Social audits: turning a blind eye

 

- Dr Liu Kaiman, Institute of Contemporary Observation, Shenzen

 

Smoke and mirrors

What should a company do to find out whether the workers who produce its clothes have their rights respected?  To campaigners, the answer is simple: ask the workers.  That's what we do, and that's how we know that conditions are unacceptable.

When companies began responding to consumer pressure by publishing their codes of conduct, we told them they needed independent evidence that these codes were observed in their factories.  And thus was born the social audit, an inspection of working conditions in factories.  Tens of thousands of these audits are performed every year, either as internal company monitoring, or as independent verification by a third party (usually an auditing firm): social auditing is now a major industry.

A typical audit will involve three things:

• Document review: looks at wage sheets, timekeeping, personnel records, etc
• Site inspection: walking through a factory to check for health and safety problems and to observe the workers at work.
• Interviews: usually this includes interviews with managers, supervisors and workers. In best practice, trade unions and local labour rights groups are also consulted.

Most audits attempt to do all this in a few hours, while some take several days.  Some are better than others.  There are important distinctions between internal monitoring visits and independent audits, between audits where warning is given and unannounced audits, and between regular auditing and one-off checkups.  At root, and however they are conducted, the evidence shows that audits are not the solution that many companies treat them as.