Many of our focus areas are included in our Supplier Code of Conduct, which is monitored and managed through our social audit programme. Our social impact work takes a long-term view to improving conditions for workers. It seeks to address more complex, systemic issues that are harder to identify and address through audits.
Our specialist Social Impact team take a risk-based approach to our focus areas. Based on our ongoing analysis of risks in our supply chain, we prioritise the following risks: safe working conditions, gender-based violence, child labour, forced labour, freedom of association and support for grievance mechanisms. Alongside these priorities, we run projects that help tackle stigmas around mental health and lack of skills training for women.
Although we don’t own any factories in our supply chain, we strive to help improve work environments and make a positive difference for workers. Our long-term supplier relationships and wider stakeholder engagement can help us better understand the root causes of systemic issues impacting workers in our supply chain. Over the years, this has enabled us to develop programmes and partnerships designed with longer-term change in mind.
Governments around the world set legal minimum wages, but these do not always give people enough money for stability and financial security.
Living wages, on the other hand, are calculated as a reasonable amount based on the cost of living in each region. According to the Global Living Wage Coalition, a living wage enables people to afford a decent standard of living, which includes food, water, housing, education, health care, transportation, clothing and other essential needs, including provision for unexpected events.
Factory workers' wages are not set by brands but it’s important we continue to collaborate with other brands and organisations to drive fair and equitable change in this area.
As members of Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT), we work with 18 other global brands to pursue living wages for workers in textile, garment and footwear supply chains. All member brands of ACT have committed to five global Purchasing Practices that will support suppliers on their journeys towards paying living wages.
In May 2024, Primark signed an agreement with the global union IndustriALL to support collective bargaining for garment workers’ remuneration and benefits, including increased wages, in Cambodia1. As part of the agreement, Primark committed to support labour costing, stable order volumes and funding for training and skills development.
This year, we delivered in-person training on labour costings in all supplier factories in Cambodia. By highlighting the labour costs of making a product, these costs can be ringfenced during price negotiations. Following training, 98% of orders placed with Cambodian factories for our Spring/Summer 2025 season provided the labour cost of our products as a separate component to protect it during negotiations.
1 For Textile, Apparel, Footwear, and Travel Goods Association in Cambodia (TAFAC)
Responsible Purchasing Practices are decisions we can make as a business and steps we can take to support our suppliers in improving wage and working conditions. We are focused on continually improving these in line with the ACT Global Purchasing Practice Commitments.
Every two years, our colleagues and suppliers complete the ACT survey to anonymously share their feedback on our purchasing practices, helping us monitor our progress and understand which areas to focus on to make further improvements as part of the industry’s largest purchasing practices survey. Results from the 2025 survey are due at the end of this year. You can see previous results in our Sustainability and Ethics Report 2022-23.
Our five commitments on purchasing practices |
Description |
Upskilling and awareness training |
We continue to improve the understanding and implementation of Responsible Purchasing Practices within our business. To date, we have trained nearly 1,400 colleagues. |
Wages as itemised costs |
Together with our suppliers, we've established a process to identify and ringfence the labour cost of a product to help protect workers’ wages from price negotiations. For the buying season Autumn/Winter 2025, 89% of products had the labour cost identified, up from 42% in the Spring Summer 2025 buying season. |
Fair terms of payments |
Setting fair terms for the way we pay suppliers, including reasonable and agreed timeframes, is crucial. For example, we offer our Goods for Resale suppliers 30-day standard payment terms. Orders for 97% of Goods for Resale suppliers were paid within the agreed timeframe, up from 93% last year. |
Better forecasting and planning |
Through long-term planning for core products, we support suppliers in managing their production cycles and budgets. We are rolling out our Product Lifecycle Management platform to allow teams to collaborate with suppliers on all stages of product development and approval. Alongside this, we are launching our Assortment Planner tool, which will improve the accuracy of order forecasting. |
Responsible exit strategies |
If we need to stop working with a factory or supplier, we continue to follow our Supply Chain Human Rights Policy and the ACT Responsible Exit Policy and Checklist, honouring any existing orders. |
We’re exploring more effective ways to gather accurate information so that we can better understand the overall wage gap to a living wage and incentivise suppliers to make progress in this space. We launched a pilot using the Fair Labor Association (FLA) Fair Compensation Toolkit to collect wage data across factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India and Türkiye. Gathering and sharing this data with each factory has been vital so that factory management and their suppliers can see gaps in their wage levels and address them.
