Standards

The British Diary The Independent publishes today an article by Martin Hickman called "Blood, sweat and tears: the truth about how your sportswear is made". Among other interesting datapoints, the article provides the official responses Nike, Puma and Adidas gave to the paper's question: Are your worst factories sweatshops? Here are the responses:

Nike
"We work closely with factories to abide by our code of conduct, which stipulates abiding by age limits, overtime hours, meeting minimum wage requirements and health and safety. Many provide additional benefits such as transportation, cafeterias, health clinics. We require no more than 60 hours' work a week." According to their own audits, 25% of their factories forced excessive overtime.

Puma
"It is the clear goal of the longstanding work we perform under the Puma Safe initiative to eliminate poor labour conditions in the supply chain. Since 1993 Puma has had a legally binding supplier code of conduct and is an accredited member of the Fair Labour Association. It is a well-known fact in our industry, that audits alone are a necessary but not sufficient tool to ensure code compliance." According to their own inspections, 20% of their factories failed the audit, of these 67% did not observe rest days.

Adidas
"Serious non-compliance issues range from factors such as health and safety to lack of management commitment to ending excessive working hours. The finding of such serious issues during an audit triggers an immediate action plan. If the factory doesn't follow up properly, our enforcement process is activated - which then results in warning letters. The action plan is worked out together with the factory before enforcement begins." Their inspections have put 2% of their factories on warnings to lose their contracts.

The sports industry as Mr Hickman explains probably provides the most extreme and powerfully visual economic chasm: "Usain Bolt paid GBP 20,000 a day for wearing clothes; and the workers paid 50p an hour to make them." Even when being ok with the extremes the worlds of entretainment and business can deliver, we could do much better. The last thorough audit of Play Fair concluded that all but one sportswear companies reviewed failed miserably on "Making a commitment to paying a living wage".

Although the spotlight seems to remain on a limited number of companies, the problem is not unique to this industry.

From an international HR perspective, equity across underdeveloped countries is yet unresolved. Take the following example: A remote and poor farming town in Poland. Farmers have a loaf of bread (with nothing in it) for lunch every day. A multinational company sets up a factory in the town and employs most of the people in it. The company considers providing a canteen service. How would you determine the expense and qualilty of the food? Would you take the loaf of bread to be market practice?

As much as a worker's wage and standard of living need to remain linked to their local context, multinational companies cannot do this blindly. Globalisation is at its worst without a common take on standards.