Pleased by the growth of consumer boycotts to support better working conditions overseas, U.S. labour rights groups believe the time is ripe to push corporations to embrace independent oversight of their foreign operations.

At the same time, many groups that monitor working conditions from Central America to East Asia are worried that U.S. and other Western corporations are taking steps to protect their company image rather than to monitor actual working conditions in their overseas plants.

“There have been too many words from the companies, too many delays, too few actions and no results,” says Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labour Committee, a New York-based firm that investigates overseas apparel manufacturing.

“Over the last year, we have heard a lot of talk by the companies regarding their plans to clean up offshore sweatshops and guarantee compliance with human rights, but that is all we have seen: words,” Kernaghan says. “Except for the single instance of The Gap (apparel retailer) opening a single contractor’s plant in El Salvador to independent monitoring, nothing has changed.”

The problem, many labour rights activists argue, is that companies are only concerned about policing working conditions once reports of low pay and horrific conditions overseas emerge.

But once the pressure is off — as when the media stopped focusing on the treatment of workers making products for General Electric and Boeing in China, for example — enforcement of company codes of conduct go “way out the window,” says Richard Dicker, associate counsel for Human Rights Watch.

The solution is to maintain consumer pressure for independent monitors, according to supporters of international human rights monitoring, who attended a forum on labour monitoring Friday at Queens College here.

“Adverse publicity has resulted in consumer dissatisfaction and reduced sales and profits,” says Elaine Bernard, director of Harvard University’s Trade Union Programme. “They’re running for cover.”

But too often, she warns, corporations protect their image, not by actually accepting independent monitoring of working conditions at their contractors’ or subcontractors’ plants, but by countering charges with their own public relations campaigns. Some also “seek prestigious cover” by hiring high-profile consultants to deal with their labour woes, Bernard adds.

Under fire over alleged labour abuses by subcontractors in Haiti and Burma, the Walt Disney Company assured the public recently that “we have engaged two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to monitor activities by licensees and their manufacturers around the world.”

But Kernaghan notes that one of the groups, the Swiss-based firm SGS, is a “multinational specialising in quality control, with more than two billion dollars a year in revenues and with absolutely no connection to human rights.”

What labour rights groups want to see instead is the same sort of formula by which The Gap ended a brief 1995 consumer boycott. A subcontractor in El Salvador, the Taiwanese-owned Mandarin firm, opened the firm up to an independent monitoring group that included human rights representatives.

Mark Anner, a member of the board for the Centre for Labour Research (CENTRA) in El Salvador and a representative on the Mandarin monitoring group, says the monitors are now entrusted with investigating working conditions at Mandarin and with resolving disputes between the wary labour force and management.

“We’re talking about societies that have come out of prolonged periods of civil war,” Anner says, noting that more than 79,000 people had died before El Salvador’s civil war ended in 1992. “Workers are not prepared to talk to anyone.” He points out that workers who communicate with his group refuse to talk sincerely to Salvadoran labour monitors, let alone anyone representing a Northern company.

Ironically, says Benjamin Cuellar, head of the independent monitoring group and director of the University of Central America’s human rights department, the group handles so many labour relations problems — from workplace treatment to ventilation — that “we’ve almost become agents of the Mandarin Company.”

“We feel that monitoring has made a difference,” Anner says, noting that, for the first time, the predominantly young female workforce at the clothes assembly plant claims to like working there.

Now, Anner says, the monitoring group feels it is ready to expand its work to as many as four Salvadoran plants. But U.S. retailers like Liz Claiborne and Philips-Van Heusen are reluctant to let them in, Kernaghan contends.

U.S. President Bill Clinton last year included those two companies on a federal task force on sweatshops that brought together sweatshop critics and nearly 20 U.S. apparel firms. But some representatives on the task force, who say they are legally prohibited from speaking on its results, are not optimistic that the groups can forge a common position on how best to monitor overseas workplaces.

The National Labour Committee and the People of Faith Network, a coalition of U.S.-based churches, now intend to assemble an Independent Monitoring Task Force to ensure that the Mandarin model expands beyond El Salvador.

The key point to any such expansion, Anner insists, is that the monitors must be fully independent from the government and corporations involved: “We don’t want ‘bonsai’ monitoring, which is small and pretty, but doesn’t grow.”