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Under what conditions is workwear made? What are the new public procurement directives? And how do companies view fair workwear? With questions like these, we put public procurement back on the button during our multiplier training in October 2019.
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Civil society has long called for more sustainability and the Council and the administration are also clearly positioning themselves: Stuttgart wants to play a special pioneering role in improving global living and working conditions through public procurement. The city no longer wanted to remain ‘at the groin’ and consciously use the considerable purchasing power of municipalities to strengthen fair production conditions and the supply of fair products. FEMNET accompanied the municipality in the successful pilot project for the procurement of sustainable work and safety shoes.
© charles deluvio - unsplash.com
Civil society has long called for more sustainability and the Council and the administration are also clearly positioning themselves: Stuttgart wants to play a special pioneering role in improving global living and working conditions through public procurement. The city no longer wanted to remain ‘at the groin’ and consciously use the considerable purchasing power of municipalities to strengthen fair production conditions and the supply of fair products. FEMNET accompanied the municipality in the successful pilot project for the procurement of sustainable work and safety shoes.
The future multipliers for fair public procurement. © FEMNET
The important market power of the public sector is increasingly becoming the focus of public attention: In NRW alone, public authorities and municipalities consume for around €50 billion per year. Other municipalities want to make sure that the products they buy are not produced under inhumane conditions. In order to accompany them in the individual steps, FEMNET has Education and training of multipliers Continued this year as well.
The FEMNET project consultants Marijke Mulder and Anni Korts-Laur at the fair stand at Fair Handel Stuttgart. Photo: © FEMNETThe Fair Handel trade fair took place in Stuttgart from 25 to 28 April 2019. FEMNET was present on site to present the first results of the current studies on working conditions in the workwear industry in Tunisia and India.
Marijke Mulder, FEMNET Project Officer, presented the results during the panel discussion ’The fashion revolution. Opportunities and challenges in textile production”, including SethuLakshmy Chakkenchath, a member of the Fairtrade Producers Network NAPP (the Network of Asia and Pacific Producers), Rapha Breyer from TransFair e.V. and Deniz Köksal from Reutlingen University, who presented his research results from Vietnam and Indonesia.
Consumers can find out more about the newly procured shoes at the user workshop in Stuttgart. Photo: © FEMNETSuccess stories in Cologne, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Veitsbronn (Bavaria) & Markkleeburg (Saxony): With the ongoing consulting and training offers, FEMNET 2018 succeeded in broadening the topic of eco-fair awarding. Large and smaller municipalities and districts built up expertise and demonstrated with successful pilot projects that public procurement can be made eco-fair. In 2019, ongoing discussions will continue. The experiences and learning effects will be made available to FEMNET in a detailed publication at the end of the year.
What do we need to ensure that fair public procurement of textiles is implemented across the board in local governments? There are currently pilot practical projects, guidance documents, instructions, Council decisions in various municipalities – the Compass sustainability currently shows 877 examples from 67 municipalities for 12 different product groups. But we are still far from a standard effective inclusion of social and environmental responsibility criteria in the production of the textile products procured. This challenge was met on 26 and 27 October 2018 by the 20 participants of the Intensive training on how to achieve fair public procurement of textiles. Many of the participants had previously attended intensive training courses on FEMNET modules 1-4 for their multiplier work on the topic. However, procurers and other employees from local governments also took part in the initial training.
Our workshop in the Fairtrade-Town Saarbrücken. Photo: © FEMNETFrom North Frisian drizzle to the sunny Saar, from vineyards on the Main to the Mecklenburg Baltic Sea: In 2018, we held strategy workshops on fair public procurement of workwear in five Fairtrade Towns across Germany. As diverse as the locations are, they all share the goal of using workwear and textiles produced in the city administration under decent working conditions and without harming the environment.
Fairtrade towns offer great potential to promote fair public procurement of clothing and textiles. Because fair coffee and another fair product are served in the city administration, the topic of fair trade is present in the city administration. Because a steering group is established, civil society, retail, city politics and city administration are already networked locally around fair trade. Based on these existing structures, FEMNET offered strategy workshops on the topic of fair public procurement for fair trade town control groups for the first time in 2018.
Bonn. Today, the report ‘This is how sustainability works!’ is published. The report documents 17 flagship initiatives and projects on how we can organise ourselves more socially just and ecologically clean in Germany and around the world. FEMNET presents initiatives of the cities of Bonn, Cologne and Stuttgart for a fair public purchase of workwear.
The report ‘This is how sustainability works! Germany and the Global Sustainability Agenda 2018’ breaks down the Sustainable Development Goals in a tangible and concrete way. The editors want to shake up politics and show in which range sustainability is already being implemented in practice.
The multipliers practice the practical implementations in the simulation game. © FEMNET
The multipliers practice the practical implementations in the simulation game. More and more municipalities are starting to develop more effective methods for procuring proven sustainable products.
After the work shoes, workwear will also be procured according to eco-fair in the future. Photo: © FEMNET/Tobias WesselingProtection from dirt, but chic enough for funerals: Work shoes of cemetery employees must meet very special requirements. The city of Cologne, capital of fair trade in 2017, follows the Bonn example and has successfully completed its pilot project on eco-fair procurement. In collaboration with FEMNET, she procured 250 pairs of work shoes that were produced with social and environmental criteria in mind.
