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While we are often lost in the
debate around what social compliance really means and whether or how to certify
such a condition, we never lose sight of the desired end result, which is to increase
the role that workers play in making improvements in the global workplace. If corrections
are to be sustainable over the long-term, workers must be provided with the appropriate
circumstances in which they can learn to use their voices.
Independent monitors are asked to
use any number of the myriad codes that are in place today to judge social and
legal compliance: the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI); SA8000; Fair Labor
Association (FLA); Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD);
Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (MNEs); the
UN’s Global Compact and individual company codes, to name a few. There are,
however, several core issues that are common to most of these codes:
Compliance with National and Local
Labor Laws
Forced Labor
Contract Labor
Debt Bonded Labor
Prison Labor
Child Labor
Freedom of Association and
Collective Bargaining
Wages and Benefits
Harassment/Abuse
Non-discrimination
Health and Safety
Hours of Work
Overtime Compensation
Increasingly we are seeing the most
progressive codes include issues such as women’s rights (regarding reproductive
health and privacy), migrant or contract labor, environmental concerns
(particularly those that intersect with core health and safety standards), and
living wage provisions.
At Verité, we consider violations
on all of these issues to be a part of what we call “hidden production systems.”
It has been our experience in over 57 countries thus far that the most
egregious violations are those that are the least obvious during a quick visual
factory inspection. It is increasingly apparent that the same flexibility and
responsiveness that allows factory owners to meet the needs of international
consumers make many of them adept at developing mechanisms for masking systemic
or institutionalized abuses that are a part of their workplaces.
For example we often find:
Verité has pioneered a model of off-site
confidential worker interviews because we feel that there is no credible
auditing possible without input from workers to check the veracity of
information obtained from management, factory conditions when auditors are not
present, payroll analyses, working conditions, human rights abuses and other
issues.
Going
beyond the snapshot...
There is a growing problem emerging
in the area of verification involving both corporate and factory behavior. The
emphasis thus far has been on which code of conduct, system and verifier to use
and not on the end purpose for such an undertaking. However, auditing only
provides a snapshot of conditions – it does not in and of itself provide relief to workers or bring factories up to legal
standards. Only verification mechanisms that include worker input, provide
transparency and emphasize remediation will begin to make sustainable,
culturally relevant and economically viable improvements a reality.
Verité is at times asked to certify factories. A full understanding
of our methodology would clarify why we do not certify factories. Verité's comprehensive factory evaluations are based on an
ever-growing and evolving list of standards derived from International Labor
Organization (ILO) core conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Occupational Safety and Health Association (OSHA) (as a benchmark), local and national
legislation and, where laws are silent, on best practices identified during our
six years of auditing. In our experience with factories that often change
management personnel, or are subject to frequent national currency devaluations
or other economic disruptions, it is virtually impossible to draw a line in the
sand and state that as of a particular date, a given factory is "compliant."
Conditions can change within a matter of days of an audit. When a factory is
faced with a downturn, labor is one of the few variable costs that can be
squeezed.
What compliance means and how to certify it are two red
herrings that detract from the urgent need for improvements in factories both
at home and abroad. The literal application of these terms can often lead compliance
program participants to believe that further action or continuous improvement
is unnecessary. The process of bringing a factory into compliance is actually more
organic, long-term, and complicated, made up of layers of improvements that
require the on-going participation of management personnel and, importantly, workers.
Without worker input, "northern" codes,
monitoring systems and guidelines will face thorny challenges offered by what
are often deep-rooted and complicated socio-economic and cultural systems, in
areas such as wage levels, minimum age requirements, weakened governmental
enforcement, harmful macroeconomic investment incentives, and women's rights
issues.
Having monitored workplace conditions in hundreds of
factories, our consistent finding is that workers must be allowed to play a role
in identifying problems and developing solutions to workplace violations for
meaningful change to take place.
Worker education and training is the most urgent need we
have identified in the countries where we’ve been monitoring. As Verité moves forward
into its seventh year, all of our education programs will focus on this area. Our
current programs in
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