Is there any website that has comprehensive information on the human rights records of a number of apparel/clothing companies?
That is a little vague. I have worked at the headquarters for a couple of them even in your locale of Massachusetts. One made lots of different kinds of shoes or at least they designed them and retailed them. The shoes were made in the far East, Europe, and South America. Those types of factories aren’t owned by any shoe companies although they compete for business among many shoe companies each. They just take the designs and set up the factories to make them as the win contracts. I am not sure how to classify that. The company did send inspectors every few months to make sure there was nothing egregious going on in the factories because that can be bad PR for such companies.
The other one was a gigantic fashion retailer that bought and sold from all over.
That is the way that most of the fashion industry works. A designer sitting at a desk and computer makes beautiful things to wear and then other folks go find someone to make it based on their specifications. There are all kinds of pe0ople and companies involved up and down the supply chain.
I am only saying this because I don’t know how someone would decide to put in such a list let alone how to interpret it.
This is how most consumer goods are created. A marketing group creates a list of features for a new product, designers create the look and feel of the product as well as any user interface (if it’s electronic/mechanical good), this is packaged up and the company goes shopping around to see how to make it cheaper - sometimes inside the company, sometimes outside, sometimes both. Each company has specific internal policies as to who, how and when can make which of their products.
For electronics, for instance, model numbers usually only signify featuresets. A lot of manufacturers will have several different companies make different submodels with completely different internal designs. A fake example: Say you have a Japanese or Korean electronics giant making a DVD player line. They make a DVD-ABC123 and a DVD-ABC123X, two identical looking model except the -X model is a little more expensive and offers, say, a bookmarking feature where it remembers spots in a movie and lets you jump back to them. It is not improbable that ABC123 will be made by one taiwanese company and ABC123X by another, possibly even in another country, sometimes to the point of using entirely different hardware and architectures on the inside. Sure, the UI and the case will be identical, and the quality assurance team at the client company will make damn sure they act the same way, but what’s on the inside doesn’t matter.
The reason I’m saying this is that if you made a list of companies actually manufacturing consumer goods, it won’t tell you anything since it’s difficult to trace the goods back to the brand name ordering them. If you make a list of brand name companies of consumer goods, it won’t tell you anything since it’s difficult to trace where what has been made and it’s probably been made everywhere and anywhere.