We have often talked on the limitation of a monolithic approach in the management of suppliers' social level. This kind of approach is however still widely used, as it seems so attractively simple: we have defined criteria and our suppliers have to comply. Even without pointing out the impossibility to meet every criteria, it is the very idea of a single criteria to be used everywhere in the world which has to be overtook if one wants to improve on the transparency and the consistency.

The social management of suppliers aims to promote the most responsible factories and to promote improvement.

We often visit factories in China with big dormitories of 6 to 8 per room. These dormitories are sometimes not perfectly maintained and cleaned, even if great improvements have been achieved these last years. However, we have to point out these problems and, as a result, reduce the global assessment of the factory. On the other hand, when visiting factories in Bangladesh or Morocco for example we don't see any dormitories, but often a shanty town surrounding the factories. Workers are living there on their own, so the factory is not considered as responsible of it.

Is it fair to judge more severely a factory that provide an imperfect dormitory (even matching with or better than the prevailing local practice) than a factory not involved at all in the lodging of workers?



It is not possible to answer this question straight away. The context is a full element of the assessment of a factory, as well as a sentence without context could be meaningless.
But the context while assessing a factory is global and complex and can't be answered by a list of questions. Therefor our audits are not performing a questionnaire and our report are not only a quotation. Our reports go along with explanation to take the context into account. Thus, we allow a fair assessment of factories.