Multinational fast fashion firms and human rights: New standards of liability

Abstract

This paper analyses how the expansion of multinational firms through the adoption of third-party chains in the fast fashion clothing industry spawns a series of violations to workers rights, which are displayed as human rights violations. The third-party chains are intensively ramified and extense, which makes their mapping difficult and the uncovering of the actors and possible perpetrators involved even more difficult. Through bibliohgraphic revision, it was possible to diagnose that the conventional civil liability framework, based on the bynom damage-causal link, no longer suits efficiently the nees to mitigate and repair these violations. Beginning in the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights directives, new paths for an ethical and susteinable operation of the firms are established, with different visions of the multinational firm and its global operation. The metodology used was a qualitative research, by the means of an indirect investigation and the dialetical method, which possibi-litates to perceive that the multinational firm operates through an articulated network of suppliers, applying vast control over them, demonstrating teh importance of the notion of sphere of influence, which still lacks a more precise definition, nevertheless can be one of the solutions to establish new paradigms of liability to human rights violations caused by big third-party chains, enhancing the expectations of reparation.