A recent article from Garrett Brown outlines the failures of CSR audits to identify labour rights violations and to remedy clearly visible health and safety hazards. While billions of dollars have been spent on the global ‘CSR industry’, Brown lists various examples from both the electronics industry and the garment industry in which leading monitoring companies awarded certifications to factories with major problems.
A notable example from the electronics sector came to light in 2012, when two Foxconn factories that did not have any Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) program in place had been given OHS certification by a CSR monitoring company.
The main story in Brown’s article is about a Vietnamese garment factory, which had been audited 26 times throughout 2015 on behalf of different apparel brands. When the Workers Rights Consortium and the Fair Labor Association visited the factory in 2016 they found a number of issues, including dozens of health and safety violations.
Read the full article here.