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Verité (Verification in Trade and Export), 49 South Pleasant St., Amherst, MA 01002, USA
Tel: (413) 253-9227; Fax: (413) 256-8960; E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.verite.org
December 2000
As
an independent third-party monitor, Verité has linked with an international
network of humanitarian and advocacy organizations to conduct over 600
comprehensive factory evaluations in 50 countries as part of its mission to
ensure that products purchased from supply chains are produced under conditions
that meet international human rights and ethical purchasing standards.
Verité’s
field-based coordinators, auditors and worker interviewers have knowledge of
local labour regulations and industry practices and the confidential on- and
off-site worker interviews they conduct provide verification as well as insight
into the true working conditions at the factory. Verité’s follow-up or “corrections” model engages the
buyer and the organization’s partner NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) to
address human rights and labour abuses found in a broad range of areas,
including forced labour, child labour, contract labour, women’s rights,
harassment and abuse, wage and overtime violations, and health and safety
hazards.
Following is a summary of some of the benchmarks Verité has developed in the last five years.
A
third-party independent monitor is an outside organization with no vested
interests in the outcome of the audit that is engaged to report on the
conditions of a factory based on an established set of criteria. Ideally, the
monitor should:
A
factory evaluation should look at a wide range of issues from multiple
viewpoints in order to ensure that the large mass of information gathered during
the audit can be formulated into an accurate picture of conditions in the
factory. An audit should include the following:
Management
interviews allow management to go on record as to their policies, while a
physical inspection of the factory can frequently expose safety and other
hazards that need to be corrected. However, the key aspect of a comprehensive
factory evaluation is off-site worker interviews. Trained people who speak the
workers’ languages and are of the same gender and ethnic group must interview
workers. These interviews should take place away from the production line in a
place where the workers feel comfortable in order to ensure that workers who
have been coached or intimidated feel free to speak candidly. Worker interviews
are the heart of Verité’s auditing process, and other organizations that do
not use off-site worker interviews have been criticized for failing to uncover
significant human rights and labour violations.
Auditing
without comprehensive follow-up deprives the monitoring process of much of its
value. After a factory audit takes place, the results should be incorporated
into a management action plan that includes the following:
Factory
audits cannot be one-time inspections, because conditions in a factory can
change over time, both for the better and for the worse. Turnover among
management staff can have a significant impact on the working atmosphere, and
issues like verbal abuse and other forms of harassment can be greatly affected
by the tone set by individual managers. Therefore, even factories that implement
all required changes should be re-audited on a regular basis to monitor
improvements and ensure that new violations do not occur.
Ensuring that a company’s products are manufactured under equitable and just conditions requires long-term commitment to finding and correcting a wide range of problems. Only by implementing a full program of independent factory monitoring, along with follow-up programs to address the problems found, is it possible for companies to fully utilize the leverage that they have as consumers to ensure that conditions in the factories they use are of a standard that is acceptable both to the brand itself, and to its increasingly aware consumers.
