The OECD Forum on Due Diligence in the Footwear and Garment Sector is a key annual event: where leaders gather to listen and explore the human rights challenges facing the sector, as well as collaborate on solutions.
This year, Impactt’s Principal Consultant and Sector Lead for Garments and Manufacturing, Raquel Fisch attended the event in Paris, along with Senior Consultant, Nicola Spruyt.
Together with a group of clients, they presented on a side session focused on how Wage Management Systems and factory-level interventions can deliver real improvements for workers, and how industry collaboration can help scale impact across the sector.
In this article, Raquel and Nicola discuss the top three recurring themes from the Forum, from sessions and direct conversations with leaders in the field.
Theme 1: Wages & Purchasing Practices
A number of discussions at the Forum focused on wages as a topic, with strong interest from brands in Wage Management Systems (WMS).
Increasingly, brands are aiming for living wages for workers, going beyond minimum wages, signalling a shift in the sector. Questions in Raquel and Nicola’s side session on this issue circled around the how.
For many brands looking to achieve living wage for workers, data is a key challenge. Many brands do not systematically collect wage-related data at the factory level, making it difficult to assess wage gaps or evaluate the effectiveness of WMS from suppliers. Without reliable and consistent data, measuring progress and identifying areas for improvement becomes significantly more challenging.
Capability at the factory level also emerged as an important factor. Brands noted that many factories have limited knowledge, time, and capacity to build and manage a strong WMS, which can affect how effectively these systems are implemented in practice.
Purchasing practices are a crucial link to both working towards fairer wages for workers and greater commercial stability.
Despite brands’ efforts to improve purchasing practices, workers often see limited benefits from that. This highlights the need to connect purchasing commitments to collective bargaining and the operationalisation of the 2024 ILO conclusions on wage setting in global supply chains.
If the price a brand pays a supplier is insufficient, the pressure can be pushed onto the workers in the form of excessive overtime, intensified production pressure, and unauthorised subcontracting, which requires remedy in the present and mitigation in the future.
There are ways for brands to create space for fairer wage payments, including adjusting their pricing structures and negotiation models.
Theme 2: Just Transition
Climate change and human rights have often been addressed in silos, but at this year’s OECD Forum, many participants raised concerns around the lack of worker voice in discussions on the green transition, and emphasising the need for joined-up thinking across environmental and human rights teams.
After record heatwaves in 2025, there is increasing concern about the direct impacts of climate change on workers.
The effect of heat is particularly concerning. In Business & Human Rights Resource Centre’s 2025 report The Missing Thread, only ten out of 65 leading fashion brands acknowledged heat stress as an occupational health issue in their policies.
Brands, suppliers and workers need guidance on how to navigate this emerging challenge, among the others that ethical trade teams are trying to juggle. Ultimately, climate first strategies that don’t involve workers mean they end up bearing the cost and having to mitigate the risks themselves.
It’s important to remember that we don’t have to start from scratch when tackling this issue: we can embed sustainability into the Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) cycle by incorporating it into existing tools like worker interviews, risk assessments and audits.
One example is the HREIA – Human Rights and Environmental Impact Assessment – which deliberately bridges environmental and human rights due diligence. HREIAs help companies understand how environmental issues, such as industrial water pollution, can directly affect people, for example, communities’ access to clean water. When thinking about a just transition this kind of approach is essential to ensure that environmental progress doesn’t come at the expense of workers or surrounding communities.
When it comes to solutions, long-term sourcing partnerships with suppliers are a core component of operationalising the just transition. Social dialogue, or workplaces with unionised workforces, have benefits for the resilience of the supply chain and sector. This is marked as a key principle in the ILO’s Guidelines for Just Transition.
Finally, this is another opportunity for brands to work together to harmonise expectations and roll out solutions operationally.
Theme 3: Supplier Voice
There was a notable shift at this year’s OECD Forum with an growing number of suppliers and factory owners actively participating as speakers.
Suppliers are often the ones facing expectations and commercial pressure from brands. Suppliers at the Forum spoke about the desire for greater ownership of HRDD processes, rather than experiencing them solely as top-down requirements.
Inclusion of supplier voice in HRDD can also reveal gaps that brands may not see, such as operational hurdles, resource constraints, competing demands from multiple clients. A key insight from the panel, Supply chains 4.0: Due diligence implications of e-commerce-driven business model, was the recognition that HRDD is ultimately a shared responsibility, and that brands cannot effectively respond to incoming regulations, or international good practice, without meaningful collaboration with suppliers.
One of the highlights of our own side session on wage management was hearing from a participating supplier from the pilot, who shared the impacts that the programme had on-the-ground at a factory level.
So many risks only become clear when we work closely with suppliers to understand root causes — not just what’s written in policies or audit reports, but the real operational constraints behind them.
That’s why Supplier Improvement Programmes are so powerful: they shift the relationship from compliance to genuine collaboration, helping suppliers build the systems, capability and confidence needed to prevent harm and drive lasting change.
In conclusion, workers remain at the core of the agenda. Brands are looking to go above and beyond, seeking fairer wages for workers, but face operational blockers in implementing these changes.
The just transition was also a key topic, with many concerned about how worker voices are being left of out from the conversation. While the majority are of the consensus that the inclusion of worker voice will support a sustainable transition, the practicalities of making it happen are ongoing.
Finally, suppliers were platformed for their on-the-ground knowledge and experience enacting change at the factory level. Their contributions to the Forum were hugely valuable, offering insights that brands can miss on the factory floor.
If you’d like to explore any of these themes further, contact Principal Consultant and Sector Lead of Garment and Manufacturing, Raquel Fisch at raquel@impacttlimited.com.
