Fashion’s best kept secret: home-based workers
They trim loose threads, stitch buttons, zippers and hooks and hem garments; they embroider and embellish with beads and sequins; they hand-paint fabrics, knot tassels and fold garments into polybags for shipment; they even do edge-painting or decorative stitching for accessories. There is hardly a supply chain in the textile, garment and footwear industry that makes do without home-based workers (HBWs). Intricate, time-consuming processes that are hard to mechanise is their expertise.
While precise global numbers for HBWs in the garment, textile and footwear industries are hard to come by because these workers are often "invisible" in official national statistics and hardly figure in industrial surveys, there could be 260 million home-based workers globally across all sectors according to WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising) and the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2021/2022 data).
Mapping the “forgotten” workforce
According to estimates, up to 90 percent of the sector’s workforce operates informally in some countries, a majority of them being women. They work within small, unregistered factories, at home or collecting and sorting (textile) waste for recycling. While a single global "headcount" for just the garment sector is not always available, WIEGO notes that the garment and textile industry is one of the primary employers of HBWs. In South Asia alone, there are an estimated 50 million home-based workers. In India, research from 2012 indicated that 45 percent of the country's 37.4 million home-based workers were involved in garments and textiles.
Despite their contributions to global production and recycling systems, these workers do not figure in companies’ due diligence efforts; brands and retailers may even claim not to employ them. And indeed, on paper they may not, but given that garment and textile supply chains can be complex and have many layers, they may simply not know that their subcontractors farm out the aforementioned tasks to home-based workers. The session “The missing millions: Due diligence in informal settings” as part of the OECD Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector shed light on this “forgotten” workforce.
Legislative progress and the data challenge
Minister for labor and human resources, Saeed Ghani, of the Sindh Government opened the session by discussing the landmark Sindh Home Based Workers Act of 2018. It grants every registered home-based worker the right to all those social, medical and maternity benefits, compensations and marriages and death grants available to workers according to current labour laws. He emphasised that while the Pakistan Peoples Party has a history of pro-labour legislation, the primary hurdle remains transitioning from policy to practice. The minister highlighted the creation of a tripartite council and the inclusion of women advocates in social security governance to ensure that those at the bottom of the pyramid finally have a seat at the table. Now, there are also ten HBWs unions and two federations.
To bridge the gap between legislation and reality, the Sindh government introduced a digital ‘labour card’ to register workers independently of their employers. This initiative was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed a complete lack of data for cash transfers to informal workers. "By removing this barrier of the employer certificate, we are allowing them to come and get registered with the government and avail the facilities under the Social Security,” noted Ghani. While the number of cards issued is still low at 150,000, the minister is confident that going forward, it would be in the millions. “Hopefully, maybe in the next few years, it would be possible to claim that we have a better number of workers registered by the government.”
Global due diligence trends — the evolving regulatory landscape
Alison Corkery, law programme director at WIEGO, provided a global perspective, identifying four trends shaping the due diligence landscape: Firstly, she noted a growing clarity on how international labour standards apply to all workers, regardless of status. Secondly, she highlighted that new EU regulations like CSDDD for instance are pushing brands to look beyond tier-one suppliers. Thirdly, this shift is essential as supply chains move towards circularity and trade policies are beginning to reinforce these expectations. Lastly, governments are seeing a formalisation of the informal sector.
While trade policies are increasingly linking market access to labour standards, thus creating economic incentives for formalisation, Corkery warned that legal recognition does not always equal protection. "We expect that this momentum around treaty ratification and due diligence laws... signals rising expectations for brands, and for those that act proactively, this shift is an opportunity to build leadership,” she stated.
