NEW YORK — Retailers and manufacturers are adopting a strength-in-numbers strategy to help improve conditions for the world’s factory workers.
During the Social Accountability International conference here on Tuesday, speakers stressed the need to empower factory workers and bring the collective influence of brands to bear in changing the policies of suppliers.
“Superior business performance is not necessarily at odds with human rights,” said Alice Tepper Marlin, SAI’s president, as she kicked off the seventh annual conference. “Workplace standards can be far more effective when integrated with strategic thinking.”
The Joint Initiative on Corporate Accountability and Workers Rights, or JOIN, is an example of that new strategic thinking and is one of the apparel industry’s first attempts at bringing together brands, retailers and six nongovernment organizations to work with factory managers and workers. The goal, said representatives from Nike, Gap Inc. and Marks & Spencer who are participating in the program, is to improve workers’ lives and help the industry develop uniform standards.
“Policing in and of itself, from the outside, doesn’t work,” said Dusty Kidd, vice president of compliance at Nike.
Dan Henkle, vice president of global compliance at Gap, echoed this sentiment when he said, “All of us operating on our own, it just wasn’t having the kind of impact needed.”
Matt Kelly, an ethical and quality systems technologist with Marks & Spencer, acknowledged that one of the biggest problems mills face when trying to satisfy the worker standards of their customers is that there are far too many. The end result is a lot of “white noise” and confusion.
“A common code would benefit the industry and the credibility of social compliance will be increased,” Kelly said.
The pilot program is being run with Turkish garment manufacturers and is to run over 30 months.
Gap and Timberland have a similar three-year pilot project under way in Guatemala and have already received $2.5 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as support from the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation. The goal of the Continuous Improvement in the Central American Workplace project is to improve labor standards in apparel and textile factories in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.
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Darryl Knudsen, a project manager for Gap’s global partnerships in the Americas, said the company’s focus in the past had been primarily on monitoring the practices of its factories. Monitoring conditions did not necessarily translate into continuous improvements, said Knudsen, and most factory owners saw few, if any, benefits to change. Getting more groups involved in the effort has been key in helping to reeducate.
“We found that encouragement is more successful when it involves a joint and coordinated message,” Knudsen said.
Bharat Wakhlu, president of Indian conglomerate Tata Inc., said many companies needed to change their view of what it means to be a socially responsible corporation.
“CSR remains a fuzzy topic,” Wakhlu said. “There are people who think it means only philanthropy. There is more to CSR than simply giving out largess.”
William Feeney, president of Dole Europe, pointed to the shift in power from manufacturers to retailers over the last 30 years as a key factor in the battle to improve worker standards. While retailers have pressured their suppliers to provide socially responsible products, they have done little to encourage manufacturers, Feeney said.
“Today, the supermarket is king,” said Feeney. “Producers have become completely dependent on large retailers to drive their business.”
In the hunt to provide consumers with the lowest prices, Feeney said retailers were now “sidestepping” suppliers and going directly to lower-cost producers. The problem is that these products are often not branded and therefore have less oversight.
“Brands serve as a guarantee for corporate responsibility,” Feeney said. “Are these brands going to be abandoned for low costs every day?” While not naming names, Feeney said “hard discounters” in Europe were driving the trend.
A worker shortage in China has made factory managers more willing to implement programs to improve worker standards, Amy Hall, social consciousness director for Eileen Fisher, said during a panel on changes in China’s workforce. Eileen Fisher uses 12 factories in China, each employing 150 to 700 workers, Hall said. The company is working with several of its mills to train managers and workers, and help them work toward gaining SAI’s SA 8000 certification.
“We felt we needed to understand what suppliers were going through and also set an example to encourage more of them toward certification,” Hall said.
Martin Ma, an SAI program officer, said factory managers are puzzled by repeated audits, resistant to developing internal monitors and often confused by conflicting recommendations from third-party audits.
“The real focus is capacity building for the workers. The workers need to learn how to reform themselves from being just a migrant worker into being working class,” said Ma. “We want to communicate with managers so they can adapt themselves to the changing reality in China.”