A ‘progressive’ new ethical supply chain monitoring regime that allows
auditors to overlook minor legal infringements in order to concentrate
on welfare concerns has been well received by the tea industry.
In a pilot conducted on tea estates in Kenya by members of the Ethical
Tea Partnership (ETP), auditors have been encouraged to focus on
helping producers deal with issues that may not be covered by law but
are important for workers’ welfare. They are also using more
‘participatory’ techniques in worker interviews.
Initial feedback from the pilot, which has been running since November,
has found that more than eight in ten producers feel the new style has
improved the value of the monitoring visits and made them a better
experience.
The ETP, whose 18 members include Sara Lee, the Tetley group, Twinings
and Unilever, tried the new regime partly as a result of producers’
comments about ‘the focus of monitoring against minutiae in the law
that were not important to workers’ rights’. But it is also trying to
address the rising chorus of complaints about the ability of supply
chain monitoring, as currently practised, to improve working conditions.
Under the pilot, ETP auditors can choose to ignore legal
non-compliances that do not ‘materially affect the welfare of the
workers’, such as rules on the height to which painted surfaces must
extend up factory walls, or demands in some countries that certain
documents be displayed in specific formats.
Some legal requirements, if followed strictly, can lead to instances of
non-compliance that fly in the face of common sense, according to
project manager Julia Kilbourne. ‘In India every factory with more than
30 women workers is required to maintain a suitable room for the use of
children under the age of six years. If this was followed strictly, a
non-compliance would be raised even when none of the women workers have
children,’ she said.
‘If a producer’s activities fail to meet a small legal point that’s not
relevant to workers’ rights or welfare, this will not be raised as a
non-compliance and will not affect their grading. That helps focus
producers on resolving critical and major non-compliances.’
Kilbourne added that the majority of producers believed the changes
made monitoring more relevant, and also easier to understand. She
emphasized that ensuring compliance with local regulations was still
part of the monitoring.
The fresh approach involves monitoring against a new tea partnership
standard that draws on the Ethical Trading Initiative base code and
gathering more ‘robust evidence’ from workers brought together in focus
groups.
The Kenya pilot ends this month, and the new regime is expected to be
extended to all other countries from which ETP members buy tea. As
before, the ETP, rather than producers, will pay for monitoring visits,
which are carried out by local PricewaterhouseCoopers auditors.
