Fatal Fashion
‘social audits’ are failing to deliver as a tool for assessing respect for labour rights. There are multiple reasons for this. Workers, workers’ organisations, women's and labour NGOs are marginalised in the social audit process. It is easy for workplaces to receive positive evaluations, as audit visits are often announced in advance, allowing factory managers time to prepare and convey a false impression of working conditions. Factory managers are deceiving social auditors in many ways, most notably by coaching workers before they are interviewed by auditors to convey false or incomplete information and by falsifying records. Social audits are usually too short, too superficial and too sloppy to identify certain types of code violations. Workers are badly informed about their rights, often too scared for their own jobs to speak up about problems during audits, and generally do not have the opportunity to file a complaint. 29 The vast majority of social audits are conducted by global firms whose staff is generally unskilled and inexperienced to do the job, and whose business model conflicts with the requirements for credible, independent social auditing. Social auditing is often conducted by means of a checkbox approach. Auditors may only look superficially at the availability of firefighting equipment and fire training certificates. Auditors often lack the expertise to assess electrical machinery, boilers, and construction deficits. Audits are often not followed by effective remediation. Last but not least, the audit industry is closed and secretive, preventing serious discussion 30 about its policy and practices and possible improvements to its methods. This report describes how social auditing failed as a due diligence tool. Furthermore, the lack of transparency of audit results inhibits effective preventive actions by other actors. When buyer audits detect non-compliances at supplier level, the buyer may cut the business relationship without alerting other relevant stakeholders. Consequently, worker representatives, the government, and/or other buyers cannot take preventive action. Garment factory management may decide not to make investments in upgrading buildings to safety standard, since there are sufficient buyers out there that are not demanding when it comes to health and safety. The lack of transparency of social audit results adds to the risk that unsafe working conditions remain unaddressed. Workers remain in current practice uninformed about the safety assessment of their factories.
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Garrett Brown, “The record of failure and fatal flaws of CSR factory monitoring”, February 2013 http://www.ishn.com/articles/95045-fatal-flaws-of-foreign-factory-audits?v=preview ; Clean Clothes Campaign, “Looking for a quick fix. How weak social auditing is keeping workers in sweatshops”, November 2005 < http://www.cleanclothes.org/component/content/article/1166 > Garrett Brown, “The record of failure and fatal flaws of CSR factory monitoring”, February 2013 http://www.ishn.com/articles/95045-fatal-flaws-of-foreign-factory-audits?v=preview; Clean Clothes Campaign, “Looking for a quick fix. How weak social auditing is keeping workers in sweatshops”, November 2005 < http://www.cleanclothes.org/component/content/article/1166 >