Garment workers travel on private buses organized by their factory in Cambodia. Credit: Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch

By Aruna Kashyap
Oct 7 2020 (IPS)

The recent refusal by five international auditing firms to inspect for labor abuses in Xinjiang was the right response to the severe human rights violations there. But this is a moment for the auditing and certifications industry, which assesses the compliance of work sites with human rights and labor rights standards, to rethink its approach to “social audits”—periodic workplace inspections—everywhere.

Xinjiang, the northwestern region of China, is home to minority Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim populations. They have long been subjected to Chinese state repression, but in recent years it has become more extreme. It is extremely dangerous and almost impossible to interview workers about labor conditions  due to pervasive government surveillance. Saying anything at all may be dangerous for workers.

Earlier this year, I spoke to a very experienced auditor who had refused to conduct social audits in Xinjiang over the last few years. “This is all under Chinese monitoring,” he told me. “Every website, every email, everything I read and send is tracked. The control in Xinjiang is so severe… they track your every movement.  There’s also facial recognition in Xinjiang. They capture your face and every activity of yours.”

Over the years, there has been growing criticism of the quality of social audits and their failure to detect human rights abuses and even flag severe fire and building safety concerns, much less sexual or other abuse of the workers by their managers or coworkers

The fact that a few firms have refused to conduct social audits in Xinjiang is an important step. But all firms should do more to publicly acknowledge their limitations in ferreting out labor abuses beyond Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is an example of how hard it is to monitor working conditions in a repressive environment—but it is not the first place in which audits have failed to flag serious rights abuses. Various incidents in the past few years have exposed further problems.

Companies have a responsibility to take steps to ensure that their business operations respect human rights, including labor rights. Many companies largely rely on social audits of businesses that are part of their global supply network—factories, farms, and mines— to produce confidential reports about working conditions.

Companies draw on these confidential audit reports to represent to consumers and shareholders that their operations are complying with human rights and labor rights standards.

Typically, social audits consist of periodic inspections of work sites, once every year or two. Many auditing firms conduct them on a contract-basis for a fee.  Inspectors—or “auditors”—have a herculean task. They have to assess compliance on a range of human rights concerns within just a few days. Auditors do this by going through documents that workplace managers produce, making observations, and interviewing workers.

Worker interviews are usually conducted at the workplace, and that can be a major problem because colleagues and managers know precisely whom an auditor interviewed. Many workers say their managers, whom they fear, coach them ahead of these inspections.

Over the years, there has been growing criticism of the quality of social audits and their failure to detect human rights abuses and even flag severe fire and building safety concerns, much less sexual or other abuse of the workers by their managers or coworkers.

In 2016, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, a nonprofit organization, helped bring a case in Germany against the auditing firm TUV Rheinland following the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,135 factory workers over the firm’s failure to detect the dangerous conditions in the factory.

In 2019, the Clean Clothes Campaign brought a case against Italian auditing firm RINA raising similar concerns, following the 2012 Ali Enterprises factory fire in Pakistan that killed more than 250 workers.

Auditing firms have a responsibility to take a rights-based approach to their business in accordance with United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. They are starting to realize that some human rights issues do not lend themselves to the way they conduct these social audits and are not really addressed.

ELEVATE, a company that conducted over 10,000 such audits in more than 10 countries, said in September 2019 that it “acknowledges that social audits are not designed to capture sensitive labor and human rights violations such as forced labor and harassment.”

ELEVATE conducted a series of Worker Sentiment Surveys, cellphone app-based surveys that suggested that social audits are widely off the mark. In Bangladesh, 30 percent of the workers surveyed said they witnessed or experienced sexual harassment.

But only 0.18 percent of ELEVATE’s social audits reported cases of inhumane treatment (including sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical abuse) during the same period. Similarly, in India, 28 percent of workers surveyed reported experiencing sexual harassment while only 0.8 percent of social audits detected inhumane treatment, including sexual harassment.

In 2019, Human Rights Watch wrote about the failure of these audits to detect sexual harassment at work. Yet, many auditing firms still perpetuate the myth that they can detect sexual harassment, or inadvertently misrepresent what social audits can achieve.

For instance, SGS, an auditing firm that conducts social audits meant to uncover human rights abuses, says on its website that its audits: “[R]obustly seek out evidence of unethical behaviour in child labour, freedom of association, compensation and pay, excessive and unfair working hours, forced labour, health and safety regulations, and environmental regulations,” including sexual harassment and discrimination, and that such audits let companies “allow your stakeholders, and communities, to trust your organisation is compliant with the law and international best practices.”

