Nike has posted social audits of 53 suppliers in North America and Mexico on its web site as part of a new commitment to openness over working conditions at its 700 contract factories around the world.
The ‘Transparency 101’ initiative commits the sports clothing manufacturer’s labour practices department to publish the results of all monitoring visits by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in 50 countries.
Results of visits since June 1999 are charted in a ‘compliance grid’ which documents the number of factories that did not comply either with a specific aspect of local labour laws or the Nike Code of Conduct.
Another page shows action plans adopted by factory partners to remedy the identified problems, as well as a sample of three unedited PwC monitoring reports, from Canada, the US and Mexico.
Nike will later publish PwC audits of supplier factories in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
Although factories are not named, Nike plans to include as much detail about all 700 as it can without specifically identifying them. It also expects to include additional comments from human rights groups, and to display the unedited impressions of students from 16 US universities who accompanied PwC auditors on monitoring visits earlier this year.
Nike hopes Transparency 101 will help counter claims by US pressure groups that poor working conditions exist in factories supplying the company.
Nike has been on the offensive on the issue for some time. The company cancelled sports sponsorship programmes with two universities – Brown and Oregon – earlier this year because it believed they were making unreasonable and uninformed demands about labour standards (EP1, 2000).‘The purpose is to expose the processes behind monitoring and help the public understand the reforms that have taken place,’ said Nike spokeswoman Cheryl McCants.
‘We need to show the length to which we have gone to make sure compliance and monitoring is as accurate as possible’, she added.
The audits so far placed on the Nike web site identify problems in 12 out of 14 specific areas covered by the code of conduct.
Most non-compliance with the code or local laws related to health and safety issues such as blocked aisles, lack of bathroom soap, too few fire extinguishers, poor ventilation and incomplete first-aid kits. However, two factories in Mexico were found to have broken that country’s child labour laws.
They were told to send the children in question to school immediately, but to continue paying them a basic wage and to provide transport to school and also a cash allowance for school supplies.
One US factory has also been told to compensate workers who were not paid for overtime and another Mexican supplier has been instructed to give workers at least a 30-minute break in an eight-hour day.
All have been told that non-compliance with those orders could lead to the loss of their Nike contract, although the company says it would prefer to work with them to resolve problems.
Sam Brown, chief executive of the US-based Fair Labor Association said the audits ‘are a very important step – they are open documents of what previously has been closed information. They indicate real intentions by Nike to first of all try to make people understand what the problems are in the supply chain, and secondly to resolve some of these issues.’