Looking for a quick fix: How weak social auditing is keeping workers in sweatshops
Sunday, 20 November 2005 00:00
This Clean Clothes Campaign report, drawing upon the input of 670 workers from 40 factories, shows that social audits as they are currently carried out often fail to deliver as a tool for checking working conditions in facilities producing garments and sports shoes.
Social audits to check working conditions in production facilities emerged in the mid-1990s after a number of high profile companies were widely scrutinized for substandard working conditions in their supply chains. At that time, a growing number of companies-for example Nike, Gap, Levi Strauss, and C&A-had adopted codes of conduct that in essence were pledges to prevent exploitation and abuse of workers producing their goods. Labour advocates soon challenged these companies to demonstrate conformity to the standards they had adopted. Calls for independent, civil society based forms of workplace assessments were made. The large majority of companies ignored these calls and actually did very little to implement or enforce their codes of conduct.