Auditing and certification firms should acknowledge the limitations of social audits and identify a set of human rights risks that do not lend themselves to being detected through them. Just as some firms have done in Xinjiang, they should acknowledge that they cannot adequately audit issues like sexual harassment and discrimination at work.

By publicizing the limitations of their current inspections, auditing firms put brands, retailers, agents, and suppliers on notice. It will force companies to take more effective measures to stop egregious workplace abuses. It will make it harder for companies to pass the buck onto auditing firms and take a box-checking approach to their human rights responsibilities.

Taking these measures would send a strong message that auditing firms will not quietly downplay human rights abuses in global supply chains because their approach is not effective in identifying key problems.

For their part, global brands and retailers should work together to create effective local grievance-based mechanisms in the regions in which they operate.

Developing models for collaborative, credible, and independent grievance-redress that is accessible to workers and local communities should be central to how companies approach human rights in their global supply chains. Continuing to rely on social audits will mark out companies as being out of touch with reality.

Excerpt:

Credit: Obaidul Arif/IPS

By Aruna Kashyap
Nov 24 2019 (IPS)

It has been two years since #MeToo went viral, and it’s about time the garment industry’s sexual harassment problem got the attention it deserves. Clothing and footwear brands can do much more to prevent and address gender-based violence in their supply chains, but first they need to confront how badly their inspection or “social auditing” programs fail women.  

Clothing brands or factories often bring in social auditors to examine factory working conditions. But social audits primarily rely on in-factory interviews with workers who may fear retaliation, often leaving them  ineffective for detecting workplace sexual harassment.

In fact,  many auditors I have spoken to have offered useful insights about the limitations of audits. Recently, I spoke to an Indonesian social auditor who shared an anecdote about a garment factory he was inspecting in central Java a couple of years ago. He found a notebook on the factory production floor, and within its pages discovered a woman worker’s anonymous note suggesting she was being sexually harassed.

Clothing and footwear brands can do much more to prevent and address gender-based violence in their supply chains, but first they need to confront how badly their inspection or “social auditing” programs fail women

The auditor’s attempts to trace the notebook’s owners and encourage workers to speak up were futile, he said, reflecting his general difficulty with documenting sexual harassment in the industry. Workers he interviewed inside factories usually gave stock or terse responses that he felt factory managers coached them to provide.

On the rare occasions that women workers testified about sexual harassment, he said, factory managers would contest it. They asked him what “proof” he had beyond the complainant’s testimony and demanded to know her name. They argued that one worker’s testimony could not justify a “finding” of workplace sexual harassment in the audit report.

In contrast, women workers who speak outside factory premises feel less anxious about retaliation, according to workers themselves, auditors that Human Rights Watch interviewed, and labor advocates.

For example, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), an international labor rights group, found evidence of sexual harassment after conducting off-site interviews with workers for three factories in Lesotho that supplied Levi’s, the Children’s Place, and Kontoor’s. Rola Abirmourched, one of the investigators, reported that despite routine social audits by third parties, sexual harassment in the factories was rampant.

The Lesotho investigation spurred the launch of a promising solution. For over a year, the WRC worked with factory unions and two prominent local women’s rights organizations—the Federation of Women Lawyers in Lesotho, and Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Education Trust-Lesotho—to design a program addressing gender-based violence and harassment at work. The factory management signed a legally binding agreement with the unions, committing to implement the program.

The agreement creates an independent investigating body to look into complaints of sexual harassment in accordance with Lesotho’s laws. Levi’s, the Children’s Place, and Kontoor’s agreed to partially fund the program for two years.

This effort imparts some important lessons. For one, involving local women’s rights groups is critical, considering the garment industry’s gender imbalance: the majority of union leadership is male even though the garment workers themselves are predominantly women.

It’s also important to recognize the important role that unions and nongovernmental organizations can play in developing training programs, providing legal services, and facilitating access to counseling for gender-based violence and harassment.

The anti-retaliation protections, the legally binding nature of the program, and support from brands were key to the program’s success, said Libakiso Matlho, national director of Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Education Trust-Lesotho. Programs by women’s rights groups to combat sexual harassment are often undercut by factories’ retaliation or failure to hold perpetrators accountable.

Global brands would be smart to take heed of how the Lesotho agreement incorporates key features of the landmark treaty against violence and harassment at work adopted by the International Labour Organization earlier this year. Under the Lesotho agreement, for example, the factories’ policies against gender-based violence and harassment also apply to its suppliers and third-party contractors. The agreement has strong anti-retaliation protections as well.

As garment workers struggle to find dignity at work, global clothing brands should institute strong worker-driven prevention and response programs that bring together credible local women’s rights groups and local unions, instead of depending on social audits. Brands can curb abuse by developing programs that truly empower workers.

Aruna Kashyap is senior counsel in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch.