Some Chains Have Cracks too: The Upstream Supply Chain Issue

The garment industry is woven into my personal story - quite literally. With my Pakistani background, and a family business in the textile and medical uniforms, I learned supply chains not from business books but from walking factory floors. I watched my father track complex production lines, spoke with managers balancing impossible delivery schedules, and even shook hands with mill workers whose livelihoods depended on every order. This lived experience which fundamentally still shapes my own retail choices today, now forms my vantage point (half insider, half critic) through which I approach this research. 

This semester, my team and I are tackling a technical and moral question: how can corporate reporting illuminate the hidden labor impacts of textile and apparel supply chains? Our focus is surgically sharp where we isolate the challenges and opportunities around labor-related impacts across the key South Asian manufacturing hubs of Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

Our initial findings are that the industry employs millions but still wrestles with systemic issues. Poverty wages, gender inequities, and unsafe working conditions are not revelations; they are the persistent backdrop of global fashion. What matters is why they persist, and why the tools meant to address them such as audits, codes of conduct, and sustainability reports, fail to penetrate beyond surface-level compliance.

The real friction point, however, lies not in the well-documented disclosures of multi-national brands, but within the middle layers of their supply chains. This is the realm of non-listed companies and small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) exist. They are the backstage crew of a Broadway production that are essential, unseen and consistently overlooked. 

The problem is structural. SMEs face crushing resource constraints and operate in hyper competitive markets where survival often trumps disclosure or accountability. For them, sustainability reporting is nowhere near the top of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs! It is a luxury they simply cannot afford. And yet, collectively, these firms carry an outsized share of the industry’s footprint. By some estimates, SMEs account for up to 80% of Scope 3 emissions in apparel value chains. Without their participation, the glossy reports of multinational buyer’s risk devolving into little more than exercises in image management rather than instruments of genuine accountability.

Why this matters now

To ignore this 'invisible gap' is to risk repeating history. I still remember reading about the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, and the traumatic images that followed: concrete floors pancaked on top of one another and sewing machines crushed into debris. More than 1,100 workers died. Many of them young women who had been warned by their families not to return to the building after cracks were spotted in the walls. And yet, they did return, because the wages they earned were not optional, they were survival.

What bothers me the most is that the factories inside Rana Plaza were producing for global brands that could proudly point to their audits, their codes of conduct and their compliance reports. On paper, oversight existed. In practice, they miserably failed to reach the places where real risks lived and mattered. A decade later, the imbalance persists. There is still transparency at the top. Multinational corporations such as Zara, H&M are celebrating progress in reporting frameworks, yet the core blind spot remains.

Critically, I force myself to ask these questions. Is sustainability reporting simply a performance staged to reassure shareholders and consumers? Is it, in many cases a sophisticated form of greenwashing? Is it as everyone says, an alphabet soup that continues to be rearranged with no progress? Or more critically, is it another mechanism through which neo-colonial structures of control are reinforced, exporting the language of transparency while leaving the power imbalances intact?

Though the optimist in me, believes in much more. I believe that reporting is a process. It takes trial and error. There are regulatory landscapes such as India that are shifting. For example, the India’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) and the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) are signalling that accountability will be pushed further upstream into the supply chain. This can either be a burden or a breakthrough for SME and non-listed companies. Those that adapt may gain an edge in global markets, however those that cannot, may find themselves behind. 

What’s next?

What I expect from this experience is not only to study reporting frameworks, but to construct a kind of permeable guidebook. One that interrogates the blind spots where real risks live, especially in the 'invisible middle' of supply chains. My hope is that such a framework could help investors, shareholders, educators, and policymakers sharpen their decision-making, transforming sustainability from an abstract concept into an everyday reality.

Ultimately, I want to push the idea that sustainability cannot remain a framework on paper. It must become a lived practice.