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.
