#FlashHacks: May - Mapping apparel companies
Details
EXPLORE OPEN COMPANY DATA & MAP CORPORATE NETWORKS
Drop in with your laptop, charger and enthusiasm to join us for an evening of civic activism.
It's been four years since the tragic events at Rana Plaza, where lack of safety and humane working conditions were exposed due to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh. This FlashHacks, we'll be digging into the corporate network of apparel brands.
"There was barely any publicly available information about the apparel brands that were using the Rana Plaza factories. Activists searched through the rubble for labels and interviewed survivors. For decades, such secrecy has been the norm in the garment industry. While a handful of companies, like Adidas, Nike, Levi’s, Puma, and Patagonia, began publishing details more than a decade ago, others have recently joined. By the end of 2016, at least 29 apparel companies (https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/04/20/follow-thread/need-supply-chain-transparency-garment-and-footwear-industry) were disclosing some information about their source factories. Yet, company commitments to transparency about supplier information are inconsistent, with widely varying standards for what they choose to disclose. Many brands have held out completely." - Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/04/24/message-global-brands-rana-plaza-survivor)
We live in the era of transnational companies. If Panama Papers proved one thing - the world of business is complex, opaque and in critical need of transparency. Not just transparency but radical transparency, so we know who controls companies and how far their networks reach. OpenCorporates has always been a community-led initiative, and we would not have reached 125 million companies in over 100 jurisdictions worldwide without our community. You have joined the battle by writing bots, finding datasets, talking about us at events and working with us to convince governments to open up their data.
Clearly, if we are to win the battle to make a closed world open, we can only do so together. These events are a great opportunity to roll your sleeves up and get stuck into the nitty gritty of opening up data!
Hope to see you all there.
p.s. if you're not on Slack already, please do sign up as that will be our main port for communication and work: slack.opencorporates.com