Economic success of China and Korea previously inspired many governments in developing countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh... The understanding of the implemented policy and of their roots help us to better understand the only partial success of social accountability approaches in those countries. Working conditions are definitely still harsh in those countries and compliant factories to international standard are exceptions, even if many factories are trying so hard to improve.
Let's try to understand the situation. The population of these countries is young and increase sharply. The social impact of this sharply increase of the population is utterly different than the one of a smooth increase has known in the past centuries. Actually, it leads the current local economic structure to be unsuitable for the massive arriving of new workers. Agricultural area can't be increased indefinitely. Governments see a huge number of unemployed young workers arriving. Thus the priority is set: creating employment, even before GDP. Rising industry needing an important workforce are encouraged while increasing the productivity is not as long as the factories aren't facing difficulties to hire workers.
Factories “trained” in such a way have always the reaction in case of increase of workload: increasing the available work quantity. As buildings are limited in size as well as the number of machines, they usually first try to increase the work duration. Thus high working hours and low wages remain related, and it is very difficult to make things change on these matters.
Governments avoid creating limitation factors to the hiring. As a result the interpretation of laws by local authority can be quite far from the original writing. As an example, social insurances in China are statutory, but factories are usually only required by local labor office to provide at least the injury insurance. States are trying to manage the social priority against the social criteria.
Such situation leads to an obviously difficult situation for factories trying to reach compliance to international social criteria (and not feigning the compliance only) as it refers to local laws. Actually most of the factories are matching with the “pervading” local requirements that can be really different from the law. It is really difficult to ask a factory to be fully different than its counterpart.
Such an observation does mean buyers have no responsibility and power on working conditions in factories, but it urges to better take the current real situation in considered countries. This, if pursuing the compliance on short term is an illusion, the continuous improvement approach is highly productive and allow to link the working condition progress for employees and the risk management for the brands.
Previous newsletter
-- All newsletter
-- Next newsletter 
