Auditor: “We go as far as brands want us to go”...
New report exposes multi-billion social auditing industry operating as corporate social responsibility (CSR) tool to protect brand reputation and profits while aggravating risks to garment workers
This week, we bring you news from the international front in the battle to protect workers’ human rights in global supply chains. A devastating new report released by the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign eviscerates the global social auditing industry — the industry that performs the superficial, ineffective audits deployed by corporations to protect their brands from public relations damage when human rights violations are discovered in their supply chains. In the words of the report’s authors:
Evidence presented throughout the report clearly shows how the social audit industry has failed spectacularly in its proffered mission of protecting workers’ safety and improving working conditions. Instead, it has protected the image and reputation of brands and their business models, while standing in the way of more effective models that include mandatory transparency and binding commitments to remediation.
Though the report focuses on abuses in the apparel industry, its findings drive the latest nail into the coffin of the broader Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) model, the model embraced by food industry industry leaders from Wendy’s to Publix and Costco to deflect the growing consumer call to join the Fair Food Program. The report’s findings of unenforced standards and empty monitoring protocols stand in stark contrast to the Fair Food Program’s Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model, the only social responsibility model in the US agricultural industry today with the mix of monitoring and enforcement tools — including worker-to-worker education, a 24/7 complaint investigation process, and market consequences for violations — necessary to make its human rights protections real...
