Our Standards

•	Adherence to local laws
•	Environmental practices and policies
•	Requirements for labor (including prohibitions on discrimination and the use of forced and child labor, protection of the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, and wage and hour standards)
•	Requirements for safe and healthy working conditions

Because no work environment is static, no factory meets these standards all of the time. Even though a factory's emergency exits may be clear when our Vendor Compliance Officer does an inspection, one of these exits could easily be blocked by a rolling cart later that same day. By monitoring factories on an ongoing basis, we strive to help them understand how to avoid violations and continuously improve their compliance with our Code.

While the Gap Inc. Code of Vendor Conduct we created in 1996 is based on internationally accepted labor standards, including the UN norms, we believe that a single, standardized, industry code is the best way to promote sustainable improvements in working conditions across our industry. That's why we're actively involved in the Joint Initiative on Corporate Accountability and Workers' Rights, an effort to develop an industry-wide alternative to often conflicting individual company codes.

As members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) and Social Accountability International (SAI), we have committed to work to better align our code with ETI's Base Code and SAI's SA8000 standard. To do this, we are working closely with these groups and other worker rights and civil society groups to address these issues both in our code as well as how we enforce it through our compliance program. Learn more about our efforts to evolve toward a common, industry-wide Code.