, SÜDWIND has accelerated the debate in 2010 and has acquired proposals for action. More

Social Commitments of Companies

Since 1996, SÜDWIND, together with other organisations, has carried out numerous studies on the working life of employees of Asian suppliers of German companies in the range of textiles, IT products and household goods. With the research results, critical consumers and campaigns, like the Clean Clothes Campaign, put pressure on companies to comply with a global social responsibility. Policy makers were invited to create binding legal rules with sanctions to enforce global social commitments of companies. More

Textiles

Serious labour law violations of the mostly female workers happen regularly in the global textile and clothing industry. SÜDWIND has analysed the everyday work in the context of the international textile and clothing trade of GATT and WTO, which was characterised during four decades until 2004 by quantity restrictions of exports of developing countries. More

Global value chains

A lot of products that are consumed in Germany are imported from developing countries. When inhuman labor conditions in the cultivation and production of these goods are discovered, it is mostly the case that the different parties involved in the value chain try to put the blame on each other and no one wants to take on the responsibility for the situation.  This is related to all kind of parties that are involved in the value chain: producers, merchants and national governments as well as domestic importing businesses, the retail industry and finally the consumers. For this reason the German institute SÜDWIND is going to retrace the value chains of some chosen products in order to create more transparency and make visible who bears the responsibility and therefore has the duty to correct the existing deficits. More