Media Shaming and Supply Chain Labor Transparency in the Fashion Industry

The fashion industry’s labor scandals have drawn wide attention, with incidents such as the Rana Plaza in 2013 and Boohoo in 2020. Several multistakeholder initiatives have called for more transparency in fashion brands’ efforts to address their supply chains’ labor issues. While recent studies have started to examine some institutional forces (e.g., corporate customers, peer firms, and regulators) driving environmental transparency (primarily on the carbon dimension), we focus on transparency about four problematic labor issues (i.e., modern slavery, living wages, gender disparities, and unionization) and draw attention to a less-studied institutional force: media. We ask whether media exposure might prompt a fashion brand to publicly disclose its policies, initiatives, and outcomes regarding its suppliers’ working and labor conditions—what we call supply chain labor transparency—and when this pressure would be more effective depending on the firm’s board. We used data on 132 fashion brands and retailers provided by the UK not-for-profit organization Fashion Revolution and supplemented it with four archival data sources. The results show that firms whose boards comprise directors with short-to-medium tenure length or include more female directors tend to exhibit more supply chain labor transparency in the wake of media controversies in a previous year. Conversely, firms whose boards are either long-tenured or mainly male have less transparent supply chains. Interestingly, while the effect thresholds for board tenure length are relatively consistent across the four labor issues studied, the thresholds for female representation differ by issue—it takes markedly more female directors to increase transparency about living wages than it does to increase transparency on gender issues. Thus, our study suggests an alternative path for using the broader social system that would advance supply chain labor transparency: media shaming can be more effective when the firm has a “fresh, diverse” board. We also provide guidance for multiple stakeholders including brands, supply chain workers, and social activists.