To improve data collection, we have worked closely with factories to train them on uploading their wage data into the tool. We’ve also been working with FLA to drive improvements in the tool. This included a pilot in nine factories to collect gender disaggregated wage data. All but one factory showed a larger gap to the Living Wage Benchmark among female workers compared to their male counterparts. None of the factories were aware of these disparities. We have explored the findings with factory management teams to understand the root causes of gender pay gaps.
For example, one of our factories in Bangladesh has used the data from the pilot to identify that there were no female workers in their ironing section in turn then running a pilot placing female workers in the ironing section.
Taking these findings forward, we’ve discussed ways to raise awareness of this issue with Business Fights Poverty and the FLA. We are currently exploring use of Anker Research Institute’s e-learning course on Gender Pay Parity to help factory management put in place long-term solutions to gender pay gaps, where they exist.
We have also commissioned an independent review of the toolkit’s use in the factories and ways that we can both enhance and scale it.
Many workers in our supply chain, especially women, are unfamiliar with payslips, social insurance or savings options, which can leave them vulnerable to financial insecurity, wage theft and debt cycles. On the other hand, when people understand how to manage their money more effectively, they’re more confident, independent and less vulnerable to financial exploitation. We’re investing in a number of financial literacy programmes to help workers in our supply chain access the knowledge and tools they need to take control of their finances, from understanding payslips to registering for social insurance.
These initiatives now reach 29 factories across four countries and cover a wide range of initiatives, from supporting factories to transition to digital wage payments in Cambodia to helping workers in India access government social welfare schemes.
Many women feel unable to progress in their careers because they lack the necessary skills to do so.
In Bangladesh, we have a long-standing programme called Sudokkho that helps to equip women to become supervisors by providing training to improve workers’ skills. It provides training to enable and encourage factories to improve workers’ skills. These could be technical skills, such as machine operation, or soft skills like problem-solving, all of which help individuals grasp opportunities to increase their earning potential and seniority in the workplace. The programme also works with factory managers to challenge traditional assumptions around who can and can’t lead teams and manage high pressure roles.
28 factories in our supply chain participated in our Sudokkho skills development programme this year.
Gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) remains one of the most widespread human rights violations in the world. Many women working in supply chains face verbal abuse, intimidation and unwanted attention. It often goes unreported, partly because women can receive threats of dismissal for speaking up, but also because much of this behaviour is normalised, making it difficult to address. We’re taking a systemic approach to address its causes, which are often rooted in social norms.
Alongside our support to address GBVH behaviours identified through our social audit programme and external grievance mechanisms, we are supporting the Maitri project in India to proactively prevent and address these issues in nine factories. This aims to challenge and change prejudice towards women, help workers and leaders better understand the nature of GBVH and create support networks for people to raise and address issues safely.
We work hard to protect the health and safety of workers in our supply chain. We require suppliers to provide a safe and hygienic working environment with access to adequate medical assistance in the event of illness or injury at work. All workers must receive regular and recorded health and safety training. We also work with suppliers to raise and maintain health and safety standards in the workplace through various initiatives.
Building from these foundations, we work with suppliers to improve workers’ health and wellbeing more holistically. That involves improving health and safety processes further, helping people access services and giving people an effective means to raise concerns. We work with suppliers to better train employees on these processes and provide access to external support where needed.
