Multinational fashion brand H&M announced its goal to raise wages for 850,000 textile laborers around the world by 2018, AFP reported.
The Swedish based company said Monday it's considering raising retail prices to help pay higher wages for poor textile workers in countries like Bangladesh. H&M won't increase the price of its clothing anytime soon, but it "might be a possibility" sometime in the future, Helena Helmersson, head of sustainability at H&M, told AFP.
This is not the first time H&M expressed a wish to help impoverished textile workers like those in Bangladesh who make less than $70 a month. The fashion conglomerate unveiled its Fair Living Wage policy in November saying "all textile workers should be able to live on their wage," but improvement has been almost stagnant, AFP reported.
Helmersson said H&M, with locations in France, Bahrain, Singapore and Russia, would use its global influence to make change happen faster. Swedwatch, a company that supervises Swedish conglomerates, lauded H&M's efforts.
"It's the first time ever they have said they were willing to raise prices and that consumers were now ready for that," Swedwatch's Viveka Risberg told AFP. "It's going to take years to get to a living wage in Bangladesh but I'm more hopeful now they have opened up to involving all the stakeholders- the unions, the workers, the suppliers and the government."
H&M's announcement comes at a time of increased international attention to the lives of textile workers. In April, a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed and killed over 1,000 people in one of the worst tragedies of the apparel industry.
Bangladesh, the world's second-largest clothing exporter, recently raised its minimum raise to $67 a month, AFP reported.
"But when it comes to the result...one of the challenges is that when you raise wages - we've seen this in Bangladesh- rents are also raised and food prices go up. So they have to find a way to continuously review wages," Helmersson told AFP.
