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A row has erupted in the US between one of the country’s largest
ethical auditing bodies and the United Students Against Sweatshops
network (USAS).
The multi-stakeholder Fair Labor Association (FLA), which monitors factories used by adidas-Salomon, Eddie Bauer, Liz Claiborne, Nike, Reebok and other companies, says the influential student network is acting irresponsibly by alleging the FLA is in the pockets of the companies it conducts audits for, and that its monitoring is inadequate.
USAS is running a campaign that criticizes the association and recently set up an FLA Watch website to ‘expose the truth about the FLA’.
However, FLA chief executive Auret van Heerden has hit back by claiming that the student body is ‘squandering valuable concern and commitment about labour rights that many students have by obsessing on the FLA instead of getting at the root causes of the problems’. He complains that the campaign is ‘forcing us to divert resources from core monitoring activities to defend ourselves’.
The FLA has disputed USAS charges that because six apparel industry representatives sit on the association’s board, affiliated companies act as ‘the fox guarding the hen house’. It points out that its charter limits the range of issues that can be subject to a veto, that a veto has not been used in the past five years, and that NGOs can in any case block any move by companies to dilute the system.
It also dismisses USAS allegations that FLA monitoring procedures are poor and that worker interviews are unlikely to uncover serious problems because they take place on-site. For its part, the FLA concedes that off-site interviews can be more productive, but says the logistics of conducting them are ‘difficult except in a small number of special cases’ and that its audits anyway uncover an average of 20 violations per factory.
Van Heerden said the campaign was unfair to businesses that work with the FLA. ‘There are many companies out there doing very little to take responsibility for labour conditions ... USAS could find more worthy targets than those that have stepped up to the plate,’ he said.
The multi-stakeholder Fair Labor Association (FLA), which monitors factories used by adidas-Salomon, Eddie Bauer, Liz Claiborne, Nike, Reebok and other companies, says the influential student network is acting irresponsibly by alleging the FLA is in the pockets of the companies it conducts audits for, and that its monitoring is inadequate.
USAS is running a campaign that criticizes the association and recently set up an FLA Watch website to ‘expose the truth about the FLA’.
However, FLA chief executive Auret van Heerden has hit back by claiming that the student body is ‘squandering valuable concern and commitment about labour rights that many students have by obsessing on the FLA instead of getting at the root causes of the problems’. He complains that the campaign is ‘forcing us to divert resources from core monitoring activities to defend ourselves’.
The FLA has disputed USAS charges that because six apparel industry representatives sit on the association’s board, affiliated companies act as ‘the fox guarding the hen house’. It points out that its charter limits the range of issues that can be subject to a veto, that a veto has not been used in the past five years, and that NGOs can in any case block any move by companies to dilute the system.
It also dismisses USAS allegations that FLA monitoring procedures are poor and that worker interviews are unlikely to uncover serious problems because they take place on-site. For its part, the FLA concedes that off-site interviews can be more productive, but says the logistics of conducting them are ‘difficult except in a small number of special cases’ and that its audits anyway uncover an average of 20 violations per factory.
Van Heerden said the campaign was unfair to businesses that work with the FLA. ‘There are many companies out there doing very little to take responsibility for labour conditions ... USAS could find more worthy targets than those that have stepped up to the plate,’ he said.
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