Sales of fairly traded products have bucked the trend of decline in the UK retail market to grow by 12% in the last year. The value of Fairtrade products sold through shops reached £1.32bn in 2011, compared to £1.17bn in 2010, according to figures from the Fairtrade Foundation, as it launches [...]

Bangladesh will almost double the minimum wage for its garment workers, a wage board official says, following months of violent protests over pay. It will rise from 1,662 taka ($25; £16) per month to 3,000 taka. The labour ministry is to formally announce the deal on Thursday. Workers wanted the rate, last raised in 2006, [...]

A few years ago, a book entitled Change or Die made the case that despite the exhortations of management hipsters and hyperbolic CEOs, companies seldom change the way they operate and people rarely modify their behavior. That in fact, even when a crisis demands change, the scientific evidence shows that nine out of ten times, [...]

Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant, and Marks & Spencer, the British retail chain, are among the companies with the most developed environmental policies, and which are also making the most effective use of these activities to differentiate their brands, a UN report has found. The Linking Shareholder and Natural Value study was produced by [...]

Laggards of the past often turn into leaders of the present. The case of Wal-Mart perfectly illustrates this paradoxical tendency, states a report published today by Geneva-based ethical reputation research firm Covalence – Covalence Retail Industry Report 2008. A year ago Wal-Mart was still last in Covalence EthicalQuote ranking calculated for 27 companies in the [...]

The issue of child labor strikes an emotional chord with a vast majority of consumers. When the BBC released a segment detailing the ongoing horrors of child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry in October 2007, massive public attention was drawn to the world’s third largest exporter of cotton and its unsettling child rights abuses. [...]

Geneva-based Covalence is publishing today its third annual ethical reputation ranking, giving the best ranked companies as well as those companies which have made the most progress in 2007. An overview of emerging and decreasing topics is also given. The main results across sectors are: > Rio Tinto, Dell and Marks & Spencer enter [...]

La société genevoise Covalence publie aujourd’hui son troisième ranking annuel de réputation éthique, qui classe les entreprises enregistrant le meilleur score et celles ayant le plus progressé au cours de l’année 2007. Les principaux résultats à travers les dix secteurs sont : Rio Tinto, Dell et Marks & Spencer entrent dans les 10 meilleures cotations [...]

Clothes chain Gap is planning to label its clothes “sweatshop free”. Following claims that the company has sold clothes made in factories that use child labour, the firm met anti-sweatshop charity Global March Against Child Labour to discuss ideas such as allowing customers to track where their clothes were made online. More good news for [...]

While I am on the subject of plastic bags, I would like to name and shame Marks and Spencer. My mother is ill so when I visited last weekend I went to buy some flowers. The flowers were pre-wrapped in the usual plastic wrapping. Taking my flowers to the counter the assistant who served me [...]