Social audits and certifications of suppliers are not enough to prevent and remedy labour rights abuses in global apparel supply chains, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said in a report released Tuesday.
- The 28-page report, Obsessed with Audit Tools, Missing the Goal: Why Social Audits Can’t Fix Labor Rights Abuses in Global Supply Chains, highlights the problems with social audits and certifications for suppliers, especially in the apparel sector, and is focused on labour rights abuses.
The Methodology: The report is based on in-depth interviews, sometimes multiple, with 20 current or former auditors, and 23 suppliers and brand representatives in the apparel industry, mostly between April 2018 and January 2019, and April 2021 and April 2022, to detail their experiences and the key challenges regarding social audits.
- Interviews were also conducted with 46 garment workers in Myanmar and India in 2018 and representatives from worker rights organizations between April 2021 and September 2022.
- HRW also conducted an analysis of 50 audit reports of garment factories. These audits used a standard social audit programme and were conducted by six large auditing firms.
- These social audit reports were provided by a European brand in 2018, on the condition of anonymity. Most of these audits were conducted in 2017 and early 2018.
Key Findings: Social audits (private inspections) and related certifications of suppliers have proliferated over recent decades.
- The time allocated to conduct an audit directly impacts its quality. The pressure to drive down costs by limiting the time available for audits undercuts auditors’ ability to interview workers offsite in safe settings, follow information leads, and corroborate information.
- Conflicts of interest between the auditing firm and their paying client can cloud the social auditing process. While auditors gave examples of the ways in which they had come under pressure by brands and suppliers who were their clients, several auditing experts felt the pressure was higher when suppliers, rather than brands, paid for and appointed auditing firms. Auditors gave examples of how they were asked to delete findings or transmit more serious findings orally or separately in emails, but not in the audit report itself.
- Many suppliers, eager to get good social audit reports or be certified, attempt to hide actual working conditions during audits. There are numerous auditing consultancies across many countries that help “game” the social auditing system, assisting factories to “prepare” for the actual audit by coaching workers and management on how to answer questions, helping generate fake documentation, and so on.
- Unfair buying practices of some brands, especially practices to drive down prices, demand discounts, or reduce the time needed to manufacture products, coupled with an inadequate commitment to help remediate problems in factories can create perverse incentives for suppliers to utilise audit consultancies to “prepare” for the audit and for suppliers to provide deceptive information.
- Even the most robust investigation of labour conditions at a supplier cannot force improvements. Auditing firms can only report findings and suggest corrective actions to the party that paid for the audit, whether it is a supplier, brand, or multistakeholder body. Remediation depends on how the supplier and brands sourcing from the factory act on the findings.
- The social audits and certification industry is largely opaque. Social audit reports of suppliers are not published. This lack of transparency allows poor-quality audits to thrive unchecked, under the radar. It leaves everyone guessing why and how a particular facility was certified as the underlying basis for certification is not made public. It fails to build trust with relevant stakeholders, especially workers, or to assist local unions and worker rights organisations in monitoring progress of corrective actions.
