III. Outline of Report

Implementation of the Dindigul Agreement began immediately after its signing a year ago. This report, developed by the labor stakeholders of the Agreement, describes the key outcomes from the first year of the implementation of the Agreement. The second chapter provides an overview of the greement and elaborates upon the key principles driving the Agreement and its components. The third chapter describes the implementation of the anti-GBVH program of the Agreement and the impact of the Agreement on women’s empowerment, worker wellbeing, and business. The fourth chapter provides concluding remarks and the way forward, based on the experiences of implementation in Year 1.

The Dindigul Agreement is rebalancing power in the supply chain and in the workplace. TTCU’s Agreement with garment and textile manufacturer Eastman Exports creates a framework for women workers – accompanied and supported by TTCU – to exercise a collective voice and build the leadership needed to identify, report, remediate, and prevent GBVH in their workplace and beyond. The fashion companies’ agreements, also called brand agreements, fortify workers’ collective power as well as monitor and enforce the terms of TTCU’s agreement with Eastman, creating an effective and efficient system that drives GBVH prevention through true empowerment and incentivization of good faith cooperation from all levels of management – a pathway for ending impunity and creating accountability for GBVH at work.

The Dindigul Agreement is based on years of work led by AFWA to identify and propose worker-led solutions for GBVH in garment and textile manufacturing throughout South and Southeast Asia. Reflecting the experience of AFWA and its member unions, the Agreement expresses and is built on certain principles. These principles are informed by evidence-based research on the problem and barriers to reporting and remediation. The components of the Dindigul Agreement assign appropriate roles and actions to supply chain actors to give life to the principles, with the various structures and processes mutually reinforcing each other. This chapter summarizes these key guiding principles and the corresponding components in the Agreement and refers to how they are actualized in the implementation described in chapter 3. These guiding principles are grouped by category below:

I. A strategic understanding of GBVH

II. GBVH remediation together with freedom of association (FOA) as essential for mature industrial relations (IR)

III. Bottom-up, multi-tier, and survivor-led GBVH remediation

IV. The capacity of suppliers to positively transform

V. Proper brand incentivization

VI. Workplaces as sites for social change

As the table on the next page shows, these principles are realized in the full text of the Agreement between TTCU and Eastman Exports, which is available in Annex 1.