Do code of conduct audits improve chemical safety in garment factories? Lessons on corporate social responsibility in the supply chain from Fair Wear Foundation

Abstract

Compliance with chemical safety requirements in garment supply chains is low and auditing is statistically correlated with improvements only at factories that have undergone numerous audits.

Exploring Supplier Sustainability Audit Standards: Potential for and Barriers to Standardization

“…In a recent analysis of the German context, Mueller and Bessas find that "companies increasingly found or join industry initiatives (Brancheninitiativen) to achieve sustainability in supply chain management" [30]. Such initiatives can be considered strategic alliances [32,33] that involve a formal association of companies (often within a branch/industry) and that use their pooled knowledge and resources to develop common tools for assessing and evaluating supplier sustainability [30,71,83], including standards for supplier sustainability audits. Such initiatives have the potential to achieve consensus around sustainability standards in their respective industry's supply chains and thereby to sensitise suppliers in those respective industries [36].…”

“…There are no doubt plausible explanations for why one initiative/association thought that category 'XYZ' could be adequately evaluated with three questions, whereas another initiative determined 40 questions to deal with the topic. Moreover, as critical literature has repeatedly pointed out, having many well-formulated questions, excellent audit statistics and documentation does not necessarily reflect audit quality, let alone guarantee effectiveness [50,72,83,92,93]. Nonetheless, this divergence in audit questions poses an array of fundamental challenges to our major proposition of standardising such SSAS to reduce inter-industry audit fatigue.…”

“…Critical literature continues to query the effectiveness of sustainability audits [93], particularly as a stand-alone instrument [13,72,83], and challenges the legitimacy and independence of auditing companies [96,97]. Some authors note that effectiveness depends on institutional pressure and follow-up activities for audits to address problems and support their improvement [13,72,92].…”

“…Audits are increasing in number, despite the standardisation (and intended reduction in redundant re-auditing) and audit sharing that is occurring within multi-brand and multi-stakeholder initiatives. Fair Wear Foundation has taken note of critical inquiry into the limited effectiveness of monitoring (e.g., [73,83]) and consequently endeavoured to develop a holistic and more collaborative approach to improving conditions at suppliers' factories, whilst also holding participating brands more accountable to their commitments to sustainability improvement [68]. Many other sustainability initiatives/associations (SI/As) surveyed in this research increasingly stress that audits are an important measuring tool, but that the important focus needs to be on what is done with the results of audits [46,68,78].…”

The Role of NGOs in Building CSR Discourse around Human Rights in Developing Countries

“…An empirical study also suggests that companies with codes of conduct are not significantly better in terms of working condition. (Lindholm et al 2016). This is basically because of the voluntary nature of these international guidelines.…”