Overview of the report

Oxfam International's new report, 'Trading Away Our Rights', reveals new research that shows how big brand companies and retailers in the fashion and food industries are driving down employment conditions for millions of women workers around the world.

Huge retailing 'empires' are undermining the very labour standards they claim to uphold by pursuing a common global strategy that demands ever-quicker and cheaper delivery of the freshest and latest products.

The companies are using their power at the top of global supply chains to squeeze their suppliers to deliver. This pressure is dumped immediately onto women workers in the form of ever-longer hours at faster work rates, often in poor conditions and with no job security. Millions of women are being denied their fair share of the benefits of globalisation as a result.

This is where globalisation is failing in its potential to lift people out of poverty and support development. There is a widening gap between the rhetoric of global corporate social responsibility and the reality of the corporate business model. Many corporations have codes of conduct to hold their suppliers accountable for labour standards, but their own ruthless buying strategies often make it impossible for these standards to be met.

Oxfam's research comes from 12 employment-related campaigns in Bangladesh, Chile, China, Colombia, Honduras, Kenya, Morocco, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Thailand, UK, US, and interviews with more than 1,000 workers, factory and farm owners, global brands, importers, exporters, union and government officials.

Focussing on the lucrative food and clothing industries, the research shows that companies are outsourcing their production and using new technologies, attractive trading incentives and their dominant market position to drive cost and risk down their supply chains. Corporate buying teams have massive power to pressure their suppliers to deliver 'just-in-time' orders at lower prices.

Companies such as Tesco, El Corte Ingles-Induyco, Taco Bell and Wal-mart must radically alter the way they work with producers and in negotiating deliveries and prices. Farm and factory owners told researchers they realize that the real power within the corporations lay with the buying teams - whose actions are helping to cause worsening employment conditions - rather than those teams responsible for codes of conduct. "Ethical trade just doesn't fit neatly into numbers so gets left out of the picture," a former buyer for a UK supermarket said.

Today's business ethos is 'make it quick, make it flexible, make it cheap'. The workers at the bottom of the global supply chains are helping to fuel national export growth and shareholders' returns - but their jobs are being made ever more insecure, unhealthy and exhausting and their rights weakened.

Women workers are being hit especially severely: their stories debunk the myth that theirs is just 'extra' income. Many women are expected to care for families and be the bread-winner - but more often today in unreliable, distant or poor conditions. This burden is ruining women's health, breaking up families and communities and undermining the prospects of future generations, the report says.

Jobs in labor-intensive industries are celebrated as empowering women. While it's welcome that millions of women are getting a wage, the wage alone doesn't free them from poverty. Instead they're being burnt-out by working harder, faster, over longer hours and with few health, maternity or union rights. This is a poor strategy for improving women's lives.

Meanwhile, many governments - encouraged by the World Bank, the IMF and big business - are also complicit as they continue to pursue laws and trade agreements that allow for deeper 'flexibilization' of labor. This results in countries being pitted in competition to provide the most flexible workforce.

For example, in Chile 75% of women fruit-pickers are now on temporary contracts and work 60-hours per week in season, but still one in three earns at or below the minimum wage. In the UK, employers have been legally able to pay home-workers just 80% of the minimum wage, and without redundancy, holiday or sick pay, or pension rights. Fewer than half the women in Bangladesh garment factories have a contract and most get no maternity or health coverage. In China, young women face 150 hours of overtime each month and 90% have no access to social insurance. Oxfam has documented hundreds of similar abuses happening in countries across the world.

This short-term advantage of trade is short-sighted and comes at the risk of a long-term cost to society. Improving employment conditions, on the other hand, would be a powerful catalyst for reducing poverty. It would strengthen an international trading system that is rightly being seen as failing the poor and would create new opportunities for investment, growth and development.

In addition to changes needed in corporate behaviour, states must also begin to guarantee workers' right to join trade unions and to bargain collectively, and to better enforce labor laws especially those that support workers who are raising families. And consumers ought to support brands that sustain good jobs as much as good fashion.

Oxfam is supporting campaigns around the world to help impoverished workers improve their conditions of employment, for instance, in Honduras, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to ensure redundancy compensation; in Kenya to secure union and maternity rights in EPZs; in South Africa, the US and UK to enforce fair wages; in Colombia to reject expanding working hours; and in Central America to reject temporary contracts with no health cover.