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Inspired by a Newsweek Magazine article on forced laborers in Malaysia, Rachelle Jackson, Director of Research and Development, and Paul Dinh, Research Associate, explore the conditions that many forced and migrant laborers face, and offer insight into the various initiatives happening globally to stop this exploitation.
While collaboration has been spoken of and hyped up for the past four years, the greater CSR community does a proportionately small amount of collaboration. Collaboration is still a leading edge idea, rather than a normative practice.
While no single group (brands, factories, monitors, NGOs, initiatives, etc) is to blame, we all share some culpability in our delay to collaborate. Some of us are demanding high level improvement in terms of living wages and carbon foot printing, but have not laid the groundwork to ensure that factory start-ups in the Pearl River Delta, Los Angeles or Bangalore know the basics of calculating holiday overtime, legal requirements of basic sanitation or the benefits of recycling. Similarly, but on the other end of the supply chain, many brands and retailers want to get the same information from a one-day audit by two auditors with a really detailed checklist as they would from a week-long participatory training and remediation.
For the sake of simplicity, we will focus on collaboration of a basic assessment for now. Each brand, each report sharing initiative, each certification body, and each monitoring firm has their own unique approaches to the standard operating procedures, reporting and grading for a one-day audit. Having so many templates, procedures and grading approaches makes coordinating collaborative assessments a drawn out process that includes a great deal of discussion, particularly if done on a large scale.
If collaboration and report sharing are going to take hold industry wide, industry stakeholders are going to have to speak to one another and compromise. Who best to facilitate those conversations surrounding compromise? How about the monitors (non-profit and private) who have done hundreds of thousands of audits over the past 15 plus years? Monitors understand the complexity of the demands and scale of the industry. Monitors understand the pros and cons of each template. Monitors understand the limitations of the audit day. Monitors understand how to get the best data and what reduces audit quality. Monitors understand the technology used across multiple brands to load the various reports and data. Monitors deal with this every day. So, let’s start talking…anyone interested?
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Carrie George is a Client Service Representative at CSCC. She studied Industrial Relations and International Development at Cornell and Brigham Young universities, and worked as a Research Analyst at Innovest Strategic Value Advisors before joining CSCC. At CSCC, Carrie has been responsible for advising and helping clients build robust responsible sourcing programs, in addition to being a vocal proponent of greater stakeholder collaboration in monitoring and remediation.
