Gap’s new partnership aims to help women garment workers

They say two heads are better than one. Four heads are even better. It’s an idiom Gap Inc. seems to be taking quite seriously. The retailer’s Pace program has partnered with Care International, Better Work, and BSR’s HERproject to create an initiative called Rise: Reimagining Industry to Support Equality.

The initiative’s focus is furthering equality for women garment workers. For context, women comprise 60 percent of the global garment factory workforce, per the International Labour Organization. With the partnership, Gap aims to scale the existing efforts of its 15-year-old Pace program, which has helped a million women and girls with everything from finding jobs to financial literacy, women’s health, water, sanitation, and hygiene. The program will also address gender-based violence.

“Knowing that we have women throughout the supply chain around the world who have generally been subjected to gender-based violence, inequalities, all the different factors of workplace barriers and limitations on what they’ve been able to do…we looked and said, based on women being the core of our business, we felt an obligation to do more,” Mark Breitbard, president and CEO of Gap Brand, told WWD about starting Pace.

Why now? Rise’s efforts to support women in the garment-making industry come at a time of continued concern about working conditions in factories around the world, where women often are not only paid extremely low wages but also face gender-based exploitation and violence.

And the issue is not just limited to garment-producing countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Turkey, but also closer to home. A recent Department of Labor report surveyed 50+ garment manufacturers in Southern California; 80% of the investigations revealed violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, such as wage theft and workers being underpaid. In one instance, a contractor reported being paid as little as $1.58 a hour.