"Adidas's slavery buster hopes app can help give workers a voice", 29 May 2017

Adidas executive Aditi Wanchoo is on a mission - to wipe out any slavery in the German sportswear company’s supply chain, and she hopes giving workers the technology to speak out will help.

As apparel and footwear industries rely heavily on outsourcing, sportswear companies have faced growing scrutiny.

Wanchoo said Adidas had been actively working on this issue since it was revealed at the 1998 World Cup that footballs were produced by child labourers in India and companies realised they did not have control over their suppliers.

Wanchoo said she was tackling the issue in various ways such as collaborating with other companies, NGOs and governments, and training suppliers about the risks of bonded labour and the impact of recruitment fees on workers.

The company already has "worker hotlines" giving 300,000 factory workers in China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia the opportunity to anonymously ask questions, make suggestions or express concerns via text messages and smart phone applications.

But the company found this was not enough, and over the past year Adidas has run a pilot project in China with apps for workers to anonymously report issues - data that is collected and then analysed.

Wanchoo said the aim is to introduce such a system in all of the company’s 105 or so primary factories in the next five years and then look at cascading this down to second-tier suppliers.

She added that efforts to hear directly from workers was paying off. Last year campaign organisation KnowTheChain ranked Adidas top out of 20 firms, chosen because of their size, for its efforts to eliminate forced labour and human trafficking.

“Sometimes there can be resistance from suppliers, but we work with them to demonstrate how this can help them in the long run by improving supply chain transparency, communication, productivity and worker retention,” she said.