Exploitation is ripe in this “invisible” part of the supply chain: These subcontracted piece-rate workers sit at the very bottom of the supply chain without holidays, sick days, grievance mechanisms, health care, benefits or safety net. Wages, therefore, are much below the often already low minimum wage. In India, for example, workers may earn between 2 and 6 rupees (between 0.02 to 0.07 US dollars) per piece for basic tasks like trimming threads or attaching buttons. While high-end hand embroidery like Zari or Zardozi pays more, around 100 to 300 rupees (about 1.20 to 3.60 US dollars) per piece, these items can take several days of intense labor to complete. It is therefore not uncommon for a home-based worker to earn the equivalent of 0.40 to 1.50 US dollars for a full eight-hour day of work.
In Bangladesh, HBWs often earn less than half of the factory minimum wage of 113 US dollars because they are paid only for what they complete. In Vietnam, they typically earn 30 to 50 percent of the average monthly wage for garment and textile workers, which was about 163 US dollars in 2025 (all figures based on data by WIEGO, ILO and Fashion Revolution).
In Eastern Europe, home-based garment workers also receive piece rates, resulting in a monthly take-home pay of 250 to 350 US dollars, significantly below the gross monthly minimum wage — 814 euros (about 880 US dollars) in Romania and 551 euros (about 600 US dollars) in Bulgaria according to Eurostat data.
Invisibility and the gendered nature of work — fluidity between home and factory
Janhavi Dave, advisor at HomeNet International, brought attention to the 49 million homeworkers in global supply chains, the majority of whom are women. She described a "fluidity" where women move between factories and home-based work depending on their life stages, such as childcare needs. This movement often renders them invisible to standard audit tools, leaving them without contracts, minimum wages or social protection.
A recent study by HomeNet across 12 locations found alarming levels of precariousness, including instances of hunger among workers' children. Dave emphasised that these workers are a structural, yet unacknowledged, part of the industry. "Home Based workers are basically at the bottom of the production chain... they were not aware of the brands that they were making for and therefore not part of company's due diligence process,” she stated.
Health hazards at the landfill — waste pickers and the risks of the circular economy
As brands crave ‘recycled’ fibres, often made with waste outside of the textile chain like plastic, Gisore Nyabuti shared the harrowing reality of those collecting these materials. He started collecting waste from the age of nine, encouraged by his mother. He described a sector rife with health risks, including chemical fumes and a complete lack of immunisation or protective equipment. He noted that while brands want "clean beauty" in their recycled plastics, they rarely enquire about the people sourcing them.
Understanding early that there is strength in unity, Nyabuti joined the Kenya National Waste Pickers Welfare Organisation as its chairman, which today reaches 46,000 waste pickers. He highlighted the daily struggle for dignity, stating: "The middle-class areas and the rich areas, they don't allow waste pickers to go in to take the recyclables, they are viewed differently... a waste picker is not a clean person." Nyabuti expressed concern that policy approaches like the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) might exclude the very workers they rely on if they are not designed with a human perspective in mind. “It seems a bit one-way at the moment but if done well, it will empower the workers,” he emphasised.
Beyond the factory floor — brand responsibility and the power of transparency
Francesca Mangano, head of CSR and sustainability of TFG Brands London, shared a progressive corporate approach, explaining how her company moved beyond a basic code of conduct to implement a specific homeworker policy. Recognising that high-end embellished garments cannot be made by machines, she sought to de-stigmatise homeworkers and treat them as an "extended branch of the family tree" rather than a liability to be hidden.
Mangano’s visit to rural communities in Sikandarbad near Delhi transformed the brand's approach, revealing how purchasing practices—like only costing for small sizes—directly impacted workers' livelihoods. She advocated for a shift from Western-centric safety demands to listening to workers' actual needs, such as battery-powered lights or female doctors. "Having that policy was a vessel to initiate the conversation and make our suppliers comfortable with the idea that we were welcoming the presence of homeworkers in our supply chain,” she noted.
Asked where brands can get started, she emphasised “small steps”. “Have a conversation with your suppliers,” she urged, adding that “what you are going to find is not a pretty picture”. However, it will lead to progress by understanding the intermediaries and conveying that the brand welcomes home-based workers. Among the challenges that remain to be discussed are per piece rates, unionisation and handling crises such as Covid-19.
OR CONTINUE WITH