The influence of the Bangladesh building and fire safety Accord and Alliance on labour conditions in global supply chains should not be underestimated. Despite targeting only a small even if very important part of the supplier landscape, some of their approaches could useful and possible to apply also more broadly.
For obvious reasons, and rightly so, these activities have attracted a lot of attention and considerable resources. It is of course important that this does not happen at the expense of other urgent supply chain needs.
Factories, farms and fisheries in many regions and countries are affected by serious problems. Child labour is still a burning issue, from cotton fields to stone quarries. Trafficking and forced labour remains a huge problem, on construction sites, fishing vessels and in many other activities. Income levels remain far below the acceptable and a living wage seems very hard to reach.
What is often lacking is respect for workers as human beings. Traditional social divides and discrimination combine with profit interests to feed resistance against worker organising, social dialogue and collective agreements. Unless attitudes change and workers’ rights to collective representation get accepted there can be no sustainable improvement of labour conditions.
There are many countries where changes will not take place without clear messages from the outside world. Excluding any groups from efforts to improve the human rights and labour situation in global supply chains would be wrong. Business as well as unions and NGOs can all make important contributions and should all be encouraged to do their part.
Buying brands and retailers need to be seriously engaged, doing their part of implementing the UN Guidelines for Business and Human Rights. Voluntary initiatives and codes of conduct can be useful guidelines for driving concrete action and they should not be belittled. There is much concrete capacity building and remediation going on with supplier companies, together with dedicated CSR schemes and initiatives such as SAI, ETI, FLA, BSCI and others. A professional social auditing industry can provide valuable knowledge about local situations and needs.
As a common business owned platform with a strong stakeholder representation, GSCP works for a general recognition and application of demanding social standards with a focus on bringing about real improvements to supply chain workers.
The GSCP Reference Tool for Auditing Competence wants to make sure that auditing remains credible and serious. Setting minimum professional standards, it supports buyers and their suppliers as well as the auditing industry itself. It helps schemes and initiatives ensure that they offer services at the highest industry standards. Most of all it benefits workers, ensuring that social audits lead to remediation and respect for human dignity at workplaces.
Although we should not in any way underrate the work for better supply chain conditions, we have to keep in mind the huge domestic labour markets where conditions are mostly much worse and less visible. Better labour conditions in export sectors can improve overall standards if there is a political determination.
Helping to make Bangladesh garment factories safer is important. Both programmes – Accord and Alliance – are concrete and already report on results. Initial factory audits have been completed and attention is on real improvements of safety conditions.
These projects work with a tight time schedule and we should soon start to see their real performance. Much will depend on how financing is arranged for the often necessary but also costly changes. Will the financial support commitments by brands and retailers be enough and what are the supplier companies themselves prepared to invest?
The Accord gives much influence and visibility to global trade unions and social campaigners whereas the Alliance is clearly business driven even if there is a civil society participation as well. The Accord reflects the European labour relations culture which is more social dialogue oriented, while the Alliance one is surely affected by the much more problematic US situation. Both are supported by the International Labour Organisation ILO and many consumer country governments.
One joint initiative would of course have been the most effective alternative. This was in fact the intention of the GSCP Executive and Advisory Boards when we took the first initiative and asked the German development agency GIZ to start preparing a fire safety project for Bangladesh and Pakistan. When I suggested to both boards that we should take concrete action I insisted that also IndustriALL Global Union be included.
There was also another building and fire safety initiative on the table, already for a few years. This was developed by American and European labour advocacy NGOs but had failed to attract sufficient support and participation from buyer brands and retailers. These organisations also became part of the GSCP-initiated GIZ process.
At the beginning, the common aim was a joint project. Soon events took another direction when differences emerged about whether the complaints procedure should be based on court proceedings or mediation and arbitration.
Particularly US companies were concerned that they could be challenged in court by hostile campaigners on various grounds, and did not accept this. Some labour unions and NGOs on their side did not trust that a mediation or arbitration procedure would be strong enough to ensure that buyers keep to their commitments. This was clearly affected also by the strained and often hostile labour relations climate in the United States.
At the final stages of project preparations, global union federations and advocacy NGOs took over the initiative from the less well coordinated buyer brands and retailers and began actively and publicly to assemble what is now the Accord. This lead most North American based brands and retailers to detach themselves from the process and develop and launch their own Alliance.
After this complicated process it is good that both projects seem to work reasonably well, side by side. Both are clearly there to bring about real changes in garment industry conditions. Hopefully the Bangladesh government and particularly the employers’ federation will do their part of the job to ensure safe conditions in the country’s garment industry.