It's time to tackle the root causes of poor working conditions

This year has seen more economic uncertainty across the globe, including a slowdown in India, labour shortages in China, a rollercoaster ride for the Euro and generally weak economic performance across OECD countries. This has translated into continuing challenging conditions for the high street as it struggles to climb out of recession.

Yet with rising unemployment and wage freezes in Europe and the US and falling real wages and continued abuses of workers' rights in the global south, it is clear that the poorest and most vulnerable workers across the globe are suffering the most.

The fact is, despite a good two decades of ethical trade, with clear progress in some areas, workers around the world continue to be denied their rights. And what's more, the continuing economic gloom is undermining any gains that have been made.

Let's first take what's going right.

It's clear that our leading members are starting to shift away from a narrow top-down approach to ethical trade, typified in its early days by a heavy focus on audits.

They are developing more sophisticated ethical trade strategies that involve not just audits but also activities aimed at building workers' understanding of their rights and supporting suppliers to become better employers. Many are making tangible progress towards embedding ethical trade into their business practices.

The scope of our members' ethical trade activities is also growing year on year. Last year, nearly 10 million workers were reached by our members' ethical trade activities, delivering concrete benefits including improvements in health and safety, wages, working hours and other fundamental workers' rights.

This all has to be good for workers. Yet it's far from enough.

So what's going wrong?

Clearly, the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent global downturn haven't helped. Yet my belief is that we've all spent too much time tackling the symptoms of workers' rights abuses - be it child labour, forced labour, poor health and safety, or discrimination - and not getting to the root causes of poor standards and abuse.

This year we launched a new approach to our organising our collaborative activities.

This involves taking a number of specific supply chains and describing not just what is happening to the workers in those chains, but also why it is happening, so that we can then tackle the underlying causes of the conditions we find. Based on this work in a limited number of strategically chosen supply chains we can also then create models for wider change that are rooted in reality.

In any given supply chain, the factors that help perpetuate poor pay and conditions for workers may include anything from inappropriate retailer purchasing practices, to lack of transparency in the supply chain, weak government capacity to implement laws, limited representation of workers and prevailing cultural attitudes.

In the latter half of this year ETI's member companies, trade unions and NGOs have been collectively identifying and starting to map priority supply chains in each of three broad product category groups: Food and Farming, Hard Goods and Household and Apparel and Textiles.

The supply chains have been selected using a range of criteria, including the vulnerability of workers, our ability to leverage collective change in the supply chain concerned and the potential for wider lessons to be learned.

Priority supply chains have now been identified within each category. The next step is to start to develop comprehensive collaborative programmes of work in each supply chain. We have already started this process for sandstone sourced from Rajasthan and garments from southern India.

The core elements that will run through each of these programmes will be joint ownership of programme objectives and design, and a commitment to collectively tackling the interrelated issues that result in workers being exploited.

Creating widespread, sustainable change for workers - particularly in the current global economic climate - is a tough challenge, but it must always be our focus.

I am convinced that our new approach will help us realise this.