Effective grievance mechanisms play an important role in supporting workers’ health and wellbeing, while understanding and addressing other issues people face in the workplace. They should give people a way to safely raise problems they’re experiencing at work without retaliation. These mechanisms are required as part of our Supplier Code of Conduct, and we are working with our suppliers to widen access to and improve channels to better support people in speaking up.
During the year, we had four initiatives supporting improvements to workers’ physical and mental health and wellbeing in over 300 factories.
Our EHS Now! programme in China upskills managers on a wide range of environmental, health and safety (EHS) topics, including chemical safety and protective equipment. As of July 2025, there are almost 400 tier one finished goods supply chain factories enrolled, on this programme. This year, the programme has set up working groups for each factory and assigned members specific responsibility zones, which will improve accountability and enhance visibility of EHS issues.
Globally, over one billion people with visual impairment could see clearly if they had glasses. This is particularly important for workers in the garment industry who need clear vision for many of the tasks involved with making clothes and textiles. We’re partnered with global social enterprise VisionSpring in Bangladesh to help improve the vision of workers in our supply chain. In the factories where this programme is running VisionSpring tests every worker’s vision and provides glasses when needed.
This year, there were nearly 35,000 tests conducted, with glasses provided to approximately 13,000 workers. 90% of these were first-time wearers. Following the project's success across 16 factories, we will continue to expand the project into more factories in Bangladesh. All suppliers involved in the project in Bangladesh have agreed to share the costs of it with us, showing their commitment to workers’ health.
Many workers in our sourcing countries don’t receive the care they need because negative stigmas around different health concerns stop them from seeking help. This is particularly the case for mental health issues.
In our experience through the programmes we run with a number of our suppliers, workplaces can play a valuable role in opening discussions around mental wellbeing. They can help remove stigmas and offer workers a clear route to getting support.
Moner Kotha (‘mind talk’ in Bengali) was inspired by the My Space project to increase awareness of mental health issues and build resilience among workers. This is done by providing support for workers through training, capacity building and the provision of mental health information in the workplace. In partnership with the the British Asian Trust and Sajida Foundation, the programme is running in five factories this year.
Using learnings from a partner review, we’ve designed the next phase of this programme to focus on showing factory management the importance and impact of good mental health, encouraging them to support access to counselling among teams.
Across our sourcing markets, we’re witnessing how the results of climate change are negatively impacting people in our supply chain. This includes excessive heat for factory workers and farmers in our Primark Cotton Project, where we continue to educate farmers on how to build resilience to climate change and other shocks, such as flooding, that are increasingly part of farmers’ daily lives.
The impacts of climate change are far reaching and diverse, so we continue to build out our assessment of the risks to further understand where we should focus our efforts.
As global temperatures rise, so do indoor temperatures, particularly in garment factories as manufacturing processes already generate heat. We have taken some steps to help address this risk and continue to build out our approach in this area.
This year, we issued a guide to all our suppliers to build their understanding of how excessive heat can create multiple human rights risks in the supply chain and provided them with guidance and our requirements of them to manage this rising risk. We now require suppliers' factories to carry out a heat stress risk assessment and put in place appropriate measures to mitigate the risk to vulnerable workers and those working on tasks that expose them to greater heat in the workplace, such as ironing.
Since October 2024, our social audits include heat stress in their evaluation of factories. This includes whether a heat stress risk assessment has taken place and evidence that heat stress mitigation has been followed, where relevant, and that worker welfare is maintained. We also check that regular health checks are completed for workers identified as being at high risk of heat stress and that medical assistance is available for workers suffering from heat stress.
Cambodia has been identified as a country where there is a higher risk of heat stress to workers. This year our Structural Integrity team supported by external engineering experts conducted more in-depth research in Cambodia into the effects of heat in the workplace environment and on working temperatures. The next phase of work following the conclusion of the research will be to develop further guidelines for our suppliers to enable them to improve the management of working temperatures in their factories.
