This week, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre published a blog by No Sweat’s T-shirt Project lead, Jay Kerr as part of their Beyond Social Auditing blog series. The traditional “ethical fashion” model is fundamentally broken. For decades, social auditing and corporate compliance have failed to end sweatshop conditions because they ignore the one thing that actually drives change: worker power.
Below is a small sample of the blog. Read the full piece over at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s website.
No Sweat has long asserted that the garment industry’s deeply entrenched labour abuses are symptomatic of unregulated global capitalism. The concept of ‘ethical production’, promoted by corporate compliance departments, has always been undermined by procurement’s relentless drive for the lowest price.
Given corporations’ legal imperative to maximise profit, procurement needs invariably took precedence, resulting in spin about ethics and the growth of an accreditation industry offering some semblance of ethical production, while workers’ rights were continuously violated.
Ultimately, our anger and frustration over this failed model led No Sweat to conceive a direct challenge: a unique project demonstrating what genuinely ethical production could look like. This decision was affirmed by an undeniable consensus from major human rights and labour NGOs.
Their reports now unequivocally expose social auditing and accreditation as a fundamentally failed system, not fit for purpose. The main failures include a critical lack of transparency and accountability. Reports are not public, meaning workers and stakeholders cannot access them, failing to build trust…