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May 1, 2008 —
Anyone who follows sweatshops or international labor standards is by now familiar with the importance of transparency and monitoring of supply chains. Large multinational corporations like Wal-Mart or Nike rarely own their own factories these days, and instead produce their goods via a tangled web of contractors and subcontractors. This way of doing business allows companies to get the lowest price possible for each component of their product, and shift production swiftly without having to shut down an old factory or build a new one. Unfortunately, it also makes it extremely difficult for labor watchers to monitor which companies are using child labor or cheating their workers out of overtime, and pretty much impossible for consumers to really know where their products are manufactured.
Former labor inspector T.A. Frank is all too familiar with these problems, and writes about them in an excellent article in this month's Washington Monthly. For years, Frank worked for a corporate social responsibility monitoring firm that was responsible for keeping its clients informed about the labor and environmental practices of their suppliers. Frank found that some companies genuinely cared about keeping their supply chain sweatshop free, while others used consulting firms like his to add yet another layer of plausible deniability to their alibi should a scandal emerge.
Saying that you monitor your supply chain to ensure that labor and environmental standards are followed looks great on a CSR report, but it's how a company goes about this monitoring that really tells the story. According to Frank, Nike is one company that goes above and beyond in backing up its "sweatshop-free" claims, whereas Wal-Mart consistently uses some of the worst contractors in China—while trumpeting its inspection regimen year in and year out in its CSR report.
The International Labour
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that deals with labour issues. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. Its secretariat — the people who are employed by it throughout the world — is known as the International Labour Office. The organization received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969. This was established as an agency of the League of Nations in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. Post-war reconstruction and the protection of labour unions occupied the attention of many nations during and immediately after World War I. In Great Britain, the Whitley Commission, a subcommittee of the Reconstruction Commission, recommended in its July 1918 Final Report that "industrial councils" be established throughout the world. The British Labour Party had issued its own reconstruction programme in the document titled Labour and the New Social Order. In February 1918, the third Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference (representing delegates from Great Britain, France, Belgium and Italy) issued its report, advocating an international labour rights body, an end to secret diplomacy, and other goals. And in December 1918, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) issued its own distinctively apolitical report, which called for the achievement of numerous incremental improvements via the collective bargaining process. As a benefit to their employee, during the retirement they gives a pension to them.
The British Labour Party had
The British Labour Party had issued its own reconstruction programme in the document titled Labour and the New Social Order
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Yeah some countries these
Yeah some countries these days offer a very cheap alternative to companies to save their costs in this recession-hit economy and stay ahead of the competitors but one should keep business ethics in mind - after all in today's world nothing is much hidden from people. A slightest leak from any person on the Internet claiming that any company is using child labor, ding! that company is under-fire immediately because any news on Internet spreads rapidly within secs..
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I am sure by now that many
I am sure by now that many sweat shops of international standards of labor have understood the relevance of transparency as you have said. Because transparency, I believe is certainly something that is very much needed in order for something r some establishment like the sweat shops to succeed. And the case does not end there, because there is an additional division there and it is the supply chains, where monitoring them is equally important! watch faces