Embracing our responsibility
Governance | Code of Vendor Conduct
Gap Inc.’s Code of Vendor Conduct (COVC) establishes the legal, social and environmental requirements that all manufacturers and factories must meet in order to do business with our company.
Our code is designed to ensure that garment workers are paid fairly, work a reasonable number of hours, and do their work in a safe, healthy environment. It is based on conventions established by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and aligned with the policies of Social Accountability International (SAI) and the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). It spells out our expectations for compliance with four main principles: laws, environment, labor, and working conditions.
We do our best to monitor factory compliance with our code together with applicable laws. Our code states that factories must abide by all applicable laws and regulations.
We developed our first sourcing guidelines for suppliers in 1992 and established our first COVC in 1996. Since then, our Code has enabled us to better evaluate working conditions in the factories that produce our clothes, make meaningful improvements and share the results with our diverse world of stakeholders.
We last updated our COVC in June 2008.